Memories of William
p. 40 · Read in the full issue
Churchill And an Extraordinary Coincidence
By Phillip H. Cummings, who writes from The Explorers Club, 10 West 72nd Street, New York.
SEEING the letters about my friend Dr.
Peter Buck’s book published in the “PIM” I am reminded to tell you a little story concerning the eminent Wil liam Churchill, mentioned in both articles. It is another case of the world being very small.
When I returned from the South-west Pacific in 1935, and afire for more infor mation on the peoples of that area, my efforts finally obtained me, through the Carnegie Foundation’s generositv, the “Polynesian Wanderings.” by William Churchill, in which his linguistic theory of the migrations is exhaustively and meticulously developed. That gave me many an hour of comprehensive studv.
In due course I married, and moved to a suburb of New York City. We bought a home and found that our neighbours, just below us, were of the good name Churchill, now of such tremendous sig nificance in the Anglo-American (not to say the whole) world.
In casual conversation I mentioned to Mr. Arthur H. Churchill that I was inter ested in the study of the text of a very scholarly book by one William Churchill, one-time American Consul to Samoa and Tonga. In brief order I learned that I was talking to his surviving brother!
By the vagaries of time and space, well known to planters and colonists in the South Pacific, Arthur had been only dimly aware of the tremendous contribu tion (my insistence on this point may be controversial) his brother William had made. It has been my privilege to recreate, before Mr. Arthur Churchill, the signifi cance of the work of brother William.
It may be admitted that Mr. Arthur was often involved in meeting the irre sponsibilities of Mr. William. My thick volume of the “Polynesian Wanderings’’ is now double its size, with autographed letters of William Churchill, copies of let ters he sent his mother at the turn of the century or shortly before, with menus of farewell dinners, and with some of his newspaper work for the New York “Sun ”
Two items abofit Mr. Churchill may interest you—first that his mother was blind, the last of her life, but maintained her wide interest and some activity in the world of music. She was proud of her son, and his one novel, “Princess of Fiji,’’ is dedicated to her.
In the family there is a special brief grace which my three-year-old has learned. It is “God bless us all and Sarah.’’ Sarah Starkweather Churchill was William Churchill’s mother.
The other anecdote told me by Mr Arthur Churchill is that this gifted lin guist used to corner his two brothers.
Arthur and Clarence, and a neighbouring boy name Taylor, and cram Shakes peare down their throats until, to this day, in their eighties, these men who sur vive are students with a thorough know ledge and love of William Shakesneare.
William Churchill died shortly after the last war, of injuries received when manhandled by an enemy agent, when he was in Washington on the censorship board of George Creel. His personal lin guistic papers were largely passed on to the library of his university (Yale Uni versity) but some remain in the archives of the Bishop Museum, and in those of the Carnegie Foundation in Washington. The remainder fatten my volume of William Churchill’s study of the people where he was most at home, and in whose company he felt he was close to something basic and fine in human relationship. The writer felt that in 1935 and since: and now, at the distance of miles, “PlM’’ stokes those fires and fervors. Arthur Churchill reads every issue of your “PIM" from cover to cover!
February 9, 1943.