Hillsdale College has announced acquisition of an important part of the Ronald Cohen collection of the writings of Sir Winston Churchill. It numbers almost 2000 individual items. They comprise six categories: forewords, prefaces, and introductions by Churchill; periodical articles; works and periodicals containing Churchill speeches; letters, memoranda, statements and letters to the editor. Some 15% of these writings have not seen print since their original, limited editions, and therefore comprise a “submerged canon,” because they open a fresh field of Churchill scholarship.

Hillsdale College also has a temporary, exclusive purchase option for the balance of the collection, books written by Winston Churchill. They number over 1200 volumes, and 640 are first editions in their country of origin. Seven books are signed by Churchill. As a whole, this is the most comprehensive Churchill library ever assembled.

This material was collected over fifty years by Ronald Cohen, author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, a three-volume definitive work listing and describing each edition, translation, and imprint of everything by Churchill ever published.

“Present at the Creation”

I had the privilege of seeing “what Cohen wrought” at Ron’s home in Ottawa last November. It brought back memories because I was “present at the creation.” In 1984, Ron and I toured scores of British bookshops in a friendly rivalry. We took turns at “first choice” in each venue. So in Lyme Regis, Ron walks through the door and says, “Do you have anything by….” He turns around, and sees a row of The World Crisis in its rare original dust jackets. “I’ll take those.” Because I was out parking the car, I was fuming!

Assembling such a collection is the work of a lifetime. It could not be reproduced today because the sources have dwindled, and many items are one-of-a-kind. It is a treasure trove for researchers, students, and scholars. I am very glad also to have been “present at the finale.”

Cohen in His Own Words

Let Ron Cohen explain the uniqueness of his achievement:

“It has virtually every edition, issue, printing, state and variant of every work (save, for obvious reasons, The Second World War), many, perhaps most (but not all) in their original jackets. Plus a very large number of translations, including one previously thought not to exist (The World Crisis in Serbian).

“There are eighteen editions of Churchill’s first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (every variant). More African Journeys are here than anywhere, including all three variants of the American issue, which is almost unknown. There is every printing of every Cassell war speech volume in jackets (plus American, Canadian and Australian editions). Included are 416 Churchill-written pamphlets and leaflets.

“No stone was left unturned, including the Korean and pirated Taiwanese English-language editions of The Second World War and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. There is complete Hansard for all the years of Churchill’s service in Parliament. Hillsdale has acquired the bibliographically Churchill forewords, introductions, letters, statements, interviews virtually unknown today.

* * *

“I have seen virtually every, if not every, significant collection, private or public, of WSC’s writings, as a part of my bibliographical research. None of these notable collections carry the same bibliographical depth. I also visited all the great public libraries with focused Churchill collections, such as Trinity College and the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto, the Forsch Collection at Dartmouth, Fulton, Longleat, the Schweizerische Churchill Stiftung Bibliothek in Zurich, the University of Illinois Mortlake Collection, and the Churchill Memorial Trust Library (Canberra).

“Also I visited the great public libraries with excellent Churchill holdings, such as the British Library, Library of Congress, Bodleian, House of Commons, Houghton Rare Book Library and Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), the Dundee and Guildhall Libraries. None were as complete as mine. Of course I was on a mission. I felt it was my duty as bibliographer to describe every edition, issue, state, printing and variant.

“I do not believe this collection could be duplicated today. Even back then, it was extremely difficult to assemble. To collect everything, one had to know what there was. Would a bookseller have offered a major collector the sixth printing of Into Battle—or any printing other than a first? Is there anyone who’d have looked at Churchill in Ottawa closely enough to see whether the date of WSC’s arrival in Ottawa was on the 29th or 30th of December (hence two states of that pamphlet)? Would anyone have offered, or sought to purchase, a Colonial Malakand with a raised 1 in the page number 231? Or a copy of Victory with a missing 1 in page number 177? So it went!”

