Driving round Vannes with one of my daughters my son and two of my grandsons I was rather startled when the sat nav told me We were on Rue Winston Churchill…it didn’t escape our notice that the automated English voice in the background struggled with translations making them quite comical but winston Churchill was instantly recognisable and left us all saying…”did she just say winston Churchill…???”
My feelings are that he was an alcoholic war-monger with many extremist racist and somewhat psychopathic views and that he could have stopped the horror meted out on innocent civilians and military much earlier…
I observe the silence on rememberance day…I now also include the Palestinians and Yemenis in my silence…
I think you are being harsh on poor old Winston.
He had to make some very agonizing decisions, Coventry being one of them.
If the Nazis knew we had penetrated Enigma there could have been a different outcome to the war.
It is quite possible for some people to drink what to you might seem enough to knock out an elephant and for them to continue to function perfectly well.
I think it is his background that you are not keen on.
Actually, it gives everyone hope. He did appallingly at school and then went on to save our nation, when the UK was worth saving.
I don’t think it’s his background or not doing well at school…many amongst us could identify with not being able to comply with “the education system”…???
I don’t see him as poor old winston…I find him quite ruthless…Dresden…Berlin…the annihilation of helpless civilians in the most horrific ways imaginable…it wasn’t necessary…they were innocent civilians…even some of those ordered to drop the bombs on Dresden etc felt awful for doing so…General Patten felt they went after the wrong enemy…
And yes I feel for every family in Coventry and every family who lost a loved one not just in Coventry but uk wide and worldwide…I feel for all those who didn’t die but came home physically injured and mentally injured…:
According to Red Cross records Germany treated their POW very well until they couldn’t…food supply lines and oil supply lines dried out…
I wasn’t even born…but I have only the utmost compassion for every life lost and every life ruined and every family shattered…
Churchill did appallingly at Eton, where it mattered not at all that failed, because mere attendance, and the money that buys it, was, and still is - enough for all doors to be opened, and all wheels to success to be liberally greased. As well as access to the law to shut the door on whatever peversions, moral or fiscal, the moneyed elite feel it is their privilege to indulge in. Including numerous members of the Royal House of Saud.
Churchill didn’t sweat a drop nor bleed a drop to save the nation. That was down to working men and women, Jane. Churchill never did a proper job in his aristocratic life. Humbug! Humbug!
Actually Churchill did do appallingly but it was at Harrow.
He bypassed Greek and did more English and he did write in adult life. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953.
Not a fan of Churchill though. I heard an interview of a ww2 soldier who escaped from a Dresden prison with a fellow soldier the night before they were due to be shot because of the Dresden bombing. Although the bombing saved his life he said the devastation and carnage was such that he would sooner have been shot if it meant Dresden didn’t happen.
I stand corrected, Teresa. I was rather carried away by my own invective against the old rogue. A silly mistake. Thank you.
Churchill had a wonderful gift of rhetoric, and much natural guile. But his ethics were dubious, to say the least. He does have a place in Imperial history, but that is a narrow definition. I think the Nobel Prize is a bit of a fashionable trinket these days: one of those “what-do-you-give-somebody-who-has-everything-already-but-will-be-displeased-if-you-don’t-come-up-with-something” tributes, like ‘Lifetime Awards’. I’m surprised that Harvey Weinstein hasn’t got one, he probably has!
I respect your opinions, and I’m no historian, but if it wasn’t for Churchill we would all be speaking German now , or maybe Russian - look on the bright side, Brexit wouldn’t be an issue.
Possibly true, Mark. As Stan Laurel didn’t use to say to Oliver Hardy, “Another fine mess you didn’t get us into!”… or was it the other way round? 
Quick, nurse, I need a bedpan! 
If only Jeremy Corbyn had been our PM in 1939, things would have turned out so much better. 
You need leaders and that is the problem we have at the moment.
He inspired the civilian population.
He didn’t choose his background.
You cannot have war without casualties and the type of aerial warfare that was used in WW2 meant that included many more civilian casualties.
May it always be so.
Poppy Red for me & also Bluet when attending French remembrance ceremonies.
I think Jeremy was just a twinkle in his Daddy’s eye in 1939, Tim. But frivolity aside, you make a reasonable point, and it’s a change from your usual irony, which always make gets a giggle from yours truly 
Re Churchill’s historical record:
Hitler was also “a leader who inspired the civilian population” and nobody chooses their background, Jane, but some backgrounds are more ‘foreground’ than others when it comes to handing out privilege.
In my opinion, some of those who admire Churchill have a too narrow view of his character, and disregard his contempt for working people, and his hatred of the Unions.
He was a man who was of his time.
The country needed him for the general good and his leadership.
Of course, he started out as a Liberal.
Would he have been able to make his mark if he had stayed with tge Liberals, I doubt it.
I am in the process of going in the opposite direction, but really trying to stay in the centre.
Haha! 
. Since joining SFN I’ve been on the move too, still an odd-ball but of a slightly different kind, perhaps?
I reckon our basic values form around a cluster of early-life formative experiences, and resist much change. Because they are at the heart of our sense of self, which is said by some to be a mere mirage, a mind-made illusion.
It’s the Bovril speaking. Book of Bovril, chapter 14, verse 9 (Revised version). 
I used to drink Bovril after swimming in the outdoor swimming pool in Morecambe when I was a kid.
You needed something to warm you up.
How nice. But how odd that you feel the need to post to tell everyone how patriotic, how superior you are. I’m from a military family, lost family in conflict, experienced civil war myself as a child and my remembrance is personal. I never felt the need to donate money, or indeed proclaim to the world that I donate money, nor wear outward demonstrations that I donated money or claim to somehow be superior because I donated money, am wearing a symbol to say that I’m patriotic. It’s as silly as the giving of white feathers to those who would not kill other humans.
I wear no poppy. Neither did my late soldier father. Who or what I donate to are private and I will remember all who were massacred on the orders of governments, for no real reason, I’ll rememer the civilians, the animals and ‘the enemy’. Wars are made by rich folks, for profit and poor folks, spill their blood.
If buying a poppy would stop wars, stop the lies about 'weapons of mass destruction, and stop the hatred, I’d sell all I had and spend the money on poppies. The whole thing is a ridiculous excercise.
What a crying shame it is then that people have to donate a few pennies in order to make a show of how patriotic they are, instead of, throughout the year, donating a fiver to SSAFA once a mo nth instead ond not telling anyone about it…