"The Gathering Storm" DVD Recommendation...

[Smithy]

Just saw "The Gathering Storm" on DVD and wanted to recommend it here.

It is about Winston Churchill in the period from 1934 until 1939, and it's absolutely brilliant. Albert Finney playing Churchill provides one of the best acting performances I have seen in my life, no exaggeration. Vanessa Redgrave plays Clementine Churchill and is superb and there is a wonderful cameo of Ronnie Barker as Inches, the Churchill's butler, which provides some wonderful banter between Finney and Barker.

A fantastic film about one of history's finest men. Very enjoyable and if you're after a DVD to watch pick this one up.

Plus great period clothing, cars and settings!

 

[Daisy Buchanan]

Just saw "The Gathering Storm" on DVD and wanted to recommend it here.

It is about Winston Churchill in the period from 1934 until 1939, and it's absolutely brilliant. Albert Finney playing Churchill provides one of the best acting performances I have seen in my life, no exaggeration. Vanessa Redgrave plays Clementine Churchill and is superb and there is a wonderful cameo of Ronnie Barker as Inches, the Churchill's butler, which provides some wonderful banter between Finney and Barker.

A fantastic film about one of history's finest men. Very enjoyable and if you're after a DVD to watch pick this one up.

Plus great period clothing, cars and settings!

I second everything you say here. Fantastic performances, great clothing, cars, setting, all of it, this movie is very well done and great to watch on more than one occasion.

 

[Hemingway Jones]

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I moved this from the OB and put the title of the film in the title of the thread.

I agree with your opinion entirely. This film was made for HBO, was played there often for several years, and even referenced on "The Sopranos."

The film itself is quite extraordinary and chronicles Churchill's political revival from his obscure period to the moment he rose as First Lord of the Admiralty. Within this, it gives you a good insight into Parliamentary power, as well as Winston's relationship with his wife.

The period effect of this film is startling. Each detail, from clothes to furnishings, is pitch perfect and Albert Finney is so good he seems to be channeling Sir Winston's spirit. The cumulative effect is as if there has been a window opened unto history and we are peering through.

This is truly a wonderful film.

I own it as well and watch it often.

 

[Smithy]

Thanks Hemmingway for shifting this.

What a gem of a film, and you are so right about Finney as Churchill, he is so like Churchill, it is almost eerie.

I'll be buying a copy of this to have!

 

[Hemingway Jones]

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I am so glad you brought this film up as a subject for a thread.

Here are some photos from the film:

 

[cookie]

Winnie

I loved this film and found it for AUD10 at the local store. The guy said - buy it - if you like Winnie. It was a great purchase.

I was able to find an article from the online UK Tele which mentioned that his apartment/flat that he used in the 1940s which was recently sold. Fortunately the owner had tried to keep it intact.

The flat that won the war




It takes a special kind of dedication to own a national treasure, writes Ginetta Vedrickas

A passion for a property's former inhabitant isn't a typical incentive for buying, but it was the sole reason that Bill Roedy, vice chairman of MTV Networks, bought an apartment at Morpeth Mansions in Victoria.


The room in which Churchill received secret information about the re-arming of Germany
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The four-bedroom flat, once belonged to Winston Churchill, who lived here in his "wilderness years" leading up to the Second World War.

You might have thought a former rock star's pad would have had more appeal to Roedy. But not so. US-born Roedy has spent tens of thousands of pounds restoring the SW1 property. He hopes to live there one day but, for the moment, his home is a converted church in St John's Wood which he shares with his wife, Alex, and their four children.

The St John's Wood house is crammed with awards and photos, bearing testimony to Roedy's work. But it's his collection of Churchill memorabilia, including cigars, portraits and Churchill's own paintings, which dominates and which Roedy ruefully admits, "I couldn't afford now".

In pride of place is the sculptor's wire frame of the "greatcoat" statue, which stands in Parliament Square. The couple secured it by racing down to Sotheby's in Sussex the minute they heard it was up for auction. "Luckily it was US Thanksgiving, so we had the day off," explains Roedy.

