8th October, 1955.
In common with all of you, I remember the name and life and work of the late Sir Richard Stawell with deep respect. He was a man of high character, of clear mind, and with a deep sense of justice. Great physicians are not always well-known to the public, nor is the quality of their work always properly appreciated. It is one of the splendours of the medical profession that its greatest men have not sought public notoriety, but have without restriction devoted their talents to the service of mankind, privately, quietly, their greatest technical achievements known only to their peers and their greatest human achievements known only to their patients and their patients' families.
When I was offered the honour of delivering the Stawell Lecture, I at first demurred on the intelligible grounds that there were so many more men who knew so much more about him; and that, in any event, I was not medical and could, therefore, not speak of his work with an informed and discriminating judgment. I was persuasively reassured by being told that the medical profession . liked every now and then to listen to a speech by a layman, and, that I'could quite readily and acceptably speak upon a topic unrelated to medicine; except that, being in commemoration of Richard Stawell, it properly refer to men of courage, character, ability and consequence.
Whether this concession to the laity was the product of
that sadistic spirit which must occasionally invade the mind of even
the most humane of medical men or was due to a desire to get away
from ' talking shop' I am not to judge. But I have assumed the best
in my own favour and have therefore undertaken to speak to you about
' Churchill and his Contemporaries'; all of them men who would have
been delighted with Richard Stawell and would have found so many matters
in common with him in the realm of the mind and of the spirit.
As you may know, I have for many years now been engaged in
public life. Sometimes the people have been good enough to approve
of that fact and sometimes their rapture has been modified. But by and
large they have been generous to me, so that in the result I have been
able, over a period of 20 years, to represent this country abroad on
many occasions and to-achieve the acquaintance-and, . in some cases, the
close personal friendship of-some of the great men of this era. There
is a strange quirk in human nature which I commend, if that be
necessary, to the consideration of the psychologist*. and psychiatrists
-among you. It is this. When we are very young and we-read our
history, we visualise the great men of the past as giants. Their
very shadows appear to be enormous as they pass across the dim and
distant landscapes of history. I have lived long enough and had
sufficient experience to find that historic giants are quite human,
that for the most part they are quite intelligible, that in many ways
they think and behave just-as we do, and that one must-discern their
greatness, not by standing with dumb amazement before them, but by
trying to discover what special quality each of them has which marks
him out for fame.
In the result, I have found both the great Churchill and
his great contemporaries refreshingly human and indeed intelligible
to people like myself, for the bulk of their time.
The idea of an incomprehensible genius which once obsessed
my mind in contemplating the noble figures of the past has long since
deserted me, except in the presence of eminent mathematicians, nuclear
scientists, : and second-year medical students. Genius in the current
affairs of men usually expresses-itself in the most-comprehensible terms.
The whole of my experience has indeed confirmed me in my very early
belief that lucidity is one of the cardinal virtues and that people who
understand their business can usually explain it reasonably: clearly to
normally educated and intelligent men. But I would not have you believe
that this means that for me the romantic conceptions of youth have given
place to: a dry cynicism. About-so many of the great I-still remain in
the frame of mind of Browning when he wrote that simple but moving
verse: ' Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and-speak to you,
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and. new!'
This preliminary excursus is designed-to persuade you that, if
in the course of my later remarks I speak in somewhat positive terms
about some of the famous men of our era, you are not to: assume that I do
not bow before them or profoundly admire their contribution to the welfare
of man. Neither praise not criticism from somebody-like myself
will, I trust, be regarded as impertinent; the truth is that, unless
those of us who-live on the plains but have occasionally visited ( strictly
as guests) the slopes of Olympus are prepared to set down-some human
remarks about great men, contemporary history when it comes to be written
will be falsified by the propagandists and by those frequent biographers
whose picturesqueness-and dogmatism are in inverse-ratio to their knowledge.
And so, with your permission, I begin with the-great Churchill
himself.
You already know a great deal about him.
He has been a soldier, a turbulent and frequently unsuccessful
politician, : a leader of ' lost-causes and impossible loyalties',
rejected at-somewhat more than my own age,-and ultimately the
idol of the world. And all the time he has written; his books
have been read across the world. His command of what I will: call
nervous English is unequalled in our generation. He has explained
himself: as few men have done. And yet his human qualities, without
which his soaring imagination and command: and eloquence : could not
have availed so much, are for most of us-a deep mystery.
