A few days before the 50th
Anniversary Celebrations of VE Day, an astounded population world
wide learnt that the British Conservative Government had ordered very
first pay out (from the
independent ?!) National
Lottery, of £12,500,000 to Churchill's daughter Mary and his
grandson Winston to stop them threatening to sell to foreigners
Churchill's war time papers known as THE CHARTWELL PAPERS.
The papers did not belong to them and had never
been the responsibility of Churchill's relatives. Parliament,
together with the public and most historians, considered that these
papers belonged to the nation, having being presented to CHURCHILL
COLLEGE at Sir Winston's request by Lady Churchill.
That is why they were housed in the care of
specialist staff, in a special air conditioned publicly funded
THE CHURCHILL ARCHIVE CENTRE
CHURCHILL COLLEGE,
CAMBRIDGE.
Forgetful of the millions of deaths, and
appalling sufferings which cause these papers to be unique;
Churchill's children - nonetheless - not only insisted upon selling
them; but also retaining extended royalty income rights on the
archives until the year 2035. It also appears (from the very limited
information available to the public) that important information may
not have been disclosed at the time.
As this matter has clearly been hushed up, the
society calls for a Parliamentary Select Committee to look into
it.
Correspondence.
__________________
We desire to be judged only by results
Winston Churchill.
House of Commons
February 11th 1943
September 23, 2004
How 25-year wrangle led to Churchill papers sale
By Richard Ford
PERSONAL papers belonging to Winston Churchill
were the subject of a 25-year legal fight as his grandson, who had
"little money of his own", tried to sell them to the Government,
files released by the National Archive at Kew reveal.
Discreet negotiations to sell the 2,000-box
archive, which included early drafts of the wartime leader's "finest
hour" and "Battle of Britain" speeches, began within six years of his
death in 1965. The Government was offered the pre-1945 papers
&emdash; half of them official papers belonging to the State &emdash;
for £100,000 to £120,000 in 1971. Finally they were bought
with £12.5 million of National Lottery money in 1995.
The collection, the Chartwell Papers, contained
almost everything that Churchill wrote before 1945, including
extensive correspondence with Lloyd George, Edward VIII and George
VI. It also included intelligence on all aspects of the Second World
War, drafts of letters to Stalin, Roosevelt and de Gaulle and Cabinet
papers.
It was in a private family trust, which
Churchill intended to benefit male descendants. The main beneficiary
by 1991 was his grandson, Winston Churchill, then Conservative MP for
Davyhulme. The papers were his most valuable possession.
The papers had been loaned to Churchill College
in Cambridge, but the trustees wished to sell them. Successive
governments wanted the papers to remain together, but they were a
mixture of official and personal documents. Sir Winston had taken
many official documents with him "on permanent loan" when he left
office and had refused to return them. Today's files disclose that
Sotheby's had estimated in 1971 that they would fetch £2
million. The letter then suggests that the Government offer between
£100,000 to £120,000 to buy them.
The purchase by the lottery provoked fury. John
Charmley, the historian, said: "The second jackpot winner is Winston
Churchill Jr. The Government should have called the bluff of the
Churchills when they threatened to break up the collection and sell
it abroad. These papers belong to the State and should never have
been removed in the first place."
John Major's Government refused to hold a public inquiry into the
death of Robert Maxwell for fear of offending Spain, according to
secret papers released today. Ministers also believed an official
investigation into the circumstances in which the Daily Mirror
publisher publisher drowned off the Canary Islands would turn into a
media circus.
Let faith, not appetite, guide our steps.
Winston
Churchill
Political Broadcast
January 21, 1950.
Because
of his
record Mr W S Churchill's appointment as Chairman of the Winston Churchill
Memorial Trust
is as astonishing as it is improper and he must resign.
________________________________________
Dalton Newfield writes in an article published in the USA re the
sordid history (and inevitable failure) of the Churchill family's
promotion of the fantastically expensive The
Collected Works in 1974.
"I am more than a little surprised that the Churchill family gave
their support to this money-grubbing project".
"It would be wonderful to own such a work".
"It would be wonderful if my - or even any US library - could own
the set, let alone risk using it".
"It would be wonderful if greed were not always the family's
motive".
"WSC was not unconscious of money - quite the contrary - but he
did put out abridgements, cheap editions, etc., so that people at all
levels could enjoy his works".
"What pains most is that the idea was all so un Churchillian", Mr
Newfield concluded.
|
|
The
story
of the
Churchill family and their friends and relatives - some of
whom were also Trustees of the Winston Churchill Memorial
Trust - promotion in 1988 of the West End Musical with
'Winnie' singing in his bath!