You get the sense that Roedy has few days off as he travels the world "building global networks". He remembers seeing an advert for Morpeth Mansions long before he took the opportunity to buy it. "I'd seen it come up for sale but was so busy that it sold before I could do anything about it," he says.

Several years later - last summer - Roedy spotted another advert, but, when he contacted the agent, found that it was already under offer. On hearing of Roedy's obsession, the vendor allowed him to view the apartment.

"I loved it right away," he says. "Knowing that Churchill spent years here writing and preparing his speeches was an intense experience." After discovering the US Embassy had made an offer, but were dragging their feet, he pulled out all stops to secure it, even missing the opening of Live8, one of MTV's most important events.

Churchill bought the apartment from Lloyd George, and moved in after leaving Downing Street in 1930. It was here that he conducted his anti-appeasement campaign with fellow parliamentarians Robert Boothby, Henry 'Chips' Channon and Anthony Eden, squeezed into the tiny study where he received secret information about the re-arming of Germany. "These were indeed the wilderness years, when Churchill had to be so strong and courageous as he honed his speeches, but I hear that he drew inspiration from the oval window, from where you can see Westminster Cathedral," Roedy says.

After Churchill, Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva lived at the apartment, following her defection to the West. For some unknown reason, Mother Teresa dined here in the 1970s, but after that its history is hazy.

When the Roedys bought it, the apartment, which spans more than 2,758 sq ft over two floors, had already been restored to a high standard. They decided to go further and have spent months and serious cash upgrading it. Alex organised the work. "I did all the designs," she says. "We wanted to open it up and make it lighter and more modern, while remembering its former resident."

The Roedys added a fireplace and panelling to the study, which, in contrast to the rest of the apartment, feels more cosy than modern. "When you imagine Churchill you think of him sitting at his fireplace smoking a cigar." The pair have added several design touches to add atmosphere and a sense of history. One of the most expensive tasks was to relay the entire floor with reclaimed oak boards weighing more than four tonnes.

And in keeping with the Palace of Westminster connection, the roof terrace looks over Big Ben, Westminster Cathedral and the river.

"We have four children so it's too small for us, but one day I definitely want to live there," Roedy adds.

He says he feels privileged to have been part of the apartment's history.



Inside Winston's lair
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 03/10/2004



Ross Clark visits the flat in Westminster where Churchill's transformation from rebel MP to wartime Prime Minister had its beginnings

As German troops advanced through Poland on the evening of September 2, 1939, a mutinous group of MPs gathered beneath the rain-lashed mansard roof of 11 Morpeth Mansions, near Westminster Cathedral, to discuss the failure of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to issue an ultimatum to Adolf Hitler.

At his desk, writing a letter to Chamberlain, was Winston Churchill, then a rebel backbench MP who had spent the past five years arguing in vain for the Government to take the Nazi threat seriously. Around him were Anthony Eden, Bob Boothby, Brendan Bracken and Alfred Duff Cooper, who was later to write: "We were all in a state of bewildered rage."

advertisementThey had just learned, as Polish town after Polish town was flattened, that Chamberlain, in spite of having appeared to issue Hitler with a final warning, was attempting to invite the Fuhrer to yet another conference. It was an act of appeasement too far. The group of MPs walked to Downing Street to deliver Churchill's letter, and within a day England was at war with Germany.

Chartwell, near Westerham in Kent, is the house most associated with Sir Winston Churchill. But his London base, at Morpeth Mansions, a redbrick 1880s apartment block half a mile from the House of Commons, saw some of the most dramatic moments of Churchill's years of political isolation in the 1930s.

It was here on March 11, 1936, that he met the French foreign minister, Pierre Etienne Flandin, in an attempt to build a coalition against the Nazis; here that he met with members of the Anti-Nazi Council, a small anti-appeasement group; here that a whistle-blowing wing commander called Torr Anderson secretly passed to Churchill details revealing the RAF's shocking lack of preparedness for war.

It was here, too, in 1936, that Churchill confronted his daughter Sarah and warned her that she must not marry her fiancee, an Austrian pianist called Vic Oliver, until he had secured American citizenship, "for if you do, in three years you will be married to the enemy".