If I were to say to you that as I have seen him, he has had
the wisdom of venerable and-embattled statesmanship, in action like
an-army terrible with banners, and, off duty, and sometimes on duty,
the chuckling spirit of a school boy;-a remarkable capacity for
political hostility and a much more remarkable capacity for the most
endearing personal friendship and goodwill; you would begin to see
that the roots of his genius are deep in a soil which produces humour
and understanding and good temper and bad temper and all those
oddities which go to make up the English-character: and occasionally,
: as-in his case, produce the most-superb genius.
I have written and said so much about him in recent years
that I must avoid repeating myself, I have known him from time to
time for many years. I sat with him longest in the War Cabinet in
the first part of 1941, when the German raiders came over every night.
And since the war, in quieter but difficult days, I am honoured to say
that I have enjoyed in large measure his personal association and
friendship and goodwill.
His political opponents have-frequently felt-the lash of
his tongue. But it has never been a crude-lash. Indeed, I have
sometimes felt that his victim in the House of Commons felt that: it
was a singular honour to-be attacked by him. That-is one of those
inexplicable things that perhaps only a politician can understand.
Could I give you one illustration of the way-in which his
mind-and body responded to the challenge of the war?
I am thinking of one week-end night: at-Chequers in about
March of 1941 when General de Gaulle was in England and when-Churchill,
de Gaulle and I sat together at dinner in this famous old house -in
Buckinghamshire. De Gaulle was by common consent: a brilliant soldier;
but it is not easy for a brilliant soldier to become quite suddenly
skilled in the politics of a French Resistance, in the economics that
go with politics, or in the tactful handling which, believe it or not,
is one of the essentials of international relations. -In brief, de
Gaulle was: as long as the average Frenchman is short; in place of
the celebrated French esprit, he possessed-asomewhat. sombre: appearance:
and smiled with difficulty. At the time of which I am speaking,
his English was to say the least of it ' sketchy'; on the whole,
conceivably inferior to my French. The conversations occurred in
French. Winston's French is magnificent, but it is not French.
' C'est magnifique mais ce n'est pas le francais'.
I gather from my friends in London that the celebrated
Birkenhead had once said of Winston'-s French: ' You know, I greatly
admire Winston's French. It is the only French I have ever been able
to understand and the odd thing is that the French: appear to be able
to understand it also!'
In this setting I was, I confess, being. a little wickedly
provocative. Every time harmony. appeared to be breaking out I would
throw in some vulgar observation about Dakar a subject upon which
Winston: and I had exchanged cables and on which de Gaulle had somewhat
turbulent views. It was a remarkable experience. We adjourned into
another room. Churchill: and de Gaulle walked up and down, delivering
homilies. at each other. I sat: back with the comfortable feeling that
I was witnessing: a fascinating phase of history. -By 2 o'clock in
the morning, de Gaulle very sensibly decided to go to bed. I decided,
for no reason that I can sensibly recall, to stay up.
The great man himself went to bed: at 3 o'clock in the morning
but before he did so he went into the: little: corner study at Chequers
and rang up Bomber Command and Fighter Command to get the reports of
the day. What he had to say to them on their reports was: all compact
of encouragement, rebuke, fire, criticism, what-you-will. Next
morning I was hugging my pillow at some rational hour: and arriving
for breakfast reluctantly at 9 o'clock, only to find that at 7 the-Prime
Minister had received his despatches, had sat up in bed with some black
coffee and a large cigar, and was busy dictating the directives of the
day. We do not see men: like this in every generation, nor indeed
does the world see too many in a century. I must confess that over the
years, I have never known Winston to observe any of the rules of health.
Yet his amazing mental fire must have been associated. with a-remarkable
physical tenacity. The two things worked together, partly because they
were born-in him, and partly because, consciously or unconsciously, he
cultivated them, using adversity to strengthen them.
The trite saying that ' the English lose the battles, but
win the wars'; Philip Guedallas epigrammatic explanation of the
great Duke of Wellington's subsequent loss of 19th Century reputation,
that the English prefer their heroes to be slightly unsuccessful, to
retreat gloriously to Corunna or die in the hour of victory at
Trafalgar; these are not irrelevant. It is, indeed, part of the
legend of our race to come from behind and to snatch victory from
defeat. In my war-time association with Winston Churchill. I caught,
paradoxically, a few echoes of this legend. Not that the great man
was ever defeatist. Far from it. Never was there a leader more unwilling'
to contemplate a defeat or acknowledge a reverse. But I have
seen him and heard him discuss a current situation, building up the
intensity of the problem, tearing away wishful thinking; only to
proceed from there literally to fight his way through the problem to
a point at which all of us who were his hearers not only believed but
knew beyond peradventure that, given courage and energy and endurance,
victory was ours.
