Vancouver Province
for December 10, 1999

London December 10

The Sunday London Times, once the best newspaper in the world now arguably only the best in London, has assumed the task of deciding the "person" of the millennium and of the century, even though they do so a year before they both change. (Now, in the unhappy event you didn’t, as I did, take Grade I Number Work from the sainted Miss Dunlop at Maple Grove Elementary school ago, let me help. Take a $20 bill to the bank and exchange it for 2000 pennies. If you are really slow, cut them each into 365 little bits, 366 for each representing a leap year. After the first chopped copper you should get the hang of it. Now count your pennies starting with little bit #1 representing Day 1 of 1AD. After you have counted all the little bits you will have counted one penny – that’s penny #1 or year 1AD. Continue counting your pennies, each containing 365 or 366 imaginary little bits until you reach 1999. Have you, having counted 1999^th penny, used up all your pennies? No. You still have that 2000^th one with its 366 imaginary little bits left. Having mastered this exercise you can, with others who know how to count, save your big celebration until December 31, 2000. But I digress – because even the Sunday Times was evidently deprived of Miss Dunlop’s guidance.)

The Times canvassed experts world wide and concluded that Gutenberg was the man of their one year short Millennium and Winston Churchill the man of the similarly shortened 20^th century.

I offer no opinion on the first – though I assume that somehow they disqualified Jesus – but heartily agree with the second.

Winston Churchill, over the last 50 years, has been evaluated by his contemporaries, who almost without exception saw him as the man who saved civilization in 1940, then by revisionist historians who found fault with his every move. Now we’re back to where we started. In short, Churchill’s deeds have taken on the Monday morning quarterbacks and, 60 years after he shook Britain’s collective fist at Hitler’s Germany, has seen them all off. The jury has decided that his contemporaries were right all along.

What’s missing from this piece is appropriate recognition of Churchill’s works. He leaves behind, of course, over 40 books and a Nobel Prize for Literature; he has a college in his name at Cambridge; he’s left us hundreds of first class paintings; his home in Kent, Chartwell, run by the National Trust, is a marvelous place to get the feel of the man; and in 1964 he was given the rare honour (the only other honoree being Lafayette) of honorary American citizenship. And, of course, there’s that marvelous statue of the great man, cane in hand, glaring eastward from Parliament Square just daring the Nazis to come and get him. But surely in a country that honours Nelson with a huge monument and Wellington with a "Place" and a museum, something more needs doing for Churchill. It does – and it’s happening.

An underground museum is to be built adjacent to the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall, Churchill’s subterranean retreat during the Blitz. His grandson Winston has donated all Churchill’s many medals and decorations including, of course, his Order of the Garter. People who served the great man, or their descendants, all over the world are donating mementos. People who cooked for him are donating kitchenware and dining utensils; a carpenter is donating a desk he made so that Churchill could work from his bed; and the list goes on. It’s expected that the museum will be as large as a football field and will become one of the great "destination" sites of London.

It’s time – exactly the right time – that such be done. Had it not been for Winston Churchill we might all well be speaking German and, worse, living the unbearable nightmare that would have brought with it.

It’s impossible for those not alive at the time to understand the impact this man had on Britain and indeed the entire free world. This museum will at least leave some idea of what this giant of history meant to the generations which followed him.

So we can ignore the year remaining – Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill must indeed be the man of the century when it finally runs out on at Midnight December 31, 2000.