I probably should go out more. But what with the pandemic, ageing bones and cramped muscles and the result of a “minor” stroke, normal socialising in pubs parties etc, have been much curtailed.
Besides I’m a bibliophile with a promiscuous collection of books some of which I dip into repeatedly as if they were old flames.
One such is “THE DARK VALLEY- A Panorama Of The 1930s” by Piers Brendon, Keeper of the Churchill Archives, and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge..
He is twelve months older than I am, but I could not approach his level of learning or output of brilliant writing were I to live for a thousand years.
He describes the characters and records of the movers and shakers of the 1930s. But not least interesting is what he tells about Winston Churchill and his friends.
“It had been said of Churchill that at birth the good fairies came trooping in with their gifts – imagination, daring, energy, guts, and then a bad fairy arrived to deny him wisdom.”
His friends were often high-living and often hard-drinking freebooters who dwelt on the outer edge of respectability. F.E,Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was a ‘fluent and and a plausible bounder’ early in his career, while later, to his fury, he was represented as a ‘crapulous and corpulent
buffoon’.
Lord Beaverbrook was aptly nicknamed ‘Been-a-crook’ and seemed to be ‘a kind of Dracula, Svengali, Iago and Mephistopheles rolled into one’. Brendan Bracken, the red-haired financial and political chancer, who was (wrongly) rumoured to be Churchill’s illegitimate son, appeared to be a charlatan incarnate. ‘Everything about you is phoney,’ said a journalist, ‘Even your hair, which looks like a wig, and isn’t. “
“With friends like there, Churchill understandably offended the bourgeoisie, though he did not let that worry him. He used ‘middle-class as a term of abuse, shared his father’s disdain for ‘suburban lords of pineries and wineries’ and despised ‘adjectival grocers’. What he would have made of an adjectival grocer’s daughter can only be imagined.”
A nice dig at Margaret Thatcher, who spoke of Churchill as if he had been her mentor.
Incidentally, the book records Churchill’s editing, during the 1926 General Strike, the Government’s BRITISH GAZETTE “CONDUCTING PROPAGANDA IN THE LURID FASHION OF THE GREAT WAR ONLY MONTHS AFTER THE GOVERNMENT HAD TO ADMIT THAT THE MOST APPALLING ATROCITY STORY FROM THAT WAR WAS A LIE.
THE TALE TOLD OF GERMAN FACTORIES TURNING CORPSES INTO SOAP AND MARGARINE. AT THE TIME IT INSPIRED KIPLING TO WRITE A POEM ABOUT CHARLOTTE SPREADING HER DEAD LOVER ‘LIGHTLY ON HER BREAD, BUT IT LATER BOOMERANGED VICIOUSLY, CASTING DOUBT ON THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF ALL OFFICIAL INFORMATION.’ “
Another case of TRUTH FALLING SLOW?
The inventor of the corpse factory lie , Hugh Pollard, played a key role in Dublin Castle during the Tan War, but his counterfeit issue of the IRISH BULLETIN and fake NEWSREEL arranged with British Pathe were exposed immediately. But stills from the fake newsreels have been recycled in books and the pages of THE IRISH TIMES frequently since.
POLLARD’S GREATEST CONTRIBUTION TO THE YEARS OF THE DARK VALLEY AND LATER DECADES WAS FLYING THE MUTINEER GENERAL FRANCO FROM THE CANARIES TO MOROCCO FROM WHICH HE IMPOSED NEARLY FOTY YEAR TYRANNY ON HIS COUNTRY. WHEN FRANCO WAS INSTALLED IN MADRID POLLARD WAS ACCREDITED TO THE BRITISH EMBASSY THERE.
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