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This article is a shameless rip-off of Blood, toil, tears, and sweat speech, suitably modified for this speech. Noel (talk) 01:46, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Does anyone wonder if this speech would be interpreted differently if it were given by Hirohito 5 years later? Brutannica 19:31, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
Frankly, I'm not sure how any logical and relevant "interpretations" is possible when only bits and pieces of the speech is quoted in the article. The section quoted under "Peroration" is incomplete and thereby Churchill's infamous wit goes by unmentioned.
197.78.149.243 (
talk) 19:56, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
The section regarding the authenticity of Winston Churchills voice requires greater clarification. From what I can gather from reputable sources the details are as follows
1. The speech was originally made in Parliament for which no recording exists. Parliament had no recording system at that time. 2. For the benefit of the public many of Churchill's speeches were recorded by Churchill for the BBC and broadcast. I think (but am not sure based on conflicting reports) that it has been confirmed that some of these were recorded by an actor under Churchill's approval. This includes the "fight them on the beaches" speech. 3. The speeches that were recorded initially by actors were re-recorded after the war by Churchill for archival purposes. 4. Official Churchill sources and BBC state that the recordings that are circulating now and that have been released by them are the ones that are actually of Churchill's voice. 5. New Scientist reported in 1991 that A Maryland company Sensimatics did a voice analysis on the authentic public recordings of Churchill and compared them to other recorded speeches and found that three of the circulating speeches were NOT of Churchill (presumably Norman Shelley who claimed he was the original stand in)
Thats what I can gather. I'm not guarenteeing any accuracy at all so if anyone cares to add the real story, or at least mention the myths in gretaer detail, feel free. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Supersnazz ( talk • contribs) 12:01, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I find it ironic that he gave this speech right after the Dunkirk debacle. Shouldn't some mention be made of that? LikeHolyWater ( talk) 02:18, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps more of the speech should be included, to clarify the context of the Dunkirk evacuation. I recall hearing a cautionary note from Churchill that evacuations-even great ones- should not be confused with victories. This speech would be the logical place for him to have said that. [User:Xperrymint] Xperrymint ( talk) 03:22, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
Is it an urban legend, or was this speech made all in Old English words (or the modern-day equivalents thereof)? Joe Clutch ( talk) 06:08, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
Any evidence euphoria, as opposed to relief? If so, please supply.
The speech if read in full is clearly an attempt to put a good face on a bad situation, rather than the other way around, and Churchill had quite a gift for that; in his hands 'many of those currently listed as missing were probably taken prisoner' becomes:
Churchill minuted 4 June 1940 the same day as the speech 'An effort must be made to shake off the mental and moral prostration to the will and initiative from which we suffer' so he clearly didn't spot a lot of euphoria in his immediate circle. What were Mass Observation saying about the mood in the country ? Or are we going off the newsreels ?? Rjccumbria ( talk) 23:29, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
No full text wikisource?-- Test35965 ( talk) 06:30, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
I have multiple difficulties with the rhetoric section as it stands, since it doesn’t altogether match the content of the speech or my layman’s understanding of rhetorical terms but I am not enough of an expert on the subject to attempt a better one. I have however added a contemporary response that the important thing about the words was that they conveyed implacable resolve.
a) “The corpus is constructed from a slow buildup of plainly reported facts”
Behind this armoured and mechanised onslaught came a number of German divisions in lorries, and behind them again there plodded comparatively slowly the dull brute mass of the ordinary German Army and German people, always so ready to be led to the trampling down in other lands of liberties and comforts which they have never known in their own.
The Rifle Brigade, the 60th Rifles, and the Queen Victoria's Rifles, with a battalion of British tanks and 1,000 Frenchmen, in all about 4,000 strong, defended Calais to the last. The British Brigadier was given an hour to surrender. He spurned the offer, and four days of intense street fighting passed before silence reigned over Calais, which marked the end of a memorable resistance. Only 30 unwounded survivors were brought off by the Navy and we do not know the fate of their comrades. Their sacrifice, however, was not in vain. At least two armoured divisions, which otherwise would have been turned against the British Expeditionary Force, had to be sent for to overcome them. They have added another page to the glories of the Light Division, and the time gained enabled the Graveline waterlines to be flooded and to be held by the French troops.
b) Though his delivery of the losses is frank, pathos is injected through scattered commendations of valor to British, French, and Belgian troops:
I take occasion to express the sympathy of the House to all who have suffered bereavement or who are still anxious. The President of the Board of Trade is not here to-day. His son has been killed, and many in the House have felt the pangs of affliction in the sharpest form.