I could talk to you for a long time about him, about his
charming and magnificent wife, and about his family. But I must
resist this temptation because I must turn for a little to some of hiscontemporaries
in order to disclose to you my deep-seated belief that
great individual powers are not a freak of nature, but-form part of: a
pattern of greatness-in any country or generation. After all, even
in the spacious days of great Elizabeth, Sh4akespeare was not a lonely
figure in the superb renaissance of poetry and drama. If he had not
lived at all, we would be reading the other Elizabethan dramatists
much more than we do. Trees grow tallest-in a tall forest, and so,
believe me, Churchill has had great contemporaries. He has himself
in a notable book written of-some of them. If you go back home and
re-read ' Great Contemporaries' you will find not the heartless cut
and thrust of political controversy but great men written of justly,
generously and affectionately.
Birkenhead's place in history is no doubt a matter of
controversy. Quite plainly his talents were greater than his achievements,
and yet Churchill wrote of him the most -splendid epitaph that
mortal man could wish:
' Some men when they die after busy, toilsome,
successful lives leave a great-stock of scrip
and securities, of acres or factories or the
goodwill of large undertakings. F. E. banked
his treasure in the hearts of his friends,
and they will cherish his memory till their
time is come.'
-6-
But let me for a few minutes go back before Churchill.
I have known six Prime Ministers of Great Britain. Two
of them, Mr. Attlee and Sir Anthony Eden, are still on the active
political scene and, therefore, though I could speak of each of
them with deep admiration and affection, it would be an impertinence
for me even to appear to sit in judgment upon them.
But three of them preceded Churchill
Ramsay Macdonald, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain. Each in.
his day enjoyed wide popularity. Churchill, thank God, ' stilldoes.
But three of them went out of office, if riot unhonoured, at least
unsung. Now, I entertain what-some of my friends regard as the
eccentric belief that Macdonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain were great
men who rendered certain vital and abiding services to their people,
and that Churchill, with. all his genius to command and-inspire, could
not have done everything that he did, but for their work.
Each was at one time, no doubt, over-praised. But each
has subsequently been over-condemned. It does little credit to our
good sense that we should swing about so wildly in our judgments,
treating today as mere folly our wild enthusiasms of yesterday. After
all, if our superficial emotions are our only guide, we have no more
assurance that we are right today than we were wrong yesterday.
When I first met him, in 1935, Ramsay Macdonald was long
past his best. He had become tired and old and addicted to rather
vague and meaningless phrases. A leonine and handsome appearance,
a fine poise-and a rich voice, with occasional flashes of international
insight, were all that-seemed to remain of a man whose personality
and force of character must have been great to lift him from a
position of almost universal unpopularity and, indeed, opprobrium
during the-first world war to No. 10 Downing Street only a few years
later. My own contact with him was sketchy enough; a few meetings
in London, * a visit to Chequers; but I count his brilliant son,
Malcolm Macdonald, now British High Commissioner in India, as: a warm
though now a geographically distant friend. I-remember Malcolm
saying to me one day in London ( I know he will not mind me quoting
him)
-7-
' You did not know my father at his best. I can
recall him standing on the tail of a truck,
by torchlight,, speaking to a thousand miners
with such power and appeal that the tears made
white furrows down their faces. As a: spokesman
for the under-dog, as a denouncer of social and
industrial injustice, he was tremendous: and
unforgettable.'
It is easily believed. England was ( and is) a traditionally
conservative place. It was Ramsay Macdonald who, with fire and great
political skill, brought the Labour Party from a small obscurity to
the seat of government. He formed and led the first Labour Government.
This ( and here I state the point of my narrative) was not a
mere accidental or transitory political triumph. It gave to organised
Labour, for the first time, a sense of power and therefore, inevitably
for sensible men, a feeling of political responsibility.
It would surprise me if the future historian, battling his
way through all the partisan records, did not come to the conclusion
that but for the work of Ramsay Macdonald there might have been no
instant place for a Socialist Ernest Bevin as Minister for Labour in
a Conservative-led War Cabinet in-the Second World War. The magnificent
co-operation of 1940-45 proceeded from a consciousness-in the
industrial unions and among politically organised wage-earners not only
of the necessities of their country, which they knew-clearly enough,
but also of their own national powers and responsibilities. The British
National Government of 1940-45 gave a lead and direction more authoritative
than could have been provided by any one-Party administration.