A Churchilliana Triad

The Cohen Collection forms a triad with the recently acquired Martin Gilbert Papers and Sir Martin’s meticulous Official Biography. His thirty-one volumes include twenty-three volumes of documents besides Gilbert’s “wodges” of papers, news reports, and, most importantly, interviews for each day of Churchill’s life. Hillsdale earlier acquired the Cohen audio collection: the voice of Churchill dating back to 1909. The college is digitalizing these for ease of access by scholars.

We thus acquire the Cohen collection, or most of it, and, besides, Ron himself, as a sometime curator, lecturer and speaker: an invaluable asset, as I know from experience.

Hillsdale College launched the Churchill Project to propagate a right understanding of Churchill’s record and to better understand his contributions to statecraft and leadership. The Project seeks to promote Churchill scholarship through national conferences, scholarships, and other resources. For more information on the Churchill Project, visit its website and subscribe for mailings.

The collection was generously donated by collector and bibliographer Ronald I. Cohen of Ottawa, Ontario. Among the 300 recordings are 100 speeches and 24 readings from Churchill’s war memoirs.

Hillsdale College has a long-standing commitment to leadership studies through The Churchill Project. We encourage scholarship in, and completion of, the remaining volumes of The Churchill Documents, a series in Churchill’s official biography. The final volume 23 arrives in 2019, and so completes a 31-volume epic Randolph Churchill began in 1962.

The Recordings

Ronald Cohen wrote the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill and founded the Churchill Society of Ottawa.“In forty years of collecting and bibliographical research, I have encountered no comparable audio collection,” he says,  “The recordings represent the truest source of what he said because they are his actual voice, not a printed record. Here are the inspiring words that drew people to the wireless and gave them the courage to fight on.”

We are excited to acquire these recordings because Churchill is one of the great modern masters of oratory. His career is an invaluable study in statesmanship.  The recordings range across a variety of mediums, from CDs and tapes to 33, 45, 78, and 80 rpm records. Few have the equipment to play them all. So Hillsdale College is now converting the recordings to digital format. The object is web-based access to students, scholars, and researchers.

Highlights of the collection:

The earliest Churchill recording known. This 1909 speech defended the Liberal budget, and so anticipated the 1910 general election. Because 78 rpm recordings did not appear until 1925, its speed is 80 rpm.

The Progress of the War. Four rare cased recordings of Churchillʼs 1940 and 1941 broadcasts.

The Waldorf Astoria speech, 15 March 1946. This followed the “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton. It is elaborately cased and bound.

The Pilgrims Society Dinner for Eleanor Roosevelt, Savoy Hotel, London, 12 April 1948. Churchill spoke on the third anniversary of Roosevelt’s death.

The 20th Century: Its Promise and its Realization. Churchill at the “Mid-Century” conference, M.I.T., 31 March 1949, a crucial but little-known oration because it predicted much of what lay ahead.kk

The Path of Duty. After becoming Prime Minister for the second time, Churchill spoke at the Guildhall, London, 9 November 1951 and laid out his program.j

The Years of Crisis (1933-1945): Columbia collected Churchill’s war speeches, including his response to Roosevelt in 1941: “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.”

Wartime Speeches of Winston S. Churchill 1940-1945. Cased edition from the Library of Imperial History, a rare item unheard of until its acquisition.

More to Come: The End of the Beginning

The Churchill Project serves to propagate a right understanding of Churchill’s record and his contributions to statecraft. We seek to promote Churchill scholarship through national conferences, scholarships, and other resources. Our resources were recently complemented by the Papers of Sir Martin Gilbert.

Ron Cohen and I often worked together over the years. It is a proud thing to see him bring this amazing collection to Hillsdale. The collaboration happily includes Ron himself, since no one can better discuss the subject. And no one else knows how some of them turned up, in odd corners of the world. For more details on the collection, please see his recordings bibliography.

But more and bigger news is still to come. Stand by!

Churchill and the Perspective of History 144 Years On

Continued from Part 1…. Do you want the good news or the bad news on Churchill today? The bad news is the high level of ignorance, as measured by that electronic Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner, the Internet.

