CHURCHILL IN DECEMBER, AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!
We want to wish you the happiest, healthiest new year, and wrap up the month of December with our final Churchill-by-the-month. Winston Churchill was a particularly busy fellow in December.
On the night of December 12, 1899, Lieutenant Winston Churchill went over the wall of the States Model School in Pretoria where he had been held captive by the Boers for 25 days; an escape that would ultimately captivate the world and launch his political career.
One year later, on December 12, 1900, in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel, young Churchill delivered a talk as a 26-year-old Boer War hero on his first-ever lecture tour of the United States. Introducing him was none other than Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
On the evening of December 1931, while visiting New York in the company of his wife Clementine and daughter Diana, Churchill went alone by taxi to his friend Bernard Baruch’s Fifth Avenue apartment for an after-dinner get-together. Annoyed that he and his driver could not find the address, he stepped out into the two-way Fifth Avenue traffic, looked left, and was struck by a passing car on his right. Had he not been wearing a thick, fur-lined overcoat, Churchill might well have been killed. Instead, he suffered a fractured nose and ribs, a three-inch cut on his forehead, and severe shock. He was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he developed pleurisy.
On December 30, 1941, having addressed the Canadian Parliament in the Ottawa House of Commons, Churchill was escorted to an anteroom where an Armenian portrait photographer named Yusef Karsh awaited him. As official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert wrote in his own memoir, IN SEARCH OF CHURCHILL, Churchill was, at the time, “in [a] happy mood… He had just made a successful speech [‘Some chicken… some neck’]. He had left the parliamentary chamber smiling… Karsh had hoped for something stern and warlike. To secure the picture he wanted, he went up to Churchill and plucked the cigar out of his mouth. ‘By the time I got back to my camera,’ Karsh later recalled, ‘[Churchill] looked so belligerent he could have devoured me. It was at that instant that I took the picture.‘”
On New Year’s Eve 1949, Winston and Clementine Churchill hosted a dinner in Paris for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The group then took the night train to Monte Carlo, with the Churchills taking up residence at the Hotel de Paris, where they were joined by their daughter Sarah (and her new beau, Antony Beauchamp). Very shortly thereafter, they all dined at the Monte Carlo Sporting Club, again welcoming the new year together.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
With our best wishes.
Chartwell Booksellers