The other surprising thing I have found out about ‘Sir Winston was that he was an innately timid man. He fought, to be fair to him, like a bulldog against his own cowardice. In World War I, after he was dismissed from his Admiralty post, his absurd eagerness to go to the front lines in France and fight the eagerness face to face didn't last very long. He was back in England as fast as he could get there. Seemingly reluctant to allow the Cabinet to recall him, he returned to a nothing post as Minister of Munitions; quite clearly he didn't fancy the mud and the slime and, the rats and the rotting bodies of men drowned in their own vomit and choked on their ride in a clean car through Whitehall and bore the bejesus out of everybody in sight with his views on the conduct of the war.

But back to the power of Churchill's language. I do not say that people of my profession are particularly intelligent, or any more than average writers, but though you may read Churchill's famous words in silence and solitude and be aware of the ‐hurl and sweep of his language, you cannot know it as well as the actor who has to learn the bloody lines and speak them to multitudes. Churchill's use and misuse of the language he’ loved so much and hiS contortion of syntax were so acute that there were times when. I thought I was going to go mad trying to figure out what hell he

Churchill's so‐called wit was slow and ponderous and probably , carefully prepared. He was continually’ defeated in debate by any man who could think fast and coherently on his feet. Lloyd George, who always felt kindly toward Churchill, was lenient with him to the pOint of condescension. Aneurin Bevan, who hated Churchill and with passionate reason, was not. Bevan crucified him again and again. And miracle of miracles,.even the man Attlee, despised ‐by Churchill as a “sheep in sheep's clothing,” defeated Sir Winston in the end, because Churchill, still speaking in the orotund phrases of a lost age, was answered sotto Voce and with deceitful mildness by an Attlee totally and deliberately and selfdeprecatingly lacking in charisma.

I am convinced that the line between genius and madness is very fine. Whether Sir Winston Churchill was a genius I don't know, but certainly he was one of the kw people—two others were Picasso and Camus—who have frightened me almost to silence when we came face to face, ,a difficult task in my case. He was an immensely impressive man to meet. have had to re‐examine my memory of Churchill. Was apprehensive because he was such a towering world figure and already a myth and legend and destined to be a part of England either as a hero or a joke, or was it because I knew I already hated him and knew that‐he was just an actor like myself but had a wider audience? I shah never know. I am still not sure that had I met him and had he neither name or fame I would have been as impresied as I was. I suspect

Few people have awed me. Camus did because of the electrifying’ brilliance of his presence and mind. Picasso did with the extraordinary stillness of a lizard; to me, he actually looked like one. Churchiil left me with the feeling that I was adjacent to a slow‐effusing volcano. tie had a kind of, dynamic lethargy.

I remember once at Hyde Park Gate his beating the table with his ectomorphic, baby‐like, hairless, effeminate right hand, slowly slamming the table to some doomed rhythm known only to himself and saying again and again in that bizarre cadence of his curious voice, “We were right to fight, we were right to fight.” Helped to his feet, he left the room. All those present stood up; but nobody moved or spoke until his ectoplasm was gone. There were some perilously garrulous people there that night, but nobody said a dicky‐bird. I went home and had a few nightmares.