Brian Bollen's Blog

The Churchill Girls: The Story of Winston's Daughters

Title:                The Churchill Girls

Author:            Rachel Trethewey

Pages:              320 including index

Publisher:        The History Press

Price:               £20

ISBN:               978-0-7509-9324-1

To be perfectly honest, I never even knew until relatively recently that Winston Churchill, arguably the greatest leader that the UK has ever had, even had daughters, let alone four. If prompted, I might recall a couple of scenes in The Crown, but they scarcely registered.

I remember first becoming aware of the Churchill name when the great man died, on January 24 1965, when I was still aged just seven. The media made the most enormous fuss, for a name that to me at that time meant absolutely nothing. He was just an old man whose death cleared the television schedules.

And what limited schedules those already were. In those days, most ordinary family television sets in the UK still offered only two channels: BBC1 and ITV. BBC2 had launched in April 1964, yes, but became widely viewed only in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As I recall, the television schedules and newspapers were stuffed with stories of Churchill’s passing and images of his state funeral procession, pushing regular programmes out of their slots.

To me, they seemed endless, and are forever etched in my memory in fuzzy black and white. One of the pictures in this book, of the family standing on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, brings that occasion firmly into the present, albeit in much sharper focus.

This book, though physically all in black and white, brings colour, often vivid colour, into the Churchill saga. As the blurb inside the front cover reads: In any other family, Diana, Sarah, Marigold and Mary would have shone. But they were not in any other family. They were Churchills and neither they nor anyone else could forget it.

As the author says in her introduction: Thousands of books have been written about Winston Churchill, but this is the first focussing on his daughters. And what a read it is, giving cinematic glimpses into a privileged but not always idyllic world, even if youngest daughter Mary likened her childhood at Chartwell, the family home, to growing up in the Garden of Eden.

Post-divorce Diana, turning to her father for support, was invited to join him at ageing film star Maxine Elliott’s luxurious villa in the south of France. There, we are told, if your feet ached after dancing all night in Cannes, a bath would be filled from bottles of iced champagne to refresh them. And when the real moon was not shining, the hostess switched on a large electric one.

Future heavy drinker and inmate of Holloway Prison, Sarah, when not high-kicking across the stage in a very short skirt and frilly knickers (sic), played a wounded pheasant in a ballet satirising an Edwardian shooting party. We are told that when Sarah was sober, she was charming, funny and talented. When in drink, it was another matter. She knew the inside of the Priory clinic as a patient, and during her 10-day sojourn in Holloway she made friends with the prostitutes, confidence tricksters and thieves she came across. When lesbian prisoners propositioned her, she took it in her stride.

Marigold died on August 23 1921, aged two years and nine months, after a sore throat developed into septicaemia. According to Winston, at the time of her death, her mother, Clementine, let out a series of wild shrieks like a wounded animal.

Mary, the youngest daughter, displaying an early entrepreneurial spirit, set up a business called The Happy Zoo, selling budgerigars to guests at Chartwell, which included the likes of Lawrence of Arabia, turning up on his motorcycle.

Another visitor was Brendan Bracken, after whom is named Bracken House, the once and future home of the Financial Times, at 1, Friday Street, London, where I began learning my trade as a journalist in October 1984. The book contains, incidentally, the one and only suggestion I have ever read that Brendan Bracken was rumoured to be Churchill’s son.

I could go on, and on, but I highly recommend that you seek out this book and read it for yourself. I think you’ll enjoy it very much.

Brian Bollen, March 26 2021

Hats Off To Wilfried Zaha

Hats off to Wilfried Zaha for refusing to participate in the ludicrous virtue-signalling 'taking a knee' before a sports event: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/av/football/56389709

 

Cressida Dick MUST resign: Part Two

Read the BBC report on the women's demonstration yesterday evening, and ask yourself if, should this be a wholly accurate version of events, the police action is remotely appropriate and proportionate: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56389824

In order to prevent a risk of spreading Covid-19, they had to handcuff and arrest people, who were protesting about the abduction and murder of a woman by a practising member of that force.

Policing by consent? Don't make me laugh. This completes the UK's journey over the past 12 months into being a dystopian totalitarian police state. Qualitatively speaking, is there any difference between what the Met are doing and what the police in Burma are doing?

I think not.

Cressida Dick MUST resign, followed swiftly by the home secretary.

 

 

Cressida Dick MUST resign

Cressida Dick MUST resign.

I am no fan of public demonstrations, and am usually agnostic about aggressive containment thereof.

