Finest Hour Fall 2016

Winston Churchill crossed the Atlantic more times than most people did before the age of jet travel. His connections with North America spanned his whole life from his first visit at the age of twenty to his last visit more than sixty years later. Many of these trips involved stops in both Canada and the United States—for both nations were tremendously important in his worldview. Terry Reardon outlines Churchill’s evolving views about the Great Dominion and how it insistently challenged his understanding about the relationship between Britain and an Empire that was becoming a Commonwealth. How Churchill first began to profit from his North American connections is explained by Bradley Tolppanen, while Elizabeth Churchill Snell traces the Churchills’ early family history, how it crossed the Atlantic—and how it returned. If Churchill’s imperial…

Finest Hour 173 Churchill in Iceland REYKJAVIK—The President of Iceland was delighted to receive representatives of the Churchill Club of Iceland and be presented with copies of Finest Hour containing Magnús Erlendsson’s article about Churchill’s visit to our country. —Árni Sigurðsson Churchill in Stratford HITCHIN, HERTFORDSHIRE— With regret I write to inform you that my father, Jack Darrah, passed away peacefully on 27 September 2016. Dad was ninety-one. During his lifetime he had many hobbies and interests. Winston Churchill had been an inspiration to him, and he was so proud to live to see his collection placed at the Stratford Armouries. Thank you to everyone in the Churchill fraternity, who has been in contact since Dad’s passing, and also for the support over the years. —Carol Harwood 2016 Churchill Conference Washington, D. C., 27–29 October From Sir Winston’s…

The Victorian era was the zenith of the British Empire. It was then the superpower of the world holding sway over 300 million people, one-quarter of the world’s population. Winston Churchill was born into the upper class, and his formative years were steeped in the belief of the greatness and righteousness of the British Empire, upon which the sun never slept. This romantic view of Britain’s position in the world remained constant all through his life. But being a member of the upper class did not necessarily mean an upper income, and it certainly did not in the case of Winston Churchill. Thus he took full advantage of the international reputation he had earned by way of his exploits and heroics in the Boer War by embarking on a lecture tour of…

After disembarking at New York on 8 December 1900 after a six-day voyage from Liverpool, Winston Churchill was met by Major J. B. Pond, America’s leading lecture agent. He had come to North America at Pond’s invitation to undertake a lecture tour that would eventually encompass at least thirty-seven lectures in thirty-one cities. Unlike Churchill’s first visit to America five years before, this trip was about earning money; as Churchill wrote a friend, “I pursue profit not pleasure in the States this time.” At twenty-six Churchill had high expectations for the lecture tour. After garnering £3,700 the previous month for lecturing in Britain, he arrived in New York with a £1,000 guarantee and the hope for as much as £5,000. Churchill was encouraged in his expectations by James Burton Pond, who…

When I was a very young girl in Nova Scotia and first learned the name of my grandfather Churchill, it seemed to be all over the radio. But I did not know what the word “war” meant, and neither did I know that chasing the Churchill name would become a lifetime’s preoccupation. My mother was the last in a direct line of ten generations of Churchills in North America that originally came from Dorset. The first generation settled in the Plymouth colony around 1643. Subsequently, the family moved to Nova Scotia in 1762. A great-grandson of the first Nova Scotian Churchill settler, Lemuel, later moved from Chebogue Point near Yarmouth to Hantsport. The Nova Scotian Churchills were shipbuilders in the age of sail and wood. Ultimately, they had one of the larger…

For Britain and its Empire, a period of intense reflection and debate followed the conclusion of the bloodbath that had been the First World War. One of the main themes discussed was how in the event of another war, military resources and forces that were scattered around the world could be better prepared, co-ordinated, managed, and led. This was not new. Similar discussions had taken place since at least 1890, when the Hartington Commission had proposed the establishment of a naval and military council. In 1904 Arthur Balfour took over the chairmanship of a Cabinet Defence Committee, and, with the prime minister in the chair, it was renamed the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) and seen “as an attempt to create an Imperial General Staff on a temporary basis.” It…