flesh and blood.
San Francisco and London
Alison Carlson
Foreword by Randolph L. S. Churchill
The year 2015 marks a special anniversary for the Churchill family. Fifty years ago, my great-grandfather Winston Churchill passed away after a lifetime of service, struggle and achievement. When I consider the course of his life, it is impossible not to be awestruck. My great-grandfather spent his life in the service of Great Britain and its allies and dependencies – first as a soldier and then as a politician and statesman who helped save his homeland, if not all the world, from the Nazi menace. He forged the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom and delivered speeches that roused the nation – and that still resonate with us today. He championed democracy, early social reform and technological innovation. Churchill shaped the world we live in.
But now, fifty years later, it is important not just to consider his achievements and commemorate his death; we must also remember – and celebrate – Churchill the man. The photographs and quotations compiled in this book do just that. They help us connect with Churchill by showing us candid moments from his life. These quotations – in both his glittering witticisms and his serious reflections – bring to life the person beyond the public persona that people everywhere have come to love. Churchill was a man of warmth and humour, as well as iron determination, and together these pictures and words serve not just to reveal my great-grandfather but also to preserve his memory in a way that would have made him smile.
Introduction by Phil Reed, OBE
There have been more books written about Winston
Churchill than almost anyone else in history, and each
year sees a new crop appear, many repeating or recycling
the contents of others, adding nothing new to our
understanding of the man. Specialist texts aplenty analyse
his political career and philosophy, his writings, his travels,
his relationships (personal and political) and his strategic
skills; the density of the texts, however, ranges from
journalistic to recondite academic. Books of cartoons of
him, of his paintings, and of his habits and tastes tend to
be more approachable, though they convey only a bare
sliver of who he was. And while books of his bons mots,
quotations and extracts from his writings are legion, too
many contain misquotations and use a thin selection of
quotations to offer quick amusement (and earn a fast buck).
There is also no shortage of books of photographs of him,
charting his life and career. From his school days onwards,
Churchill courted the camera – so much so that most of the
images so familiar to us are ones that he purposely allowed
or encouraged. His view that “history will be my judge and
I will write the history” applied as much to images as to
text, and the photographs we have of him in our minds are
largely those that he wanted us to have: the stern, bullish
leader of the famous Karsh portrait; the fatherly figure of
the wartime posters; and the clown twirling his hat on his
stick. These images have been widely used – and abused – to
peddle a position or brand goods and services that have
no relationship to him and his life. They each illustrate
different aspects of his character and style and, these many
years later, their familiarity both colours and constrains our
views of the man.
Photography allows us to make judgments about a person
that prose does not; the latter dictates to us a particular
view, whereas the photograph allows us to speculate
about the character, even the thoughts, of the subject as
implied by the details of the image. But we have been
subjected to the same images of Churchill over and over
for decades; gaining new insights from images that have
become quotidian, even passé, is ever more difficult. The
Man Within offers less-known images, often ones that
were not quite so engineered by Churchill himself. When
matched with the more well-known images, they provide
a much broader picture of the man. When that range of
images is paired with a robust selection of quotations – from
pithy, situational one-liners to pondering reflections on
humanity – we glimpse not just the titanic figure but the
human being.
Reflecting on mankind in 1949, when he was seventy-four,
Churchill quoted Alexander Pope:
“A being darkly wise and rudely great
Created half to rise and half to fall
Great lord of everything, yet a prey to all
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled
the glory, jest and riddle of the world.”
These pictures of Churchill show us a man long since raised
into the pantheon of great men, but also a man whose
greatness rests on the fact that, despite all his faults and
failings, almost despite his very humanity, he achieved the
stature of one who will never fade and never be forgotten.
This book will, I hope, enable us to amble through the life
and character of this great man, enjoying him, analysing
him and, perhaps, forming our own personal views of
him – not just of the man of history but of the man within.
YOUTH
C
hurchill’s youth was a typical upper-class Victorian
one, and he attended boarding school from an early
age. A willful and often rebellious child, with parents
who were too busy to pay him the attention he craved,
he found succour in his beloved nurse, Mrs Everest,
whom he nicknamed ‘Womany’ or ‘Woomie’. Some
of his father’s letters suggest he believed his son would never amount to
much, and a short inspection of Churchill’s school