Just as Olivier, as James Tyrone, climbed onto the table and was about to unscrew the light bulb to save on electricity, there was a general power failure in the West End. As Olivier reached up the lights in the theatre went out, blackening it completely. There was dead silence, then loud applause from the house at the power of his acting. It went on for what seemed an eternity until the emergency diesel generator kicked in and the lights came on dimly. It was one of the most electrifying moments in my theatre-going life.

Philip Drew, Annandale, NSW

Cleaning it up

Dear Editor,

I am rarely roused to anger by a review so usefully controversial as John Thompson’s writing on Germaine Greer’s White Beech: The Rainforest Years (February 2014), but here I am spitting chips. Your reviewer pays due credit to Dr Greer’s dedication in restoring sixty hectares of degraded rainforest to its rightful health, but judges her colossal effort as ‘piecemeal’ and sees public policy as the solution to conservation.

I write as a dedicated conservationist who has lapsed into frail old age secure in the conviction that saving a single bare acre from weeds and erosion was worth the effort of my younger years.

Dr Greer has enabled the great white beech to flower again. I can recall my own emotion when I found a koala munching on a swamp mahogany I had planted ten years earlier on my bare acre. I have faith in individuals, as does Germaine Greer. Individuals made the mess, and individuals can clean it up, piecemeal as you like.

Joy Foster, Seaham, NSW

No Pushover

Dear Editor,

In his review, Robin Prior offers an astonishingly – I might almost say delightfully – perverse misreading of my book The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches (March 2014). In response, I must content myself with addressing just a few of the issues he raises.

First, Prior asks which serious scholar has asserted that Churchill’s speeches made the decisive difference to Britain’s willingness to fight on. I offer him the respected military historian John Keegan, who wrote: ‘In 1940 he [Churchill] had swayed the outcome of the invasion summer with such oratory as “Their Finest Hour”.’ This, I suggest, coincides with the popular image, which few historians have challenged, even though many of them (as I point out in the book) are more cautious in their phraseology than Keegan.

Second, the 4 June 1940 ‘fight on the beaches’ speech. It is worth quoting the following day’s Home Intelligence report at length: ‘The grave tone of Churchill’s speech made some impression and may have contributed in some measure to the rather pessimistic atmosphere of today. It should be remarked, however, that only the Daily Mirror and the [communist] Daily Worker gave Churchill’s speech headline value (“We Never Surrender”, “Not Blind to Colossal Military Disaster”). The contents of the speech were on the whole expected but some apprehension has been caused throughout the country on account of the PM’s reference to “fighting alone”. This has led to some slight increase in doubt about the intentions of our ally.’

Prior asks, ‘Where is the negativity?’ But I nowhere assert that the reactions to this speech were negative (although they were certainly rather downbeat), rather that they were complex, and that, in the circumstances, this was not surprising. Again, this complicated picture contrasts with the overly simplistic one with which we are so often presented.

Third, the Gallup poll: contrary to Prior’s repeated suggestions, I nowhere suggest that Churchill was unpopular, only that his popularity was substantially more qualified than this one simple measure would suggest. As I point out in my introduction, Churchill’s Gallup ratings ‘must be read in the light of the fact that he scored 83% satisfaction in May 1945 and yet lost the general election heavily that July, after a campaign based very much around his own personality’. The broader point, though, is that the Yes/No binary of the satisfaction survey tells us little about the reactions to the speeches – the subject of my book – which requires examination of qualitative material.

Finally, Prior implies that the book was intended to ‘dent the reputation of Churchill and his speeches’. But – with the exception of the obvious misfires, of which there were a few – I do not criticise the speeches, nor indeed Churchill himself. Instead, I simply point out that his oratory generated more criticism and controversy than is generally believed. I do not see that this in any way casts him in a bad light; that’s just politics. But we do not do justice to Churchill’s highly impressive rhetorical achievements by suggesting that his audience was somehow a pushover.

Richard Toye, University of Exeter