From the archive: Young Winston

October 1966: What were the youthful ingredients to Churchill’s greatness?

“Churchill as a Young Man”, by Edwin Arthur Ward. Image via Art Collection 2

In a 1966 issue of the New Statesman, the literary critic VS Pritchett reviewed the first volume of Randolph Churchill’s biography of his father, who had died the previous year. A second volume would follow Youth, 1874-1900, before Randolph’s own death from a heart attack in 1968

A great man who is also a great public figure unloads a burden on the son who writes his life and it is inevitably a load of marble. Nothing less than the monumental will do, especially where the traditional pride of a powerful family is involved. But “can these stones be made to speak”? This was not quite Randolph Churchill’s problem when he became his father’s biographer. Sir Winston had spoken already quite a lot. He had written about his own early life. He was a man of action, but he was, even more, a voice. The son’s method has been to call upon the rather different, less Macaulay-like voice of his subject’s letters. In them Sir Winston is left to create himself; and is set off against the background of the letters of his parents and contemporaries. Linking the letters are terse, filial and uncommonly self-effacing passages of commentary.

There is nothing opaque about the boy’s or the young man’s letters: they are open and unguarded, in fact pathetically so in the schoolboy appeals to his cold and irritable parents. In no country has the severity of the English upper classes to their children been surpassed. As he grows older he fights for their attention, or against the general reproaches that pile up; in due time, he becomes brash and boastful but, even here, the letters are transparent, honest and even innocent. They assume that the whole world should be concerned with the knowledge that he has “a star” and is on the way to greatness. Those who obstruct him are petty and are simply digging their own graves. He was a mutinous, demanding and emotional boy, who saw every important decision taken over his head. There are hints that life is wretched.

The first volume of the Life opens with the alarming premature birth at Blenheim. The family doctor could not be reached, the layette had not come from Paris; the local doctor had to be called in and the baby clothes borrowed from the local solicitor’s wife. The hero arrived with the rudeness of a Gargantua, and a life-long impatience began. The volume ends with a pungent and urgent letter – all his letters are urgent – from the pushing young man of the world: he has hit the jackpot with his account of the South African campaign, written a bad novel, and has a very large sum in lecture fees in his pocket as he leaves New York in 1901. He has just heard of the death of the Queen and the immediate question is whether he ought to bring his name diplomatically to the attention of the new monarch.

The handsome chequerboard of interlocking families with the nation’s politics in their hands looks very promising for a Churchill; but the temptations of aristocratic amateurism are strong. Sir Winston was not made to play the family game for its own sake: he was determined to exploit the board. The directions to his mother as to how to use her influence are earnest and innumerable: they usually fail because his pushing has made him unpopular. Fellow officers were not mad about serving the ambitions of the cheerfully bumptious and unscrupulous grandson of a duke who broke the rules and who – in their view – was concerned to show off and simply jump over their backs to the top. Soldiers were offended by Sir Winston’s double game of being a war-correspondent when he was really an officer and an officer when he was really a war-correspondent. It made a mockery of their profession.

The rich are often close-fisted and exacting parents, and Sir Winston had behind him his father’s angry letters, warning him of slovenliness and unreliability.

“The first extremely discreditable feature of your performance was missing the infantry, for in that failure is demonstrated beyond refutation your slovenly, happy-go-lucky harum-scarum style of work. Never have I received a good report of your conduct in your work from any master or tutor. You will become a mere social wastrel.”

Lord Randolph was inaccurate and intemperate: Sir Winston did rather well at school in the end, though, as his biographer says, he liked to pretend he was a failure there, in order to heighten the drama of his later success. “Look at Churchill; he, too, was a failure at school.” This is legend. What he greatly regretted was that he had had so little literary education and had not gone to university. The ardent young soldier liked battle for its own sake, but (more important) it confirmed his inner conviction that he had a charmed life and “a star”. He had gone to India against his will – it was the graveyard of political hope – and the showing-off was meant to remind the world that he had other ideas. His real life in India was reading, to make up for lost time.

“Altogether since I have been in this country I have read or nearly finished reading (for I read three or four different books at a time to avoid tedium) all Macaulay (12 vols), all Gibbon (begun in England, 4,000 pages), The Martyrdom of Man, Modern Science and Modern Thought (Laing), the Republic of Plato (Jowett’s translation), Rochefort’s Memoirs, Gibbon’s Life and Memoirs and one complete Annual Register on English politics. I have hardly looked at a novel. Will you try and get me the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon and also Pascal’s Provincial Letters – I am very anxious to read both these as Macaulay recommends the one and Gibbon the other.”

