Churchill Recorded All His Speeches?

dlm is hitting me with the bewappitus* over my statement that many of Churchill's speeches were recorded, as we know them, by an actor.

This article disputes that. It states that Churchill's "beaches" speech was indeed recorded for broadcast by Churchill himself, and that the only source for the claim that an actor read it is the actor himself.

And further casting doubt on the claim is its dubious pedigree: It comes from David Irving, noted Holocaust denier/enthusiast, who peddled the absurd myth that the Dresden bombing was an entirely anti-civilian operation and grossly exaggerated the death toll to create sympathy for the Nazis.

So, there you go. Looks like it's mostly debunked. Even if you don't buy this guy's claims, the provenance of this tale looks pretty shaky, certainly too shaky to be credited as "accepted fact."

As Will Rogers said, more or less, "The problem of ignorance isn't so much folks not knowin' things, but folks knowin' things that just aren't true."

* "The Bewappitus" was a length of red semi-rigid whiplike rubber tubing my brother and my friends and I discovered sometime in high school. It was good for bewappitting, that is, hitting people with, but not so hard as to draw blood. It occupied a useful weapon-space in between a nerf bat and an actual bat.

Or maybe closer to a Pimp's Helper, a gym sock filled with nickels and golf balls.

I just remembered that because my brother just emailed me.

posted by Ace at 03:58 PM

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