Stanley Baldwin's political reputation is today surrounded by
clouds and darkness. The current picture of him is that of an indolent
and not very gifted man, sucking at his pipe or inspecting his pigs,
oblivious of the state of Europe or the rising menace of Hitler,
ignoring the eloquent warnings of Churchill, allowing his country to go
on, unaware and unprepared, to the very edge of the abyss.
Some of the lines in this picture are, alas, true enough.
Some are fantastically wrong. I saw a good deal of Baldwin in those
years. He was a plain and solid Englishman, of great personal friendliness
and charm,.. an easy and-indeed magnetic talker over the breakfast
table, a supreme Parliamentarian in the House of Commons.
He was a poet at heart, a master of that kind of simple and
moving speech which best expresses the underlying passion of the
Englishman for his own-countryside, its history, its form, its familiar
colours and. smells.
' To me, Engl4 is the country, and ' the country is
England. And when I ask myself what I mean by England,
when I think of England when I am abroad, England
comes to me through my various senses through the
ear,-through the eye, and through certain imperishable
scents The sounds of England, the tinkle of
the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy,
the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the
scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a
plough team coming over the brow of a
And above all, most subtle, most penetrating
and most moving, the smell of wood smoke coming up
in an autumn evening, or the smell of the sctutch fires.'
At more than one period of domestic political crisis,
his conduct was cool, shrewd and successful. The General Strike
of 1926, trouble on the coal-fields, the unprecedented problems
of the Abdication, were all handled by him with skill and a just
understanding of underlying British opinion.
What was the secret of these successes, so sharply
contrasting with his chronic failure to realise or deal with the
menace arising in Europe?
The answer is that he was an Englishman of great character
and talent, but a provincial Englishman. Europe mystified him;
he was never attracted to its history or its problems; he probably
illustrated to perfection the old and true proverb about the rural
Englishman, that for him ' the negroes begin at Calais'. Steelmaster
Baldwin might be, by force of circumstances. But at heart
he was of the English country; ready to recall his people to its
beauties; possessed in rare degree of the faculty of invoking a
sense of national unity. It was this sense of unity which defeated
the General Strike, which at one stage averted grave trouble
in the coal-mines, which plucked out of the thorns of the Abdication
the flower of an actually strengthened Crown.
The historian's balance may, for aught I know, weigh
down against Stanley Baldwin. But the superb national unity with
which Great Britain went to war against odds on September 3rd, 1939,
owed not a little to the man who had nurtured it in the deep and
simple pride of his people.
Neville Chamberlain succeeded him at a time when the
average Englishman still did not accept the inevitability or even
the real probability of war. Chamberlain was the son of the great
champion of Tariff Reform and Imperial Preference. His family and
political background was industrial.* But, as in the case of
Baldwin, he was at heart a countryman. He would turn from the
complexities of a Budget to a week-end whipping a remote stream,
identifying obscure plants during some woodland ramble, or
listening with joy to the song of a bird ( and a bird he knew)
in a hedged lane.
I could never understand why he was so little understood.
' He would have made a good Lord Mayor of Birmingham
in a bad year!', said the mordant Birkenhead. Yet, as I shall
try to show, he rendered services ' to his country certainly no
less remarkable than those of Birkenhead himself.
' A mere accountant!' said another critic. Yet on
two occasions I sat in the gallery of the House of Commons and
heard him deliver a Budget Speech with such clarity, point, and
dramatic sense that I shall always regard them as among the
greatest Budget Speeches I ever heard.
And what of Munich?
We might as well admit ( in British countries at any
rate) that, when the Prime Minister who had never flown took his
Hamburg hat and his folded umbrella and flew to Germany to come
to terms with Hitler, nine out of ten of us, with an instinctive
horror of war, said ' Thank God!'.
Two years later it was hard to find a single human being
who had not, so he said, disagreed with Chamberlain. The ' men
of Munich' became ma~ rked men. The idol had not only turned out
to have feet of clay but, oddly enough, had never, so it seemed,
been an idol at all!
On September 3rd, 1939, we listened, from across the
sea, to the broadcast words of a declaration of war from a Prime
Minister who saw his efforts in ruin about him. An hour later
I was telling the people of Australia that we, too, were at war.
To most people the story of Neville Chamberlain came
to be a story of ignorance of danger, of unawareness of Hitler's
true character, of simplicity confronted by guile, of weak and
uncertain action, of ultimate failure. Did Chamberlain, then,
contribute nothing to ultimate victory?
