PREPARING A SPEECH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24448, 6 November 1940, Page 5

PREPARING A SPEECH

In Mr Churchill’s one and only novel, “ Savrola,” the hero, also named Savrola, “a man of vehement, high and daring cast of mind,” is the leader of the democratic party in the Mediterranean State of Laurania. notes “ Peterborough ” in the Daily Telegraph. We see the great orator preparing a speech while smoking many cigarettes. As Mr Churchill told _ it; “Amid the smoke he saw a peroration . a high thought, a fine simile expressed in that correct diction which is comprehensible even to the most illiterate and appeals to the most simple. . . . His ideas began to group themselves into sentences: he mur-

mured to himself; the rhythm of his own language swayed him; instinctively he alliterated.’’ He.begins to scribble it out. Savrola knew that impromptu feats of oratory existed only in the minds of listeners and that "the flowers of rhetoric were not hothouse plants.” I think, “Peterborough ’’ adds, that if Mr Churchill were to explain to-day his method of preparing an important speech it would correspond closely to this description of an orator’s, craftsmanship which he wrote at the age of 22, • ... ■ '!'