CHURCHILL IN AUGUST, ONCE MORE
Malakand, First Cigar Order, Diana, North America Tour, "The Few"
Three years ago, as we were just emerging from the pandemic but still were obscured physically by ongoing lobby obstruction, we celebrated the month of August by looking at all that Winston Churchill accomplished in August over the course of his long career.
As we re-enter August, three years later, happily unobscured, and accessible again, we thought we would celebrate Churchill in August once more. Just for fun.
>In August 1897, news reached Winston Churchill, as a 21-year-old subaltern stationed in Bangalore, India, that tribal revolts had broken out along India’s northwest border with Afghanistan. On the instant, Churchill decided to pursue action there, and write about it, as a member of the Malakand Field Force being formed by Major General Sir Bindon Blood. Credentialed as a journalist in the employ of both the Daily Telegraph(at £5 per column), and the Allahabad Pioneer (for which Rudyard Kipling had once written), Churchill in Malakand soon found himself also pressed into service as an officer in command of cavalry troops, tangling with the fierce Pathan tribesmen up close, witnessing much bloodshed and meting out a little himself, often in hand-to-hand combat. The result, just a few months later, was his first book: The Story of the Malakand Field Force, an instant best-seller.
>On August 9, 1900, young Churchill made his first cigar purchase under his own name at his parents’ favorite London tobacconist, Robert Lewis’s emporium at 81 St. James’s Street. Churchill’s maiden order consisted of 50 Bock Giraldas (a small Havana cigar) and a box of the firm’s gold-tipped Alexandra Balkan cigarettes, for his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill.
>Eight years later exactly, on August 9, 1909, Winston and Clementine Churchill’s second child, and first daughter, Diana Churchill, was born.
>On August 3, 1929, Churchill — newly unemployed as a former-Chancellor of the Exchequer following the 1929 General Election defeat of P.M. Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative Party government — embarked on what would become his most storied vacation, a three-month cross-country tour of North America. Traveling with his son Randolph, his brother Jack, and his nephew Johnny (Jack’s son), Churchill on holiday traversed the landscape glories of Northwest Canada from a special railway car provided by the Canadian Pacific Railroad; reveled in the tinsel of Hollywood, where he met Charlie Chaplin; and, finally, landed in New York. There, as fate would have it, he witnessed “Black Thursday,” the stock market’s collapse, firsthand, including the sight of a man leaping to his death just below Churchill’s window at the Savoy Plaza hotel.
>On August 20, 1940, having overcome the tribulations of the Battle of Britain, Churchill, as Prime Minister, delivered perhaps his most iconic oratorical flourish of World War II in a victorious House of Commons speech: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
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We wish you a very hot August, in terms of achievement,
and a terrifically temperate one in all other ways.