| "Churchill's Pet Unmasked" - National Post, Jan. 23/04 (long) - CLICK HERE for the Pet Manual Forum Home Page |
| Linda Ambrose-Bates |
Xref: 127.0.0.1 rec.pets.birds:200781
This article was in today's "National Post". Hope you find it
entertaining.
--
Linda
~*~*~*~*~
Charlie The Parrot's Finest Hour Is Up
-- by Mary Vallis
Winston Churchill's parrot is dead.
It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the
curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible.
It is, as John Cleese put it in the famous Monty Python skit, an
ex-parrot.
In a purported "exclusive", a British tabloid this week claimed it had
discovered Churchill's parrot, Charlie, alive and well at a garden
centre in Surrey, England. At 104 years old, the "Daily Mirror"
reported, it was still cursing the Nazis.
"Her favourite sayings were 'F*** Hitler' and 'F*** the Nazis,'" the
paper reported. And even today, 38 years after the great man's death,
she can still be coaxed into repeating them with that unmistakable
Churchillian inflection."
The story was too good to pass up. Newspapers and television stations
worldwide eagerly repeated it alongside vibrant shots of Charllie, a
scruffy blue and yellow macaw with a nasty habit of plucking out her
breast feathers.
But the news is not new, nor does it appear to be true. Churchill
experts and the former prime minister's daughter refute the tale.
"The truth is that it is not Sir Winston's parrot," said Judith Seaward,
marketing manager at the National Trust's Chartwell property,
Churchill's former country home in Kent. "He did have a grey African
parrot at one stage, but not the macaw."
Ms. Seaward told the "National Post" the African grey died while it was
still in Churchill's care.
The National Trust has no records of a macaw matching Charlie's
descriptions. Ms. Seaward stressed Churchill was indeed an animal lover
who had a poodle named Rufus and kept ducks and black swans at
Chartwell. He also had a budgie named Toby that would have breakfast
with him and perch on his books. Churchill often wore one of the bird's
feathers in his cap.
Churchill also stipulated there must always be a marmalade cat at
Chartwell after his death (the current resident is Jock III).
But there was no macaw. Lady Soames, Churchill's 82-year-old daughter,
publicly denied its existence this week.
"I'm fed up with this story that my father taught it rude words," she
told the "Daily Mirror". "He only ever had an African grey parrot and it
certainly did not talk."
Reports of Charlie, the ageing foul-mouthed parrot, first surfaced a few
years ago. Peter Oram has repeatedly claimed his father-in-law, Percy
Dabner, sold Charlie to the former prime minister in 1937. As the story
goes, Charlie was Churchill's constant companion during the Second World
War, and even attended crisis meetings. Churchill encouraged it to swear.
Mr. Oram says he bought the bird from Chartwell when Churchill died in
1965. The bird now lives at his gardening centre, Heathfield Nurseries,
in Reigate, Surrey.
Mr. Oram, 77, was not available for comment yesterday. He fled England
early for a holiday in Gambia when the news media descended this week.
According to his son, Mark, who grew up with Charlie, the bird does
swear -- but it does not say "Hitler" or "Nazis".
"It doesn't say that at all," said Mark Oram, who fears for the bird's
safety. "With each story, it seems to have gotten blown out of
proportion."
He said he could not confirm his father's story because the events
transpired before he was born.
Lady Soames also refuted the story in a 2002 letter to the "Finest
Hour", a quarterly journal published by the Churchill Centre in
Washington, D.C. In it, she says the African grey parrot Churchill
actually owned lived in a cage in the dining room at Chartwell during
the war, far from Churchill.
"As Lady Soames says, to think that he would spend his time as a war
leader training a parrot to swear is ridiculous," said Dan Myers, the
Churchill Centre's executive director. "And it's totally out of
character, too. Churchill was not known as a man who swears. It's a
story that plays well, but it just ain't true."
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| John Hines |
Linda Ambrose-Bates <irixazul@videotron.ca> wrote:
>This article was in today's "National Post". Hope you find it
>entertaining.
Yes, great followup.
Charlie is still a old B&G, who obviously was around people that did
cuss, during the war.
A reminder to teach your birds nice things to say, as they have long
life ahead of them.
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