Winston Churchill symbolised the ‘bulldog spirit’ of the Allies in 1940 through to eventual victory in 1945.Winston Churchill symbolised the ‘bulldog spirit’ of the Allies in 1940 through to eventual victory in 1945.

When my daughter was about four years old, she overheard a discussion in which Winston Churchill was mentioned. I don’t remember what my friends and I had been talking about – it could have been something to do with the Queen’s Jubilee – but I do remember the conversation in the car back home.

“Mama, I know Churchill,” she said from her car seat at the back.

“Ehe, ħanini, you do?” I replied absent-mindedly.

“Yes. Churchill is the talking dog on telly. Count-on-Churchill-Cheap-Car-and-Home-In-shoes,” she said in one breath.

I chuckled all the way home. Churchill insurance adverts were on a loop in between cartoons on Cartoonito, and they featured a talking, nodding, bulldog mascot. I suspect targeting younger au­dien­ces was a way of indirectly getting to potential clients: the parents.

This came to mind last week when I read the Times of Malta story on the examiners’ report about students’ performance in last May’s SEC examination.

Apart from the fact that students struggled to express themselves in either Maltese or English, judging by the report, knowledge of history has gone to the dog(s).

In the Maltese history section of the exam, several students confused Malta’s fourth Prime Minister, Gerald Strickland – Mabel’s spirit please look away quickly now – with former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff. Others – okay, you can look again Mabel – struggled to say on which day Malta became a republic.

In European history, many had no clue that Winston Churchill was Britain’s Prime Minister during World War II.

At this rate, I doubt whether in a few years’ time students will be aware that there were any wars, except those they play on Xbox.

I find this particularly sad, firstly because I really believe that knowing our history will help us not repeat the mistakes of the past, and secondly because I am a huge fan of Churchill and his trademark bowler hat, bow tie and cigar.

There was a time when my his­torian friend and I would meet up to discuss current and historical issues, and all throughout we’d smoke cigars, the edge of which we’d dip in port; a favourite habit of Churchill.

How many of us sat down with our children and talked to them about the significance of Remembrance Day?

Perhaps if students had been told these quirky things about him, then maybe they would have found it easier to remember him as the man who symbolised the ‘bulldog spirit’ of the Allies in 1940 through to eventual victory in 1945.

I can think of quite a few other quirky traits at the top of my head: his love of costly, fine woven silk (pale pink) underwear from the Army and Navy Stores; his fondness for bricklaying and how he even was a qualified member of the Amalgamated Union of Bricklayers; how he invented the Victory sign; and his speech impediment and how he overcame it.

It is only in the context of all this that we can appreciate his stint as Prime Minister in May 1940 while Nazi Germany was busy conquering much of Europe. He is the best example of how to rally a nation in the face of a looming attack.

Maltese people, too, used to be glued to their Redifusions, and listen to his speeches on BBC World Service: “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”

As France prepared to submit to the Nazis, he told his countrymen to “brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” I feel like crying every time I hear it, can you imagine the emotions stirred in people at the time?

But what I love about Churchill mostly is what he said when he was voted out of the office even before the end of World War II. In July 1945, after Germany had surrendered but not Japan, Britain held its first general election in a decade. Churchill’s Tory party lost in a landslide, having been successfully portrayed by the Labour Party as anti-worker and anti-welfare (I mean, come on).

Upon hearing the result of the election, Churchill said: “They have a perfect right to kick us out. That is democracy. That is what we have been fighting for.”

I know this has ended up sounding like an ode to Churchill. But I really want students to learn to love history. Perhaps it has to come from us as parents – how many of us sat down with our children last Wed­nesday and talked to them about the significance of Remembrance Day and how the symbolical poppy represents the poppy fields of Flanders and the blood shed by people who had a normal life just like us?

Maybe it’s time we started doing that, or the only memory of Churchill will be truly that of a barking insurance dog.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti

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