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Articles
Great Contemporaries: Ralph Wigram and His Death
- By THE CHURCHILL PROJECT
- | November 2, 2015
- Category: Great Contemporaries Q & A
Above: Churchill and Wigram walking at Chartwell, ca. 1935 (Hillsdale College Press)
How did Wigram die?
Q: Can you confirm a statement by Churchill biographer William Manchester? He writes that Churchill’s key informant on Germany, Ralph Wigram, committed suicide. I can find no evidence, except for conjecture. — M.F., Dallas
A: The producers of “The Wilderness Years” television documentary (1982) took liberties by suggesting that Wigram was a suicide. Ever since it has been broadly accepted as fact. Indeed recently another myth was layered on to this one. Allegedly, Wigram’s parents didn’t attend his funeral in Sussex because suicide was proscribed by the Church.
Without foundation
Hugh Axton, a Wigram researcher in England, put that canard to rest in 2014: “On the morning of his funeral Wigram’s parents were attending a memorial service for him at Landkey Parish Church near Barnstaple, Devon. Ralph was brought up in the area. Many family friends attended who could not have journeyed to Sussex on short notice in winter.”
According to reader Richard Rose, the death certificate gives the cause of death as “Pulmonary haemorrhage and carcinoma of lung (left).”
William Manchester was a peerless stylist but had an unfortunate tendency to emphasize the seamy or judgmental. (There is nothing to suggest that Churchill was, as Manchester wrote, “less than generous” toward Wigram, in fact quite the opposite). And his footnotes are often, as in this case, a mare’s nest.
On Wigram in The Last Lion, vol. 2, Alone 1932-1940 (UK title The Caged Lion) Manchester (193) quotes the biographer Henry Pelling: “depression overtook him and he committed suicide.” But Manchester’s footnote leads not to Pelling’s Churchill (1974) but to Robert Vansittart’s The Mist Procession, Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, and Gilbert’s The Wilderness Years—none of which contain any reference to suicide.
In Pelling’s book the comment is footnoted “The Gathering Storm, 73, 178” (English edition 1948). But Wigram is not mentioned there. Churchill does recount Wigram’s death (155) but does not call it a suicide. So the question is, where did Henry Pelling get this impression?
Would anyone be able to confirm conclusively as to where Wigram was found dead. Did this happen at his rented flat in Lord North Street London or his country house at the Pantiles, Firle Road, Seaford?
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Sir Martin Gilbert and other sources quote only WSC’s letter to his wife (2Jan37: “I was deeply shocked and grieved to learn from Vansittart by chance on the telephone that poor Ralph Wigram died suddenly on New Year’s eve in his wife’s arms.” See comment below.
Derek, he died in Seaford, East Sussex.