Winston Churchill Better To Die

Looking into the diaries of a “smelly” trail blazer

So says Peter Lord, who spent nearly a decade looking into the colourful life of Winifred Coombe Tennant and reading her diaries. Steve Dube investigates the “formidable” and often “smelly” trail blazer

Peter Lord thinks he would have fallen in love with Winifred Coombe Tennant of Cadoxton Lodge, Neath.

When you’ve spent the best part of eight years investigating someone’s life and work and reading the intimate thoughts of her daily diary, you get to know them well.

And Lord thinks he would have wanted to know her even better.

“I went through phases,” he recalls. “Sometimes I felt I was married to her. I found myself sitting in trains having conversations with her.

“You do develop a quite peculiar relationship with your subject.

“I think if I had been exposed to Winifred in her prime I would have fallen in love with her.

“She just had something behind the eyes. There was a procession of men falling for her. Something emanated from her, some kind of mystery, and if I was there I would have fallen for it.”

Reading Between Two Worlds, the edited diary of Winifred Coombe Tennant, 1909-1924, you end up with a sense of relief on Lord’s behalf that he wasn’t there.

And Lord, who has produced another sumptuous book that adds to his reputation as the outstanding interpreter of Welsh visual culture, must feel the same way.

He says: “She’s a real disgrace. She was absolutely foul to her husband. She did not think she was duty bound to him in any way.”

It’s hard to know where to start with the formidable and larger-than-life Winifred Coombe Tennant.

Brought up in France, Wales, England and Italy, she married a businessman twice her age whose grandfather built the Tennant Canal to carry coal down the Neath Valley to the docks at Swansea. She lived a life of luxury – Lord says she never actually cooked anything in her entire life – and was Mistress of the Robes in the National Eisteddfod’s Gorsedd y Beirdd, who dressed in traditional Welsh costume every morning until after lunch for 10 years.

An ardent supporter of women’s suffrage, which she called “the cause of causes”, she became a close friend and confidante of Prime Minister Lloyd George, and a frequent visitor to 10 Downing Street, where she witnessed momentous events such as the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921.

Winston Churchill was a Bolshevik on Healthcare? Does Granny know ...

By Joe Conason

Aug. 14, 2009 | Long before many of today’s frothing right-wing demagogues were born, American conservatives came to idolize Winston Churchill, the late Tory prime minister whose wartime leadership of the British people transformed into the living symbol of democracy armed. That reputation was cemented by his legendary Missouri speech in 1946 warning of the “Iron Curtain” drawn by the Soviet Communists across Eastern Europe. Indeed, journalists and bloggers on the right admire the old warhorse so much that he has even outpolled Ronald Reagan as their “Man of the Century.”

Yet by the standards of the present moment, as these same conservatives mobilize against health care reform to “stop socialism,” that same great man was actually a raving Bolshevik. For among his most enduring legacies was the founding and sustenance of the system that became the National Health Service. Arguably as much as any other British politician, it was Churchill who established “socialized medicine.”

Perhaps it is a forlorn hope that facts and history can make any impression on the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Chuck Grassley, or Bill Kristol, but let’s try anyway — because it is worth understanding that despite the low quality of our own so-called conservatives, there was once another kind.

Churchill was renowned as a politician who put country and civilization above party. The government he led during World War II was a broad coalition of the British parties, from his own Conservatives to the democratic socialists of Labor. Midway through the war, Churchill’s government asked Sir William Beveridge, a Liberal Party social reformer and economist to study systems of social insurance that could reduce poverty, disease, unemployment and illiteracy in Britain.

In 1942, Beveridge issued an far-reaching report that proposed a national health service to provide medical care to every man, woman and child, regardless of means — much as the coalition government had done during the medical emergency brought on by the German bombings of their cities, hospitals and clinics.

Although Churchill endorsed the idea of a national health system, his party lost the first post-war general election in 1945, partly because British voters didn’t trust the Tories to implement the Beveridge report. Instead a Labor government established universal care under the NHS in 1948.

Only three years later, the Tories returned to power with Churchill restored as prime minister. At that point, the NHS could still have been killed — and many members of the Tory party, not to mention the British Medical Association, were eager to do so.

Winston Churchill, personal accounts of the great leader at war

The Hinge of Fate

It's Better to Die Laughing Than to Be Dead Serious, How to Be the Life of the Party, the Podium and Everywhere in Between

Better to die, the story of the Gurkhas

I Refuse to Die, My Journey for Freedom