Portrait of a Leader

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 120, 10 October 1941, Page 5

Portrait of a Leader

\V HAT manner of man is this with the slouching gait, the tight-set eyes, clenching a cigar, the old-fashioned bowler hat, who has become the symbol of England’s, of the Empire’s, will to fight to a victorious finish the greatest military machine the world has seen? You won’t get the answer from seeing him on the cinema screen; I don’t think from

any single recollection, that you'll get it from seeing him in the House of Commons — though he was not making an utterance then, but merely a rather playful if seriously intended speech on India. The stubborn, impatient, self concentrated yet compassionate Churchill, whose words are subordinated in the time of peril, yet whose character rests upon a mercurial genius, may

elude you until you pick up this book. For here we have glimpses of him in the dreadful intimacy of his home-where few men can remain heroes to a valet or a private secretary, Winston Churchill is Miss Moir’s hero, for all that he would order her out of a sick bed at midnight to take down some quite unimportant letter; and as for his valet, that harassed but managing individual is none other than his official bodyguard, Sergeant Thompson, assigned to him years ago by Scotland Yard, and fulfilling out of devotion the secondary unofficial task of laying out his clothes and trying to get him to keep his appointments in time. The sergeant, by the way, is the reason, Miss Moir declares, that Mr. Churchill always looks rather rumpled — as no doubt he deserves to look, entrusting his clothes to a police-man.-(Book Review by John Moffett, 4YA, September 16.) ©