Churchill’s name elicits 100 million Google hits, a colleague says, “Some are questions, many of which simply require the answer ‘No’—such as: ‘Was Churchill anti-Semitic?’ ‘Did Churchill hate Indians?’ ‘Was he bipolar?’ ‘Was he born in a ladies’ loo?’ ‘Did he have an affair with Lady Castlerosse?’ ‘Did Alexander Fleming save him from drowning?’” Of course, this was going on long before the worldwide web. Churchill wrote in 1938:

It is astonishing to me, looking back…how many different kinds of people—Suffragettes, Sinn Feiners, Communists, Egyptians, and the usual percentage of ordinary lunatics—have from time to time shown a very great want of appreciation of my public work. To be guarded and shadowed day and night…is only rendered tolerable…by the extraordinary tact, courtesy and skill of those entrusted with the duty of watching over public persons, who, at particular times, are thought to be worthy of powder and shot.

* * *

He’s still worthy today—although the powder and shot of history is digital not literal. Let’s face it: the web is where people GO. So much of it warps reality. A recent survey revealed that most British schoolchildren think Churchill was a mythical figure and that Sherlock Holmes was a real person in history.

Professor John Charmley said: “After holding our heads in our hands and deciding that the world has indeed gone to the dogs, we might care to reflect that there may be an irony in this. Churchill did set out to make himself a mythical figure; so it may be only just….that he seems to have become one.”

Surviving the Internet

But here’s the good news. Churchill has defied this mother load of ignorance. His social media critics don’t go unanswered anymore. Sometimes the answers are from people we’ve never heard of, who take the trouble to learn the truth. Last month a former U.S. astronaut, who said something nice about him, cravenly apologized when dunned by Tweets claiming Churchill was a racist who starved the Bengalis in 1943. He was greeted with a cacophony of digital guffaws, referring to a dozen different websites that disprove such nonsense. As a writer I have to be glad for all this calumny. After all, it furnished me with enough material for a book, Winston Churchill: Myth and Reality, which Ron and I will be happy to sell you tonight. Alas it’s already out of date, because new charges are constantly invented.

My website recently listed all the false claims of 2018 along with links to the best rebuttals. The defenders range from Toronto’s Terry Reardon, a Mackenzie King historian, on who was really to blame for the disastrous 1942 Dieppe raid—to Zareer Masani, an Indian scholar, on what really caused the Bengal Famine. One of us posted a quotation you won’t find among the attacks: “The old idea that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must go….We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada.” (Churchill said that in the War Council in 1943.)

I think we should be encouraged and heartened by such defenses. We didn’t have nearly as many allies five or ten years ago. We owe thanks to diligent efforts of Churchillians like yourselves. Which brings me to the many societies like this one.

National societies…

…like the one I founded fifty years ago, are increasingly creaky—like me. People just don’t join clubs the way they used to. The exchange of information and opinion they offer is freely accessible with a gadget you hold in your hand. Yet local societies, like this one, are going strong. What past political figure can you think of, besides perhaps Lincoln, who engenders such enthusiasm? The more advanced Churchill societies, like this one and Vancouver’s, welcome speakers on current events—not necessarily about Churchill, but keeping Churchill firmly in mind. It’s a remarkable credit to a man who realized the value of encouraging informal discussion by all shades of political opinion when he founded his own club for that purpose 107 years ago. In Wisconsin they named theirs after it. They call it the Other Other Club.

In print media…

…his reputation stands. Critics arose soon after the war. In 1957 Lord Alanbrooke published his frustrated, late night harangues with Churchill—and then apologized to him for leaking those private diaries. Brooke’s fuming is often used to show Churchill’s feet of clay—and Lord knows he had them.

But lately we’ve seen another side of Brooke—as when the PM arrives in France after D-Day. “I knew that he longed to get into the most exposed position possible,” Brooke wrote. “I honestly believe that he would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success. He [often said that] the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” I think that little aside, by a frequently cited critic, captures a key aspect of Churchill.

Books about him keep piling up. At Hillsdale we’ve reviewed 100 since 2014, twenty per year. Yes, a few dwell in muddy byways, half-baked history. Some are pretty grim. To paraphrase Sir Winston, in war you can only be killed once—but by writers, many times. And yet, 144 years on, his reputation survives.