He read and annotated all the volumes of the Annual Register, consecutively, and called for a detailed parliamentary history of the previous 100 years – “Debates, Divisions, Parties, cliques and caves”. He became, as his son says, his own university. He was about 24.

In fact he had already tried journalism when he got leave to go to the Cuban war at the age of 21. At 22 he was “collecting the material” for his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Incidents appear in letters to his mother:

“I remained till the last and here I was very near my end. A subaltern – Bethune by name – and I carried a Sepoy for some distance and might, perhaps, had there been any gallery, have received some notice. My pants were stained by the man’s blood. We also remained till the enemy came to within 40 yards firing our revolvers. I rode on my grey pony all along the skirmish lines where everyone else was lying down in cover. Foolish perhaps but I play for high stakes and given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.”

There speaks the romantic and knowing realist who believed that military service was essential to a successful political career – a view the English electorate did not take in 1945. Gibbon had told him how much the historian owed to his picaresque drudgery in the militia.

The gallery did not break into applause until the famous capture by the Boers and his escape. It is an excellent story and lost nothing in Sir Winston’s telling. The family name paid off handsomely at once all over the world. The daring of the escape, the dilemma it put the Boers in, and, above all, the vigour of his description of it, gave him exactly what he needed for the beginning of a political career. There were complaints that he broke the agreement with his fellow escapers and, impatient when they were all foiled, took the risk and got out ahead of them and stole the thunder: from Mr Randolph Churchill’s researches the accusations seem quite untrue. Churchill hid, in some danger, waiting for his companions who at the last minute could not get out. What is evident is that Churchill saw that this escape was the chance of a lifetime. He knew the hour had come. He would miss his destiny as well as the headlines if he drifted any longer in tedious negotiations with the Boers. Escape would open the door of the House of Commons and he would at last be able to follow in the steps of his admired father.

A lot of English people were “breaking out” of something or other in this ebullient and high-fed period of English life and without his advantages. Yet he was poor by the standards of his wealthy relations. His difficulties were his own extravagance and the ruinous extravagance of his father and (after Lord Randolph’s death) of his mother: £800 a year, £500 of which was an allowance from his mother – did not keep him clear of Indian usurers – he genially admired them – and the bouncing cheque. His mother had run up debts to the tune of £17,000 and had to raise a loan secured on her insurance of his life and hers, leaving him to pay the joint premiums of £700 a year. The first he heard of it was from family solicitors: his mother “did not to inform her son of these important transactions”. He took the heaven-sent opportunity of writing to her from a position of strength but was very tolerant.

“We both know what is good – and we both like to have it. I sympathise with your extravagances – even more than you do with mine – it seems just as suicidal to me when you spend £200 on a ball dress as it does to you when I purchase a new polo pony for £100. And yet I feel that you ought to have the dress and I the polo pony.”

Her situation was to get far worse; but the mother for whose attention he had pleaded in his school days was now his eager friend. At 27 he was able to boast to her that in two years he had earned £10,000 from books and lecturing, “without any capital”.

The silver spoon was important, even more perhaps because it was half-pawned, but nothing like so important as Churchill’s grasp of what he had to do. He knew how to grind away at the instruction of his mind. The military life had the advantage of absorbing what could easily have been insidious at this stage: the premature dream of glory, the stupefying effects of youthful Napoleonism. Under the pushing and boasting there is a warning sense of the distance to run. Sir Winston grew up in a closed world of ruling families, fixed in the illusions and satisfactions of imperial power. Outside of Society and its servants and soldiers the young man probably knew more Cubans, Indians and Boers than he knew English of any other kind than his own, and the nature of these relationships was one of ruler to the ruled. The exception is in his American experience. It astonished people that he was so greatly taken with Bourke Cockran, an Irish American politician and lawyer. “He inspired me when I was 19 and taught me how to use every note of the human voice like an organ”; he urged him to study sociology and political economy. One can be certain that none of Sir Winston’s English acquaintances had warmly and admiringly suggested that. The English idea is to keep the young in the cold, outside the door. The talkative politician and the young soldier corresponded when Churchill was in India. Randolph Churchill puts his finger on the importance of their friendship: “As far as we know, he was the first man or woman Churchill met on level terms who really saw his point and his potentialities.” Their friendship was also a portent, that he would find his own teachers and go his own way.

[Further reading: From the archive: An oral history of Suez]