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12  
Victory Day broadcast from 10 Downing Street, 8 May 1945
(courtesy of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum – ref. H41846
)
13  
Victory! The famous V-sign, 1945
(Broadwater Collection, Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge,
BRDW 1, photo 1
)
14  
‘An Iron Curtain has descended!’, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946
(Churchill Press Photographs, Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge,
CHPH 1A/F4/4A, Associated Press
)
15-18  
Electioneering in his Woodford constituency, 1951
(Churchill Press Photographs, Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge, CHPH 3/F2/54–57, by Doreen Spooner)
19  
Campaigning for his son, Randolph, with the editor’s support, Plymouth, 23 October 1951
(Winston S.Churchill Collection
)
20  
The victorious campaigner casts his vote in Woodford, Election Day, 1951
(Broadwater Collection, Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge, BRDW 1, photo 1)
21  
US Honorary Citizenship: Randolph, supported by the editor, delivers his father’s reply to President John F. Kennedy, The White House, Washington, DC, 9 April 1963
(Winston S. Churchill Collection)

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to correct any mistakes or omissions in future editions.

Acknowledgments

I wish, first and foremost, to express my thanks to my aunt, Lady Soames DBE, for sharing with me her recollections of the way her father worked when preparing his speeches. My thanks are also due to Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archive Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, as well as to Archives Assistants David Carter, Rachel Lloyd and Jude Brimer, for their unfailing help in providing original documents and tracking down photographs.

I am indebted to Sir Martin Gilbert, Sir Winston Churchill’s official biographer, who completed with such distinction ‘The Great Biography’, on which my late father, Randolph Churchill, had embarked, for his guidance and advice. I am also most grateful to that veritable mine of knowledge regarding Churchill publications and quotations, Richard M. Langworth, CBE, Chairman of the Churchill Center of the United States (see Appendix).

I wish also to express my appreciation to Robert Crawford CBE, Director-General of the Imperial War Museum and to Hilary Roberts, Head of Collections Management of the Photograph Archive, for assisting in the provision of photographs, as well as to Esther Barry, Librarian of the BBC Photograph Library and Julie Snelling of the BBC Written Archives Centre.

I wish especially to record my indebtedness to my late friend and erstwhile parliamentary colleague, Robert Rhodes James, who, assisted by an army of researchers world-wide, published in 1974 his massive eight-volume work
Winston S. Churchill; The Complete Speeches 1897–1963
(Chelsea House Publishers in association with R.R. Bowker Company, New York and London), for the magisterial job he did in tracking down and assembling the overwhelming majority of my grandfather’s speeches. His work has been invaluable in the preparation of this book and remains a treasure trove for universities, libraries and researchers. It contains twenty times the material that could be accommodated in this volume, and I commend it to anyone seeking a fuller text.

Finally, I must express my gratitude to James Rogers, for his encouragement, as well as for his painstaking assistance and advice in the checking of material and in the preparation of the text for the publishers. My special thanks are also due to my secretary, Penelope Tay, for her cheerful and untiring efforts in the preparation of the typescript. I also wish to record my appreciation to Jörg Hensgen of Random House UK for his help and advice.

Winston S. Churchill

Editor

Editor’s Preface

Winston Churchill’s rendez-vous with destiny came on 10 May 1940, with his appointment as Prime Minister in Britain’s hour of crisis. On that day Hitler launched his
blitzkrieg
against France, Belgium and the Low Countries, which was to smash all in its path. It was then that Winston Churchill, already 65 years of age and, as he put it, ‘qualified to draw the Old Age Pension’, deployed the power of his oratory. After years during which the British nation had heard only the voices of appeasement and surrender, suddenly a new note was sounded. In a broadcast to the nation on 19 May 1940, he declared: ‘I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister in a solemn hour in the life of our country, of our Empire, of our Allies and, above all, of the cause of Freedom.’

After a graphic account of the devastating advances by Nazi forces on the Continent he continued: ‘We have differed and quarrelled in the past; but now one bond unites us all – to wage war until victory is won, and
never
to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame, whatever the cost and agony may be.’

The effect of his words was electric. Though the situation might appear hopeless, with the French and Belgian armies – which had held firm during four long years of slaughter in the First World War – crumbling in as many weeks in the face of the furious German assault, and the remnants of Britain’s small, ill-equipped army preparing to retreat to Dunkirk, and when many, even of Britain’s friends, believed that she, too, would be forced to surrender, Winston Churchill – in the memorable phrase of that great American war-correspondent, Edward R. Murrow, ‘mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.’

