Churchill vs. Publishers

The decision of Messrs. Nash and Grayson, publishers of Captain Peter Wright's Portraits and Criticisms (TIME, Aug. 3), to change "to pursue and possess every sort of woman" into "to pursue every sort of woman" not only pleased Lord Gladstone, whose father, the late Premier William Ewart

Gladstone, is the subject of the above discourse, but created a precedent of which Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston S. Churchill was not slow to take advantage.

Mr. Churchill called upon the same publishers to withdraw from circulation the anonymous volume entitled Uncensored Recollections.* He made this demand in defense of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, whom he claimed had been much maligned.

One of the authors of this volume-- there are two of them--declared that Lord Randolph "rose to the top of the tree by liberal use of insolence"; that "from the viewpoint of ability, character and brains Randolph was quite of the ordinary class, vastly inferior to his brother and without the genius, high courage and splendid patriotism of his son Winston. His notoriety was obtained by one endowment only--insolence, of the heavy 'made-in-Germany' kind." Churchill senior was viewed as a man who evinced "nothing but the increasing desire to eat, drink and sleep a great deal."

It may have been quite natural for Mr. Churchill to be annoyed, but, as the publishers pointed out, it was a bit late to call for the suppression of a book which has had a wide circulation and which was printed in England two years ago.

*Reviewed by TIME, Sept 1, New Books (foreign).