May it not also be that the cause of civilisation itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen? There never had been, I suppose, in all the world, in all the history of war, such an opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into a prosaic past: not only distant but prosaic; but these young men…
c) Summoning the archaic rhetoric of Tennyson,
d) Linking the struggle of war to a storm, while simultaneously personifying Nazi Germany as 'the menace of tyranny', Churchill draws on the emotion of the audience.
The British PM when the Grand Armee was camped at Boulogne ready to invade was William Pitt the Younger, famously (perhaps not today, but most MPs in 1940 would have known) hailed by his contemporaries as ‘The Pilot That Weathered The Storm’. So one would suspect that ‘riding out the storm’ is engaging his audience’s emotions not by reusing a timeworn figure of speech (‘the storm of war’) but by again invoking past chapters in Our Island Story and ‘the menace of tyranny’ is not a personalisation of the current enemy, but rather a generalisation covering all those - Napoleon et al (now including Hitler; Philip of Spain is carefully not mentioned)- who were kidding themselves when they thought old England was done. Rjccumbria ( talk) 21:41, 9 May 2014 (UTC)We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles. This has often been thought of before. When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, he was told by someone, "There are bitter weeds in England."
I note, more in sorrow than in anger (but not by much)that
in 2010 this article said that the German advance to the sea once they had broken through the French defences at Sedan cut off the BEF and the French First Army from their lines of communication and the main French forces,
on 14 October 2011 user 98.67.174.173 made 4 edits for style on it, only 2 of which had edit summaries. One edit had the edit summary "The word "said" followed by a blockquote needs to have a colon added "said:" ". The other edit summary provided was "Someone needs to study the writings of Churchill, Jefferson, etc. "on the 10 May" does not make sense, and single-digiit numbers are written out as words." which was consistent with the tone/content of the other summary, but did not entirely accurately reflect the nature of the edit which was not just MOS stuff but 'my English is better than yours' stuff as well with extensive paraphrasing and recasting. Unfortunately the recasting was done without due care & attention and resulted in the BEF now being cut off from the French First Army as a result of the Germans having broken through the French defenses ( I note the spelling correction). 98.67.174.173 had gone on to give his POV as to where the French troops evacuated from Dunkirk should have been sent. Somebody spotted and removed that, but the net result was that the revised text looked passable and the residual bit of good-faith (if snitty) vandalism has persisted until today, when I finally realised that the article no longer said what I expected it to say and had therefore been reading it as saying. A warning to us all, but I'm not quite sure about what - all sorts of things, probably Rjccumbria ( talk) 20:55, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
If I listen to online recordings of this speech, the sentence "Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail." is not spoken. Not sure if there is a separately written speech or that the transcript is just inaccurate. SiggyF ( talk) 15:55, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
The file c:File:Sir Winston Churchill - 19086236948.jpg has been nominated for deletion on Commons Reason: I don't understand the decision above. The final comment, "The Karsh photo of Churchill is PD in Canada and the US since it was published in a 1945 issue of Life magazine. URAA affects images published or taken after 1945 in Canada. -- Leoboudv ([[User talk:Leoboudv|[ Template:M used with invalid code 'int:Talkpagelinktext'. See documentation.]]]) 09:44, 21 August 2017 " is wrong. It was, indeed, the cover of Life in 1945. That issue of Life had its copyright renewed, so the image will be under copyright in the USA until 2040. Deletion request: link
Message automatically deposited by a robot - - Harideepan ( talk) 07:18, 3 March 2018 (UTC).
Before my edit, the "Reception" subsection started with "It has been said {{by whom?|date=December 2017}} that ..." The answer to "by whom" is given in the reference at the end of the sentence. It was said by Dominique Enright, in her cited book.
Please read the entire sentence and look at the reference before tagging something. I too hate wesel words and remove them where ever I find them, but never if they are supported by an actual reference. In this case the reference was to a book, and contained a note that this is not certain, which the visible phrase "it is said" indicates. Nick Beeson ( talk) 22:39, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
I've seen this speech in print (such as where it is included on the International Churchill Society website, and the capitalization of the first letter of the last word in the peroration has always bothered me given the text of the entire sentence. Churchill for much of this period was trying persuade the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States (such as in the " This was their finest hour" speech) to intervene on behalf of Britain, which at that point was in the process of becoming the only democratic major power left standing in Europe opposed to Nazi Germany, and to rescue the Old World from the Nazi regime. Given that Churchill won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, it occurs to me that Churchill was gifted enough as a writer and knowledgeable enough of history to use such language. Could someone please provide an explanation? -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 23:09, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the On this day section on June 4, 2020. |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article is a shameless rip-off of Blood, toil, tears, and sweat speech, suitably modified for this speech. Noel (talk) 01:46, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Does anyone wonder if this speech would be interpreted differently if it were given by Hirohito 5 years later? Brutannica 19:31, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
Frankly, I'm not sure how any logical and relevant "interpretations" is possible when only bits and pieces of the speech is quoted in the article. The section quoted under "Peroration" is incomplete and thereby Churchill's infamous wit goes by unmentioned.
