“A House of Many Mansions”

The New Testament Gospel according to St. John, Chapter 14, contains an inspiring passage that the young Winston must have read and re-read as a boy:

1.  Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.

2.  In my Father s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.

I go to prepare a place for you.

3.  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

4.  And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.

Churchill particularly liked verse 2, “a house of many mansions”, and used it during five important moments in his career. An excellent early instance was in Dundee, Scotland, in May 1908, which he won and would hold for fourteen years. Here he spoke of the broadness and diversity of the British Commonwealth and Empire:

Cologne Cathedral took 600 years to build. Generations of architects and builders lived and died while the work was in progress. Still the work went on. Sometimes a generation built wrongly, and the next generation had to unbuild, and the next generation had to build again. Still the work went on through all the centuries, till at last there stood forth to the world a mighty monument of beauty and of truth to command the admiration and inspire the reverence of mankind. So let it be with the British Commonwealth.

Let us build wisely, let us build surely, let us build faithfully, let us build, not for the moment but for future years, seeking to establish here below what we hope to find above - a house of many mansions, where there shall be room for all.168

The thought remained with him three years later, when as Home Secretary he said in London:

The British Empire must be a house of many mansions, in which there shall be room for each and all to develop to the fullest his personal or national contribution to the common united welfare and to the strength of the indivisible whole.169

The words from St. John lodged comfortably in his commodious memory for almost thirty years before Churchill found need of them again, to assure the peoples under the Nazi boot that liberation was sure:

The day will come when the joybells will ring again throughout Europe, and when victorious nations, masters not only of their foes, but of themselves, will plan and build in justice, in tradition, and in freedom, a house of many mansions where there will be room for all.170

He certainly thought this a serviceable line, because he invoked it to President Roosevelt in 1943, quoting only the chapter and verse - for he knew FDR kept a Bible handy. The President had cabled that Cairo, their proposed meeting place before the Teheran Conference with Stalin, was vulnerable to German air attack, and had wondered if they should choose another rendezvous. Churchill replied in nine words: “See St. John, chapter 14, verses 1 to 4.”171

The text of the verses (see the beginning of this appendix) was typed on the message by his Map Room staff. “On reading this through more carefully after it had gone,” Churchill wrote, “I was a little concerned lest, apart from a shadow of unintended profanity, it should be thought I was taking too much upon myself and thus giving offence. However, the President brushed all objections aside and our plans were continued, unchanged.”172

Again at Fulton in 1946, in perhaps his most crucial speech of the post-war years, Churchill argued for a continuation of the Anglo-American “special relationship”. There was nothing in the United Nations Charter, he said, that precluded any special relationships between countries:

The British have an alliance with Portugal unbroken since 1384, and which produced fruitful results at critical moments in the late war. None of these clash with the general interest of a world agreement, or a world organisation; on the contrary they help it.

“In my father’s house are many mansions.” Special associations between members of the United Nations which have no aggressive point against any other country, which harbour no design incompatible with the Charter of the United Nations, far from being harmful, are beneficial and, as I believe, indispensable.