Joining in the festivities opening the exhibition
"Churchill and the Great Republic" are members of Sir Winston Churchill's
family, from left, his granddaughter Celia Sandys; his youngest daughter,
Mary, Lady Soames; and Mr. and Mrs. Winston Churchill.
With them are Mr. and Mrs. James Billington.
The story of how the Marlborough Papers came to the Library of Congress is told in a Manuscript Division case file. On Aug. 3, 1928, Bainbridge Colby, who had served as President Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state, wrote to Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam that he had dined with the ninth Duke of Marlborough, who "disclosed that he had this interesting collection, and he told me that the idea had long been forming in his mind to present it to America." The collection included original autograph letters, "not only from personages of historical eminence in the past but also from contemporaries of very wide fame," Colby told Putnam. More letters ensued as Colby arranged for the gift to go "to an honored place in our great National Library," and on March 22, 1929, Colby advised Putnam that four wooden boxes "of considerable size" had been delivered to the U.S. Embassy in London for shipment under embassy seal to the Library. A May 9, 1929, Library memorandum to the case file noted that the gift consisted of 155 pieces of historical material, including letters, documents, a small statue of Winged Victory, an illuminated book, press clippings and photos. The collection was publicized at least once; the file contains a June 9, 1929, New York Times article describing the Marlborough Papers.
Letter from Winston Churchill to his mother describing his lecture tour in the United States, Dec. 21, 1900. Courtesy of Curtis Brown on behalf of the Churchill family. - Churchill Papers, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, U.K.
The story of the Library's mounting a new exhibition, "Churchill and the Great Republic," is one of seeking and finding buried treasure in the Library's vast collections. The search for exhibition items began in the Library's Manuscript Division on a Monday morning three years ago. It was military historian Daun van Ee's first day on the job, having taken the weekend off after 27 years of organizing and editing President Dwight D. Eisenhower's papers for Johns Hopkins University.
His first Library assignment: Find materials in the Library's collections to complement items chosen from the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, England, for the first major U.S. exhibition about Sir Winston Churchill. The exhibition was to show Churchill's ties to the United States.
Van Ee approached this task with some trepidation. "I'll admit," he said at a press briefing preceding the Feb. 5 opening of the exhibition, "I had some concerns."
For one thing, he said, the Manuscript Division collected primarly American materials, and the Library was not known among scholars as a repository of Churchill materials. For another, the presidential libraries of Churchill's contemporaries—Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower—seemed more likely to hold Churchill correspondence or speeches. The Library's catalog did not yield ready access to the subject.
School report for Winston Churchill from St. George's School, Ascot, September-November 1883
Van Ee's first break in the case came while having coffee with a colleague, Josephus Nelson. Library archivist Nelson remarked that he had seen a picture of Blenheim Palace, constructed by Churchill's ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, in the "Marlborough Papers." Thinking that such a picture could illustrate Churchill's heritage, van Ee said, he visited an out-of-the-way corner of the Manuscript Division stacks to investigate "this obscure, uninventoried collection," a 1929 gift to the Library from Churchill's cousin, the ninth Duke of Marlborough. Van Ee opened one of three large volumes and found a letter tipped into the gutter. Squinting at the small, even hand slanting across the page in pencil, he saw the date, Sept. 29, 1898. The letter was addressed to "My Dear Sunny" and signed "Yours affectionately, Winston S. Churchill."
"I read it through, and I thought, ‘Somebody planted this,'" van Ee recalled with a chuckle.
But he looked further, and there among the Marlborough Papers he found 10 more letters from young Winston S. Churchill to his cousin "Sunny," Charles Richard John Spencer Churchill, the ninth Duke of Marlborough, as well as other relevant items.
"There was far more here than I had realized; indeed, far more than anybody had ever known," van Ee said. Of 210 items in the exhibition, the Library's collections yielded 155 in several formats—newspaper clippings, photographs, cartoons, posters, drawings, maps and a globe, as well as letters and other manuscripts.
Winston Churchill, left, reads his inscription to President George Bush in a copy of his new book, "Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches." This book and another one inscribed for James Billington are two of 135 leather-bound copies in a limited edition published by the Easton Press.
Van Ee's initial discovery was the earliest Churchill letter from the Marlborough Papers. Writing to his cousin while aboard a train near Vienna, 23-year-old Churchill describes his experience in the last great British cavalry charge of the 19th century in the 1898 Battle of Omdurman, which was the basis for the film "The Four Feathers." According to van Ee, young Churchill, anxious to distinguish himself as a soldier and war correspondent, had joined a British cavalry unit, the 21st Lancers, just before the climax of the Anglo-Egyptian expedition to reconquer the Sudan.
"The Battle was a wonderful spectacle," Churchill wrote. "I had the good luck to ride through the charge unhurt—indeed untouched—which very few can say. I used a pistol and did not draw my sword." Churchill reported the unit had sustained its greatest losses since the charge of the Light Brigade more than 40 years earlier—22 men killed, 75 wounded and 119 horses wounded or killed.
