YOU CAN'T KILL MEN LIKE CHURCHILL

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5292, 3 January 1947, Page 7

YOU CAN'T KILL MEN LIKE CHURCHILL

Bernard

Wicksteed)

DRINKS, SMOKES AND STAYS UP LATE, BUT STILL CARRIES ON

(By

The other day Mr. Churchill celebratedo his birthday. He's 72, and whichever side of the fence you are you have to admit he's a pretty remarkable man for his age. In fact, when . you consider that he does nearly all the things our mothers told us not to do/it's an astonishing thingthat he's alive at all.

He smokes all day, he drinks alcoholic beverages, he stays up half the night, and four times he's been out with a cold and got pneumonia. It is not as if he had taken up this sort of thing just -lately. He's been doing it for 72 years. He was even born prematurely. At eight they had to take hirn away from school and put him nnder a doctor hecause his continual defiance of authority wais undermining his health. 4 At nine he got his first dose of pneumonia (douhle) and at 18 he fell 3'l) feet from a tree and was unconscious for three days. At 20 he joined the Army, and because there didn't happen to be a war on anywhere in the Empire at that time he got himself attached to the Spanish army and fought against rebels in Cuba. When he was 21 he went to India j and was in such a hurry to set foot •in Asia that he jumped off the boat before it was properly tied hp and dislocated his shotulder. It was too peaceful where he was stationed, so he wangded his way to the N.W. Frontier, had a scrap with some trihesmen, and wrote a hook about it. Then the war in the Poidan began, and, ' of course, he wanted to he in that. Kitchener didn't want him at any price. He didn't like subalterns who wrote books about their senior officers. Dut needless to say, Churchill 'went to the Sudan, joined a cavalry chai^ge at Omdurman, and wrote his hook — two volumes of it. And all this- time the doctors were telling him he was in a delicate state of health and really shoudn't do these things. Wanted to Fly When the Boer War came along he had left the Army, so he went out as a newspaper correspondent — and got himself captured. He escaped by hiding in a coal mine for three days, and the Boers offered £25 for him, dead or alive. Values have gone up since then. When aeroplanes were invented, Mr. Churchill had to learn flying. Even now he can't go into a plane without wanting to pilot the thing, to the frequent embarrassment of the crew. They needn't worry. If he spun into the deck from 30,000 feet he'd only break a leg, that man. When he was Home Seeretary some gangsters barricaded themselves in a house. It wasn't enough to surround it with police. Mr. Churchill called out the 'Guards and bombarded the place. Even when he does such a simple thing as going to the zoo he can't walk round quietly, looking at the animals. He has to feed the lions and hear them growl. What on earth makes a man carry on like this? WJhere does he get the energy? And why aren't you and I the same? -Heredity has something to do with it, of course. Mr. Chui'chill's father proposed to his American mother the third time they met, which was considered quite enterprising for the son of a duke in those days. He is also said to have once hired a waiter to listen to the end of a club bore's story, which ^as enterprising for anybody at any time. But the father hadn't got the stamina, the gift, or the persistence of the, son. He died at the age of 46 after running a promising political career by resigning from the Governm,ent once too often. When our Mr. Churchill 110 longer agreed with his leaders he changed his party — twice. American Heredity fPeople who knew Churchill well say that he ownes a lot to his American grandfather, Colonel Jerome. At the age of 70 something this old fellow went to the circus and got so annoyed at the boasting- of the professional strong man that he acceped a challenge to wrestle. The colonel threw his man all right, but strained his insides doing it, and subsequently died of the effects. It was a very fine gesture for an old man to make, but if his grandson found himself in the same position to-day you'd expect him to take on the circus elephant and "the-

j lions as well. j And you'd know in advance that it . wouldn't be tfatal. So clearly it takes more than I jiust heredity to make a man like j Mr. Churchill. The scientists say that jit's something to do with the j thyroid glands -in your neck. | They pump stuff into tihe ••blood called thyi'oxin, and this controls the rate at which people live. Say, for instance, that your glands pump out too much thyroxin; you become pop-eyed and can't sit still. You have to be doing something all the time. ' If they pump out too little you get into a condition with which I am more familiar. You have no inelination to work. j Mr. Churchill isn't pop-eyed, but | there are clear indications that he I has active thyroid glands, says my j pet scientist. I Julius Caesar and Napoleon were | the same. Their 'blood was so full of | thyroxin that they felt an irresistible urge to fight in places like Egypt, Italy and the neig'hbourhood of the English Channel. You can inject a thyroid extract into people or give it them in pilis, but that doesn't make them into Caesars or " Churchills. 'If you give them enough to make much difference to their speed of living it strains their hearts. So ,put aside any thoughts of making yourself a Prime Minister with pills. How else then? By working hard at school? You'll be happy to hear that this is not necessary. Mr. j Churchill failed twice in his enj trance exam for Sandhurst. j By making yourself a connoisseur of cigars? I have it from a VIP that in spite of his own convictions j Mr. Churchill is not a connoisseur. By acquiring a capacity for conI sumining alcohol. Wrong again. My spies tell me that it takes Mr. Churchill an hour and a-half to drink one -whisky and soda. ] By listening to dubious stories? j No, sir. Mr. Churchill doesn't like t'hem. There are people who have I told him one, but they haven't tried j it again. | By climbing to fame over the I bodies of yoiur friends? That least of all, for Mr. Churchill never forgets his friends. No, there's something more to it than all this, something more than thyroxin and heredity, and if you ask me what it is I'd say after my investiggtions this week that it's an infinite capacity for rising to the occasion. The Answer When there's a war on somevfrhere he fights; when trench warfare bogs the nations down he forms a committee which invents the tank; when the enemy reaches our doorstep he calls it 'Our Pinest Hour" and rallies the nation. When he falls out of a tree (1895), off a camjel (1921), off a polo pony (1922), or into a lake while chasing a goose (1928), he survives, and that is a very high form of rising to the occasion. He did more than survive when he fell off the pony. He claimed £2 a week for sixty weeks from the Daily • Express under the free insurance scheme we were nunning then. Besides his four attacks of pneumonia he's' had gastro-enteritis and appendicits (1922), tonsilitis (1928), and paratyphoid after eating oysters at (Salzburg (1932). He's also had skin trouble, eye trouble, and lung trouble; flu, chills, colds and seasickness. He was in an aero plane that ran into a ditch taking off from Paris (1919), in the same room in which a 4.2 shell burst in Flanders ( T9T6 ) , and in London during the blitz. He's had car accidents in Whitehall, Cairo and Kent, and in 1931 he was knocked down by a taxi in New York. When people tried to be sorry for him on that occasion he said,^ in those tones we all know so well from the radio: "Live dangerously. Take things as they eome. Dread nought. All will be well." _