Charlotte Gray on “Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons”
/November 30, 2023
Her Excellency Susannah Goshko CMG, the British High Commissioner to Canada, and her husband Matt Goshko, hosted a wonderful reception at Earnscliffe on November 30, 2023 for members of the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Ottawa in honour of the 149th anniversary of the birthday of Sir Winston Churchill.
The evening began with words of greeting from the High Commissioner, followed by a reminder from SWCSO President Ron Cohen that this night was the 12th anniversary of the first Churchill birthday anniversary celebration generously supported by British High Commissioners at Earnscliffe back in 2011. Ron also underscored the close relationship of Churchill with Canada (which he had visited nine times) and Ottawa (which he had visited on six of those trips between 1900 and 1954). He thanked High Commissioner Goshko “for permitting us to bring Sir Winston back to Ottawa in such elegant circumstances.”
There followed “An Appreciation of Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill” by author Andrew Cohen, a Director of the Churchill Society. Referring to his recent experience finding Churchillian books in the oddly placed “Nostalgia” section of a local book fair, he mused about the evocation of the “feeling of wistfulness and sentimentality, [and the] sense of loss and longing” resulting from “the loss of the clarity, authority, eloquence and elegance of the Great Man.” That “flawed, imperfect, temperamental, vulnerable ... giant ... knew the creases in the map of the world, because he had traversed them; he understood the arc of history because he had read it, written it and made it.”
And then the assembled guests were treated to SWCSO Director Charlotte Gray, telling them about her new book (widely viewed as a triumph), Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons, the dual biography of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt, both of whom were born in 1854 in New York City or its environs. No other biographer has knitted together the two stories. It was a delightful, thoughtful, perceptive exploration of the mothers’ fascinatingly dissimilar guidance of their famous sons’ futures. Churchill and Roosevelt did after all become the supremely powerful leaders of the Allies in the nation-threatening Second World War. Charlotte proved that Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons is a fresh, original, superbly researched, intimate, compelling, perceptive and immensely readable history.
Charlotte was thanked by the Hon. David Collenette, Chair of the NATO Association of Canada, longtime Member of Parliament, and SWCSO Director.
