Tag Archives: Winston Churchill

Weekend read: Odd poem: Winston Churchill, ‘Our Modern Watchwords’

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I
The shadow falls along the shore
The search lights twinkle on the sea
The silence of a mighty fleet
Portends the tumult yet to be.
The tables of the evening meal
Are spread amid the great machines
And thus with pride the question runs
Among the sailors and marines
Breathes there the man who fears to die
For England, Home, & Wai-hai-wai.

II
The Admiral slowly paced the bridge
His mind intent on famous deed
Yet ere the battle joined he thought
Of words that help mankind in need
Words that might make sailors think
Of Hopes beyond all earthly laws
And add to hard and heavy toil
The glamour of a victorious cause.

*****

Around 115 years after it was written, the only known poem written by Winston Churchill as an adult was discovered by Roy Davids, a retired manuscript dealer from Great Haseley in Oxfordshire: ‘Our Modern Watchwords’, which was apparently inspired by Tennyson and Kipling.
Written between 1898 and 1900 when Churchill was a cornet (equivalent to today’s second lieutenant) in the 4th Hussars, the 10-verse poem is a tribute to the Empire. The author peppers the poem with the names of remote outposts defending Britain’s interests around the world, many of which he would have visited as a young officer and even fought at, including Weihaiwei in China, Karochaw in Japan and Sokoto in north-west Nigeria. Written in regular iambic tetrameter but with irregular rhymes, the poem exists in a tradition that stretches back to Homer’s Iliad: the soldier waiting impatiently for the battle to begin. As Churchill writes: ‘The silence of a mighty fleet / Portends the tumult yet to be.’
Davids, who says the poem “is by far the most exciting Churchill discovery I have seen”, admits it is merely “passable”.
Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, goes further, calling it “heavy-footed”. “I didn’t know he wrote poems, though somehow I’m not surprised: oils, walls, why not poems as well?” said Motion. “This is pretty much what one would expect: reliable, heavy-footed rhythm; stirring, old-fashioned sentiments. Except for the lines ‘The tables of the evening meal/Are spread amid the great machines’, where the shadow of Auden passes over the page, and makes everything briefly more surprising.”
Despite its lack of literary virtues, however, the poem written in blue crayon on two sheets of 4th Hussars-headed notepaper was expected to raise between £12,000 to £15,000 when it went on sale in 2013. Its price reflected its rarity: the only other poem known to be penned by Churchill is the 12-verse ‘The Influenza’, which won a House Prize in a competition at Harrow school in 1890 when he was 15. However ‘Our Modern Watchwords’ failed to sell at the auction as bidding never reached the reserve price.
Churchill was well-known for his love of poetry. He won the Headmaster’s Prize at Harrow for reciting from memory Macaulay’s 589-line poem ‘Horatius at the Bridge‘.
Allan Packwood, director of the Churchill Archive Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge, said the wartime prime minister’s interest in poetry spanned the sophisticated to the more earthy: “In his speech accepting freedom of the city of Edinburgh in 1942, he quoted Robert Burns and ended by quoting the music hall entertainer Sir Harry Lauder, who was in the audience. This was no cheap politician’s trick, Churchill was an admirer of Lauder’s.”
By the way, Churchill was well-known for his oratory and repartee, but he wasn’t always the victor. My favourite story involves Richard Haldane in the 1920s. Churchill prodded Haldane’s ample belly and asked “What’s in there?” Haldane answered: “If it is a boy, I shall call him John. If it is a girl, I shall call her Mary. But if it is only wind, I shall call it Winston.”

Photos: https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/churchill-bulletin/bulletin-056-feb-2013/appreciation-the-young-churchill-poem-hints-at-the-rhetorical-greatness-to-come/

Odd poem: ‘The Naughty Preposition’ by Morris Bishop

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I lately lost a preposition:
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.
And angrily I cried: “Perdition!
Up from out of in under there!”

Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor;
And yet I wondered: “What should he come
Up from out of in under for?”

*****

Morris Bishop had a high regard for light verse: “The aim of poetry, or Heavy Verse, is to seek understanding in forms of beauty. The aim of light verse is to promote misunderstanding in beauty’s cast-off clothes. But even misunderstanding is a kind of understanding; it is an analysis, an observation of truth, which sneaks around truth from the rear, which uncovers the lath and plaster of beauty’s hinder parts.”

Bishop was an acknowledged master of rhyme and meter, but that doesn’t imply that he would be limited by the grammatical restrictions of the apparently well-educated. He employed and enjoyed common speech.

Now this may sound strange coming from me, someone who writes a blog dedicated to the expansion of formal verse, but many “rules of grammar” are garbage. To me, correct speech is whatever unambiguously communicates what the speaker intended. This is naturally aided by the use of predictable patterns of word usage, because we are a pattern-recognition species, and this in turn leads to “rules”; but these rules are really only “commonly used patterns”.

Similarly the forms of traditional verse are there because they are useful: rhythm guides and builds emotion; rhyme, rhythm and wordplay all create engagement and help memorisation. The forms are neither arbitrary nor sacrosanct. The formality is purely useful (and part of its use is creating fun). Grammatical rules and formal verse have that in common.

Winston Churchill is often cited as the author of a scribbled comment on someone “correcting” his grammar: “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.” But that joke appears to predate his involvement with the issue: there is a lengthy discussion of it here in the Quote Investigator.