Ten Great Books in the Space of a Year

Think of all the really good books we’ve had just this year. Lewis Lehrman’s Churchill and Lincoln, a scholarly comparison of two dominant statesmen. Antoine Capet’s exhaustive encyclopedia, Dictionnaire Churchill. David Lough’s My Darling Winston, the insightful letters between WSC and his mother. Brough Scott on his life with horses, Churchill at the Gallop. Jill Rose’s Nursing Churchill on his health in wartime. Larry Kryske’s Churchill without Blood Sweat and Tears applied his leadership principles to modern living. Leslie Hossack’s Charting Churchill is a beautiful photo documentary of Churchill’s London. Piers Brendon’s Churchill’s Bestiary is a scholarly account of his relations with and allusions to animals. Hillsdale College’s The Churchill Documents offer massive new primary source material from D-Day through 1945. All these books are reviewed, with ordering links, on Hillsdale’s Churchill website.

The crowning achievement is Andrew Roberts’ Churchill: Walking with Destiny. Full disclosure: I was one of Andrew’s readers and kibitzers. Together with the tenacious Paul Courtenay, we exchanged a thousand emails. We ran down facts and factoids, from the Royal Library to gossip columns, arguing out every conclusion. With Hillsdale’s help, we checked even the unpublished parts of Sir Martin Gilbert’s “wodges”: documents, clippings and diaries covering almost every day of Churchill’s life. We didn’t agree about everything, but the average isn’t too bad.

* * *

This was the first biography I’d proofread since William Manchester’s The Last Lion, so I am perhaps qualified to compare. No one will ever reach the lyrical heights of “Horatius at the Gate,” as Manchester did. Andrew is however far more insightful, accurate, up to date, and critical where he needs to be. Walking with Destiny is I think the best single volume life of Churchill you can read.

Right now Andrew is on book tours. He’ll be here in Ottawa on May 27th. “Where are you now?” I just asked him. “New York en route to Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison,” he said—“just like Churchill in 1901. And guess what—I don’t even have to pay the crooked major.” He was referring to Major Pond, Churchill’s 1901 lecture agent, whom WSC called “a vulgar yankee impresario.”

Here’s what matters: these books have again brought Churchill to the forefront of history. Andrew writes: “There’s an explosion of love for him among ordinary people that would make you very happy. It’s like 1940 in terms of his popularity, whenever you get away from the smug elites. Big audiences. We sell out constantly. They ask good questions. No questions about firebombing Dresden, Iraqi gassings or the Bengal Famine. Sometimes one can feel down over the Twitter eruptions and statue smearings. But out in the real world, he’s as much loved as ever. Our life’s work has borne fruit.”

Scholarly Institutions…

…are a third part of his stature. The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has become the Center for Churchill Studies Ron and I used to dream about. It began in 2006, when Hillsdale President Larry Arnn declared he would finish the Official Biography. Oddly, this reminded me of what Churchill said when Japan declared war on the United States, the British Empire and the Dutch East Indies. “They have certainly embarked upon a very considerable undertaking.”

Considerable? It seemed impossible. The great history had stalled after the 1941 document volume. Undaunted, Dr. Arnn reprinted all twenty-four previous volumes, most of them out of print. Since then, helped by the Churchill Fellows, our dedicated student researchers, Hillsdale has published five more, taking the documents through 1945—seven volumes in all on World War II. In June, the 31st and final volume completes the job Randolph Churchill began fifty-six years ago. We celebrate with a cruise around Britain and a London banquet. But this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end….

The Churchill Project’s endowment finances an array of activity: seminars, online courses, conferences, tours and publications. We are building the largest Churchill archive in North America, housed in a new purpose-built Archives building. It includes the Martin Gilbert Papers—all of them, on 20th century and Jewish history as well as Churchill. My own library and papers are in trust for it. We are 2/3rds of the way to a $9 million endowment. Hillsdale maintains a Canadian link through its recognition by your CRA. So your support too is tax-deductible.