The-answer is that he gave us time, even at the price
of humiliation. There had been, under the Air Administration
of Philip Swinton, a concentration upon quality in the Spitfire
and the Hurricane; great ' shadow' factories had been set up
and equipped. The Battle for Britain had already been partly
won. Let us remember that it was won not only by the superb
dash, individuality, and courage of the pilots, but also by
the superior speed, manoeuvrability, and fire-power of their
aircraft. If Chamberlain really believed that the risk of war
was ended at Munich, and if all efforts at armament then
slackened, Munich was an unqualified disaster and Chamberlain
must be condemned. But ' I have never quite believed this.
True, Germany obtained the Skoda Works and other great resources
by the rape of Czechoslovakia. But Chamberlain inherited ( except
on the Naval side and the development of fighter aircraft) a largely
undefended nation. A year was worth a good deal. We were much
stronger in 1939 than in 1938. And, apart from all this, the
twelve months after Munich, with their grim and hateful record of
treachery and aggression, did much to marshal the decent moral
opinion of the world, to harden the spirit of resistance to tyranny
and crime. That is why I believe that the historian will say that
Neville Chamberlain, in spite of his undoubted disposition to
appease, to seek to solve the problem by postponing it, made his
contribution to ultimate victory.
And then the great blows fell, and disaster was in the
air, and Churchill, who in the opinion of his critics had been, up
to that time, always brilliant but mostly wrong, was sent for.
Ramsay Macdonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain, could never have
stood in the imminent deadly breach and rallied the forces of
freedom against all odds and all reason. That task was for one
who understood danger and despised it, whose motto was faction,
action, action!', who went down through the poetry and pride of
his people into those elemental deeps of courage and defiance and
sacrifice and cheerful fortitude which turned aside all attacks.
No English-speaking man or woman of our time will ever
forget the thrill of hearing from time to time, over the radio, the
voice of Churchill, and of getting from that distant voice a new
fire and a renewed bravery.
I will never forget how this great warrior-statesman
would enter the historic Cabinet Boom in Djowning Street, take his
seat in dead silence, pull his truculent and tilted cigar from his
mouth and say
-11-
' Gentlemen, we have the signal honour of being
responsible for the government of our country
at a time of deadly danger. We will proceed
with the business.'
It sounds prosaic, as repeated now, but it made our
hearts beat the faster. It is hard to believe that there was
ever a war leader like him.
But no man could be a great leader without a great
people. He evoked and stimulated courage; he did not create it.
He himself was and is an unrivalled benefactor to posterity.
But those who went before him, with all their faults, made their
own contribution to victory. Ultimate justice demands that we
should occasionally remember it.
And, of course, there are others of whom I will speak
only as I have known them.
Lloyd George was, of course, for all practical purposes
a retired and elder statesman when I first met him 20 years ago.
But even in 1941, I went down to his farm at Churt and had a full
day with him to me one of intense joy. His silver mane blowing
in the wind, his brilliant and penetrating eye, his personal charm
and his mastery of language were all, even then, quite irresistible.
I am sure that his distinguished son, the Right Honourable
Gwilym Lloyd-George, now Home Secretary in the United Kingdom Cabinet,
will not mind if I tell you a simple story which illustrates the
whole matter. Gwilym in 1941 had invited me to lunch at one of the
University Clubs in London, together with a couple of other men.
He said to me: ' I believe you have been seeing something
of my father'. I said: ' Yes, indeed I have'.
' What do you make of him?' said Gwilym, with a twinkle
in the eye. ' Well', I said, ' in the last five or six years, I don't
think he has made a single public speech in the House of Commons
or outside it with which I would feeL able to agree. Yet, after
half an hour with him, if he said to me ' Menzies, I want you to abandon
everything that you are doing and follow me' I think I probably
would!'
Perhaps the right way to put this matter is to say that the two great crisis leaders of our time have been Lloyd George
and Churchill, and that each of them had a magnetic quality possessing
almost physical force which drew men to them and enabled them to
attain their most remarkable achievements.
One of Winston Churchill's older contemporaries is Lord Halifax, a former Viceroy of India, a notable. Foreign Secretary,
and British Ambassador to the United States when I passed through
there in 1941. Halifax is a kind of man who can perhaps be produced
only in his own country but not for export. A tall man of rather
sombre appearance, deeply religious and scholarly in ecclesiastical
matters, he was nevertheless or because of that fact one who brought to international relations a dignity, a clarity of mind, an
innate sense of justice, which imp-essed the whole of his contemporaries
and sustained on the highest level the greatest traditions of English public life.