A blue plaque outside 11 Morpeth Mansions states that Winston and Clementine Churchill were in residence there from 1930 until 1939. However, the current owner, Peter Sheppard, believes that the Churchills did not start using the property until 1932, the year in which Winston was photographed outside the front door with his daughter Diana, on their way to her wedding. The apartment was not unfamiliar with political intrigue: a previous resident had been Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George's mistress.

The Churchills enlarged the two-storey flat, adding three extra rooms on the upper level to make four bedrooms, yet it can never have been especially comfortable for them there. The kitchen was tiny, as was Winston's study, where he used to write in a standing position. The only way to reach the upper floor was via a narrow spiral staircase. "People used to ask how on earth could Churchill manage to squeeze his way upstairs," says Sheppard. "But he wasn't especially broad: he just looked it because he was short."

Sheppard and his partner, Keith Day, who run the design company Sheppard Day, replaced the spiral staircase and installed a new one where the bathroom used to be. They have also enlarged the kitchen and remodelled the downstairs corridor along the lines of a Venetian street, with a floor based on the pavement outside the Doges' Palace in Venice.

Would Churchill have approved? "Contrary to what many people would imagine, he wasn't the least bit fuddy-duddy," says Sheppard. "If you look at Chartwell, his tastes were quite modern."

Unfortunately, no trace of Churchill's decorations remains at Morpeth Mansions: before Sheppard bought the flat 10 years ago, it had been used by the Morpeth Society as an old people's home and had acquired an institutional feel.

What does survive, however, is the building's magificent period lift. Churchill's possessions had long gone before Sheppard moved in - save for a single voting paper bearing Churchill's name, which the owners found under the carpet. Sheppard has managed to buy a few pieces of Churchill memorabilia at auctions. They include various Cummings cartoons, one of Winston's unsmoked cigars and an invitation from the Soviet ambassador, dated 1944, to celebrate the 27th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Churchill declined the invitation but Clementine accepted. The kitchen sink, on the other hand, came from a skip in Onslow Gardens during the renovations of Field Marshal Montgomery's house.

One of the most agreeable aspects of Churchill's home is its position on the fifth floor, overlooking Westminster Cathedral, shielded from the street below by thick plane trees.

The property has a small outside terrace, as well as being the one flat to enjoy access to the roof, with its views over Victoria. This was where Winston and Clementine went briefly after listening to Chamberlain's broadcast announcing the declaration of war. He looked about him and imagined, as he wrote, "pictures of ruin and carnage and vast explosions shaking the ground".

He wasn't wrong; though happily Morpeth Mansions was saved.

In Churchill's footsteps
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 04/04/2005
The far-flung travels of Britain's greatest leader mirrored an extraordinary life, says Richard Holmes.


History for me has always been as much about the heart as the head. So when the opportunity arose to make a BBC television series on Winston Churchill and write the accompanying book, I didn't want to do just another survey of a life that is already well documented, but instead to get a feel for his time and, in particular, the places he visited.

In one sense, of course, the social and political paths he walked have vanished, "changed," as he put it, "to such an extent I should not have believed possible in so short a space without a violent domestic revolution". Yet if the tenor of Britain and the world has been transformed, many of the places to which Churchill travelled have changed little.

He led a frenetic life - to call him much-travelled is an understatement - and one of the delights of making the series was the opportunity tread in his footsteps in the most literal sense.

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I started where he started. Churchill's birthplace, Blenheim Palace, one of Britain's grandest stately homes, stands on the edge of Woodstock, in whose royal manor Chaucer once lived and in which Richard the Lionheart and Edward the Black Prince were born. If the house itself sometimes feels the weight of tourism, there is a wealth of Churchill memorabilia, and in its garden is the little Greek temple where Churchill proposed to his future wife, Clemmie. Here the sense of the man is still palpable.

Then it was on to Harrow, where Churchill was educated. Although unhappy at the school, he left his mark, for his name is carved in the wooden panelling of a form room, along with the names of generations of other distinguished Harrovians.

After attending the Royal Military College at Sandhurst - the high, dusty riding school where Churchill would have been put through his paces is still extant - he was commissioned in early 1895. But before he joined his regiment, Churchill dashed to Cuba, where the Spanish were engaged in a war against local insurgents. On the way he stopped in New York, and stayed with Bourke Cockran, a close friend of his mother. Cockran lived on Fifth Avenue, just off Central Park, where the General Motors complex now stands. Churchill loved the place - the US, he told his brother, was "a very great country".

