It is both a pleasure and an honour to be your guest today. I am especially delighted to have the opportunity of renewing my links with your great country with which the United Kingdom enjoys such strong and cordial relations.

The theme of my address to you today is: Sir Winston Churchill: The Man, His Life and His Archive. I came to know my Grandfather when I was a small boy of five years old and he had just been thrown out of office after five long years as Prime Minister during World War II. Following his rejection by the British electorate in the very hour of Victory, in the General Election of 1945, Churchill retreated to his country home of Chartwell in Kent, which he loved and where he wrote the greater part of his literary output.

I had no understanding of all this, nor of the fact that he remained a Member of Parliament, as well as the Leader of the Conservative Party. Furthermore, while I imagined him to be sleeping, he was in fact working through the night until 3.00 am or later, dictating new chapters for his War Memoirs and, later, his History of the English Speaking Peoples’, for which he was to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was under the impression that he was just there for my pleasure and enjoyment!

Time and again, while speaking on the US lecture circuit, I have been asked if I did not find it “awesome” to have Winston Churchill for a Grandfather, and if I was not very frightened of him. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was the gentlest and most approachable of human beings, with a lovely sense of humour.

Well do I remember as a small boy making my way at around 9.00 am each morning through his study, with its high oak-beamed ceiling, to his small bedroom beyond. There through wreaths of cigar smoke, I would find the venerable Grandpapa sitting up in bed, dictating letters or speeches to his secretary. Before him he had a bed-table, cut out to accommodate the shape of his ample belly. It was covered in papers. To his right, on a shelf besides his bed, alongside photographs of his parents, there would invariably be a glass of very weak Scotch whisky, from which he would take occasional sips.

On my arrival, he would beam with pleasure, promptly dismiss his secretary and exclaim: “Winston! We must plan what we shall do today!” Regular fixtures in the day’s routine were visits to his giant goldfish, the Golden Orfe, who lurked in dark, shaded pools which he had himself constructed in the 1930s. Next he would feed the Black Swans with their scarlet bills, who sailed majestically on the lake. They were the gift of the Government of Australia.

Finally we would visit the pigs. My Grandfather was very fond of his pigs. He would scratch their backs with his walking-stick. They would grunt at him and he would grunt back at them! I well remember him saying to me one day: “Winston, take note: A dog looks up to Man; a cat looks down on Man, but a pig will look you in the eye and see his equal!” If the weather was fine, he would try to fit in an hour or two’s brick-laying in the afternoon. At the time he was engaged in completing a tall wall around his large vegetable-garden – an enterprise in which I joyfully assisted him, handing him the bricks one by one, as he laid them on a course of sand and cement. I am glad to report that the wall still stands today! As you may imagine, I treasure the many happy hours I spent in his company.