CHURCHILL IN OCTOBER
We continue our appreciation of Churchill by-the-month with a look at what Winston Churchill achieved in the month of October over the course of his expansive career.
On October 7, 1914, his second daughter, Sarah [Millicent Hermione], was born at Admiralty House, in the midst of Churchill’s first stint as First Lord of the Admiralty, at the commencement of World War I. Racing home from an official mission to Antwerp, Churchill, in fact, missed his daughter’s arrival by a matter of hours.
On October 24, 1929 Churchill found himself, as fate would have it, in New York City on “Black Thursday” — witnessing 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. Dining with a bunch of stunned tycoons at Bernard Baruch’s apartment that night, he heard himself toasted with the invocation: “Friends and former millionaires…”
Six days later, on October 30, Churchill sailed home to England, where My Early Life, his first (and, ultimately, only) volume of personal memoirs would be published on October 20, 1930 to laudatory reviews and strong sales.
In October 1933, Adolph Hitler withdrew Germany from Europe’s disarmament conference at Geneva and then from the League of Nations itself, to Churchill’s disgust and dismay. Few at home or abroad grasped, as he did, what Hitler’s intentions inescapably were. “The philosophy of blood lust,” Churchill warned Parliament, “is being inculcated into their youth in a manner unparalleled since the days of barbarism.”
“The Great Crash” brought the collapse of Churchill’s own highly leveraged personal fortune. His bank account, in October 1933, was overdrawn by almost £9,500. Only the publication that month of the first book in what would become a 4-volume biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, the first Lord Marlborough, saved Winston Churchill from bankruptcy.
On the night of October 10, 1940, No. 10 Downing Street was badly damaged in The Blitz by a Nazi bomb; its basement kitchen utterly destroyed. Churchill, dining in the Garden, was spared, as was his cat, Nelson, and his devoted personal chef, Georgina Landermere.
Two poodles, Rufus and Rufus II, consecutively took up residence with the Churchills after the war. Rufus was a present from private secretary John Colville. Rufus II was a gift from Churchill’s American publishing representative, Walter Graebner, after Rufus I was struck by a car at Chartwell in October 1947.
On October 26, 1951, the 14th General Election of Churchill’s fifty-year parliamentary career brought him back to power as PM at the age of almost 77. It was also announced in October that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Churchill’s response was characteristically fiscal: “My darling one,” he wrote to Clementine. “It’s all settled about the Nobel Prize. £12,100, free of tax. Not bad!”
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~OCTOBER ALSO BRINGS BANNED BOOKS WEEK (October 5-11)~
AT CHARTWELL BOOKSELLERS
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