197.78.149.243 (
talk) 19:56, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
The section regarding the authenticity of Winston Churchills voice requires greater clarification. From what I can gather from reputable sources the details are as follows
1. The speech was originally made in Parliament for which no recording exists. Parliament had no recording system at that time. 2. For the benefit of the public many of Churchill's speeches were recorded by Churchill for the BBC and broadcast. I think (but am not sure based on conflicting reports) that it has been confirmed that some of these were recorded by an actor under Churchill's approval. This includes the "fight them on the beaches" speech. 3. The speeches that were recorded initially by actors were re-recorded after the war by Churchill for archival purposes. 4. Official Churchill sources and BBC state that the recordings that are circulating now and that have been released by them are the ones that are actually of Churchill's voice. 5. New Scientist reported in 1991 that A Maryland company Sensimatics did a voice analysis on the authentic public recordings of Churchill and compared them to other recorded speeches and found that three of the circulating speeches were NOT of Churchill (presumably Norman Shelley who claimed he was the original stand in)
Thats what I can gather. I'm not guarenteeing any accuracy at all so if anyone cares to add the real story, or at least mention the myths in gretaer detail, feel free. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Supersnazz ( talk • contribs) 12:01, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I find it ironic that he gave this speech right after the Dunkirk debacle. Shouldn't some mention be made of that? LikeHolyWater ( talk) 02:18, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps more of the speech should be included, to clarify the context of the Dunkirk evacuation. I recall hearing a cautionary note from Churchill that evacuations-even great ones- should not be confused with victories. This speech would be the logical place for him to have said that. [User:Xperrymint] Xperrymint ( talk) 03:22, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
Is it an urban legend, or was this speech made all in Old English words (or the modern-day equivalents thereof)? Joe Clutch ( talk) 06:08, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
Any evidence euphoria, as opposed to relief? If so, please supply.
The speech if read in full is clearly an attempt to put a good face on a bad situation, rather than the other way around, and Churchill had quite a gift for that; in his hands 'many of those currently listed as missing were probably taken prisoner' becomes:
Churchill minuted 4 June 1940 the same day as the speech 'An effort must be made to shake off the mental and moral prostration to the will and initiative from which we suffer' so he clearly didn't spot a lot of euphoria in his immediate circle. What were Mass Observation saying about the mood in the country ? Or are we going off the newsreels ?? Rjccumbria ( talk) 23:29, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
No full text wikisource?-- Test35965 ( talk) 06:30, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
I have multiple difficulties with the rhetoric section as it stands, since it doesn’t altogether match the content of the speech or my layman’s understanding of rhetorical terms but I am not enough of an expert on the subject to attempt a better one. I have however added a contemporary response that the important thing about the words was that they conveyed implacable resolve.
a) “The corpus is constructed from a slow buildup of plainly reported facts”
Behind this armoured and mechanised onslaught came a number of German divisions in lorries, and behind them again there plodded comparatively slowly the dull brute mass of the ordinary German Army and German people, always so ready to be led to the trampling down in other lands of liberties and comforts which they have never known in their own.
The Rifle Brigade, the 60th Rifles, and the Queen Victoria's Rifles, with a battalion of British tanks and 1,000 Frenchmen, in all about 4,000 strong, defended Calais to the last. The British Brigadier was given an hour to surrender. He spurned the offer, and four days of intense street fighting passed before silence reigned over Calais, which marked the end of a memorable resistance. Only 30 unwounded survivors were brought off by the Navy and we do not know the fate of their comrades. Their sacrifice, however, was not in vain. At least two armoured divisions, which otherwise would have been turned against the British Expeditionary Force, had to be sent for to overcome them. They have added another page to the glories of the Light Division, and the time gained enabled the Graveline waterlines to be flooded and to be held by the French troops.
b) Though his delivery of the losses is frank, pathos is injected through scattered commendations of valor to British, French, and Belgian troops:
I take occasion to express the sympathy of the House to all who have suffered bereavement or who are still anxious. The President of the Board of Trade is not here to-day. His son has been killed, and many in the House have felt the pangs of affliction in the sharpest form.