With his innate understanding of the instincts and character of the British people, garnered from leading them in battle as a junior officer in conflicts on the North-West Frontier of India, in the Sudan and South Africa, as well as in the trenches of Flanders in the First World War, Churchill inspired the British nation to feats of courage and endurance, of which they had never known, or even imagined themselves capable. In his very first Address to the House of Commons, three days after becoming Prime Minister, he famously declared (13 May 1940): ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’

Nor was it only the British nation that was inspired and buoyed up during five long years of war but also, as I discovered, his words gave hope to the downtrodden nations of Occupied Europe. A few years ago I had the privilege of addressing a Service of Commemoration at London University, on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Afterwards a strikingly attractive lady came up and told me: ‘Mr Churchill, I was a girl of just twelve, living in the Ghetto at the time of the Uprising, as the Nazi storm-troopers were attacking us to take us off to the concentration camps. Whenever your grandfather broadcast on the BBC, we would all crowd around the radio. I could not understand English, but I knew that, if my family and I were to have any hope of coming through this war, it depended entirely on this strong, unseen voice that I could not understand. We were all taken to Bergen Belsen – I was the only survivor. I was liberated by the British Army, in fact by the man you see standing beside me, who is today my husband.’ I found it a profoundly proud, yet humbling, moment.

The Orator with his editor, 10 Downing Street, 1952.

With his pugnacity and puckish sense of humour, Winston Churchill commanded the attention of the British nation and was successful in persuading his fellow countrymen that – though every other major nation of Europe had surrendered to the invading Nazi hordes – Britain could, and would, fight on alone. There may have been greater orators, in the traditional sense of an ability to stand up on a soapbox and – without a note or a microphone – command and move a crowd of 10 or 20,000. Most obviously the names of Gladstone and Lloyd George spring to mind, though even in that league Winston Churchill was in the forefront.

But where he came into his own was in his command of the House of Commons and, most of all, in his radio broadcasts on the BBC to the people of Britain and the wider world. Here technology came to his aid in the nick of time. For many centuries, ever since William Caxton invented his printing press in the year 1474, the only means of mass communication had been through newspapers which, by the early twentieth century, had fallen into the hands of a handful of media tycoons who, individually and collectively, wielded immense political power. However, in 1924 – just fifteen years before the outbreak of the Second World War – Stanley Baldwin became the first British Prime Minister ever to make a radio broadcast. At the time there were barely 125,000 radio sets in Britain. However by 1940 this number had risen to close on 10 million, almost one to every home and certainly to every pub in the land.

This technological breakthrough gave Churchill a direct link to the masses of the people, and proved invaluable. The style that he adopted, and which proved so effective, was to address them not as unseen masses, but as individuals - he envisioned his audience as a couple and their family, gathered round their coal fire in the ‘cottage-home’. In this way he succeeded in forging a personal bond at grassroots level with the ordinary man and woman in the street; and it was this that was to see him – and them – through five years of the cruellest war the world has ever known. Though, at the time, there were no facilities for the broadcasting of Parliament, the British Broadcasting Corporation would, in the case of his more important parliamentary speeches, arrange for him to redeliver them before their microphones, so that they could be heard, not only throughout Great Britain, but across Occupied Europe, as well as throughout the United States and the farthest outposts of the British Commonwealth and Empire.

In embarking on this work I have been anxious to draw together into a single manageable volume what I regard as the best and most important of my grandfather’s speeches, spanning more than sixty years of his active political life, from his first political speech in 1897 to his acceptance of United States Honorary Citizenship from President John F. Kennedy in 1963. At the outset, I had no idea of the magnitude of the task upon which I was embarking. I knew that my grandfather was prolific as a writer, with some 30 volumes of history and biography to his credit, I was also aware of his phenomenal output as an artist, with nearly 500 completed canvases – some of a remarkably high quality – at his home at Chartwell in Kent by the time of his death.

However, I had no idea of the sheer scale of the speeches he painstakingly composed, rehearsed and delivered. The great majority were brought together by my late parliamentary colleague, Robert Rhodes James, in his
Winston Churchill: The Complete Speeches 1897–1963,
published in 1974, an 8-volume work comprising more than 8,000 closely printed pages – 12,500 pages in any self-respecting typeface – totalling some 5 million words.

Time and again on the American lecture circuit I have been asked: ‘Who was your grandfather’s speechwriter?’ My reply is simple: ‘He was a most remarkable man, by the name of Winston Spencer Churchill.’ In an age when front-rank politicians, almost without exception, have a raft of speechwriters, my reply provokes amazement. My aunt, Mary Soames, the last survivor of my grandfather’s children, recently told me:

My father never, at any stage of his life, employed the services of a speechwriter. At various points in his career, in dealing with Departmental matters, he would be supplied by officials with various notes and statistics, especially in relation to technical or legal matters.
Furthermore, there was a gentleman called George Christ (pronounced ‘Krist’) - whom my father insisted on summoning with the words: ‘Send for Christ!’ – who was an official at Conservative Central Office, and who would supply suggestions of points he might consider including in his Addresses to the Conservative Party Annual Conference, during the years he was Party Leader.
But it was my father – and he alone – who drafted all his major speeches especially, of course, those to the House of Commons. Jane Portal (Lady Williams), who was one of his private secretaries at the time, tells of how my father, already 80 years old and in the final months of his second Premiership, delivered himself, in the space of 7 to 8 hours, of a lengthy and detailed speech on the Hydrogen Bomb.
BOOK: Never Give In!
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