A younger contemporary is Lord Salisbury, formerly Lord Cranborne, known to a host of his friends as ' Bobbity' Salisbury. This may-. seem to you to be a strange pseudonym for one who has claims
( which he does not make for himself) to be one of the wisest men of our time, but it arose in a simple way.
His famous grandfather was Robert; in the next generation, there was another Robert which inevitably became ' Bob' a name which I trust you all treat with suitable respect and therefore, in the
third generation, some distinction had to be made and ' Bob' became ' Bobbity'. There used to be a somewhat cynical saying that ' There are
three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves' or, as I believe
they used to say in Lancashire ' from clogs to clogs' The whole point
of the saying is that it is seldom that genius, or even high talent,
will be transmitted for very long.
It is therefore a stimulating thing to recall that when
the first Queen Elizabeth came to the Throne a horseman went out
through the mire and slush from London to Hatfield to tell the
Cecil 9f those days that there * was a new Queen. Only a few years
ago, on better roads and by more modern transport, a messenger went
out from London to tell the Cecil of these days Robert Salisburythat
the second Elizabeth had come to the Throne. There is something
magnificent and enduring in the Cecil blood.
-13-
The present holder of thz family title has modesty, good
sense, good judgment, high character, imagination and a sense of
responsibility so completely blended in him that I would think my
life well spent if I had known only him among the great contemporaries
of Churchill. Before I conclude you might perhaps allow me to refer to
two of Winston's great American contemporaries.
The first, of course, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It
is quite likely that the historians will say that in his declining
health he was deceived at Yalta and at Potsdam. Perhaps he was;
for his mind was friendly and generous and, towards the end, not
easily prepared for cunning or indirect motives.
Of-his immense personal charm I can speak from conviction
and experience, His courage was enormous.. There can have been
few men in the history of the world who came through a long and
crippling disease ultimately to sit in one of the most powerful
places of authority in the world.
It is not for people like us to attempt to estimate his ultimate place in history or the final measure of his intellectual
parts. But there can be no doubt that in the very best sense of the
word, he was one of the master politicians of this century. He knew
his own people. He spoke intimately and easily across the wireless
to his own people. He was always on our side in the war, but he
knew better than anybody else how to handle his own public opinion
so that his own great nation would at least not be against us; would
certainly at least be the most helpful of neutrals; and would in due
course be with us to the end.
His successor, Mr. Truman, was written down when he became President. He appeared to the superficial onlooker to be just a man
who had become President by the accident of Roosevelt's death. He
answered most of his critics when, single-handed and against all the
odds, he retained the Presidency in 1948; but there will remain a
perhaps vagrant idea that he was what the Americans would call a
' run-of-mine' politician who had not the personality or command of
his more famous predecessor.
Well, I have had the opportunity of seeing a good deal
of Mr. Truman and of thinking a good deal about what, when he was
President, he was called upon to decide and to do.
I-think, therefore, that I should tell you, without any presumption I hope, that he was and is a great man with qualities
of the most essential and remarkable kind. H had many bitter
decisions to take, including the crucial decision about the atomic
bomb. He-took his decisions and never swerved from them. And when
his decisions had been taken and the political attacks followed and
many newspapers assailed him, he stood to his guns, quite serenely,
cheerfully, humanly. I don't think I ever met a more naturally
friendly man. I don't think that I have met many men who behind their
naturalness and friendliness possessed such pertinacity of mind, such
determination to pursue the course seen to be the right one. I would
venture to say that any man who possesses decision, courage and
endurance has great claims to honour in a world in which time-serving
and being all things to all men are so frequently regarded as the
marks of a superior political intelligence.
I have named only a few of Winston Churchill's contemporaries. I ave spoken to you for another two hours about 20 or 30 more. But I have mentioned those whom I have named because it is one of my profound beliefs that the greatest men are not lonely accidents but come out of a generation of great men who provide at once their stimulus and their foil. In any great man's hey-day it is fashionable to eulogise him to excess. When his day has gone, it is, I fear, fashionable to decry him and to-get some clever young man to write a book to explain he was never great at all.
The whole purpose of my speech to you tonight has been to endeavour to restore the balance. It will be a poor day for our race when any generation arises which is not able to say with a full heart and a true mind ' Let us now praise famous men'