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THE MAN WITHIN
Copyright © 2015 by Alison Carlson.
All rights reserved.
Created by Alison Carlson.
Edited by Girl Friday Productions.
Design by Macfadden & Thorpe.
The punctuation of Churchill’s words may have been modernized to improve clarity.
Quotations reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London, on behalf of the
Beneficiaries of the Estate of Winston S. Churchill.
Copyright © The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Winston S. Churchill
Published by Inkshares, Inc., San Francisco, California.
Printed in China.
First Edition
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015933323
ISBN 978-1-941758-10-6
(Hardcover)
THE MAN
WITHIN
Winston Churchill
An Intimate Portrait
Alison Carlson
In memory of my father, who steadied and
calmed all those he loved.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface by Alison Carlson
Foreword by Randolph L. S. Churchill
Introduction by Phil Reed, OBE
Churchill returns from
Casablanca.
Preface by Alison Carlson
When I was a child, my parents regaled me with stories
of World War II – my father became an RAF pilot, and
my mother was evacuated from Manchester during the
bombings. During the war, as my parents stood in respect,
Churchill’s iconic and sonorous voice came to them over
the radio. It calmed them, empowered them, and wove a
nation of embattled citizens together. Churchill’s words
ran deep in the soul of both my parents.
Standing five feet six-and-a-half inches tall, Churchill was
a lone player – in his father’s eyes, in school, in Parliament,
in the press. An outsider and perpetual underdog, he took
an irrevocably principled stand no matter the odds and
maintained his initiative with astonishing optimism. For
me, it is that unshakable, unflagging spirit that is perhaps
the most remarkable aspect of his personality. Importantly,
the reservoirs of strength that he crafted over his life – in
the face of adversity and in his own failures – were what
steadied my parents, England, and the world.
Churchill embodied a kaleidoscopic mix of personalities.
These many facets are not readily captured in the
photographs with which we are familiar. I have spent the
last five years poring over photographs in the Imperial
War Museum, the Churchill Archives in Cambridge, and
a variety of lesser-known libraries in England, sourcing
photographs that portray a renewed image, rather than just
the familiar vision of him: cigar clenched jauntily in hand
or flashing a V for victory. Many of these photographs have never been published before – photographs which, for better or worse, I alone have chosen. Remarkably, I found no photographs of him drinking, with the exception of one on a boar hunt; clearly, Churchill decided how he would be photographed, and, ergo, perceived.
It is my hope that the words and images on these pages
convey a bit of the bedrock strength and comfort of
Churchill – the strength and comfort that came to my
parents, and all of Britain, over the radio waves. The world
is still a scary place, and Churchill, if only in memory, has
reservoirs of strength yet to impart to us. But this strength
and comfort should come not just from the unidimensional
monolith, the thin sliver so often conveyed, but from the mix
of personalities that comprise the man within – his joyousness
and sorrow, his pugnaciousness and tenderness, his moral
certainties and doubts, his strengths and vulnerabilities.
Considered by many to be the greatest man of the twentieth
century,