Missouri College a Center of Churchill Studies

This tiny town in the green rolling hills of Missouri is a leading center of British culture and history--all because of a speech Winston Churchill delivered here six months after the end of World War II.

It was on March 5, 1946, in an address at Westminster College, that the wartime prime minister of Great Britain warned of Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe and coined the term Iron Curtain to describe the political and ideological barrier emerging between the Soviet Bloc and the West.

“From Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) on the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended upon the Continent,” he said, alerting the world to the imminent cold war. “Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. . . . All subject not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in many cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

It was Churchill’s most famous postwar public address. But what was he doing in this obscure town of 10,000 people, delivering a major speech at a little-known liberal arts school?

Franc L. McCluer, then president of the private, nonsectarian school founded in 1851, had invited Churchill to be part of the John Findley Green Foundation lecture series. An annual program designed to promote understanding of economic and social problems of international concern, it was established as a memorial to a St. Louis attorney who graduated from Westminster in 1884.

Harry Vaughan, a Westminster graduate then serving on Harry Truman’s White House staff, asked the President if he would like to add a postscript to the invitation, eliciting the following note: “This is a wonderful school in my home state. Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you.”

Indeed, Churchill, who had lost leadership of Parliament a few months earlier, came and Truman introduced him. It was the biggest day in Fulton’s history, marked by a plaque in the auditorium where Churchill spoke.

Fifteen years later Westminster’s then-president Robert Davidson was reading a Life magazine story about several bombed-out London churches slated for demolition when he, too, had a seemingly far-fetched idea: Wouldn’t it be nice to reconstruct one of the churches in Fulton as a memorial to Winston Churchill’s visit?

Importing a church proved easier than Davidson expected. The Diocese of London offered to give the Missouri college the Church of St. Mary, Aldermanbury, a 13th-Century structure that had been destroyed by the great fire of London in 1666 and redesigned and rebuilt by Christopher Wren in 1677.

All that remained of the church after the World War II London blitz by the Nazis were the exterior walls, the bell tower and 12 stone columns. The remnants were razed stone by stone, each marked for reassembling, and transported 4,500 miles by ship and train to Fulton. Donors paid the $3-million restoration cost.

Today the gleaming limestone church is the campus chapel and centerpiece for the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library, the only center in the United States devoted to the study of Churchill’s life. The museum and library in the basement is filled with an array of exhibits, including original oil paintings, Churchill’s letter and manuscripts and photographs, published works and memorabilia pertaining to the British leader.

Every year British authorities on Churchill visit and speak on campus. Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s private secretary for 13 years, gave the commencement address this year. Philip Ziegler, the Earl of Mountbatten’s biographer who has been commissioned to write Edward VIII’s official biography, spoke on campus this year as did Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s biographer.