But perhaps we are looking at it from a rather partisan point of view. I hope that the International Churchill Society, wherever, whatever chapters are formed, will continue to take a particular care and pride in keeping the record straight. There are a lot of stories told about famous people, and I find that as time goes on it is rather like the lens of a camera becoming out of focus. Virtues become out of focus, and faults come out of focus. Inaccurate statements said in some paper or book are copied light-heartedly, and reproduce themselves all over the place.
Few people take the trouble to go back to the source, and find out if that really was what happened.
I like to hope that the International Churchill Society chapters will, among all the other things that they do, regard themselves as the guardians of the true picture and try always to bring that camera back into true focus. Naturally, as his daughter, I care very much about that. Your chairman has suggested that you would like it most if I were to recall for you my father as a family man, and I shall do so with great joy as well as some nostalgia. But it always gives me happiness when I have the opportunity to revive both myself and for others the vivid personality, the warmth, and the humanity of my great and beloved father in the glow of whose memory I shall ever live. Of course, it was his family and close friends who were the principal beneficiaries of his warm-hearted, and in the main genial temperament.