World: Anniversary of an Antediluvian

A quarter-century ago this fall, Britain declared war on Hitler’s Germany. Fifty years ago, its troops were digging in for the first, fearsome winter of World War I. Ninety years ago this week was born the only man who, in his own words, “passed through both the two supreme cataclysms of recorded history in high Cabinet office.” It is a mark of the world’s affection and deep respect for Sir Winston Churchill that his birthday is celebrated almost as a national anniversary throughout ‘ the free world.

In London, tributes to “the only antediluvian,” as he styled himself in 1940, range from an hour-long BBC television show built around his favorite songs to a radio play about the second most illustrious of the Churchills, the Duke of Marl borough. At dozens of observances throughout the U.S., Americans contributed funds to the Winston Churchill Memorial— at Fulton, Mo., commemorating the historic 1946 “Sinews of Peace” speech at Westminster College, in which Churchill urged the Western world to close ranks again in the face of a threat to peace as formidable as any it had yet seen: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Duty Done. One of the few statesmen to achieve undisputed immortality in his lifetime, Sir Winston is perhaps the only world leader who has ever written history as memorably as he made it. His chronicles of the First and Second World Wars, and the West’s misspent years between, are without parallel either as history or, as he saw them, a distillation of “thirty years of action and advocacy that comprise and express my life-effort.” Thanks to a deep sense of the past and a lofty view of the future, Churchill has always been a poet of action, a brilliant interpreter of great events from the British army’s last great cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898 to the final defeat of the Axis powers in 1945. And for all his political pragmatism, Churchill never hesitated to point to the underlying moral of events or to affirm that, by and large, the Allied cause was that of civilization itself. As he said in the hour of victory: “We gave thanks to God for the noblest of all His blessings, the sense that we had done our duty.” The Voice. It seems a distant victory now, with yesterday’s friends and foes dizzyingly reversed. His own finest hour remains the summer of 1940, with the clamor of fighters overhead, the army trucks clattering along country roads, the crunch of falling bombs, the civilians digging trenches against the invasion that could come at any hour. All this is not memory but only history to a new generation. But it is still sometimes brought to life—for instance, in a massive birthday edition by London Records (24 sides) of Churchill’s speeches, readings and spoken recollections.

With not too much imagination it is possible to hear that gruff, grave, sibilant voice as the voice of Elizabeth at Tilbury, of Henry V at Agincourt, of Pitt, or Chatham, or the Lloyd George to whom Churchill paid tribute in his last speech before the House of Commons nine years ago. The words could apply to Churchill himself: “He imparted at once a new. surge of strength, of impulse, far stronger than anything that had been known up to that time … As a man of action, resource and creative energy, he stood, when at his zenith, without a rival.” Old Feats. If Churchill’s zenith is past, his words retain a remarkable pertinence. The Iron Curtain speech itself, his advice to seek pragmatic understandings with the Communists, the vision of a united Europe and a European army, above all the incomparable definition of Western values, remain strikingly contemporary. At fourscore years and ten, Churchill lives in quiet seclusion. Increasingly feeble and withdrawn within himself, he still enjoys his food and drink and the company of a few old friends who recall old feats of arms or totter out with him to feed the black swans at Chartwell, his country house in Kent. He no longer paints, for his eyes are dim—as his testimony will never be.

— Consisting of a library of Churchilliana, housed inside the transplanted shell of Sir Christopher Wren’s 17th century church of St. Mary Aldermanbury in London (it was destroyed during the blitz). The interior of the church will be rebuilt to Wren’s original plans.