Unseen Artifacts of Winston Churchill | History Traveler Episode 72

all right well we are just walking out of this building right here which is the gymnasium where in 1946 Winston Churchill delivered really one of the most famous speeches of all time the the iron curtain speech here at Westminster College if you haven't watched that episode that's it's in the one right before this one all kinds of interesting stuff that we got to see and the Churchill Museum and here at the the gymnasium anyway we're getting ready to head back over to the museum where Tim Riley who is the director and curator has pulled some pretty special items out of the vault that he is going to be showing us very very excited [Music] [Laughter] [Music] Winston's wit and wisdom Churchill certainly had a way with words so this should be good all right let's see what we got here okay we are going to go with Maxim's when I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of the first million years in painting so to get to the bottom of the subject okay let's see about socialism and communism socialism is the philosophy of failure the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy that's a good one trying to maintain good relations with the Communists is like wooing a crocodile you don't know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it over the head okay oh boy women this could be dangerous where does a family start it starts with a young man falling in love with a girl no superior alternative has yet been found okay if I could not be Who I am I would most like to be mrs. Churchill's second husband this is actually kind of a neat addition that they put here in the museum looking at Winston Churchill in pop culture and how he was kind of character Don these mugs and plates and different things like that like this one here he was a character that is for sure here are a few other World War two artifacts so this is obviously what it looks like you know just a newspaper announcing the bombing of Pearl Harbor but here is the thing that really caught my eye this is a clip and some ammunition from a 303 in field and this was recovered from Dunkirk how cool is that well as I have said multiple times before anywhere I go I always try and find somebody who is smarter than me that I can learn from and here at the churchill museum that guy would be tim riley who is the chief director director and chief curator right okay all right so anyway he has been really gracious to kind of let me in here today and i've already learned so much but anyway we're gonna go into the the Clementine spencer-churchill library the library reading room is named after Winston Churchill's wife was an early supporter of the museum so all right it's going in check it out awesome gonna see some things that that you typically wouldn't see on display here at the Museum one of the lesser-known talents of a greatly known man when dissing Churchill was the fact that he was a painter he'd loved to paint he didn't come at it as a child he didn't start taking taking a brush until age 40 but when he did he pursued it with a passion he created over 570 painting in his lifetime whose self-taught loved the fact that he could go out into nature and observe the colors the light the reflections upon water and it really helped him focus and sharpen his mind his observation of the world and how shadows and and contrasts in nature helped him think about geopolitics and his statesmanship and we see here a great painting that he did in 1937 entitled the boats at khand Harbor and Churchill has captured a moment as a sailor in front of his boat docked in Kahn harbor the famous South French port where the famous film festival is today and if you look closely here Churchill said in an essay in 1921 he wrote called painting as a pastime that painting for him was like a joyride in a paint box and you can see him having a terrific ride in the colors down below here you and I might take up a brush and paint the water as blue that Churchill he saw with his keen sense of observation you know the Blues the Reds the greens the light blues the way the colors ripple and dance on the surface of the water fascinated him and he was challenged and to to translate what he saw in nature through his mind into his hand through his brush onto the canvas that process that thought process was the same way he thought about his speeches coming up with a concept observing a thought and idea formulating that and finding words not colors and shadows but finding words to move people Winston Churchill loved cigars and he spent a few days in Cuba Havana Cuba in January 1946 not long before he gave the iron curtain speech at Westminster College in Fulton Missouri and as a gift to the great statesman the government and people of Cuba presented the Honorable Winston Churchill with this box a humidor which you can imagine in 1946 was filled to the brim with Cuban cigars there could be probably not a better gift for Churchill today of course the humidor was empty it came to us empty Churchill probably has so you enjoyed those cigars a great deal but it's a reminder that before he came to Fulton to give that historic iron curtain speech he spent a couple of months in South Florida and Miami Beach and Cuba relaxing refreshing after many long years of World War two and thinking about the next step that of course being the drafting of the iron curtain speech and the warning of the looming threat to come but he had some great cigars courtesy of the Cuban government of people and this is a and I witness to that gift here that the box that once contained those cigars it's a great piece [Music] all right now Tim just showed me what might be my favorite piece that I have seen so far okay so in February of 1945 Churchill and FDR and Stalin met at the Yalta Conference and this top hat right here was a gift to a guy named Sir Andrew brown Cunningham and if you look you see the signatures of Winston Churchill Franklin Roosevelt and it's a little bit tougher to see and it looks like somebody just kind of scribbled on it but that is the signature of Joseph Stalin that is really amazing [Music] alright well that was the national Churchill museum right here in Fulton Missouri pretty amazing place definitely learned a lot feel pretty fortunate to have been able to see some of those items out of the vault now that is not the only history that is here in Fulton Missouri there's also this church here behind me I'm not going to give too much away but let's just say that the history of this church involves Nazis and incendiary bombs we're going to tackle that one into the next episode [Music]

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 20,099

Keywords: history, history education, wwii, world war ii, churchill, winston churchill, statue, iron curtain, cold war, westminster, westminster college, fulton, missouri, truman, sinews of peace, iron curtain speech, berlin, berlin wall, communism, democracy

Id: EAJqRYXYmDI

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020