After three performances it was taken off.
It was reputed to have lost £3 million pounds and was
described by a Buckingham Palace courtier as:_
"just done
for
money,
money, money
. . . .
vulgar vulgar vulgar!"
Mary Soames. Churchill's daughter,
Nicholas Soames MP, Churchill's
grandson.
Winston Churchill minor. Churchill's grandson.
|
______________________________________
The Daily Telegraph
Re: Unsocial society
Date: 3 October 2004
SIR
Despite being hugely and patriotically English, I can only endorse
the prescience of Kevin Myers in opting to live in Ireland.
What he says about us is completely accurate, and is tremendously
dispiriting for those of us who can remember that other England, the
one where care, courtesy, respect and manners were part of everyday
life.
Again quite correctly he identifies the culprits as the
intelligentsia (although the noun is in many respects a misnomer),
who have conducted a merciless and unrelenting assault on all those
things that made us what we were.
Now, from the top down, we have a yobbish culture which prevails,
and we have become a society motivated by spite, envy, greed,
gloating, filth and voyeurism.
The England in which I was raised and educated, and for which I
would gladly have laid down my life, has been stolen from us, and we
are now an awful country, probably in terminal decline, ruled over by
an elite who are self-serving, duplicitious and hugely incompetent.
It is time, I think, to summon back King Arthur, or bang Drake's
Drum or whatever it is that we are supposed to do in time of peril.
From: Arthur Mead, Dereham, Norfolk.
___________________________________________
The Times Newspaper
London
September 7th 1998
(abbreviated)
Mr Mark Thomas has accepted a position advising Chancellor Gordon
Brown about reforming the tax system to ensure that rich people
cannot cheat.
Mr Thomas was invited after his television programme revealed that
Nicholas Soames (Churchill's grandson and Conservative MP and former
Minister) avoided paying inheritance tax on family heirlooms he had
been left, by listing them as available to public inspection when
they were not.
____________________________________________
TIMES NEWSPAPER. London.
September 23, 2004
From Professor Emeritus Thomas Stapleton
Sir,
' Churchill's tears'
Richard Morrison (T2, September 20) writes that Churchill is said
to have been a bit of a sobber, though never in public.
Professor Robert Debr, the father of French paediatrics, told me
that when in 1944 Churchill received the freedom of the City of Paris
in the Hotel de Ville, on opening the casket, found it contained not
a scroll but the Hakenkreuz (Nazi flag) that had flown over the town
hall during the Occupation, the tears poured down his cheeks.
Yours faithfully,
THOMAS STAPLETON,
The Foundry Cottage,
Lane End, High Wycombe,
Buckinghamshire HP14 3JS.
thomas.stapleton@btinternet.com
September 22.
___________________________________
THE
CHURCHILL SOCIETY
London.
The Editor
The Times Newspaper
London
October 1st 2004.
Sir
(From France)
'Churchill's tears'
Letter 23rd Sept 2004
Professors Stapleton's account of Churchill's reception of the
Nazi flag presented to him in France in 1944 was moving.
It represented the French nation's tribute to Churchill and all
his comrades in arms who lost their lives and the grief and pain of
their
widows and orphans, plus the many who suffered appalling injuries.
The flag belongs to them and now to the nation.
Where is it now?
Yours faithfully
The Secretary.
Norman Harvey Rogers.
__________________________________________
The Churchill family to pay back The Lottery Money.
The High Court (London) proceedings. Who owned the Chartwell Papers?
Churchill's Medals.
How safe are the contents of Chartwell?
Copy of correspondence with The National Trust.
Churchill's daughter Mary Soames,
Churchill's grandson Nicholas Soames,
Churchill's grandson Winston Churchill minor.
Important information.
'Conservative Party
sleaze added to the continuing collapse of moral standards in the UK.
From 1983 onwards it gathered pace and led to the national uproar
caused by the the story of the Churchill family threatening to sell Sir Winston and Lady Churchill's
gift to Churchill College of The Chartwell
Papers.
Lord
Rothschild's
letter.
The very sad press chronology
of Winston S Churchill
Jnr.
Professor Charmley writes:
Is there no end to the making
of money by the family our of Sir Winston?
Commercial
advertising.
Cashing in on
Churchill.
Who authorised this
crude example?
Criticisms of the book
'Churchill's
Private
Letters'
selected, edited, and published by his daughter Mary Soames.
May 1999. Important
information.
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