Thomas Raddall Selected Correspondence: An Electronic Edition


About the electronic version

Copyright 2000. Dalhousie University.

PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Edwin K. Ford, 17 January 1959. MS-2-202 41.21.

Subject Headings

Summary

Raddall outlines the genesis and publication history of his phrase "blood, sweat, and tears" to describe war in response to a letter from Edwin Ford, Provincial Director of Vocational Education. Raddall goes on to relate that although he had never been able to confirm Winston Churchill had been influenced by reading his phrase in his short story, "At the Tide's Turn", in Blackwood's Magazine (Nov. 1939), he had always wondered if Churchill's use of a very similar phrase in his famous inspirational speech delivered in the British House of Commons on May 13,1940, was just a coincidence.

January 17th, 1959



Dear Edwin,
     You're not the first to notice the coincid-
ence and to ask the same question. Here's the answer.

I wrote "At The Tide's Turn" in the early autumn of 1939,
and on November 1 I received a letter from Blackwood's
Magazine accepting it and enclosing a cheque for �27 in
payment. They published it some time between then and
January 1940. (I can't find my old copy of the magazine,
but my Blackwood tales usually appeared about two months
after acceptance, never more than three.)

     The phrase, "blood in that change, and sweat and
tears" came to my mind from nowhere -- possibly a memory
of boyhood Sunday School lessons about Christ's passion.1
Anyhow it expressed exactly what was in "Bunt's" mind
and I wrote it down. Years later (1947) the tale re-
appeared in the collection of my magazine tales called
"The Wedding Gift", published by McClelland & Stewart.

     Mr. Churchill,2 as you know, came to the Prime Minister's
office in May 1940, succeeding Chamberlain.3 On May 13 he
uttered his famous reference to "blood, sweat and tears."4
Maybe he, too, remembered his Sunday School lessons.
I understand he has been a lifelong subscriber to Black-
wood's Magazine, and if he had any time for reading in
that black spring of 1940 he must have read my story.

I've often been tempted to write and ask him where he got
that phrase, but it seemed presumptuous and I never did.
I still wonder.
With every regard,





Edwin K. Ford, Esq.










Annotations

1. "And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." (Luke 22.44)

2. Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), soldier, statesman, and historian, was Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War II from 1940 to 1945 and later from 1951 to 1955.

3. Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940), businessman and statesman, was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1937 to 1940.

4. "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat." Churchill's first statement as Prime Minister, House of Commons, 13 May 1940. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations 16th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1992), 620. Similar phrasing was also used by John Donne and George Gordon, Lord Byron (both major British poets), according to this source.