Hi again.
I presume this is an easy question, and it's supposedly a joke.

On the verge of resigning (or probably soon after), the Queen offers a dukedom to Churchill, which he duly rejects. But he says this to Colville:


"I should have to be Duke of Chartwell, and Randolph would be the Marquis of Toodledo."



I gather this is a variant of "Toodle-oo", that is, "bye-bye" or "see you later". If not, I would be saying wrong things in my note to the Spanish reader.


All the best.

Yes I read it that way, (toodle-do being a varient of toodle-oo, ie a parting phrase like bye-bye), although why use that particular word in that context? I suspect Churchill used "Toodle-do" simply as a joke/meaningless word; like saying the Marquis of Wherever, or the Marquis of Nowhere-Town, or the Marquis of Whatsit etc. especially as both he and Randolph had a rather low opinion of the House of Lords (a title would have meant they would have become members of the HoL) as both were streadfast parliamentarians who saw their careers only ever as being in the lower chamber, the House of Commons, where the main 'business' of government was/is conducted. However wasn't that offer of a peerage made to him shortly after he'd had a heart attack, and accordingly there was secret discussion about whether he would be able to continue as PM? Is that significant? Probably not as the 'joke' would work better if he'd said that he himself would have to be the Duke of Toodle-do, ie Duke of Goodbye, signifying his exit from a long political life in the House of Commons.

That's your influence - you've got me looking for allusion and hidden significance where probably none was ever originally intended.

I agree, totally. I think all these hidden meanings are tacitly there, for sure. I hadn't seen the one of his own "exit" (and I think you have a good point here), both from politics and life itself (early on, these days, Clementine said her husband's retirement from politics would be his "first death" (the physical inevitable one, with christian and jewish eschatology seeing a second one, eg, the —evitable— annihiliation of the soul of hard sinners…). Furthermore, his at least two strokes (the last one quite serious, having him two months incapacitated) seemed to speak at the time for a quick and fatal deterioration…

In this case, the sole possibility of indicating to the Spanish reader that Churchill is saying "marquis of bye-bye" makes the statement sound simultaneously funny and pensive, a dimension I wanted to make explicit in the translation.

Take care, Meles meles.

We should also remember that the "Marquis of Toodledo" quote, like many others, is based on one person's memory of something said privately - in this case wasn't it said to Colville (Churchill's Principal Private Secretary - ie a senior civil servant) but only recorded in Colville's personal diary. Doubtless Colville - just like Churchill himself - 'polished' the wording of some his diary entries, to make them sound better, or wittier, or more succinct, or more poignant, with the benefit of hindsight when he reviewed them for publication some years after the actual events. There again, Colville, might have failed to pick up on the implied humour (or otherwise) of what Churchill was saying; or that Churchill, for all his quick wit, didn't quite get his 'joke' completely right in his off-the-cuff remark.

It has been discussed somewhere here before but Churchill was certainly prone to embellishing the way his words and image would be seen for posterity, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, and sometimes these were at variance with what he had originally said. The way some of his more famous speeches are remembered/recorded is somewhat different to the way they were actually first made. His better-known wartime speeches to Parliament or those broadcast on the radio were only recorded as an audio record (onto gramaphone disks) much later after the war. In the case of his addresses to Parliament, his words were recorded at the time by the official stenographers and were duly published shortly after in Hansard (the official record of Parliamentary debates) and this record often has different wording to the way Churchill eventually recorded them in his memoirs and on audio vinyl disk. Also like the minutes of any committee or business meeting, the official record does not necessarily replicate exactly what was actually said at the time: