Training | 2010.08.21
Battle of Britain veterans gather for Churchill speech anniversary
Only a few of the Few remain to hear wartime prime minister\'s stirring words again 70 years on
Precisely as Big Ben struck four this afternoon, a Hurricane and a Spitfire swooped low over the rooftops of Whitehall. They were commemorating, almost to the minute, the 70th anniversary of Winston Churchill\'s Commons oration in which he praised the courage of the Battle of Britain pilots who were even then fending off German air attacks. At that moment, almost as a throwaway line, the notion of the Few – "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" – was born.
Only a few of the Few remain. Nine of them sat on gilt chairs , glasses of champagne in their hands, outside the Cabinet war rooms where Churchill had his bunker under the Treasury building, to commemorate once more their heroism as young men. Beside them were two nostalgic symbols of the summer of 1940, a living one, Dame Vera Lynn, and, a few feet further away, a stationary Spitfire.
They heard the actor Robert Hardy – a man used to impersonating Sir Winston – at his most actorly, declaiming a portion of the speech anew, no sibilant left unhissed, perhaps even more dramatically than Churchill himself did at the time. Although Churchill recorded the speech later, it was originally heard only by MPs, spectators and reporters.
The veterans listened intently as, rather more evocatively than Hardy, Lady Soames, Churchill\'s youngest and last surviving child, recalled hearing the speech as it was made on 20 August 1940 – maybe the last person still alive to have done so. "It is very moving for me to be here today," she said. "Seventy years ago I was in the House of Commons and heard my father … those words ring like a bell and will do so for a very long time, I am sure."
The veterans, all in their nineties now, are having a gruelling summer nearly three-quarters of a century on, attending a series of commemorations and telling and retelling their stories over and over again to journalists. They had a commemoration last month at the battle memorial above the white cliffs of Dover, then yesterday\'s ceremony, and next month they will be at RAF Duxford in Cambridgeshire for yet another gathering.
At the war rooms, they were being interviewed in relays until some were clearly exhausted. Former Pilot Officer Keith Lawrence, now 90, came from New Zealand the year the war broke out to train for a short service commission and became a Spitfire pilot. He said he could recall hearing a report of the speech on the BBC news in the mess at RAF Middle Wallop in Hampshire that evening. Still sitting ramrod straight and as bright as a pin, his moustache neatly trimmed, with his wife at his side, he said: "What a wonderful speech it was. We needed it – it was good to be reminded that the alternative would have been invasion. We were very pleased to be mentioned.
"People now are beginning to realise what a close run thing it was. It was only two months since the evacuation of Dunkirk and if Hitler had invaded it would have been a walkover. Germany was at the height of its might and power."
The speech, which Churchill composed the previous weekend at Chequers, does indeed still resonate with extraordinarily vivid phrases – Hitler was described as "sprawling over Europe" – and firm determination, what his biographer Roy Jenkins described as his gift for communicable emotion.
The following day\'s Manchester Guardian reported the speech verbatim over three grey columns – on page 7 – without highlighting the reference to the Few and under the downbeat headline "Premier\'s Review of the War", pointing up only the periodic cheers that interrupted it and the prolonged cheers that followed his reference to the RAF, two-thirds of the way down the third column. It was left to the fourth item in the paper\'s stop press on the back page to mention another, late-breaking, event of the day: "It is announced in Mexico City that Trotsky has been hurt in an accident" – the accident being his encounter that afternoon with his assassin\'s ice pick.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/20/battle-of-britain-churchill-few
