Chapter One
Young Thruster
Of all the towering figures of the
twentieth century, both good and evil, Winston Churchill was the
most valuable to humanity, and also the most likable. It is a joy
to write his life, and to read about it. None holds more lessons,
especially for youth: How to use a difficult childhood. How to
seize eagerly on all opportunities, physical, moral, and
intellectual. How to dare greatly, to reinforce success, and to put
the inevitable failures behind you. And how, while pursuing
vaulting ambition with energy and relish, to cultivate also
friendship, generosity, compassion, and decency.
No man did more to preserve freedom and democracy
and the values we hold dear in the West. None provided more public
entertainment with his dramatic ups and downs, his noble oratory,
his powerful writings and sayings, his flashes of rage, and his
sunbeams of wit. He took a prominent place on the public stage of
his country and the world for over sixty years, and it seemed empty
with his departure. Nor has anyone since combined so felicitously
such a powerful variety of roles. How did one man do so much, for
so long, and so effectively? As a young politician, he found
himself sitting at dinner next to Violet Asquith, daughter of the
then chancellor of the exchequer. Responding to her question, he
announced: “We are all worms. But I really think I am a glow worm.”
Why did he glow so ardently? Let us inquire.
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on
November 30, 1874. His parents were Lord Randolph Churchill,
younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, and Jennie, second of
the four daughters of Leonard Jerome, financier, of Chicago and New
York. The birth was due to take place in London, in a Mayfair
mansion the young couple had taken, where all was prepared. But
during a visit to Blenheim Palace, Lord Randolph’s home, Jennie had
a fall, and her child was born two months prematurely in a
ground-floor bedroom at the palace, hastily got ready. Thus the
characteristic note was struck: the unexpected, haste, risk,
danger, and drama. The birth pangs were eight hours long and
exhausting, but the child was “very healthy,” also “wonderfully
pretty.” He had red hair, described as “the colour of a bronze
putter,” fair, pink skin, and strong lungs. He later boasted that
his skin was exceptionally delicate and forced him always to wear
silk next to it. He claimed he had never owned or worn a pair of
pajamas in his life. Like his mother, he was active and impulsive
and so accident prone, but of organic disease he was little
troubled for most of a long life. Though he suffered from deafness
in old age, he had no disabilities other than a slight lisp (almost
undetectable on recordings). For this reason he took great care of
his teeth. He went to the best dentist of his time, Sir Wilfred
Fish, who designed his dentures, which were made by the outstanding
technician Derek Cudlipp. (They are preserved in London’s Royal
College of Surgeons Museum.) He also took care of his health,
appointing, as soon as he was able, a personal physician, Charles
McMoran Wilson, whom he made Lord Moran (Fish was rewarded with a
knighthood). Churchill also ate heartily, especially steak, sole,
and oysters. He daily sipped large quantities of whiskey or brandy,
heavily diluted with water or soda. Despite this, his liver,
inspected after his death, was found to be as perfect as a young
child’s. Churchill was capable of tremendous physical and
intellectual efforts, of high intensity over long periods, often
with little sleep. But he had corresponding powers of relaxation,
filled with a variety of pleasurable occupations, and he also had
the gift of taking short naps when time permitted. Again, when
possible, he spent his mornings in bed, telephoning, dictating, and
receiving visitors. In 1946, when I was seventeen, I had the good
fortune to ask him a question: “Mr. Churchill, sir, to what do you
attribute your success in life?” Without pause or hesitation, he
replied: “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit
down, and never sit down when you can lie down.” He then got into
his limo.
