I enjoyed this brief note at The First Post about the morning habits of Winston Churchill. Here are his breakfast requirements:
1st Tray: Poached egg, Toast, Jam, Butter, Coffee and milk, Jug of cold milk, Cold Chicken or Meat.
2nd Tray: Grapefruit, Sugar Bowl, Glass orange squash (ice), Whisky soda.
Wash hands, cigar.
Yessir, there is nothing first thing in the morning like a brisk glass of whiskey and a nice, fat stogie to go with your toast and jam.
Proving that no record of history is ever final, this recent article from the London Daily Telegraph says that British historian Andrew Roberts has uncovered papers from Churchill’s assistant Lawrence Burgis that included original handwritten notes from Churchill’s War Cabinet meetings. In reading the notes, which were supposed to have been destroyed once formal meeting minutes were published, Roberts found a treasure trove of information about Churchill’s opinions, ideas, and decisions throughout the war as captured first-hand by the younf Burgis. They reveal insights into Churchill’s thinking that weren’t well-known, even despite the reams and reams that have been written about the war and Churchill himself over the last half-century. In the Telegraph story, we learn that Churchill was nearly as taken in by Joseph Stalin as Franklin Roosevelt was when they met in person at Yalta, and believed Stalin’s promises not to occupy Eastern Europe after the war. Churchill’s dislike for Mohandas K. Gandhi is also mentioned; he criticized the South African leader Jan Christian Smuts to his own face for failing to “get rid of” Gandhi during his years of imprisonment in South Africa.
Churchill is such an engrossing figure and his character so complex, that these notes are interesting glosses on the man all on their own, but absolutely add a great deal more to understanding the workings of the War Cabinet, the internal political struggles of the Allied leaders, and the sereis of consequences that determined the nearly three quarters of a century that have transpired since.
Oh, and Roberts’ book has just been published in the U.K.. Not yet published in the U.S., but I do believe Amazon UK ships to the States if you’re dying to get this book. I do very much want to read it, but will probably wait for the American edition.
1. Mark at Going Like Sixty gets top billing because he posted about how the now-classic Peace Symbol came to be. Today happens to be the 50th anniversary of the creation of that symbol, which was meant to represent the semaphore codes for the letters N and D for "Nuclear Disarmament". These days, people tend to confuse the peace symbol with the Mercedes Benz logo, since owning a Merc has superseded working for peace in the minds of a lot of Americans. By the same token, Winston Churchill’s "V for Victory" hand gesture was also appropriated by the ’60s youth culture to mean "peace". Churchill originally used the gesture with his fingers turned inward like this:
He turned his hand around after someone worked up the guts to tell him what that gesture actually means (HINT: it ain’t pretty). I imagine more than one American traveling Europe has gotten punched in the snoot by some local misunderstanding this little gesture over the last 40 years.
2. Hollywood has wasted no time since the conclusion of the WGA strike to make sure that quality scripts are being hurried into production. The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Hasbro has signed a movie deal with Universal to make a series of movies based on the classic games "Monopoly", "Battleship", "Candy Land" and "Ouija". What, no Yahtzee?
3. The new five dollar bill is about to be launched. The fiver was one of the first bills to be re-designed back in the 1990s, but this re-design incorporates the various anti-counterfeiting measures that have been instituted in subsequent bill designs including colored ink, microprinting, and watermarking. That should keep the counterfeiters at bay for at least a week.
4. Apparently MSNBC isn’t the only news network engaging in various acts of douchebaggery against Barack Obama. Crooks and Liars reports that the closed-captioning of Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN included a statement that Al Quaeda had called Obama to congratulate him on his primary win in Wisconsin. Cooper himself did not say this, it was just in the captioning, but a lot of public places with televisions turn on the closed-captioning so that patrons can follow a program even if crowd noise drowns out the audio.
5. It’s Official: George W. Bush is the WORST.PRESIDENT.EVAR.
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You might have already seen the Daily Mail article from last week that reported that 25% of people in the U.K. don’t believe that Winston Churchill was a real person, yet they do believe such fictional characters as Robin Hood, Eleanor Rigby and Major Biggles were real people. Only about a third of Britons believe in the existence of God, which puts Biggles at a significant advantage in that category, too. Carry on, Biggles!
What is it about bunkers? Hitler had a bunker, Churchill had a bunker (we visited the “War Rooms” on our trip to London several years ago, and it was one of the highlights of the whole trip), and, of course, Dick Cheney has his “undisclosed location”.
Lest you think it’s just right-wing dictators who prefer to hole up in the ground, the always-interesting EnglishRussia.com had a post last week with a whole series of photographs from Stalin’s bunker, which was built in 1939 as World War II loomed. It was supposed to be hidden beneath a sports arena, but apparently the stadium was never built. The bunker was connected back to the Kremlin by a tunnel ten miles long.
Churchill’s War Rooms were quite spartan and functional, but you can see from this series of pictures that Stalin made sure that his underground lair was quite well appointed (Hitler’s bunker was destroyed when the Russians took Berlin, but I suppose Stalin might have had a bit of bunker envy). He continued to use it after the war — it was no doubt a very good place to get rid of generals and commissars without attracting a lot of attention.
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