* * *

My first surprise when I joined Hillsdale in 2014 was to find so many young people with a keen interest in the great man. They have varied opinions and questing minds. My second surprise was the events. There is no registration charge. They’re free, whether online, on campus, at the Kirby Center in Washington, or elsewhere. We even provide lunches and dinners. You just have to get there. The secret is owning most of the necessary real estate and pre-financing expenses.

With the Official Bio behind us, the Churchill Project will turn to events, online education, and new publications. The work is something great and lasting, to “keep the memory green and the record accurate,” as Lady Soames charged us to do. And all of it is financed and set in stone to continue long after we are gone. This is the only way, in the long run, to assure that Churchill’s statesmanship will be recognized and studied forever.

Concluded in Part 3…

Churchill and Canada, 144 Years On

I thank Ron Cohen. And return his compliments. I thank him for his scholarship—especially his great Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, which is one of the eight or ten standard works on Winston Churchill. And for his prowess as bag man, helping me empty the bookshops of Hay-on-Wye, which he has just described to you.

In 1954, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent arrived in London, exhausted from a world tour. A frequent traveler, Sir Winston offered him advice: “Never stand when you can sit. Never sit when you can lie down. Never miss an opportunity to visit a washroom.” It falls on me to stand. But since I promised Ron not to take more than 3 1/2 hours, I’m sure I can make it.

Sir Winston lies at Bladon in English earth, “which in his finest hour he held inviolate.” He would enjoy the controversy he stirs today, on media he never dreamed of. He would revel in the assaults of his detractors, the ripostes of his defenders. The vision “of middle-aged gentlemen who are my political opponents being in a state of uproar and fury is really quite exhilarating to me,” he said. Yes, and the not so middle-aged, too.

I have five quick points to make. One of them is Churchill’s overriding message—I differ in this from some of my colleagues. Another is, Churchill’s encounters with Canada. They are many, and they are important. I’ll then describe what Canada meant to him. And I’ll say what the world thinks of him right now. Finally we’ll look at where he stands in the perspective of history: what is it about him that is most worth bringing to the attention of thoughtful people.

What is Churchill’s overriding message?

At this hour on New Year’s Eve 1941, the day after he spoke here, describing Britain as a chicken with an unwringable neck, Churchill was on a train hurtling past Niagara Falls. He was heading back to Washington, to finish telling the Americans what the war was like. You probably know what he said when a colleague urged him to approach the U.S. with caution and deference. “Oh! That is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her. Now that she is in the harem, we talk to her quite differently!”

The war had gone global, and Mr. Churchill was on top of his game. As the sweep second hand of “The Turnip,” his gold Breguet pocket watch, counted down the final moments of 1941, he called staff and reporters to the dining car. There, raising his glass, he made this toast: “Here’s to 1942. Here’s to a year of toil—a year of struggle and peril, and a long step forward toward victory. May we all come through safe and with honour.” That was a tough year. But came through we did.

I think this was his overriding message then. I think it is still his message today. No, there is no Third Reich, no Imperial Japan. But there are stateless enemies who seek our ruin. There is economic uncertainty. There are strains between old friends. What a time for Churchill’s strength and optimism. And there he is to encourage us: never despair, we will all come through safe and with honor.

* * *

How often he knew exactly what to say! It’s true he insisted that the people had the “lion heart,” that he had merely provided the roar; that he had always earned his living by his pen and his tongue. What did they expect? They came through that time in part because they were led by a professional writer. And today, 144 years since his birth, his words, statesmanship, optimism and courage still beckon to us. We are right to worry over current events. And to remember Churchill’s unswerving faith that all will come right.

I like what a Churchill speaker, the publisher William Rusher, said to us at a conference in Banff: “I know we have a tendency to be discouraged about how things are going,” Bill said, “although in our time, you know, they haven’t gone all that badly. The Marxist idea lies in ruins. Free market economics, which I wouldn’t have given you a plugged nickel for at the end of World War II, is now so popular that even China calls its policy ‘Market Socialism,’ whatever that is. These are big victories. There is still much that is worrisome. But Churchill, if he were here, would encourage us: Never despair. Never give in.” Good advice. And just look–despite all the kerfuffle, we even have new North American trade deal!

