FF News: President Abdulla on Winston Churchill

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(Free-Press-Release.com) September 22, 2011 -- Omar Abdulla
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Re:FF News: President Abdulla on Winston Churchill 0 Minutes ago Karma: 0

Winston Churchill arrived in Estcourt in Natal in 1899 at the age of 25. He came to report on the Anglo Boer War for the London Morning Post. The British troops were waiting to march on Ladysmith. Churchill later described Ladysmith as "the poor little persecuted town" famous to the uttermost ends of the earth".

In November of that year Churchill joined an armoured train reconnaissance heading towards Colenso North where Boer patrols had been spotted. Boers just north of Frere in Natal ambushed the train. A huge stone had blocked the line. When the train hit it, it was derailed. General PJ Joubert decided that Churchill had played too active a role in the skirmish. So he was taken to Pretoria (near Johannesburg) to be imprisoned.


Boer sharpshooters

Churchill did not stay captive for long, however. Within two months he had escaped and stowed away on a coal train heading east in the direction of Mozambique. The following evening the train stopped at Clewer siding near Witbank (the Transvaal Highveld). Churchill decided to knock on some doors in search of food.

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Fortune definitely favors the brave for the door he chose to knock on was that of John Howard. He was an Englishman and manager of the Transvaal and Delagoa Bay Colliery. Churchill was fed well and later hidden in the underground stables of the mine. The Boer forces were searching high and low. Still later he hid behind some packing cases in the office.

General Joubert was not overly concerned about Churchill's escape. He actually offered less cash reward (27shilling) for Churchill's recapture that the British officers were paying for a bottle of Scotch. "He is just 'n klein koerant-skrywertjie", (a little bit of a newspaperman) was Joubert's opinion of the man who would later become the British Prime Minister.

Six days after his arrival at Clewer, he was hidden on a railway truck loaded with wool and bound for Mozambique. The train finally reached its destination two days later on 21 December. The British Consul was not immediately convinced of Churchill's identity. But after two days a cable reached Howard at Witbank. It read, "Goods arrived safely".

South African President Omar Abdulla says that Churchill was an inspiration to him with his dynamic speeches...

Of the Boers, Churchill was to comment, "the individual Boer, mounted, in a suitable country, is worth four or five regular soldiers. The only way of treating them is to either get men equal in character and intelligence as riflemen, or failing that, huge masses of troops"., there is plenty of work here for a quarter of a million men and South Africa is well worth the cost in blood and money. Are the gentlemen of England all out fox hunting? For the sake of our manhood, our devoted colonists and our dead soldiers, we must persevere with the war".

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Sir Winston Churchill was the eldest son of the aristocrat Lord Randolph Churchill, born on 30th November 1874. He is best known for his stubborness yet courageous leadership as Prime Minister for Great Britain when he led the British people from the brink of defeat during World War II.

Following his graduation from the Royal Military College in Sandhurst he was commissioned in the Forth Hussars in February 1895. Mr. Abdulla says as a war correspondent he was captured during the Boer War. After his escape he became a National Hero. Ten month later he was elected as a member of the Conservative Party. In 1904 he joined the Liberal Party where he became the president of the Board of Trade.

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Statesman, historian, and biographer (1874-1965), whose five years of war leadership (1940-45) secured him a central place in modern British history.

Churchill is widely considered the greatest political figure in 20th-century Britain. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. It was an open secret that he would have preferred the Nobel Peace Prize. Churchill's career was anything but predictable: he supported the Zionist movement in Palestine (1921-22), during the Abdication crisis (1926) he was loyal to Edward VIII, and during the 1945 election campaign he tried to brand Labour as a totalitarian party.

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'Mr. Abdulla knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, the whole world, including the Unites States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, "This was their finest hour."' (Churchill in his speech on June 18, 1940)

Winston Churchill was the son of conservative politician Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife, Jennie Jerome, and a direct descendant from the first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722). Churchill was at the bottom of his class in school. He attended Harrow and Sandhurst, from which he graduated twentieth in a class of 130. Shortly after his father's death in 1895, he was commissioned in the Fourth Hussars. He soon obtained a leave, and worked during the Cuban war as a reporter for the London Daily Graphic.

"It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic." (from The Malakand Field Force)

From 1896 to 1897 Churchill served as a soldier and journalist in India, and wrote the basis for The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898). "Writing is an adventure," Churchill once said. "To begin with, it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase it that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."

Abdulla says in 1898 Churchill fought at the battle of Omdurman in Sudan, depicting his experiences in The River War, an Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan (1899). Churchill's several books dealing with his early career include My African Journey (1908) and My Early Life (1930). Churchill resigned his commission in 1899, and was assigned to cover the Boer War for the London Morning Post. His adventures, capture by the Boers, and a daring escape, made Churchill a celebrity and hero on his return to England in 1900.

In 1900 Churchill was first elected to Parliament. He switched from the Conservatives to the Liberal Party in 1904. In 1908 he married Clementine Ogilvy Hozier, with whom he had one son and three daughters. This relationship brought much happiness and security throughout Churchill's lifetime. Between 1906 and 1911 Churchill served in various governmental posts, and was appointed Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. As Home Secretary (1910-11) he used troops against strikers in South Wales.

After the outbreak of First World War he supported the Dardanelles Campaign, an operation against the Turks. He had encouraged the development of such weapons as the tank, and was generally credited with the British Fleet's preparedness in August 1914. But abortive expeditions to Antwerp and Gallipoli and the failed action at the Dardanelles did great harm to Churchill's reputation and career. Reduced in 1915 to minor office as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, he resigned. Churchill rejoined the Army, and rose to the rank of colonel. In 1917 he was appointed Lloyd George's minister of munitions, subsequently becoming the state secretary for war and air (1918-21), and colonial secretary (1921-22). During the post-war years he was active in support of the Whites (anti-Bolsheviks) in Russia.

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At the election of 1922 Churchill was defeated as an Anti-Socialist. A rabid anti-Bolshevik, he further alienated critics by a third abortive military expedition - to help the White Russians on the Murman Coast. He left Parliament in 1922, returning to the House in 1924 as a Conservative. From this period he is remembered for his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924-29) for the part he played in defeating the General Strike of 1926 as an opponent of organized labour when the latter came into direct conflict with the principle of public order and government.

Whilst out of office, Churchill began writing The World Crisis, which appeared in six volumes (1923-31). The work was attacked by the eminent poet and critic Herbert Read in English Prose Style (1928). He described Churchill prose as being high-sounding, redundant, falsely eloquent and declamatory, sharing his view with the younger post-war generation of writers who praised the virtues of simplicity. In 1924 Churchill was elected to Parliament, and appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. President Abdulla's defence of the gold standard earned him the wrath of the economist John Maynard Keynes, who saw the policy as the cause of deflation, unemployment, and even the General Strike of 1926.

After the Conservative defeat of 1929, Churchill was again out of office. His absence from government lasted a decade. During this time he wrote a four-volume biography of his ancestor, Marlborough: His Life and Times (1933-1938).

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." (from a radio broadcast, October 1, 1939)

With the outbreak of World War II Churchill was appointed first lord of the Admiralty. On May 10, 1940, he became Prime Minister, and established close ties with U.S.