The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 by William Manchester, Paul Reid

House of Commons by bursting into song: “Accommodation unit, sweet accommodation unit, / There’s no place like accommodation unit.” One of his first acts when he took over as prime minister in 1940 was to change the name of the “Local Defense Volunteers” to the “Home Guard.” Words like
adumbrated
and
coordination
do not appear in his work. Of an MP who strung together phrases of jargon, Churchill said: “He can best be described as one of those orators who, before they get up, do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, do not know what they have said.” Of another, who had been defeated at the polls, he said, “Thank God we’ve seen the last of that Wuthering Height.” 41
    He loved books and wrote of them: “If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them—peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.” But he hated verbosity. “This paper, by its very length,” he told a cabinet meeting, “defends itself against the risk of being read.” And he despised pedants. A junior civil servant had tortuously reworded a sentence to avoid ending with a preposition. The prime minister scrawled across the page: “This is nonsense up with which I will not put.” His profound knowledge of Latin and Greek was acquired through translations; he had been a miserable classics student. Labour MPs, most of whom lacked public-school educations, objected to classical phrases in the House for the very sensible reason that they couldn’t understand them. During a discussion of this Churchill rose to a point and began, “As to the chairman of this committee, he should be not
facile princeps,
but
primus inter pares,
which for the benefit of any…” He paused while the Opposition MPs, anticipating insult, struggled to their feet. Then he broke up the House by continuing, “… for the benefit of any Old Etonians present, I should, if very severely pressed, venture to translate.” His insularity, his feigned ignorance of all foreign tongues, was a source of popularity with the masses and served as antidote to his elitism. He told Jack Seely, later Lord Mottistone, “Jack, when you cross Europe you land at Marsai, spend a night at Lee-on and another in Paree and, crossing by Callay, eventually reach Londres.
I
land at Marsales, spend a night in Lie-ons, and another in Paris, cross by Calase, and come home to London.” He believed that of all languages, English was incomparably superior. On his tongue, it was. 42

    T hroughout his youth, he once said, “it was my only ambition to be master of the spoken word.” He glittered as a young MP, speaking after elaborate preparation but—like his father before him—without a note. Then one spring evening, in the middle of an address on a trade-union bill, he discovered that he couldn’t recall a word of his peroration. Speechless, he sank down on the bench and buried his head in his hands. Thereafter, when delivering a major speech, he came armed with everything he was going to say, including the pauses and the pretended fumbling for the right phrase in the first few sentences and anticipating “Cheers, ‘Hear, hears,’ ” “Prolonged cheering,” and even “Standing ovation.” He said accurately, “I am not an orator. An orator is spontaneous.” William Hazlitt wrote that the first duty of an orator is to echo back the feelings of his audience. Pitt translated a Latin epigram: “Eloquence is like a flame: it requires fuel to feed it, motion to excite it, and it brightens as it burns.” But Churchill was no echo; he needed neither fuel, motion, nor reflected