Piers Brendon - Churchill’s Menagerie: Winston Churchill and the Animal Kingdom

CHURCHILLS
MENAGERIE

Winston Churchill and the Animal Kingdom

PIERS BRENDON

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

CHURCHILLS MENAGERIES

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Copyright 2019 by Piers Brendon

First Pegasus Books hardcover edition August 2019

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ISBN: 978-1-64313-136-8

ISBN: 978-1-64313-180-1 (eBook)

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

To Helen and John

with love

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The place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

INTRODUCTION

R. Rhodes James (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches [henceforth Speeches] VII (8 vols., 1974), 6824.

H. Vickers, Gladys: Duchess of Marlborough (1979), 196.

C[hurchill]A[Archives]C[entre], CHAR 2/124B/159, Archie Sinclair to Churchill, 13 September 1922.

CAC, CHAR 28/14/7, Winston to his mother, 23 March 1887.

CAC, CHAR 1/4/14, Mrs Everest to Winston, 2 October 1891.

CAC, SCHL 1/1/8, Sarah to her father, 27 July 1948.

W. Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill (1983), 7767.

R. Boothby, Boothby: Recollections of a Rebel (1978), 55.

Letters Written by the Earl of Chesterfield III (1775), 220.

Mr Jorrocks actually said that fox-hunting was the prince of sports. The image of war without its guilt, and only half its danger. (R. Surtees, Jorrockss Jaunts and Jollities [1965 edn.], 67).

J. Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of HumanAnimal Relationships (Cambridge, 1996), 235.

K. Halle, The Irrepressible Churchill (2010), 285.

A. Montague Browne, Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchills Last Private Secretary (1995), 145.

S. Churchill, A Thread in the Tapestry (1967), 27.

Manchester, Last Lion, 778.

CAC, EADE 2/2, 11 September 1942.

CAC, CHUR 1/58A-B/227.

D. Gilmour, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (2002), 196. Gilmour is wrong, however, in suggesting that Churchill was unaware of Kiplings hostility towards him. (See Speeches VI, 5905.)

H. Nicolson, Harold Nicolson:Diaries and Letters 19301964, edited by S. Olson (1980), 317.

Commenting on her inability to live a normal married life, Sarah told her father in 1947: I suppose every now and then, something goes wrong and a mule is born. (CAC, CHUR 1/45/12.) She signed many of her family letters with drawings of a mule in various comic poses.

Such preferences were at least as old as classical antiquity. According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar once rebuked visitors to Rome for lavishing on puppy-dogs and monkeys embraces that would have been better given to their own children.

J. S. Churchill, Crowded Canvas: The Memoirs of John Spencer Churchill (1961), 31.

CAC, SCHL 1/1/7, Sarah to her mother, 1 July 1944.

W. S. Churchill, The Second World War III (6 vols., 194854), 757.

J. Kennedy, The Business of War: The War Narrative of Major-General Sir John Kennedy (1957), 7980.

Speeches VII, 6741.

M. Holroyd, Bernard Shaw III 19181950: The Lure of Fantasy (1991), 227.

W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis [henceforth World Crisis] IV (6 vols., 192331), 40.

Speeches III, 3023. Churchill may have had in mind the hybrid leopard-man in H. G. Wellss science-fiction novel about vivisection, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).

CAC, CHAR 2/235/90, Churchill to Lord Rothermere, 12 May 1935.

World Crisis IV, 38.

P. Brendon, Winston Churchill: A Brief Life (1984), 92.

Job XII, 7.

Churchill VIII, 1075.

Finest Hour 166 (Winter 2015), 33.

Montague Browne, Long Sunset, 280.

ALBATROSS

J. A. Cross, Sir Samuel Hoare (1972), 172. Churchill also called him, along with stronger epithets, a snake. (A. Eden, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning [1965], 96.) Talking off the record to the journalist Frank Owen in 1937, Churchill was especially contemptuous of Hoare for quitting the Admiralty to go to the Home Office: The only man who chose to leave Jack Tar for Jack Ketch. (Parliamentary Archives, BBK/C/86.) In 1911, of course, Churchill himself had exchanged the Home Office for the Admiralty.

Speeches VI, 5638.

A. Lascelles, Kings Counsellor: Abdication and War: The Diaries of Tommy Lascelles, edited by D. Hart-Davis (2006), 60.

D. Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan 19381945 (1971), 287.

ALLIGATORS

CAC, CHUR 2/351/f408, 30 March 1955.

H. Nicolson, Harold Nicolson:Diaries and Letters 19301939, edited by N. Nicolson (1966), 328.

ANTELOPE

R. S. Churchill, Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa (1892), 215.

Churchill I, C. 1, 237, 248 and 260.

W. S. Churchill, Ian Hamiltons March (1900), 166.

W. S. Churchill, My African Journey (Toronto, 1909 edn.), 2023.

CAC, CHAR 1/72/34, 8 March 1908.

ANTS

Churchill I, C. 1, 103.

R. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1908), 117.

Churchill V, C. 1, 1313. Churchill, who was writing to George Bernard Shaw, did not blame humanity for its plight since the real fault lay with the Creator: and there is no apparent way of bringing it home to him. He just keeps rolling along.

J. F. M. Clark, Bugs and the Victorians (2009), 101.

W. S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, edited by J. W. Muller (Wilmington, Del., 2009), 2723. Churchill may have been influenced by Maurice MaeterlincksThe Life of Termites (1926), as was General de Gaulle.

APES

B. Roberts, Churchills in Africa (1970), 30.

T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, edited by J. G. Paradis and G. C. Williams (Princeton, 1989), 109110.

Speeches VI, 6185.

W. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene 2.

F. Glueckstein, Churchill and the Barbary Macaques in