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Articles
Churchillisms: “Take This Pudding Away—It Has No Theme”
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | April 26, 2024
- Category: Q & A The Literary Churchill
Q&A: “It has no theme”: Churchill words?
A columnist and former presidential advisesr asks us to confirm Churchill’s rejection of a tasteless pudding (generic word for dessert in Britain). “It has no theme.”
While not actually published, members of his family confirm that he sometimes used the expression when dining. Along with puddings, he applied it to soups. Asked what gave a recipe a theme, the late Lord Soames thought Churchill meant “a distinctive flavour or ingredient.”1
What we didn’t expect, researching the phrase in our database of his words, was that Churchill used the line politically. And more than once. We found five occurrences, each illustrating what he thought about the flaws of legislation or leaders.
1935: The India Bill
A concentrated dose of Churchillian vocabulary poured forth on the Government of India Act. Some analogies were a bit strained, but his word-pictures were vivid, albeit in a lost cause. The Act granted more autonomy to the provinces, provided for a federation with the “princely states,” and increased the franchise sevenfold.
Sir Samuel Hoare [Secretary of State for India] has thrust upon Parliament the most bulky Bill ever known. If it was as luminous as it is voluminous, it would indeed command respect. But what is this India Home Rule Bill? I will tell you. It is a gigantic quilt of jumbled crochet work. There is no theme; there is no pattern; there is no agreement; there is no conviction; there is no simplicity; there is no courage. It is a monstrous monument of shams built by the pygmies.
India is to be subjected to a double simultaneous convulsion in the Provinces and at the Centre by a crazy attempt to create a Federal system, before the units which compose it have even been formed. The wall before the bricks are made, the faggot before the stakes are cut!
The faithful, trustworthy Indian police, the mainstay of peace and order are to be disturbed and harassed by divided allegiances arising from unsure, irrational compromise. The supreme government of India is to be racked by Dyarchy—rival authorities clutching at the levers of power.2
Churchill’s magnanimity was evident after the Act passed desite his efforts to kill it. Through a mutual friend, he advised Gandhi “to use the powers that are offered and make the thing a success.”
1939: Napoleon versus Hitler
Churchill always deprecated comparisons between the great French emperor and “a squalid caucus boss and butcher.”3 In 1939, as Hitler was absorbing Czechoslovakia, Churchill declared only that Hitler had no theme of which the mind and spirit of man should stand in awe”:
There is no question of comparing the present ruler of Germany with Napoleon…. Hitler can traverse in his aeroplane, in a few hours, distances which Napoleon’s coach, with all its special relays, could scarcely cover in twice as many days. One of Hitler’s mechanized divisions could certainly disperse all the armies Napoleon ever led. Hitler can add a nought or two to most of the figures with which Napoleon dealt.
But after all, quantity, bulk, mass, have never been the tests of human grandeur… Mass and weight may produce violent reactions when collisions occur but they offer no theme of which the mind and spirit of man should stand in awe.
An avalanche may overwhelm a village but the village is more important than the avalanche. Mere “bigness” has long ago been put in its proper place by the human mind. We have only to travel with Gulliver to Lilliput and Brobdingnag to see how easily the proportions may be altered.4
1940: Third Reich
What is this New Order which [the Nazis] seek to fasten first upon Europe and if possible—for their ambitions are boundless—upon all the continents of the globe? It is the rule of the Herrenvolk—the master-race—who are to put an end to democracy, to parliaments, to the fundamental freedoms and decencies of ordinary men and women, to the historic rights of nations; and give them in exchange the iron rule of Prussia, the universal goose-step, and a strict, efficient discipline enforced upon the working-classes by the political police, with the German concentration camps and firing parties, now so busy in a dozen lands, always handy in the background. There is the New Order.
Napoleon in his glory and his genius spread his Empire far and wide. There was a time when only the snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover with their guardian fleets stood between him and the dominion of the world. Napoleon’s armies had a theme: they carried with them the surges of the French Revolution. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity—that was the cry. There was a sweeping away of outworn medieval systems and aristocratic privilege. There was the land for the people, a new code of law. Nevertheless, Napoleon’s Empire vanished like a dream.
