1965-01-24

British lion, WINSTON CHURCHILL died. He had been Britain’s wartime prime minister whose courageous leadership and defiant rhetoric had fortified the English during their long struggle against Hitler’s Germany. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” he stated upon becoming prime minister at the beginning of the war. He called Hitler’s Reich a “monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime.”

Following the war, he coined the term “Iron Curtain” to describe the barrier between areas in Eastern Europe under Soviet control and the free West. There was a scandal about boys playing with boys when Churchill was at college that he resolutely denied. But in his biography of W. Somerset Maugham, Ted Morgan writes that Maugham once asked Churchill if it were true as Churchill’s mother had claimed, that the statesman had affairs with men in his youth. “Not true!” Churchill replied. “But, I once went to bed with a man to see what it was like.” (The man turned out to be British musical-comedy star Ivor Novello whose birthday was last week) “And, what was it like?” Maugham asked. “Musical,” Churchill replied.