Winston Churchill
‘I avow my hope and faith…’

Lithograph
61 x 46 cm

‘I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will, for their own safety and the good of all, walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace.’

Winston Churchill uttered these words during an address, ‘before a Joint Session of Congress,’ on the 26th of December, 1941.

To put this piece into context, in the days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the United States formally entered the Second World War, marking the end of Britain’s solitary stand against Hitler’s Germany, which it had sustained since the fall of France. Churchill immediately decided to travel to the United States, and on December 12, 1941 began the 10-day trip across the Atlantic. Churchill then addressed the U.S. Congress on the 26th and the Canadian Parliament on the 30th.

Churchill’s speech to Congress was sober, resolved, and eloquently defiant, but of course also featured the sparkle of Churchillian wit, irrepressible even in the dark hours of the war and the speech went down in history.