But Hitler, Hitler has no theme, naught but mania, appetite and exploitation. He has, however, weapons and machinery for grinding down and for holding down conquered countries which are the product, the sadly perverted product, of modern science.5
1946: “Vague palimpsest of officialese”
Albert Victor Alexander had served as First Lord of the Admiralty in Churchill’s wartime coalition, and there was affection between them. So much so, WSC declared, that Alexander could not have written the document under discussion. With no more a theme than the India Act, it suffered from the same maladies:
We have next the White Paper by the Minister of Defence. I must again remind the House that the Rt. Hon. Gentleman used very hard language about the arguments of his political opponents the other night, and about their style. No more barren, dismal, flatulent, platitudinous documents than his White Paper—if you can call it “his” White Paper—has ever been laid before the House of Commons.
His friends—and I am certainly a wartime friend—hope that it is to his credit that he had nothing to do with writing it. It was one of those rigmaroles and grimaces produced by the modern bureaucracy into whose hands we have fallen—a kind of vague palimpsest of jargon and officialese, with no breadth, no theme and, above all no facts. think I shall be speaking for everyone in all parts of the House when 1 say there is a broadly-spread feeling that our manpower in the Forces is being wasted, muddled and mismanaged.6
1949: Nature of the new threat
Speaking at a dinner given by Henry Luce, Churchill revived his belief that Nazism had no theme save racial supremacy. Communism, by contrast, did—and that made it an even more formidable challenge than Hitler. His first paragraph was a variation on his message through an intermediary to Hitler in 1932, when they almost met in Munich: Anti-Semitism was “a good starter but a bad sticker.”
We are now confronted with something which is quite as wicked but much more formidable than Hitler, because Hitler had only the Herrenvolk stuff and anti-Semitism. Well, somebody said about that—a good starter, but a bad stayer. That’s all he had. He had no theme.
But these fourteen men in the Kremlin have their hierarchy and a church of Communist adepts whose missionaries are in every country as a fifth column, and not only a fifth column, in your country, ours, everywhere, and so on, with a feeling that they may be running a risk but if their gamble comes off they will be the masters of the whole land in which they are a minority at the present time. They will be the Quislings with power to rule and dominate all the rest of their fellow countrymen. Therefore they have a good prospective advantage.
It is certain in my opinion that Europe would have been communized and London would have been under bombardment some time ago but for the deterrent of the atomic bomb in the hands of the United States. That is my firm belief and that governs the situation today. Sometimes one looks at the terrible alternative. Fancy if they had got it first.7
Words for our time?
All this was an interesting scholarly excursion showing how Churchill consistently relied on a favored phrase in his oratory. But those were issues issues long past. Then we found what he said about “no theme” to the 1930 Socialist government. It is remarkable how close this seems to certain situations today:
There is also a feeling, and, I must say it quite frankly, perhaps not altogether justified, that with the Socialist regime in Great Britain this island and this Empire are passing through a period of eclipse which may well be converted into a period of decline. There is anxiety abroad, and can we wonder at it! Why should the Government complain? Look at all they have said. Look at all they protest they stand for….
They have no theme [and] have deluded the masses of their supporters in the country into believing they are about to bring into being some vast, splendid, new world. They have climbed and ensconced themselves upon the structures of Capitalism, and they are shouting to the mob below that they are going to pull them down…. Can they wonder there is confusion and anxiety abroad in the nation; and can they wonder that the electors are showing an increasing reluctance to entrust the task of restoring confidence to a bankrupt Government…?8
Endnotes
All references are to remarks, speeches or broadcasts by Winston S. Churchill.
1 Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2015), 531.
2 Broadcast of 30 January 1935, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 12, The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 1058. Churchill’s typescript reads “shams.” The Listener transcript reads “shame.” The phrase was to become famous as “a monstrous monument of shame,” but we believe he meant it as typed.
3 Churchill by Himself, 44.
4 “Will Hitler Make Napoleon’s Mistakes?” in Illustrated, 4 March 1939, reprinted in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), I: 429.
5 “The Atlantic Meeting with President Roosevelt,” broadcast, London, 24 August 1941, in The Unrelenting Struggle (London: Cassell, 1942), 236.
6 “National Service Bill,” House of Commons, 31 March 1947, in Europe Unite (London: Cassell, 1950), 53.
7 Dinner given by Henry Luce, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, New York, 25 March 1949, in In the Balance (London: Cassell, 1951), 38.
8 “Unemployment,” House of Commons, 28 May 1930, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), V: 4815.