In Cuba, on his 21st birthday, he found himself under fire for the first time; his last similar experience would be in Athens in 1944, half a world and much of a lifetime away. Cuba left him with an affection for post-prandial siestas - and Havana cigars - and would be the first of many far-flung travels.

His next journey was to India, where Churchill left his regimental colleagues in 1897 at Bangalore to join the Malakand Field Force as supernumary officer-cum-correspondent. Although I could not get up to the Malakand Pass this time - some parts of Pakistan are now safer than others - four years ago I rode a tetchy grey Afghan pony from Gilgit to Chitral, north of the Malakand, and could see why Churchill found the landscape enthralling.

I drove back from Peshawar to Islamabad along the bustle of the Grand Trunk Road, through the cantonment at Nowshera, where the Malakand Field Force had assembled. In 1897 it was 2,028 miles by rail from Bangalore, "five days' journey in the worst of the heat… in a dark padded moving cell, reading mostly by lamplight or by some jealously admitted ray of glare." An obelisk near the road commemorates the Chitral Relief Expedition, which had also started from Nowshera two years before Churchill was there. The lettering on the obelisk would have been fresh when Churchill looked at it: most of it, in a silent commentary on the vanity of military glory, is now barely legible.

In the following year, Churchill accompanied Kitchener's expedition against the Dervishes in the Sudan, and took part in the charge of the 21st Lancers at the battle of Omdurman. I followed his route as far as I could, starting with a languid trip by felucca down the Nile. On terra firma, I then ambled through the desert behind the camera car, on a borrowed horse whose ideas differed markedly from my own. You cannot narrate a cavalry charge at a walk, and so I finished at a gallop, describing Churchill's feelings when he saw that the watercourse in front of the regiment was full of Dervishes. My own, when the car unexpectedly turned right rather than left, were not dissimilar.

Churchill then made his first attempt at a political career, but he failed to find favour with the electors of Oldham and immediately set off for the Boer War as correspondent for the Morning Post.

Tracing his passage across South Africa was infinitely rewarding. I went first to Chieveley in Natal, where he was captured in an armoured train, and where some of his comrades still rest in a trackside grave. Then to the State Model School in Pretoria, now a library, where he escaped from prison, and finally to Spion Kop in January 1901, where a bullet snipped the plume from his slouch hat.

Spion Kop is one of those battlefields whose natural splendour almost effaces the horror of what happened there. I stayed in the lodge on Three Trees Hill, from where Churchill started his ascent of Spion Kop, and where, as the tropical night thuds down, there is an extraordinary sense of place.

Churchill's travels then took him home, or at least to London, where he was elected Conservative MP for Oldham before crossing to the Liberal benches in 1904. In 1910 he became Home Secretary (at the age of 35), and was based in what was then the Home and Colonial Office building.

While filming I was allowed to leave via the seldom-opened door opposite the Cenotaph, through which Churchill probably stepped in 1911, to visit "the Siege of Sidney Street" where a group of anarchists had been cornered by police in a house in the East End. The area was bombed in the Second World War, and redevelopment has not been kind. The block of flats on the spot is called Siege House, but there is no resonance.

From the Home Office, Churchill moved along Whitehall to the Admiralty as First Lord. The building, designed in 1723 with an anchor-embossed portico is now veiled from the road by a later frontage, but it houses one of the delights of official London, not usually open to the public, the Admiralty Board Room, with a wind-dial above its fireplace so that their Lordships could see how the wind in the Channel stood. Churchill left the Admiralty in 1915 as a result of the failure of the Gallipoli expedition, but decided to return to the army to redeem himself.

In France he first stayed in a château near GHQ at St Omer, writing delightedly to Clemmie that the place had "hot baths, beds, Champagne and all the conveniences". It is still there, but only just, in a wood at Blendecques. Built around 1880, it is more shadow than substance, with a much-worn Flanders-baronial feel. I can rarely look at a near-ruin without wanting to rescue it, and still slightly regret not asking the caretaker who would sell me this scruffy but engaging place.

