On Tuesday 15 October, 2024 Allen Packwood BA, MPhil (Cantab), FRHistS, OBE, the Director of the Churchill Archive Centre at Churchill College, the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Churchill College, delivered the British-Luxembourg Society’s Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture for 2024 at the Hemicycle on the Kirchberg. 2024 is the 150th anniversary of Sir Winston Churchill’s birth and the 80th anniversary of D-Day. it was, therefore, wholly appropriate for the BLS to invite Allen to give the lecture because he has recently co-authored “Churchill’s D-Day: The Inside Story” with General Sir Richard Dannatt to coincide with the 80th anniversary of D-Day. His lecture was entitled “Churchill’s D-Day: The Tyranny of Overlord”.
Other speakers were Fleur Thomas, British Ambassador to Luxembourg; Cambridge Alumni Louise Benjamin, Vice -President of the BLS, and Sir Nicholas Forwood, KC Patron of the BLS; and Patrick Santer, also Patron of the BLS.
Allen Packwood gave a most interesting and enjoyable lecture, clearly in total mastery of his subject. A central focus of his presentation was that in the public sphere Churchill is rarely mentioned in connection with D-Day, his reputation resting mainly on the events of 1940 rather than those of 1944. When he is mentioned, the narrative is often negative, suggesting that Churchill deliberately delayed and obstructed attempts to stage the cross-Channel assault at an earlier date, thereby unnecessarily prolonging the war and the suffering of countless millions in Europe. The accounts of some of the other major actors have contributed to this. Mr Packwood argued that this is a simplistic and fundamentally incorrect viewpoint. Churchill was aware of the tremendous risks of what was a highly complex and dangerous operation. Operation Overlord was the largest land, sea and air operation ever staged , requiring the most careful planning and execution. It was vital that it succeed, failure would have been catastrophic. Churchill’s intricate thinking, the strength of his instrumental leadership, the precison of his planning and his impeccable timing are revealed by the documents. In his lecture Allen provided a masterful synthesis of the arguments and analysis in his book with Lord Dannatt.
After the lecture Allen took questions from the audience, all of which were very pertinent and interesting, as were his answers.
The lecture was followed by a cocktail.
This is the second year in a row that the Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture has been given by a Cambridge alum – last year it was Baroness Brenda Hale of Richmond – so once again the Society was very pleased to arrange a Lunch for Allen Packwood at the Cercle Münster before he returned to the UK. Eleven alumni, plus Guy Thewes, the Director of the Museums of the Ville de Luxembourg took part. The Cercle Münster provided an excellent lunch with very good food and wines in its pleasant surroundings. Over coffee and petits fours Allen told us about the Churchill Archives Centre and his role in it. It was purpose-built in 1973 on the campus of Churchill College, the National and Commonwealth Memorial to Winston Churchill, to house his Papers – almost 2,500 boxes of letters and documents ranging from his first childhood letters, via his great wartime speeches, to the writings that earned him the Nobel Prize. Allen was part of the team of five archivists who were charged with organising and cataloguing these papers and making them available to researchers and the public. The Churchill Papers served as the inspiration and the starting-point for a larger endeavour – the creation of a wide-ranging archive of the Churchill era and after, covering those fields of public life in which Sir Winston played a personal role or took a personal interest. Today it holds the papers of some 600 important figures and the number is still increasing. The acquisition a few years ago of Margaret Thatcher’s personal and political papers was most significant.
Great thanks are due to Louise Benjamin who on the BLS side ensured the participation of Allen Packwood in the 2024 Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture, and chaperoned him during his visit. We look forward to Allen and Guy Thewes combining for an event and exhibition celebrating Churchill’s visit to Luxembourg in 1946.
