Mr. Churchill's Aside

"Blackout blues" was New York Timesman Raymond Daniell's phrase for Great Britain's state of mind last week. Members of the War Cabinet went on the stump to give the country a lift, but the first of their speeches to that end--by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill--gave it a laugh instead.

In industrial Manchester's Free Trade Hall, 2,500 citizens listened as the First Lord vaunted that Adolf Hitler had lost the first phase of the war by not launching crushing attacks. Suddenly from the audience came a single shout--for Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Police threw the heckler out. Unruffled, Winston Churchill went on. The time might come, he said, when Britain would take the initiative. "We want Mosley!" came a new shout. Police did their work again. Churchill continued. The shout was repeated.

Manchester's worried Lord Mayor rose from his seat, walked over to apologize to Winston Churchill. "It's all right," the First Lord reassured him--but in a voice loud enough to be picked up by the microphone and hurled to the extremities of the British Empire: "I'll hold them. I have had 40 years' experience addressing many rowdy meetings." Later that day the Berlin short-wave radio gave this critique of the Churchill talk: "His speech was a boisterous tour de force of jingoism mixed with boastful exaggeration and elegant bluff."

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