But even I thought that the London police might show SOME sensitivity in policing the demonstration by, mostly, it seems, women, prompted by the abduction and murder of a woman in respect of which a member of that force has been accused.

I watched in astonishment at some of the scenes on our tv screen last night depicting policemen physically attacking demonstrators and arresting some with what looked like a degree of force bordering on brutality.

Cressida Dick has been in her post as head of the Met for long enough for blame for this culture of macho aggression (displayed by female police as well as male) to be laid firmly at her door.

She simply MUST resign. If not, she MUST be sacked.

Bradley Walsh: Why?

Would someone please explain to me why Bradley Walsh is everywhere on telly? From sub-standard game shows to sub-standard travel shows to sub-standard Doctor Who.

Now, I learn, he is to be Pop Larkin in what I fully expect to be a sub-standard iteration of a rehashing of The Darling Buds of May.

Why?

Non-fungible token technology

Just when I thought I had seen every variety of snake-oil imaginable, along comes another.

I had never heard of non-fungible token technology until this week and have just looked it up, discovering that it is in effect cryptocurrency without the underlying solidity.

 

Löw to quit as Germany football national coach

After 15 years as the national coach of the German national soccer team, Joachim Löw will leave his post after the postponed 2020 Euro Championships take place.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/sport/fussball-em/joachim-loew-tritt-nach-der-fussball-em-als-bundestrainer-zurueck-17235022.html

Cowries to Crypto The History of Money, Currency and Wealth

Title: Cowries to Crypto The History of Money, Currency and Wealth

Author: Jame Di Biasio

Illustrator: Harry Harrison

Publisher: OANDA

ISBN: 978-1-7342286-0-1

I can safely say that this is the most attractive book about the history of money that I've ever seen. It makes an immediate and positive first impression, in a way that I do not recall The History of Banking making upon me when I started reading it in the autumn of 1979 after joining Midland Bank International Division as an ambitious young graduate.

The illustrations are eye-catching, as one would hope, and relevant and amusing from start to finish. As is the text, including the short introduction by David Hodge, OANDA's chief marketing officer, explaining its genesis as the moment when a pub quiz unexpectedly featured a money section. Of the five questions put, he was only confident of the answers to two.

The book proper begins with a chapter called Cowries and ends with a chapter called Crises. For anyone with even a slight awareness of the history of money as a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account, that will resonate immediately. 

It ends with a detailed and fond reference to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by the late Douglas Adams. From cowry/cowrie shells and the stones of Yap to Flainian Pobble Beads and the Triganic Pu. Beyond crypto, even if Adams wrote his books before cryptocurrency was a twinkle in the eye of Satoshi Nakamoto. 

Then again, digressing slightly, did we ever once see cash change hands in an episode of Star Trek? And in the cult television series, The Village economy ran on the basis of invisible credits.

There is an irreverence to the writing that sets it apart from academic tomes on the subject, which tend to treat it as something being handed over at the top of a mountain in the Old Testament.

“Prostitution is often called the oldest profession, but surely that honour goes to commodities brokers,” we read on page 10. I'm not sure how that will go down with the commodity broking community, but it certainly made this reader smile.

Any non-fiction book that tells an experienced reader something new is to be applauded. I had no idea that to the Incans, gold was the sweat of the sun and silver was the tears of the moon. And I love the notion that the conquistadors held sway in South America because they had access to credit. I rather thought it was a combination of gunpowder, military knowhow and previously unknown disease, but it rings a bell. Look at the debts run up in the 20th century by the Allied Forces in the winning of WWII, which could be the basis for a second volume from OANDA.

On page 82, we read that while Spain's main banker understood money in the 16th century, Spain's rulers did not. Does that not sound disturbingly familiar in the here and now? Especially when followed on the next page by: “The spread of Italian banking...coincided with a borrowing binge among rulers throughout Europe...”

Technology might change, but human behaviour remains resolutely the same.

If I'm going to nitpick, I would suggest that the spelling of cowry/cowrie should have been standardised. Both spellings are acceptable, but it should be one or the other, not both, within about two inches of one another on pages 10-11. And given the historical depth and breadth of the topic, I would strongly suggest future editions carry an index.

But for now, I would suggest equally strongly that if you are looking for a birthday/unbirthday/Christmas present for someone you know with an interest in money that goes beyond having enough to buy the daily bread, this book will fit the bill. My copy is most definitely an excellent addition to my personal money library.