WE WISH YOU A MAGNANIMOUS NEW YEAR!

On New Year’s Eve 1949, Winston and Clementine Churchill hosted a dinner in Paris for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It is most revealing that Churchill pursued his friendship, postwar, with the Hitler-sympathizing, abdicated-King, whom he had viewed as such a threat to the Allied cause during the war that Churchill forcibly had exiled him for the duration to the Bahamas. Churchill’s steadfast efforts to avert the former-Prince of Wales’s abdication in 1936 to marry the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, nearly had destroyed Churchill’s career.

And yet, with the war’s conclusion, Churchill renewed their relationship. Following the New Year’s Eve Paris dinner, the Churchills and the Windsors took the night train to Monte Carlo, where they took up residence at the Hotel de Paris, joined by the Churchill’s daughter, Sarah (and her new beau, Antony Beauchamp). The following night, January 1, 1949, the Churchills and the Windsors dined at the Monte Carlo Sporting Club. A New Year’s Eve menu card from that dinner once passed through our shop. It was signed by all concerned in pencil: “W. Churchill,” “Clementine S. Churchill,” “Sarah Oliver” [Sarah Churchill’s married name], “Westminster” [Churchill’s lifelong chum, “Bendor,” The Duke of Westminster], “Wallis Windsor,” “Anne W. Westminster” [The Duke’s fourth wife] and “Edward Duke of Windsor.” The once-folded card contained the Restaurant Du Sporting Club’s full dinner menu for “Nouvel An 1948-1949.”  It also bore silent testament to Winston Churchill’s magnanimity.

We wish you a New Year of magnanimity,
one of Winston Churchill’s finest qualities.