English has particularly confusing and contradictory rules because of the blending of several waves of Germanic speakers (Anglo-Saxons, followed by Danish invaders and later Dutch merchants) overrunning the British (i.e. Celtic speakers with their complicated auxiliary verbs: “How did you do that?”), in turn being overrun by French-speaking conquerors supported by Latin-speaking priests. (I recommend John McWhorter’s ‘Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue‘.) It was this latest ruling class that was averse to (among other things) ending a sentence with a preposition. But that’s a natural and correct part of speech for a Dane to end with.

And I’m an Anglo-Dane.

“T-shirt Slogan: ‘Never use a preposition to end a sentence with.’” by Ken Whytock is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Odd poem: French Verse on painting, by Winston Churchill

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La peinture á l’huile
Est bien difficile,
Mais c’est beaucoup plus beau
Que la peinture á l’eau.

The translation: “Oil painting / Is certainly hard, / But it’s much lovelier / Than watercolour.” For reasons unknown, Winston Churchill came up with what is almost a Clerihew in style, but in French, as a comment in his little 1948 book ‘Painting as a Pastime‘.

Churchill first took up painting in 1915 at age 40 when he was removed as First Lord of the Admiralty. His fall was a result of the disastrous Dardanelles and Gallipoli attacks on Turkey that he had organised.

He took up painting for distraction, but it became increasingly a part of his life. He didn’t have hopes of making money from his “daubs”, and didn’t consider he had mastered the art. As he wrote in that slim book, “When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so to get to the bottom of the subject.” Early on he submitted and exhibited under pseudonyms as a way of assessing his abilities without the influence of his name. In 1921 he exhibited at Galerie Druet in Paris under the pseudonym Charles Morin and sold six paintings for £30 each. In 1947 he submitted paintings to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition under the name David Winter, and was successful with two of them.

He continued to paint for over 40 years, landscapes when the weather was obliging, still lifes when stuck indoors. Wherever he travelled–Morocco and Egypt, France and Italy, Jamaica, Canada and the US–his easel, brushes and paints went with him and were put to use. He produced at least 500 paintings, giving many away and not keeping records of them. You can see several of his paintings here if you scroll to the bottom.

‘Photo: Churchill painting a view of the Sorgue river in 1948, photographer unknown

Odd poem: ‘The Influenza’ by Winston Churchill, age 15

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Oh how shall I its deeds recount
        Or measure the untold amount
        Of ills that it has done?
        From China’s bright celestial land
        E’en to Arabia’s thirsty sand
        It journeyed with the sun.

I omit the next nine stanzas, as the influenza makes its way to Britain. The poem ends:

        For though it ravaged far and wide
        Both village, town and countryside,
        Its power to kill was o’er;
        And with the favouring winds of Spring
        (Blest is the time of which I sing)
        It left our native shore.

        God shield our Empire from the might
        Of war or famine, plague or blight
        And all the power of Hell,
        And keep it ever in the hands
        Of those who fought ‘gainst other lands,
        Who fought and conquered well.

Written in 1890 when he was a lazy 15-year-old Harrow schoolboy who did badly at everything except English, Winston Churchill partially redeemed himself with this prizewinning poem on the global influenza epidemic (which may have been a Coronavirus) of his day. This “Asiatic Flu” or “Russian Flu” killed about a million people worldwide.

The photograph shows Churchill in his school clothes at age 14.

So there you have him: a teenage Churchill, with excellent control of English and an early exposition of his oratory, bombast, nationalism, imperialism, and enjoyment of warfare. And fifty years later he did brilliantly for Britain in the Second World War (but thank goodness for Clement Attlee picking up the pieces afterwards).

Review: Lord Macaulay, “Lays of Ancient Rome”

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horatius

Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’ are remarkable in several ways. The well-known ‘Horatius’ (aka ‘Horatius at the Bridge’) is glorious, memorable, stirring, heroic, in lovely rolling ballad-type stanzas:

Then up spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?”

Great stuff! It seems in keeping that Winston Churchill (love him or loathe him) would have learnt all 70 stanzas as a schoolboy, inspiring himself to develop courage (and oratory).

But the second remarkable thing is how bad the rest of the material in the volume is. The poetry is uninteresting, and the pure heroism of ‘Horatius’ is replaced either by gods winning the human battle, or by a girl being ‘saved’ from being despoiled by a tyrant by her father killing her when the three are together in the Forum (and not attempting to kill the tyrant), or by the poems deteriorating into blathery fragments.

Macaulay was wordy from an early age. The story is told of him that, uninterested in toys, he was reading avidly by the age of three and he already talked like a book. When hot coffee was accidentally spilled on his legs and a kindly woman asked “Is Diddums all right?” he replied, “Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.”

The third way in which this volume is remarkable is in the main Preface and in the shorter prefaces to each of the poems, especially ‘Horatius’. Here Macaulay lectures in detail on a perceived universal process of ballad creation in preliterate societies (and on the value of verse for memorisation), ballads’ subsequent devaluation when higher standards of literacy come in, and finally their total loss or partial recovery. He recounts the differences between two ballads of the Battle of Otterburn which have quite different outcomes for the protagonists, even though both ballads were probably written by people who were alive at the time of the battle.

And in a throw-away paragraph he inadvertently highlights the changes in education and culture that have taken place in the past 150 years: “The early history of Rome is indeed far more poetical than anything else in Latin literature. The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd’s cabin” (to these five he adds a further 23 examples, ending with) “the combat between Valerius Corvus and the gigantic Gaul, are among the many instances which will at once suggest themselves to every reader.”

As if! Well, that was then, this is now. But ‘Horatius’ itself has a timeless quality to it. Although if you are trying to invoke heroism by reading it to a 10-year-old which I strongly recommend, you should pre-read it and comfortably skip some of the unnecessary early verses.