May it not also be that the cause of civilisation itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen? There never had been, I suppose, in all the world, in all the history of war, such an opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into a prosaic past: not only distant but prosaic; but these young men…
c) Summoning the archaic rhetoric of Tennyson,
d) Linking the struggle of war to a storm, while simultaneously personifying Nazi Germany as 'the menace of tyranny', Churchill draws on the emotion of the audience.
The British PM when the Grand Armee was camped at Boulogne ready to invade was William Pitt the Younger, famously (perhaps not today, but most MPs in 1940 would have known) hailed by his contemporaries as ‘The Pilot That Weathered The Storm’. So one would suspect that ‘riding out the storm’ is engaging his audience’s emotions not by reusing a timeworn figure of speech (‘the storm of war’) but by again invoking past chapters in Our Island Story and ‘the menace of tyranny’ is not a personalisation of the current enemy, but rather a generalisation covering all those - Napoleon et al (now including Hitler; Philip of Spain is carefully not mentioned)- who were kidding themselves when they thought old England was done. Rjccumbria ( talk) 21:41, 9 May 2014 (UTC)We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles. This has often been thought of before. When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, he was told by someone, "There are bitter weeds in England."
I note, more in sorrow than in anger (but not by much)that
in 2010 this article said that the German advance to the sea once they had broken through the French defences at Sedan cut off the BEF and the French First Army from their lines of communication and the main French forces,
on 14 October 2011 user 98.67.174.173 made 4 edits for style on it, only 2 of which had edit summaries. One edit had the edit summary "The word "said" followed by a blockquote needs to have a colon added "said:" ". The other edit summary provided was "Someone needs to study the writings of Churchill, Jefferson, etc. "on the 10 May" does not make sense, and single-digiit numbers are written out as words." which was consistent with the tone/content of the other summary, but did not entirely accurately reflect the nature of the edit which was not just MOS stuff but 'my English is better than yours' stuff as well with extensive paraphrasing and recasting. Unfortunately the recasting was done without due care & attention and resulted in the BEF now being cut off from the French First Army as a result of the Germans having broken through the French defenses ( I note the spelling correction). 98.67.174.173 had gone on to give his POV as to where the French troops evacuated from Dunkirk should have been sent. Somebody spotted and removed that, but the net result was that the revised text looked passable and the residual bit of good-faith (if snitty) vandalism has persisted until today, when I finally realised that the article no longer said what I expected it to say and had therefore been reading it as saying. A warning to us all, but I'm not quite sure about what - all sorts of things, probably Rjccumbria ( talk) 20:55, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
If I listen to online recordings of this speech, the sentence "Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail." is not spoken. Not sure if there is a separately written speech or that the transcript is just inaccurate. SiggyF ( talk) 15:55, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
The file c:File:Sir Winston Churchill - 19086236948.jpg has been nominated for deletion on Commons Reason: I don't understand the decision above. The final comment, "The Karsh photo of Churchill is PD in Canada and the US since it was published in a 1945 issue of Life magazine. URAA affects images published or taken after 1945 in Canada. -- Leoboudv ([[User talk:Leoboudv|[ Template:M used with invalid code 'int:Talkpagelinktext'. See documentation.]]]) 09:44, 21 August 2017 " is wrong. It was, indeed, the cover of Life in 1945. That issue of Life had its copyright renewed, so the image will be under copyright in the USA until 2040. Deletion request: link
Message automatically deposited by a robot - - Harideepan ( talk) 07:18, 3 March 2018 (UTC).
Before my edit, the "Reception" subsection started with "It has been said {{by whom?|date=December 2017}} that ..." The answer to "by whom" is given in the reference at the end of the sentence. It was said by Dominique Enright, in her cited book.
Please read the entire sentence and look at the reference before tagging something. I too hate wesel words and remove them where ever I find them, but never if they are supported by an actual reference. In this case the reference was to a book, and contained a note that this is not certain, which the visible phrase "it is said" indicates. Nick Beeson ( talk) 22:39, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
I've seen this speech in print (such as where it is included on the International Churchill Society website, and the capitalization of the first letter of the last word in the peroration has always bothered me given the text of the entire sentence. Churchill for much of this period was trying persuade the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States (such as in the " This was their finest hour" speech) to intervene on behalf of Britain, which at that point was in the process of becoming the only democratic major power left standing in Europe opposed to Nazi Germany, and to rescue the Old World from the Nazi regime. Given that Churchill won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, it occurs to me that Churchill was gifted enough as a writer and knowledgeable enough of history to use such language. Could someone please provide an explanation? -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 23:09, 23 March 2023 (UTC)