My Years with Churchill By Norman McGowan Excerpt from Chapter One: I Meet a Great Man For a long time I have pondered on an invitation to set down my experiences during my memorable and momentous years as personal servant to Mr. Winston Churchill, as he then was. I have decided to do this because I believe "my beloved Guv'nor's" life belongs to the world. It is perhaps the penalty of greatness that the personal life is inextricably mixed up with the public one. Like everyone else who has come into personal contact with Sir ...
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My Years with Churchill By Norman McGowan Excerpt from Chapter One: I Meet a Great Man For a long time I have pondered on an invitation to set down my experiences during my memorable and momentous years as personal servant to Mr. Winston Churchill, as he then was. I have decided to do this because I believe "my beloved Guv'nor's" life belongs to the world. It is perhaps the penalty of greatness that the personal life is inextricably mixed up with the public one. Like everyone else who has come into personal contact with Sir Winston Churchill I became his devoted admirer. The man is of such a grandiose and complex character that one yearns to know more. No bookworm by nature, I felt impelled to read Sir Winston Churchill's own outstanding contributions to literature and history, and some of the innumerable biographies, diaries and histories which exist about him. Curiously enough, in view of the flood of words which has poured out over more than fifty years, there seems to be a dearth of description of Churchill the Man. The soldier, the political renegade, the Cabinet Minister, the statesman, the outcast, the saviour of Western civilisation, the painter, the author, the Grand Old Man full of honours and esteem millions of words describe all these facets of an amazing life. But of Churchill the human being I think there has been a strange and inexplicable shortage of words. An eighteenth century French wit said "no man is a hero to his valet" In the twentieth century one was. As a man of twenty-five I went into my employment quite open-minded. When Mr. Churchill became the idol of seven-eighths of the world in 1940 1 was only fifteen and too young to know whether the reputation was justified or not. As a member of the restless, somewhat cynical postwar generation Mr. Churchill did, indeed, stand for many things which I believed old-fashioned and outmoded in the middle of the twentieth century. But as the weeks and months went by my downright North Country attitude to my fellow men told me that "here was a man" This brief and unskilled account has no literary pretensions. Nor is there anything sensational or melodramatic in it. Such jaundiced enemies as Sir Winston Churchill may have will look in vain for "keyhole" revelations or details to show that my idol had feet of clay. Not that I would have qualms, in reporting idiosyncrasies and faults for fear of repercussions. Freedom is not just a word in the Churchill menage. It is practised. I have had no restrictions on saying or writing whatever I will, and it would have been completely out of character if my Guv'nor ever made such stipulations on freedom of action or freedom of speech for those who have served him. Yet what I set down does concern... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Windham Press is committed to bringing the lost cultural heritage of ages past into the 21st century through high-quality reproductions of original, classic printed works at affordable prices. This book has been carefully crafted to utilize the original images of antique books rather than error-prone OCR text. This also preserves the work of the original typesetters of these classics, unknown craftsmen who laid out the text, often by hand, of each and every page you will read. Their subtle art involving judgment and interaction with the text is in many ways superior and more human than the mechanical methods utilized today, and gave each book a unique, hand-crafted feel in its text that connected the reader organically to the art of bindery and book-making. We think these benefits are worth the occasional imperfection resulting from the age of these books at the time of scanning, and their vintage feel provides a connection to the past that goes beyond the mere words of the text.
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