Churchill Collection)

2  ‘Escape!’ Durban Town Hall, South Africa, 23 December 1899 (Churchill Press Photo Photographs, Churchill Archive Centre Cambridge, CHPH IB/11, Odhams Press)
3  Electioneering in Manchester, 1908 (Churchill Press Photographs, Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge, CHPH IB/15, Daily Mirror)
4  Winston visits Clementine’s munitions workers’ canteen, Enfield, 1915 (Broadwater Collection, Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge, BRDW 1, photo 1)
5  Electioneering on the way back to Westminster, 1924 (Broadwater Collection, Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge, BRDW 11, photo 513)
6  Welcoming home the crew of HMS Exeter, Plymouth, 1940 (Churchill Press Photographs, Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge, CHPH 12/F1/31, Fox)
7  ‘Their Finest Hour’, House of Commons, 18 June 1940 (Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge, copyright Winston S. Churchill)
8  ‘The Few’, House of Commons, 20 August 1940 (Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge, copyright Winston S. Churchill)
9  Thanking the ship’s company of HMS Prince of Wales on return from the Atlantic Charter meeting, 19 August 1941 (courtesy of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, ref. H12856)
10  Address to a Joint Session of Congress, 26 December 1941 (Winston S. Churchill Collection)
11  Address to men of Britain’s victorious Desert Army in the Roman amphitheatre of Carthage, 1 June 1943 (courtesy of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, ref NA3255)
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.