Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

I discussed in the earlier post how one theory on why my father enlisted in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve is due to the Never Surrender speech of Winston Churchill. However, the public didn’t hear this historic speech until after WWII. The recordings we hear today didn’t air on the BBC at the time; yet that hasn’t stopped many Britons from remembering otherwise. Nevertheless, it was published in the newspapers, so the general public would have been aware of the ‘spirit’ of the times. The Daily Mirror, for example, ran the headline “We Never Surrender” on its front page on June 5, 1940.  

Darkest Hour (2017)

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I often went to the cinema in Oslo together with my son Alan see the latest Hollywood offering. The great thing about going to the cinema with your young son is that you can watch films you would never dream of watching alone. Any film that glorifies Winston Churchill has to be reactionary. As mentioned above, I don’t want to go into a long rant about the WHY of politics! 

Although I feel ideologically opposed to Winston Churchill, I have to admit that I liked the film. The risk is that if you suck in Hollywood entertainment, you become ‘drunk’ and start to believe it.

After all, Gary Oldman did a fantastic job portraying Churchill! As was Lily James’ portrayal of Churchill’s personal secretary. I had fallen in love with Kristin Scott Thomas when she played the starring role in “The English Patient” some twenty years before. She was also magnificent in “The Darkest Hour” in the role of Churchill’s wife! The theme of the film was just as fantastic; ‘Britain saving the world from tyranny’, which Churchill mentioned in his speech.

Contradictions

However, in the middle of all this patriotic hullabaloo  one tends to forget Churchill’s ‘criminal’ past. I searched on Google for ‘crimes of Winston Churchill,’ which resulted in more than one million hits! Obviously, I don’t want to delve into all these crimes here – one would have to live until one was 999 years old, and write 999 volumes. But just searching my own personal memory I can remember that Churchill (the so-called ‘anti-Fascist’) had a lot in common with the Norwegian fascist, Nazi and traitor, Vidkunn Quisling. Both men employed the military to crack down on workers.  

My point is that, in Churchill’s ‘Never surrender’ speech, he talked about fighting ‘tyranny’. He also implicitly explained that for most of his career, he had been defending colonial and imperial ‘tyranny’. The ‘give-away’ comes towards the end of his speech: 

And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

US as a Democratic Republic

There are so many contradictions here that I cannot comment on them all. Primarily, Britain’s ally, the U.S., was a democratic republic and not interested in supporting an ‘Empire’, which they had fought a war against in 1776. In the sense of ‘Empire’, Churchill seemed to have more in common with Hitler and Thatcher, who both wanted to build (like the imperial Romans), a 1000-year Reich. The other irony is that the ‘Empire beyond the seas’ would disintegrate in the post-war period (Burma, India, African countries, and others, and finally, Hong Kong in 1999). In other words, Winston Churchill was an anachronism, like the British Empire.

But of course, all wars are full of lies.  This is a self-evident truth, so I won’t waste the reader’s time by referring to numerous ‘war lies’.

²⁰ Hansard HC Deb 04 June 1940 vol 361 cc787-98 

²² https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/winston-churchills-historic-fight-them-beaches-speech-wasnt-heard-public-until-after-wwii-180967278/ Read 12 August 2022.

²³ Daily Mirror. 5 June 1940. https://www.militaryimages.net/media/daily-mirror-front-page-1940.6673/ 

²⁴ Ironically, I rarely went to the cinema with my father when we lived in Culcheth, Lancashire. But I can remember going to the cinema in Leigh with him (when I was about ten years old). My memory is perhaps unclear here. We had a choice between a cowboy film and Blue Angel starring Marlene Dietrich. Of course, my father suggested we watch Blue Angel. I say that my memory is unclear – because the Dietrich film was made in the 1930s. Whatever, although I was a young boy and it made a lasting impression on my mind concerning ‘mysterious (forbidden) blonde women of German and foreign origin’.

²⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstad_conflict

²⁶ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonypandy_riots