The Old Lion

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 928, 24 May 1957, Page 22

The Old Lion

WAS not prepared to be so moved by the programme "I Can See It Now," edited by Edward R. Murrow from Sir Winston Churchill’s many broadcasts, but as the programme rolled on, from the dire warnings in the wilderness before the war, to the assumption of supreme office in 1940, the war, the peace, the wilderness again, and more dire warnings, I surrendered once more to the enormous hypnosis of this undeniably great man. His reputation is being sniped at these days by little men and some big ones; none of them can dim the glory of his wartime speeches, authentic voice of a whole people, imprisoning in their lefty cadences a nation’s consciousness of itself, nor make ridiculous this old knight mounted on his charger, storming into the lists, at his helm the favour of his sovereign lady, England, Sir Winston, as an orator, shows us history as a sort of medieval bestiary, ludicrous perhaps, to scholars, but just, in its simple grandeur of conception, what a fighting perme needed. The lion and her cubs (Britain and the Commonwealth) stand menaced by the treacherous tiger and jackal (Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy), but the lion will conquer, "the stars in their courses proclaim the deliverance." He speaks with a gruff resonance entirely appropriate to the mood of embattled heroism which only he, in modern times, has been able to strike with full conviction. The relish of his indictment of the "Nazi villains," the vigour of his fighting French ("Francais!

C’est Churchill qui vous parle!") and the Elizabethan fotundity of his cadenced prose, almost Shakespearian in its slow assemblage of weighty rhetoric, are, recorded, a superb monument to an unshakeable will and a dauntless

spirit,

B.E.G.

M.