June 2006

Ditchley Park

Ditchley Park, Enstone, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire

Though I didn’t make the short drive from Oxford on Saturday afternoon to see Ditchley Park, I recently read an interesting story about it in the Churchill biography by Roy Jenkins.

I’ve always heard that Ditchley Park was offered to Churchill during W.W.I.I. because the weekend house for use by serving Prime Minister’s, Chequers:

“in its Buckinghamshire hollow, was held to be unacceptably vulnerable at the time on the month ‘when the moon was high’”.

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Chartwell, Westerham, Kent

We had a visit to Churchill’s beloved Chartwell on Wednesday morning. One of his private secretaries related a delightful story about each time the PM would arrive at the gates of the driveway. As one makes the final stretch of the drive, you come up a hill and then wind down and around several bends with the roofline of Chartwell finally appearing through the trees. Each time they were on this final part of the winding drive, cigars and papers would be flying everywhere around the car; once they reached the gates of Chartwell, Sir Winston would always repeat the words, “Ah, Chartwell!”

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