1 - Winston Churchill

Riddles, continuedhitherto secret documents may amplifythis but probably not alter much..1 enjoyed very much the• Spring "Wit and Wisdom,"buT noticed several "digs" atJohnny Walker Red Label scotch.What does the writer recommend?As to malts, my favorite is Oban.A. Personal opinions are only• that, but Teacher's is theblended scotch of choice here andin most households we know whereblends are consumed regularly.Your choice of single-malt showsdiscernment: Oban was one of tentop single malts named recently byWine and Spirits and is a lovely,soft, west-of-Scotland whiskey witha light touch of peat. Wine andSpirits also named many maltswhich we see regularly in thehomes of Churchillophiles includingour own: MacAllen (first place),Glenmorangie, Laphroig, Lagavullin,Bowmore and Glenfiddich.On the cover of that issue was aglass of Jura, one of our favoritesfrom a little-known island we havevisited. Several readers wrote us tosay that Johnny Walker Blackshould not be lumped with barroomscotches like Red Label; andthat there is now an ultra-premiumJohnny Walker Blue..1 recently purchased a novel>-r .by Winston Churchill from1901 called The Crisis. I rememberreading somewhere about anAmerican novelist named WinstonChurchill, who was active duringSir Winston's earlier literarycareer, and that they exchangedcorrespondence. It was probably inManchester, but it's not indexed.Can you help jiggle my memory?A.A likely reason why The• Crisis stayed in print for solong (it was available as late as1970) was that people (like me,once) were mistaking it for TheWorld Crisis and ordering copies.It was, of course, one of those ubiquitousnovels (like Richard Carvel,Mr. Crewe's Career, Coniston, TheCrossing and a dozen others, byWinston Churchill the Americannovelist, a distant relation. Thetwo Winstons engaged in an amusingcorrespondence in an attemptto prevent public confusion overtheir books (it can be found in MyEarly Life, in The Churchills:Pioneers and Politicians byElizabeth Snell and in FinestHour 83, which also provides illustrationsof the two Winstons). TheEnglish Winston agreed to use hismiddle name "Spencer." DuringWSC's American lecture tour in1901 the American Winston hosteda dinner for him in Boston, whereamidst joviality they agreed therewould be no more confusions...butWSC got the dinner bill. TheDartmouth College rare books collection(see InternationalDatelines) holds the papers of theAmerican Winston and a fine collectionof WSC as well; on a recentvisit we were able actually to seethe originals of the famousexchange between the twoWinstons./^V.The piece about JamesW.Muller (FH 88) says Churchillwrote over forty books andsixty-four volumes. My review listhas forty-nine in fifty-three volumes.What is the true count andis there a chronological bibliographyavailable which settles thisquestion? Would it be wiser to purchasethe 1974 "Collected Worksand Essays" or the volumes individuallyto obtain a complete collectionof Churchill?A.Churchill wrote forty-fourm hardbound titles if you countFrontiers and Wars, an abridgedcompilation from his first warbooks, and three posthumouslypublished works: Young Winston'sWars, the Collected Essays (published1975, never published involume form before) and TheDream (published for the first timein volume form by ICS in 1985;now available for $151 £10 softbound).This figure counts, as mostcollectors do, the first collected editiono/"War Speeches and the 1952definitive 3vol edition of The WarSpeeches as individual works,even though they are rearrangementsof the individual WW2speech volumes.FINEST HOUR 89/15The volume count is more problematic.Figuring two volumes forThe River War and Lord RandolphChurchill, four volumes (English edition)for Marlborough and A Historyof the English-Speaking Peoples, fivevolumes in six books for The WorldCrisis, three volumes for The WarSpeeches Definitive Edition and sixvolumes for The Second World Wargives us sixty-four actual volumes forthe forty-four titles. But if you includespin-offs like Blenheim, The IslandRace, The American Civil War, Joanof Arc, Heroes of History, and theone-volume abridgements of TheWorld Crisis, The River War andThe Second World War, you come upwith seventy-two individual volumes— or seventy-five if you include thefour-volume Collected Essays. So,while forty-four is the accepted figurefor book-length titles, your count ofthe actual volumes varies dependingon what you count.Whether it is preferable to buythe Collected Works (thirty-eightvolumes including the Essays) orthe individual titles depends onwhat you wish to achieve. For alltheir beauty and exclusiveness, theCollected Works are just magnificentreprints. (See "The SordidHistory of the Collected Works" inFinest Hour 57.) They will barelybe worth the price of just one classicfirst edition, the two-volumeRiver War (and by the way, thetext of that work in the CollectedWorks is only the one-volumeabridged version). Though buyingthe Collected Works and Essaysdoes secure (at a price) virtually95% of WSC's writings, there arecheaper ways to do this. You canput together a complete collectionof those writings for under $1500 ifyou settle for mundane and readingcopies and non-first editions.An ICS publication, ChurchillBibliographic Data, available fromICS Stores for $131£8 postpaid,does provide a good and mostlyaccurate list of works by and aboutWSC, pending the publication thisyear of more advanced works.Send your questions to the editor; ifwe can't find the answers we will askour erudite readership. Answers toqueries posted here are alsomost welcome. &5