Back in the News: Richard Burton’s Fraught Relationship with Churchill

Burton played a magnificent Churchill in “The Gathering Storm.” He also played to the camera, alternating praise with vitriol depending on his audience.

Churchill’s commitment to human rights ran deeper than we may imagine. It was still in evidence with regard to Apartheid South Africa as late as 1954.

Rather than advancing segregation in South Africa, Churchill strove hard for justice, arrayed against the broad prejudices of his time. Part 1: 1902-09

Churchill and Caesar both wrote literate war memoirs. Was this special pleading, or was there a higher purpose? For Churchill, there certainly was.

A chapel in Java built by Allied POWs included national symbols, in which Winston Churchill was surreptitiously added under the noses of Japanese guards.

Clews paints a loyal but frustrated Churchill who later defined the rule of the Phoney War: “Don’t be unkind to the enemy; you will only make him angry.”

“In my mind’s eye I invest him with the robes of Caesar…. The lives of the great are an inspiration to their posterity.” —Lewis Broad

On VE Day seventy-five years ago, Winston Churchill spoke on radio, in Parliament, from the Ministry of Health , and to celebrants in London streets.

Through education, Churchill strove to elevate the individual. Through labor exchanges, he strove to promote natural market functions. Through unemployment insurance, he paired the virtue of thrift with an encouragement of personal responsibility to strengthen the individual and curb the effects of uncontrollable misfortune. Churchill recognized an end; he saw a means and pursued it.

The Churchills, father and son, had close friendships with prominent, talented Jews. One was Nathaniel Mayer “Natty” Rothschild, First Baron Rothschild, head of the British branch of the famous banking family. He was the first Jewish member of the House of Lords. Another was Sir Ernest Joseph Cassel, also of Jewish origin, though he became a Catholic in 1880. A renowned merchant banker and financier, Sir Ernest was young Winston’s mentor, financial consultant and lifelong friend.

Churchill, who won a Nobel Prize, and did a few other things, cannot reply. He lies at Bladon in English earth, “which in his finest hour he held inviolate.” He’d love the controversy he stirs, on media he never dreamed of. He once said 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.”

Randolph Churchill’s career in journalism lasted thirty-six years. He wrote hundreds of articles, edited seven volumes of his father’s speeches, and published fifteen books, including the first seven narrative and document volumes of Winston S. Churchill, the official biography.