This vivacious and healthy child was the elder of
two sons born to remarkable parents. The father, Lord Randolph
Churchill (1849-95), was educated at Eton and Merton College,
Oxford. He was MP for the family borough of Woodstock, just outside
Blenheim Palace, for the decade 1874-85, and then for South
Padding-ton in London until his death. His political life was
meteoric, turbulent, and punctuated by spectacular rows. With a few
discontented colleagues, he founded a pressure group advocating
more vigorous opposition to the Liberal majority (1880-84) and
espousing what he called “Tory Democracy.” But, asked what it stood
for, he privately replied: “Oh, opportunism, mostly.” He also
opposed Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule policy, which would have made
Protestant Ulster submit to an all-Ireland Catholic majority, with
the inflammatory slogan “Ulster will fight—and Ulster will be
right.” He was an impressive speaker, and by the mid-1880s he was
one of only four politicians whose speeches the Central News Agency
correspondents had orders to repeat in full, the other three being
Glad-stone himself, Lord Salisbury, the Tory leader, and the
dynamic radical-imperialist Joseph Chamberlain. The years 1885-86
marked the apex of Lord Randolph’s career. He was first secretary
of state for India, and then for six months chancellor of the
exchequer. But while preparing his first budget he had a deadly row
over spending with the prime minister. Salisbury was supported by
the rest of the cabinet, and Lord Randolph resigned, discovering in
the process that he had grotesquely overplayed his hand. It was a
case of the dog barking but the caravan moving on. He never
recovered from this mistake. At the same time, a mysterious and
progressive illness began to affect him. Some believed it was
syphilis, others a form of mental corrosion inherited from his
mother’s branch of the family, the Londonderrys. Gradually his
speeches became confused and halting and painful to listen to,
until death in 1895 drew a merciful curtain over his shattered
career. Winston was only twenty when his father died, and was
haunted by this tragic final phase until he exorcised the ghost by
writing a magnificent two-volume biography, transforming his father
into one of the great tragic figures of English political history.
It was a further source of unhappiness for Winston that he had seen
so little of his father, first so busy, then so stricken. He
remembered every word of the few personal conversations he had had
with him.
How much Winston inherited from his father, good or
bad, is a matter of opinion. Mine is: not much. Indeed there was
little of the Churchills in him. They were, on the whole, an
unremarkable lot. Even the founder, John, 1st Duke of Marlborough,
might, in the view of King Charles II, a shrewd judge of men, have
remained a quiet country gentleman had he not been stirred into
activity by his astounding and ambitious wife, Sarah Jennings. Of
his successors, none achieved distinction. Five of the first seven
dukes were victims of pathological depression. Winston, it is true,
complained of periodic dark moods, which he called “the Black Dog.”
But these were occasioned by actual reverses, and were soon
dispersed by vigorous activity. His father’s extremism and his
judgments were often quoted against him during his own career, and
there were a few occasions when he went too far and was severely
punished for it. But in general, he learned from Lord Randolph’s
mistakes and pulled back from the brink. Nor was there ever any
sign of the mental breakdown which slowly took possession of his
father. Until his late eighties, Winston remained in full
possession of his faculties despite a general physical
decline.
It was, rather, from his mother that Winston
derived his salient characteristics: energy, a love of adventure,
ambition, a sinuous intellect, warm feelings, courage and
resilience, and a huge passion for life in all its aspects. His aim
to be the most important politician in Westminster was a male
projection of her intense desire to be the desirable lady in
Mayfair. She kept and held this title for a decade or more, not
just because of the sheer physical allure of face and figure but
because she looked, moved, talked, laughed, and danced with almost
diabolical magic. She said later: “I shall never get used to not
being the most beautiful woman in the room.” It was an intoxication
to sweep in and know every man had turned his head. She was also
very much an American. She believed the sky was the limit, that
everything was possible, that tradition, precedents, the “right”
way of doing things could always be ignored when ambition demanded.
She loved high risks and did not weep—for long, anyway—if they did
not come off. All this she transmitted to her firstborn son
(Winston’s younger brother, Jack, brought up from infancy playing
second fiddle, was much more of a routine Churchill). She also
accustomed him to be the center of conversation. In the mid-1870s
the Churchills went into exile in Dublin after Lord Randolph,
characteristically, took violent sides with his elder brother over
a woman and antagonized the Prince of Wales. The Duke of
Marlborough had hastily to be appointed viceroy of Ireland, and
thither the Churchills went, to electrify Dublin Castle, until the
storm blew over. Winston’s earliest memory was of his grandfather,
then viceroy, haranguing the elite in the courtyard of their
castle. The subject: war. Winston saw little of his parents, then
and later. The principal figure of his childhood was Mrs. Elizabeth
Anne Everest (1833-95), his nurse, a Kentish woman of humble
background who loved him passionately and whom he knew as “Woomany”
or “Woom.” Her letters to him are touching period pieces. He
returned her affection and memorialized her in his novel,
Savrola, which contains a powerful passage praising the
virtues and loyalty of family servants. Her existence and love
ensured that Winston’s childhood, which might have been disastrous
and destructive of him, was reasonably happy.
