This 45-minute radio documentary is named “William Bourke Cockran - The Irishman Who Made Winston Churchill!”.

Theme of documentary-
On the corner of Fifth Avenue and 58th Street in Manhattan, New York, roughly where Apple’s flagship Fifth Avenue retail store is located today, once stood the home of perhaps the most famous Irishman most people have never heard of. William Bourke Cockran was a Sligo-man from the West of Ireland, who in 1871 at the age of 17 emigrated to the United States. Within a few years he’d become a successful New York lawyer and politician regarded in his day (from the 1880s to the 1920s), as the United States’ greatest orator. He was a trusted adviser to several US presidents and a friend to men of the calibre of Mark Twain.
In the 1890s he became the lover of Jenny Churchill, the mother of Winston Churchill, after her husband died. As a result, when the 19-year-old Winston first visited New York in 1895, he was put up by Cockran. For the next decade or so, Cockran became Churchill’s primary political guru and mentor, especially in oratory. Later in the 1950s, Churchill credited Cockran’s profound influence over him, how he “…inspired me …”, as well as “taught me how to use every note of the human voice like an organ. He was my model.”

In addition, Churchill often used Cockran’s phrases in his own speeches, and in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri in 1946, Churchill paid his Irish-born mentor due credit: “I have often used words which I learned fifty years ago from a great Irish-American orator, a friend of mine, Mr. Bourke Cockran. ‘There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother; she will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice, and peace.’”

This 45-minute radio documentary investigates Cockran’s profound influence over the young Winston Churchill.

* All dramatic narrations of the voice of William Bourke Cockran by Vincent Lavery, who used to work for Bobby Kennedy in the 1960s.