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Preface by Alison Carlson

When I was a child, my parents regaled me with stories

of World War II – my father became an RAF pilot, and

my mother was evacuated from Manchester during the

bombings. During the war, as my parents stood in respect,

Churchill’s iconic and sonorous voice came to them over

the radio. It calmed them, empowered them, and wove a

nation of embattled citizens together. Churchill’s words

ran deep in the soul of both my parents.

Standing five feet six-and-a-half inches tall, Churchill was

a lone player – in his father’s eyes, in school, in Parliament,

in the press. An outsider and perpetual underdog, he took

an irrevocably principled stand no matter the odds and

maintained his initiative with astonishing optimism. For

me, it is that unshakable, unflagging spirit that is perhaps

the most remarkable aspect of his personality. Importantly,

the reservoirs of strength that he crafted over his life – in

the face of adversity and in his own failures – were what

steadied my parents, England, and the world.

Churchill embodied a kaleidoscopic mix of personalities.

These many facets are not readily captured in the

photographs with which we are familiar. I have spent the

last five years poring over photographs in the Imperial

War Museum, the Churchill Archives in Cambridge, and

a variety of lesser-known libraries in England, sourcing

photographs that portray a renewed image, rather than just

the familiar vision of him: cigar clenched jauntily in hand

or flashing a V for victory. Many of these photographs have never been published before – photographs which, for better or worse, I alone have chosen. Remarkably, I found no photographs of him drinking, with the exception of one on a boar hunt; clearly, Churchill decided how he would be photographed, and, ergo, perceived.

It is my hope that the words and images on these pages

convey a bit of the bedrock strength and comfort of

Churchill – the strength and comfort that came to my

parents, and all of Britain, over the radio waves. The world

is still a scary place, and Churchill, if only in memory, has

reservoirs of strength yet to impart to us. But this strength

and comfort should come not just from the unidimensional

monolith, the thin sliver so often conveyed, but from the mix

of personalities that comprise the man within – his joyousness

and sorrow, his pugnaciousness and tenderness, his moral

certainties and doubts, his strengths and vulnerabilities.

Considered by many to be the greatest man of the twentieth

century, he was, despite it all, of flesh and blood.

San Francisco and London

Alison Carlson