The Everest-Winston relationship was one of the
best episodes in Churchill’s entire life. She encouraged and
comforted him throughout his school days in ways his mother could
not or would not, detecting in him both his genius and his loving
nature. He responded by cherishing her as his closest confidante in
all his anxieties. He believed his parents treated her meanly,
dismissing her after her services were no longer needed and leaving
her to a life of poverty. Though still a schoolboy, he did his best
to alleviate her privations, and later he sent her money when he
could afford it. He attended her deathbed, and took Jack with him
to the funeral. He had inscribed and set up her headstone and paid
a local florist annually to ensure that her grave was kept
up.
Winston loved both his parents with the limitless,
irrational love of a passionate child and adolescent. But they
continually disappointed him, by absence, indifference, and
reproaches. He was not a boy who did naturally well at school and
his reports were mediocre. His father soon wrote him off as an
academic failure. After his poor performance at private school Lord
Randolph decided not to send him to Eton: not clever enough.
Instead he was put down for Harrow. One day he visited Winston’s
playroom, where the boy’s collection of lead soldiers was set out.
There were over a thousand of them, organized as an infantry
division with a cavalry brigade. (Jack had an “enemy” army, but its
soldiers were all black men, and it was not permitted to possess
artillery.) Lord Randolph inspected Winston’s troops and asked if
he would like an army career, thinking “that is all he is fit for.”
Winston, believing his father’s question meant he foresaw for his
son a life of glory and victory in the Marlborough tradition,
answered enthusiastically, “Yes.” So it was settled.
Winston’s performance at Harrow confirmed his
father’s belief he would come to no good. He never got out of the
bottom form, spending three years there, until he was transferred
to the Army Class, to prepare him for the Cadet School at
Sandhurst. Some of Lord Randolph’s letters to him are crushing,
indeed brutal. His mother’s are more loving but they too often
reflect his father’s discontent. Few schoolboys can ever have
received such discouraging letters from their parents. His father,
too, was determined Winston should go into the infantry, while
Winston preferred the cavalry. The infantry required higher marks
but it was cheaper. His parents, especially Lord Randolph, were
worried about money. He had an income from the Blenheim estates,
and his wife brought with her another from her father. But together
they scarcely covered the expenses of a fashionable couple in high
society; they had no savings and debts accumulated. Winston
contrived, just, to get into Sandhurst on his third attempt, and he
did reasonably well, true. But he went into the cavalry—the Fourth
Hussars—to his father’s fury. But by this time Lord Randolph was
nearing the end. He went to South Africa in an attempt to make a
fortune for his family in the gold and diamond fields. In fact he
was guided into shrewd investments, which would eventually have
proved very valuable. But when he died in 1895, all had to be sold
to pay his debts. It was clear by then that Winston would have to
earn his own living.
As it happened, Harrow proved invaluable in
enabling him to do so. He did not acquire fluency in the Latin and
Greek it provided so plentifully. He learned a few trusty Latin
quotations and skill at putting them to use. But he noticed that
his headmaster, the Reverend J. E. C. Welldon (later his friend as
bishop of Calcutta), winced as he pronounced them, and he
perceived, later, the same expression cross the face of Prime
Minister Asquith, a noted classical scholar, when he pronounced a
Latin quote in cabinet. But if he never became a classicist, he
achieved something much more worthwhile and valuable: fluency in
the English language, written and spoken. Three years in the bottom
form, under the eager tuition of the English master, Robert
Somervell, made this possible. Winston became not merely adept but
masterly in his use of words. And he loved them. They became the
verbal current coursing through his veins as he shaped his
political manhood. No English statesman has ever loved them more or
made more persistent use of them to forward his career and redeem
it in time of trouble. Words were also his main source of income
throughout his life, from the age of twenty-one. Almost from the
start he was unusually well paid, and his books eventually made
prodigious sums for himself and his descendants. He wrote thousands
of articles for newspapers and magazines and over forty books. Some
were very long. His account of the Second World War is over
2,050,000 words. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire by comparison is 1,100,000 words. I calculate his total
of words in print, including published speeches, to be between 8
and 10 million. There can have been few boys who made such
profitable use of something learned at school. In that sense,
Winston’s education, contrary to the traditional view, was a
notable success.
