Did Churchill say: “Sometimes you have to fake a shipwreck to get the rats to escape”?

In the Russian-language segment of the Internet you can find a quote about traitors attributed to a British politician. We have verified the correctness of this attribution.

Users sign this quote in the name of Churchill Facebook, Instagram, "VKontakte"and other social networks. In October 2022, Speaker of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation Valentina Matvienko referred to her, commenting on the behavior of compatriots who criticize the actions of the Russian authorities from abroad: “If they water their Fatherland like this, then let them stay there, if they feel good there, let them not return to us. Churchill’s statement probably applies to them: “Sometimes you have to simulate a shipwreck so that the rats will run away.” In a similar context, a quote was given by a member of the Council on Interethnic Relations under the President of the Russian Federation Bogdan Bezpalko and head of the Center for Resolution of Social Conflicts Oleg Ivanov. But a Ukrainian lawyer and blogger Rostislav Kravets in mid-February 2022, he used it in a post about the mass exodus of Verkhovna Rada deputies and civil servants amid rumors of an impending Russian invasion.

Winston Churchill is one of the most frequently quoted politicians in history. The downside of such popularity is the large number of quotes falsely attributed to him, some of which have already sorted it out "Checked." Special selection There are also such statements on the website of the International Churchill Society. However, neither there nor in search database Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge (more than 800,000 pages of documents are available there), nor on other authoritative websites, related to the legacy of the former British prime minister, we did not find quotes that are even slightly similar to the one being analyzed.

At the same time, Churchill certainly knew old idiom about rats fleeing a sinking ship, and I used it more than once. For example, that's exactly how he described Britons who emigrated to Canada shortly after the end of the Second World War, and one Conservative MP, who gathered for the election from the Liberals, named the only rat swimming towards a sinking ship.

Moreover, “Verified” did not find any examples in Western sources where Churchill was even credited with a quote about the need to simulate a shipwreck. In the Russian-language segment of the Web, this attribution appears around 2020, although the phrase itself - without attribution - has been known at least since 2005, when it was published in "Alive magazine" It is not found in earlier printed editions presented in the Google Books project database.

Judging by open sources, the statement being verified is not very popular in English at all. In a slightly different form (with reference not to imitation, but to the real sinking of a ship), the phrase is more or less actively spreads only since the beginning of the 2020s. This version is much more popular in Germanwhere she became commonly used proverb. There the saying is known in two versions: “Sometimes, to get rid of rats, you have to sink a ship” (attributed to the Austrian writer Alfred Polgar) and “Often there is nothing left to do but sink the ship and learn to swim in order to get rid of the rats” (attributed to a German doctor and aphorist Gerhard Uhlenbruck).

On the other hand, throughout the 20th century the idiom “Burn ship for the sake of Togoto get rid of rats" (in some cases vessel was supposed sink). It means “to lose something valuable in pursuit of an insignificant goal,” that is, it carries a completely different meaning. A rare example when a statement about the sinking of a ship was named advice, appears in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin for 1954, but even there this advice is characterized as not harmless.

Thus, the aphorism about faking a shipwreck to get rid of rats is definitely not the work of Winston Churchill and, most likely, did not originate in Great Britain. A similar saying has been known in German since at least the mid-20th century.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons

Incorrect quote attribution

What do our verdicts mean?

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