A Visionary Winston Churchill Foresees the Need for Both a European Union and an Alliance of the English-Speaking Peoples

Other topics he chose reveal the breadth of his interests and vision, from national defense and readiness in the face of the Nazi threat, to inventions and how they would change life, to population and birth control.

 

This letter and article list reveal him he as a man ahead of his time

Winston Churchill’s main source of income was not his salary as a Member of Parliament, but as an author. He was a journalist as early as the mid-1890s, and then reported from captivity during the Boer War. As a serving MP he began publishing pamphlets containing his speeches or answers to key parliamentary questions. Beginning with Mr Winston Churchill on the Education Bill (1902), over 135 such tracts were published over his career. He wrote 43 book length works in 72 volumes, including his 6-volume history of the Second World War. His first book was printed in 1898, and the last in 1958, a remarkable span of 60 years. Four of the works were fiction, showing the breadth of his writing genius. There were 28 books published containing collections of his speeches. He also wrote some 10,000 articles for newspapers and magazines over a period of decades on a broad variety of subjects.

In many cases, these newspaper articles were for-hire, commissioned by such publications as Colliers, News of the World, the Daily Mail, and the Sunday Dispatch. The News of the World was so fond of his work that from 1936 and 1939, they paid him £400 for article, which would be £12,000 (or over $15,000 ) in today’s money. Quite a sum to pay a columnist during the Depression, and enough to keep Churchill in his Pol Roger champagne and Romeo y Julieta brand cigars. Major Percy Davies was director of the News of the World, and Sir Emsley Carr was the editor in the 1930s. When Carr died in 1941 Davies ascended to the editorial position. It was with these men that Churchill dealt.

In 1936, Churchill contracted to write series on “Great Men I Have Known” and “Great Men of All Time”, and he and the News of the World executives selected the subjects. In 1937, the articles switched focus to important issues. Davies sent Churchill a list that included seven topics, most of which related to Churchill’s campaign to make Britain prepared for the war he saw coming, and his affinity for the bond between English-Speaking Peoples, about which Churchill would later write a set of books. The Davies suggestions were: 1. The Future of National Defence; 2. How Future Wars Will Be Waged; 3. The Effect of Aerial Transport on Civilization; 4. The Importance of Our Social Services; 5. The Reform of Our Penal System; 6. The Peopling of the Wide Open Spaces; and 7. The Union of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Churchill had additional ideas, ideas that show the breadth of his interests, and also his priorities, in the Wilderness years. He added eight more possibilities, and returned the combined list to Davies. Headed “Mr. Churchill’s suggestions” by his secretary, they were: 1. The United States of Europe, a topic that shows his foresight, as he was the first important statesman to use the term; 2. Parliamentary Democracy; 3. The Future of Invention; 4. Marriage and Divorce; 5. Birth Control and Population, a subject showing him decades early in identifying this as an issue; 6. Asia Tomorrow (India and Japan); 7. The Future of Taxation; and 8. The Effect of Modern Amusements on Life and Character, a question still very much current today.

Typed letter signed, on his Chartwell letterhead, Kent, September 26, 1937, to Davies. “I have been getting to work upon the seven articles you suggested to me for the new series, I send you eight more suggestions, out of which five should be chosen to complete the dozen. Will you let me know what you think about them, and whether you have any alternatives? The least satisfactory appears to me to be ‘The Future of Taxation.’

“When is the second half of the current series going to be published in the “News of the World?” The current series Churchill refers to had articles on World War I and other topics, such as “When the Crash Came to the United States” on the Wall Street Crash; “The Dominions are Partners of Empire” on the strengths of the British Empire; and “Chief Factors in our Social Revolution” on the development of social legislation.

When Davies received the letter and list, he struck out the articles about Asia, Marriage, and Birth Control. The articles ultimately selected in this back-and-forth with Churchill ran in 1938. For example, an article entitled “Why Not ‘The United States of Europe’?” would run in The News of the World in May 1938 and “Union of the English-Speaking Peoples” shortly after. The disastrous Munich Conference would follow just a few months later.

So here we see the vision of Churchill, foreseeing the need for both a European Union and an alliance of the English-Speaking Peoples, way before others did. Likewise, his interest in invention and how inventions would change life was, if anything, even more visionary. Truly he was a man ahead of his time.