In the process of turning words into cash, Lady
Randolph played a key part, particularly in getting her son
commissions. She had done all she could to alleviate Lord
Randolph’s suffering in his slow and dreadful decline. But after
his death in 1895, she was free to devote herself to furthering her
elder son’s career, and this became the object of all her
exertions. In begging for help for Winston she was fearless,
shameless, persistent, and almost always successful. Her position
in London society, her beauty and charm, and her cunning enabled
her to worm her way into the good books of newspaper proprietors
and editors, publishers and politicians—anyone in a position to
help. “This is a pushing age,” Winston wrote to her, “and we must
push with the best.” They became the pushiest couple in London,
indeed in the empire, which then spread over nearly a quarter of
the earth’s surface.
No sooner commissioned into the army, Churchill (as
we may now call him) began his plan of campaign to make himself
famous, or at least conspicuous. A soldier needs war, and Churchill
needed it more than most, for he could turn war into words, and so
into cash. But if you sat still, expecting wars to come to you, you
might be starved of action. You had to go to the wars. That became
Churchill’s policy. The Fourth Hussars, under Colonel Brabazon, a
family friend, was ordered to India. But there was a handsome war
going on in Cuba, where America had sympathy for the insurgents.
Brabazon’s agreement was reluctantly secured, and Churchill and his
mother pulled strings to get him to the front and arranged a
contract with the Daily Graphic to publish his dispatches.
By November 1895 he was already under fire as well as braving
outbreaks of yellow fever and smallpox. “For the first time,” he
wrote, “I heard shots fired in anger and heard bullets strike flesh
or whistle through the air.” This recalls the famous description by
George Washington of first hearing bullets whistle in 1757. But
unlike Washington, Churchill did not find “something pleasant in
the sound.” On the contrary, he learned to take cover. He was under
fire, I calculate, about fifty times in the course of his life, and
never once hit by a bullet. He was not the only outsider who came
to Cuba for experience. Theodore Roosevelt, his older contemporary,
led a force of freeboo ters there. The two men had a great deal in
common but did not get on. Roosevelt said: “That young man
Churchill is not a gentleman. He does not rise to his feet when a
lady enters the room.” That may be true. Once Churchill was
comfortably ensconced in a chair, he was reluctant to rise, part of
his conservation-of-energy principle.
The Spaniards awarded Churchill their standard
medal for officers, the Red Cross, which he gratefully received—his
first medal—along with twenty-five guineas paid by the
Graphic for five articles. Thus the pattern of his life for
the next five years was set. Finding wars. Getting special
permission to visit or participate in them. Reporting them for
newspapers and in book form. And collecting medals. Once in India,
he looked about him for action. But he was not idle while waiting
for opportunities. He was conscious of his ignorance and begged his
mother to send him big, important books. She did. The Indian army
day began early but there was a big gap in the middle when the sun
was hottest. Most spent it in siesta. Churchill read. He thus
devoured Macaulay’s History of England and Gibbon. He also
read Winwood Reade’s atheistic tract, The Martyrdom of Man,
which turned him into a lifelong freethinker and a critic of
organized religion (though he always conformed outwardly enough to
avoid the label “atheist,” which might have been politically
damaging). He read everything of value he could get his hands on,
and forgot nothing he read. But there were always gaps, he felt, in
his knowledge, which he eagerly filled when vital books were
recommended to him.
In August 1897 he took part in his first British
campaign, as a member of the Malakand Field Force raised by Sir
Bindon Blood to punish the Pathans for incursion. Blood was a
glamorous figure, a descendant of the Colonel Blood who tried to
steal the Crown Jewels under Charles II. The expedition was a
notable success, and Churchill saw action, was under fire, and
learned a good deal about punitive expeditions and guerrilla
warfare. His mother arranged for him to write for the Daily
Telegraph a series of “letters.” He was annoyed with her for
not first stipulating they be signed—for he was hot on the scent of
fame—and he demanded £100 for the series. He also wrote for the
Indian paper The Allahabad Pioneer and eventually a book,
The Story of the Malakand Field Force. This was his first
book, and he sent a copy to the Prince of Wales, who wrote him a
delightful letter of thanks, praised it to the skies, and
recommended it to all his friends. Blood was also pleased with him
and reported favorably to his superiors. He lived to a great age,
dying in 1940, two days after he received the glorious news that
his former subaltern had become prime minister. Churchill followed
up this success with attachment to the Tirah Expeditionary Force:
more experience, another medal.