After gaining trench experience as a major, Churchill was promoted lieutenant colonel to command 6th Battalion the Royal Scots Fusiliers. For six months he lived the life of an infantry officer at the front, with his headquarters in Laurence Farm, just south of Ploegsteert Wood. The farm has long disappeared, but its well-head stands forgotten in a field, and there are splinters of roof-tile in the grass. In Lancashire Cottage Cemetery, on the road running along the edge of the wood, lie Scots Fusiliers killed during his time in command. If the detail has been brushed away by time and shellfire, Churchill would still recognise the long wood-line to the north, and the houses - ruins then, but prosperous now - that marked the front line.

Churchill returned to England in May 1916, and eventually got back into government, as Minister of Munitions, with his office in what had been the Metropole Hotel in Northumberland Avenue. Places once commandeered are not so easily returned, and it is still part of the Ministry of Defence.

He returned to Parliament as member for Epping in 1924, and in 1926, during the General Strike ran the government's British Gazette from the Morning Post offices at No 1 Aldwych. It is now a hotel and you can have a coffee in what used to be the machine room, and imagine Churchill dashing down to see his newspaper rolling off the press.

Thrown out of office in 1929, he spent the next decade, as he put it, in the Wilderness. He had a flat in Morpeth Mansions, which now has a commemorative plaque on its outside wall, in the shadow of Westminster Cathedral. It was from the roof that Churchill, equipped with a bottle of brandy, watched Londoners streaming into air-raid shelters when the first sirens went in 1939.

Many of his wartime haunts are familiar. He was frequently in the Cabinet War Rooms, which contain a first-rate Churchill museum, but he generally slept upstairs, in what is now part of the Treasury. He visited Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, which is open to the public and gives a wonderful impression of the very British mixture of improvisation and intelligence that did so much to help win the war.

On VE day, he stood on the balcony of the old Ministry of Health in Parliament Street to receive the acclaim of the crowd. The building was being beautifully restored when I filmed there. Saplings lined the street in 1944: they are mature trees now, but you can still see the balcony.

In his last term of office, 1951-5, Churchill was past his best, and after his resignation he spent a good deal of time in the south of France. "I am easily satisfied with the best," he declared, and having visited his suite near the Casino at Monte Carlo I can see what he meant.

I followed Churchill from Spion Kop to Cairo, and Ploegsteert to Yalta, but it was at Chartwell, his family home, that I felt closest to him. He chose it partly for its location, in the quintessentially English Weald of Kent, but still comfortably close to London. Although it is neither a grand house nor a beautiful one, its setting is stunning, and sums up all that Churchill was fighting for in 1940. He dictated his books, and would then work on the proofs, standing at a specially designed desk in his first- floor study. It is still there, and there were moments when I thought he was, too. If you are inclined to tread in just one of his footsteps, then let it beat Chartwell: I swear that you can still catch a whiff of Havana.

The eight-part series, 'In the Footsteps of Churchill', written and presented by Richard Holmes, begins on BBC Four on April 13. The accom-panying book, above left, is published on Thursday (BBC Books, £20).

Getting there Blenheim Palace (08700 602080; www.blenheimpalace.com). Park open daily 9am-4.45pm; palace, formal gardens and Pleasure Gardens 10.30am-4.45pm. Admission: palace, park and gardens £11.50 (£13 peak); park and gardens £6 (£8); park only £2.50. Bletchley Park (01908 640404; www.bletchleypark.org). Mon-Fri 9.30am-5pm, Sat-Sun 10.30am-5pm (last admission 3.30pm). £10. Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms King Charles Street, London SW1 (020 7930 6961; www.cwr.iwm.org.uk). Daily 9.30am-6pm. £5. Chartwell Mapleton Road, Westerham (01732 868381 or 01732 866368; www.nationaltrust.org.uk). Wed-Sun 11am-5pm until July 3 and Sept 1-Oct 30; Tue-Sun July 4-Aug 31. £8. One Aldwych Hotel 1 Aldwych, London WC2 (020 7300 1000; www.onealdwych.co.uk).