The other lives of Sir Winston Churchill
By ADAM EDWARDS
He was our greatest wartime leader – but did you know that he was also an expert bricklayer, a pet lover with a particular soft spot for pigs and parrots, and owned a string of racehorses?
IT WAS a brickie, albeit one with a cigar rather than a roll-up, who won us the war. It was a man who was a master of the trowel and mortar who faced down the Nazis and who, when he wasn’t unloading a hod or tapping a red brick into place, was saving the nation. Winston Spencer Churchill was much more than the greatest 20th-century war leader.
Our image of him may be of the British bulldog flashing his famous victory sign but he was also a soldier, writer, farmer, orator, painter, racehorse breeder, scriptwriter, parrot owner and bricklayer. “One man in life plays many parts,” wrote William Shakespeare in his play As You Like It and no one played more parts than Sir Winston Churchill.
Today a new radio series, Churchill’s Other Lives, begins, in which historian Sir David Cannadine looks at Churchill not as a statesman but as a Renaissance man. “In contrast to today’s 24/7 politicians who have neither the time nor the talent to cultivate their hinterlands, Churchill did so all his life with extraordinary energy, imagination and versatility,” said Sir David. “I do not think that many of us appreciate the full dimensions of his personality and his genius.”




Courtesy AMJ Masonry Fort Worth, Texas