Churchill was already looking to Africa, which in
1897 was alive with wars, actual and threatened. He wrote to his
mother, which tersely and crudely exposed his aim to use fame in
war to get himself into Parliament: “A few months in South Africa
would earn me the SA medal and in all probability the Company’s
Star. Thence hot-foot to Egypt—to return with two more decorations
in a year or two—and beat my sword into an iron dispatch box.”
Actually, it was Egypt which came first. With tremendous efforts,
Lady Randolph got him attached to a cavalry regiment taking part in
the expedition to avenge Gordon’s murder at Khartoum. This involved
an appeal to the prime minister, over the head of the local
commander in chief, Lord Kitchener, who had already heard of
Churchill’s growing reputation as a pushy medal chaser and did not
want him. Nevertheless the young man arrived in time to take part
in one of the last cavalry charges in the history of the British
army, during the famous battle of Omdurman (1899), which destroyed
the Dervish army. Churchill reported this campaign, too, for the
London press, for handsome payment, and also produced one of his
best books, The River War, in two volumes, a magnificent
account of the splendors and horrors of imperialism at its
zenith.
Next came South Africa, where he reported the Boer
War for the Morning Post. Strictly speaking he was a
noncombatant, but during a Boer ambush of an armored train, he took
an active part, characteristically directing operations to free the
engine. He was captured, made a prisoner of war, escaped, had a
hazardous journey through the Boer lines, with posters advertising
a large reward for his recapture, and had a rapturous welcome in
Durban, where he found himself a hero. He then went back to the war
in earnest, showing an extraordinary amount of physical energy.
Before the Boers surrendered Johannesburg, Churchill contrived to
tour the city on bicycle, speeding up when he saw armed parties of
the enemy. We tend to epitomize Churchill by his later sedentary
existence. In youth he was hyperactive. He was the Harrow and
Public Schools Fencing Champion—and fencing is one of the most
energetic of sports. In India he played polo enthusiastically,
being part of his regimental team, which won the All-India Calcutta
Cup, the supreme prize in those days. Much of his time in South
Africa was spent on his tramping feet, wearing out a pair of boots
in the process. He was among thirty thousand men who marched in
triumph to Pretoria, the Boer capital, led by a war balloon which
he compared in his Morning Post report to “the pillar of
cloud which led the hosts of Israel.”
All his exploits figured largely in his newspaper
articles. But by 1900 he felt he had exhausted the opportunities of
South Africa, where the war had settled into an exacting but dull
guerrilla campaign. He hurried home. He had achieved the fame he
sought, made himself conspicuous (his photograph appeared over a
hundred times in newspapers in the year 1900), and returned to
London a hero. He quickly published two books, London to
Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton’s March. Cashing
in further on his fame, he gave a series of public lectures in
Britain, Canada, and the United States. These efforts left him with
a capital of £10,000, which was invested for him by his father’s
financial adviser, Sir Ernest Cassel. In addition, he had a row of
medals: the Spanish Cross of the Order of Military Merit, First
Class; the India Medal 1895, with clasp; the Queen’s Sudan Medal
1896-98, no clasp; the Khedive’s Sudan Medal, with clasp; and the
Queen’s South Africa Medal, with six clasps. He also earned the
Cuban Campaign Medal 1895-98 from Spain. He had meanwhile taken his
first steps in politics. He contested Oldham for the Tories in
1899, and won it in the “khaki election” the following year. In all
these rapid developments, he had accumulated a number of critics
and even enemies, and a reputation for being brash, arrogant,
presumptuous, disobedient, boastful, and a bounder. He was accused
of abusing his position as a British officer and his civilian
status as a journalist, and of breaking his word of honor as a war
prisoner. Among the orthodox and “right thinking,” the mention of
his name raised hackles. On the other hand he was the best-known
young man of his generation. When he took the corner seat above the
gangway in the House of Commons to make his maiden speech in
February 1901—it was the seat occupied by his father for his
resignation speech in 1886—he was barely twenty-six. It was not bad
going.