Another of van Ee's discoveries is a letter that Churchill had written to his cousin from "Government House" in Madras, India, on Jan. 14, 1899, after he had resigned his commission in the British Army. "I am staying here for a few days. The governor is a decent and amiable man, the house is comfortable & the weather cool," he wrote.
At this point in his life, van Ee said, Churchill's goal was to advance his career of writing and politics. He commented that he had received a check for £26.5 from the North American Review, "which I think is the highest pay per thousand words I have received as yet."
Churchill worked energetically for the success of Overlord—the cross-Channel airborne and amphibious attack known as "D-Day"—albeit with some misgivings. Casualties from such a direct assault might be catastrophically high. Men and equipment would have to be withdrawn from Italy and the Mediterranean, where things looked promising, and they would be sitting idle for several months. Pre-invasion bombing might kill many French civilians. This March 1944 photograph may reflect both his doubts and Overlord commander Eisenhower's suspicion that Churchill's heart was not really in it. Associated Press photo, "A Serious Inspection," 1944. - New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Prints and Photographs Division
Van Ee provided the context for Churchill's last letter in the Marlborough collection. Blamed for a disastrous attempt by British forces to attack Germany's ally Turkey through the Dardanelles Strait, Churchill was fired in 1915 as the first lord of the admiralty. He left England in despair and volunteered for six months as an infantry officer in the trenches of World War I.
"One becomes quite reconciled to the idea of annihilation," Churchill wrote his cousin Sunny, "& death seems to be divested of any element of tragedy. The only thing to dread is some really life wrecking wound which left one a cripple, an invalid, or an idiot. But that one must hope is not on the agenda of the Fates."
As van Ee continued his Library search for exhibition materials, he found items in other collections, among them candid observations from George S. Patton's handwritten diaries, and maps and documents illustrating World War II code-breaking secrets as well as Churchill's "amazingly successful ‘bodyguard of lies'" that deceived the Germans waiting for the D-Day invasion."
Complementing these riches from the Library's Marlborough Papers in "Churchill and the Great Republic" are items from the Churchill Archives Centre, including photographs of Churchill's parents, Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill (Winston's American mother was Jennie Jerome, the daughter of a New York entrepreneur). A poignant note, dated May 7, 1882, written in 8-year-old Winston's script to "My Dear Mamma," asked when she might visit him at Blenheim Palace. (According to exhibition labels, Winston and his younger brother Jack were raised largely by nannies and boarding schools.)
A report card indicates Winston was at times "still troublesome." Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre and a co-curator of this exhibition, noted that, although young Churchill excelled in history and English, he did not perform well in other subjects. "He was clearly not university material," he commented. Churchill ended his formal schooling at age 20 and, in spite of his father's opposition, enrolled in the cavalry, an expensive enterprise requiring a string of polo ponies and equipment.
Lady Soames declares "open" the Library exhibition about her father's life at an evening reception on Feb. 4 and said, "He lived through stormy times and political ups and downs to become the statesman who saw and grasped the implications of the nuclear age, and died—great with years and honors—a hero to freedom-loving men and women throughout the world. And here he is hailed—as he was so proud to be in life—as the son and citizen of both America and Britain."
Blenheim Palace figured in one of Churchill's happiest moments, as the place he chose to propose to Clementine Hozier, whom he met in 1904 and married on Sept. 12, 1908. Rooms apart, the couple sent notes to one another by way of a footman. On Aug. 12, 1908, the morning of Clementine's departure after a visit, Winston wrote: "My dearest—How are you? I send you my hearts [sic] love to salute you. I am getting up at nine in order if you like to walk to the rose garden after breakfast and pick a bunch before you start." She replied, "My dearest, I am very well—Yes … I should love to go to the rose garden. Yours always, Clementine." He was her "Pug," she his "Cat."
Items from both the Library and the Churchill Archives document young Churchill's fascination with America as revealed in letters and postcards from his trips to New York and California; the progress of a maturing Churchill's writing and political life; his prescient call to arms against Hitler in 1938; the Atlantic alliance he forged with Roosevelt during World War II; and postwar negotiations with Stalin, whose consolidation of power east of the Iron Curtain (a phrase Churchill coined in a U.S. speech) he had warned against in 1946.
Churchill's youngest daughter and only surviving child, Mary, Lady Soames, and members of her family attended the exhibition opening. Declaring "this exhibition open," Lady Soames said the close collaboration between the Library and the Churchill Archives Centre "exemplifies the working together of ‘The Great Republic'(the title by which Winston Churchill hailed the United States) and Great Britain, a partnership in which he passionately believed, and for which he labored unremittingly in his lifetime." Earlier in the day, with tears in her eyes, she saw for the first time the letters written by her father. "This is a wonderful exhibition, really," she said.
Listening to the president's speech earlier in the day are, from left, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.); Rep. Thomas Petri (R-Wis.); Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young (R-Fla.); Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah); Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind).
