Talk:Ralph Wigram

Churchill's sources
Hi, I'm going to delete mention of Creswell (whom I have a half-completed article on offline, by the way) and that other person because there were in fact many others, and although I could add the names I don't want to get into listing all of them in an article about Wigram. I only mentioned the two I did because I was quoting Gilbert's conclusion - if you think it would be better to leave them out too, and just say that Gilbert said Wigram was one of the three main ones, without naming them, that's fine with me.

I'm not sure where the complete list should go - it's a bit too much detail to put into the Churchill article, which is already quite long - perhaps a new page on Churchill's sources and/or the anti-appeasment movement in the Pre-WWII UK is in order, which we could then reference from the Churchill page? Noel (talk) 23:45, 8 May 2005 (UTC)


 * I dropped the names in because they were the ones mentioned in the sources I found. I'll re-search the sources and see where they came from. A page for a list of his sources sounds like a good place (you're right they probably don't belong here, but I also didn't know where to put them).   &#8212; KayEss | talk 05:16, 9 May 2005 (UTC)


 * After pondering it for a while, I think the Right Thing is a page about the British anti-appeasment movement in the 1930's - we could add links to that page from Churchill, appeasement, here, etc. Information about the group of people who provided info to Churchill would be a subsection of that. I've been re-reading Manchester (The Last Lion) and it gives good enough coverage of the anti-appeasement movement for the initial version of a Wikipedia page on it. Noel (talk) 17:43, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Odd facts
There are two odd bits on this. One is minor - my source said that Squadron Leader Charles Torr Anderson and not Wing-Commander. Maybe one is where he ended up and the other is where he was at the time? Probably not a big problem. &#8212; KayEss | talk 05:28, 9 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Probably a normal promotion, sometime in the 1930s. The mini-bio of him in Gilbert (Prophet of Truth) doesn't give a date for that promotion, but does record that he was promoted to Group Captain in 1940. I wouldn't worry about it. Noel (talk) 17:43, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Slightly more interesting is that one of the sources I had said that Churchill was a Privy Counsellor, but he's not on the Wikipedia list. Whether he was or not changes the potential legality of what Wigram was doing. &#8212; KayEss | talk 05:28, 9 May 2005 (UTC)


 * That's because Winston was appointed in 1907, under King Edward VII, see List of Privy Counsellors (1901-1910); the page you listed only covers 1910-1936. Although technically Churchill's PC membership would have lapsed on the death of Edward VII in 1910, in practise all existing PC's were all re-appointed by the new sovereign (see Privy Council). Noel (talk) 17:43, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Mass deletion
To the person who deleted a large block of material because we didn't 'jump to it' to provide phrase-by-phrase source notes at the drop of a hat: you need to understand that a lot of content on Wikipedia was written before the modern sourcing rules were put in place (and we also have lives, with other things to do than go back and add footnotes to stuff that was written many years ago).

In this particular case, information on him was hard to find when I first did the article on him, and it was pastiched together from dribs and drabs from a large number of sources. However, even then, they were all listed: see this old version for proof of this assertion.

So, for instance, the "letter from Henry Pelling" saying he committed suicide is from Manchester (pg. 193, Little, Brown hardback first edition), which is also the source for a number of other points (e.g. the report that their child suffered from Down's Syndrome); the report that he died in his wife's arms is from Gilbert (pg. 833, Minerva paperback edition of 1990). The report that he was found dead at home was from an article in the Guardian, which is also the source of the report of the son having cerebral palsy, the death certificate listing the cause of death as pulmonary haemorrhage, his parents not attending his funeral, etc.

The fact that these sources don't all agree, on any number of points, is something I could not overcome. They are all reputable: Gilbert is Churchill's official biographer, Manchester is well thought of (and his volume is fully footnoted as to sources), and the Guardian is a major English newspaper (and not a low-brow one). So I threw up my hands and wrote 'sources differ'.

When I get a chance (unless someone else does it for me), I will add these individual footnotes. Until then, if you want sources for statements, you could always try looking in the sources that are listed. Noel (talk) 04:46, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

I have added all the requested citations. To avoid putting them in the middle of sentences, they are all at the end of the sentence; feel free to move them to the middle if you feel it's necessary. If a sentence says 'Some say A, others B', the citation for A is given first after the sentence, followed by that for B. Noel (talk) 02:28, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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Death cause
Wigram has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, stating his cause of death, which (speaking from memory of a number of years ago reading it) was, I thought, coronary thrombosis. Had he committed suicide there would have been a publicly published inquest in at least a local newspaper, although it might have been given an 'open verdict' by the coroner.Cloptonson (talk) 08:42, 29 April 2022 (UTC)