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An anecdotal history of Winston Churchill’s foreign journeys – for journalistic, political or holiday purposes, and in war and peace – as told by his granddaughter Celia Sandys, who travels in his footsteps.
With all his other remarkable achievements, it is easy to overlook the fact that throughout his long life Winston Churchill was an indefatigable foreign traveller.
As a young man, his thirst for fame and adventure took him to Cuba, the North-West Frontier, the Sudan and South Africa. He experienced battle at close quarters, was taken prisoner, and made a daring escape which brought him worldwide fame at the age of twenty-five. As Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies and then as First Lord of the Admiralty he became perhaps the best-travelled British politician of his time, his unquenchable energy exhausting a succession of aides.
Even during the Second World War, when he held his nation’s destiny in his hands, there was little diminution in Churchill’s foreign travel, as he made uncomfortable and hazardous journeys for face-to-face meetings with allies such as Roosevelt and Stalin, or to witness at first hand the progress of the conflict.
Perhaps above all there was his lifelong love affair with the United States, the country of his mother’s birth, to which he made repeated visits. In later years his growing passion for painting provided the impetus for other travels.
His granddaughter Celia Sandys accompanied him on some of these late journeys, including a memorable cruise on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, and on his very last foreign trip. Now she traces her grandfather’s footsteps across four continents. Wherever she goes, she finds people who knew, entertained or simply crossed paths with him. Many of them, she discovers, have stories which have never been told before, and which illuminate Churchill’s character in unexpected and often surprising ways.
Chasing Churchill is a fascinating and entertaining insight into an important but often neglected aspect of Winston Churchill’s life, and an engaging record of a unique quest.
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