Encounters with Canada

Our theme is the perspective of history, and since we are where we are, let’s start with the perspective of Canada—for much has emerged about Churchill and what he called “the linchpin of the English-speaking world.”

David Dilks’s 2005 book The Great Dominion is a signal legacy. Churchill loved Canada, David wrote. “He never returned to India after 1899, or to South Africa after the Boer War. He never visited Australia, New Zealand, British Southeast Asia, the British Pacific. Half-American though he was, he never considered the Great Dominion an appendix to the United States, nor regarded Canadians as decaffeinated Americans.”

In early 1901 he was lecturing in Manitoba, which astonished him. “At the back of the town,” he wrote his mother, “there is a wheat field 980 miles long and 230 broad…a visit here is most exhilarating.” It was there that he heard Queen Victoria had died. He was struck by the shared sense of loss: “The news reached us at Winnipeg,” he wrote, “and this city far away among the snows, 1400 miles from any town of importance, began to hang its head and hoist half-masted flags.”

* * *

On his next visit in 1929 he contemplated moving here. “Darling, I am greatly attracted to this country,” he wrote his wife. “Immense developments are going forward….I have made up my mind that if Neville Chamberlain is made leader of the Conservative Party or anyone else of that kind, I clear out of politics and see if I cannot make you and the kittens a little more comfortable before I die. Only one goal still attracts me, and if that were barred I should quit the dreary field for pastures new….But the time for decision is not yet.”

Who knows what would have happened? Would he have become a Vancouver timber mogul, an Edmonton oil baron, or got into Parliament? Probably the latter. After all, as he once told the U.S. Congress, if things had been different he might have got there on his own. It’s probably just as well, I think we all agree, that he didn’t emigrate—Neville or no Neville.

What did Canada mean to Churchill?

He visited Canada again on his 1932 lecture tour, four times during the war, twice in the Fifties—nine times in all. Fifty-four years after his first visit he arrived for his last. “I love coming,” he told reporters. “Canada is the master link in Anglo-American unity, apart from all her other glories.” And he added, in French—“I think of Canada as being almost my own country.”

He respected Canada’s contributions to liberty. “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies,” he told Canadians in 1941, “because we are made of sugar candy.” They didn’t have to be told. Today we see in Canada tolerance, equality, the golden rule. Eighty years ago there was a somewhat limited tolerance for certain persons, and it led to playing a huge part in the wars that made us what we are today.

When World War I ended 100 years ago last month, Canada had suffered 263,000 casualties, eight times the number per capita of the USA. When World War II began, Canada had 10,000 soldiers and ten Bren guns. By the end of the war there were a million men in uniform, and 25,000 enlisted women. 107,000 were killed or wounded, again more per capita than the United States.

* * *

At dinner here at Laurier House after his 1941 speech to Parliament, Prime Minister Mackenzie King said, “Canada plans to make an immediate gift to you of one billion dollars.” Churchill, accustomed to speaking in English terms of “a thousand million,” wasn’t sure he’d heard right. He asked King to repeat himself. “A billion dollars,” Mr. King said. Then he added two billion in cash and interest-free loans. That is $57 billion in today’s money—twice the size of your current defense budget. Churchill was floored.

From the start of the war, Canadian food supplies and convoys kept Britain from starving. Toward the end, Canadian miners supplied ingredients for “Tube Alloys,” the atomic bomb. Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee scarcely knew about it. “Mackenzie King knew everything about it, through Minister of Munitions C.D. Howe, who held a seat on the project’s board.

Nor was World War II the end of Canada’s contributions. Canadians fought and died in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan. A Canadian general directed the NATO effort in Libya. No peacekeeping force in the past fifty years was without Canadians.

David Dilks brought all this out masterfully in his book. “That is what Canada has done,” he said—“in NATO, the UN, the Commonwealth and in peace-keeping operations. My audience contains many distinguished Canadians. I hope they will allow me to say what is felt by countless people in Britain and America, but too seldom expressed: Thank you a thousand times.”

Continued in Part 2…