by Paul Johnson
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 18
96-98, 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.
Chapter Two
Liberal Statesman
Churchill was now in the House of Commons. But what for? Personal advancement, certainly. He thirsted for office, power, and the chance to make history. Personal vindication, too: to avenge his father’s failure by becoming prime minister himself. But were there not higher motives? Did not altruistic elements coexist with his ambition, vanity, and lust for success? Did he have a political philosophy? A book has been written on the subject but leaves one little wiser. Churchill, then and always, was a mass of contradictions.
Churchill’s experiences as a young warrior confirmed and intensified his imperialism. The empire was a splendid thing: enormous, world-embracing, seemingly all-powerful, certainly gorgeously colorful, exciting, offering dazzling opportunities for the progress and fulfillment of all races, provided the white elite who ran it kept their nerve and self-confidence. Churchill never lacked either and was anxious to display them in ruling an empire whose outward show stood for everything he loved and enjoyed. He also had certain gut instincts which fitted in well at a time when the great-power “scramble for Africa” was at its height. From the Sudan in 1899 he wrote to his mother: “I have a keen aboriginal desire to kill some of these odious dervishes . . . I anticipate enjoying the exercise very much.”
At the same time Churchill had a warm and tender heart and a perceptive insight into the darker side of power. He saw the horror of empire as well as its splendor. He loved to be top dog. But he felt for the underdog. The River War, for instance, was an accurate and unflinching account of what he saw. He told his cousin Ivor Guest: “I do not think the book will bring me many friends, [but] in writing the great thing is to be honest.” It angered Kitchener and many others, another item in the growing dossier of “Churchill’s unreliability.” The official reports after Omdurman said the wounded Dervishes “received every attention.” In fact, he told his mother, their treatment was disgraceful and most were just slaughtered. Kitchener, he told her, was “a vulgar, common man—without much of the non-brutal elements in his composition.” This was toned down in the book. Even so, he dealt with the question of the wounded Dervishes honestly, and he added: “The stern and un-pitying spirit of the commander was communicated to his troops.” In a sense, he disapproved of the whole expedition insofar as it was a gigantic reprisal for the murder of Gordon. He wrote: “It may be that the gods forbad vengeance to man because they reserved for themselves so intoxicating a drink. But the cup should not be drained to the bottom. The dregs are often filthy tasting.”
It would be untrue to say that Churchill, as a young politician and junior minister at the Colonial Office, kept an eagle eye open for the blemishes of empire. But when they attracted his attention he spoke out. He expressed his concern for the six hundred Tibetans killed by the machine guns of the Younghusband expedition to Lhasa, and for the twenty-five Zulu rebels deported to Saint Helena and who, he said, were starving there. He was quick to speak out for the Boers in giving a generous peace and reconciliation. In his maiden speech in the Commons, made immediately after taking the oath, his opening words were: “If I were a Boer, I hope I should be fighting in the field.” This was not the least courageous of the five hundred major speeches he was to make in the Commons over the next sixty years. Nor did his eagerness to see war, and the relish he took in it and in medal collecting, blind him to its inescapable horrors, or prevent him from taking every opportunity to warn fellow MPs about its nature. In another speech in his first year in Parliament, he said that colonial wars were beastly, marked by atrocities and senseless slaughters. But a European war would be infinitely worse. He was “alarmed,” he said, by the “composure,” even “glibness,” with which MPs and, worse, ministers talked of a possible European war: “A European war cannot be anything but a cruel, heart-rending struggle, which, if we are ever to enjoy the bitter fruits of victory, must demand, perhaps for several years, the whole manhood of the nation, the entire suspension of peaceful industries, and the concentration, to one end, of every vital energy in the community.” He added: “Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings.” These prophetic words were spoken more than a dozen years before the catastrophe occurred in 1914. Churchill was never a warmonger as his enemies claimed. On the contrary: he warned against it just as urgently as he warned against unpreparedness for it—the two were indivisible. But Churchill was sufficient of a realist to grasp that wars will come, and that a victorious one, however dreadful, is preferable to a lost one.
In a broader sense, it is not easy to classify Churchill. He had a historian’s mind, eager to grapple with facts, actualities, to answer the who, how, where, when questions, rather than a philosopher’s, mesmerized by abstractions with their whys and wherefores. He was born a Tory and entered Parliament as one. But he was unhappy on the Tories’ benches. Salisbury, the man who had destroyed his father, ceased to be leader in 1902 but, on retiring, handed over to his nephew, A. J. Balfour, cool, aloof, calculating rather than impulsive. Now, he had a philosopher’s mind, and Churchill found it uncongenial, although they moved in similar circles and remained nominally friends until Balfour’s death in 1930. Churchill had no desire to serve under him. Moreover, Balfour had got himself and his party into a muddle over free trade; Joe Chamberlain, having split the old Liberal Party over Ireland in 1886, now split the Tories over his plan to reimpose protective tariffs. Churchill’s constituency, Oldham, was a free trade town and he was, too, both by interest and by choice. Moreover, it was really a Liberal seat which he had won by a fluke in the “khaki” landslide of 1900, and he was more likely to hold it as a Liberal. The Tories had been predominant for twenty years but the wind of change was now blowing and the young man, sniffing it, wanted it to fill his sails. So he “crossed over” in 1904 and fought and won Oldham as a Liberal in the 1906 election, which returned a huge Liberal majority. This caused fury among the right-thinking, and they added a hefty item to Churchill’s dossier of unreliability.
He was not a party man. That was the truth. His loyalty belonged to the national interest, and his own. At one time or another he stood for Parliament under six labels: Conservative, Liberal, Coalition, Constitutionalist, Unionist, and National Conservative. This was partly due to his failure to find a safe seat, or one he could hold. For his first quarter century in the Commons he moved between Oldham (1900-1906), North-West Manchester (1906-8), and Dundee, which he scrambled into in 1908 and finally lost in 1922, being then outside the Commons for over a year. This dictated his return to the Conservatives. He said: “Anyone can rat. It takes real skill to re-rat.” His reward was that he at last got a safe seat he could hold in all seasons, Epping in Essex (later called Wood-ford), which he retained for thirty-five years, once as a Constitutionalist, twice as a Unionist, once as a National Conservative, and five times as a simple Conservative, usually with enormous majorities. This safe seat, near London, was of enormous benefit to his career. He never had to worry about it.
All the same, if Chur
chill was ever anything, he was a Liberal (as well as a traditionalist and a small-c conservative). There is a curious story about this, told to me by the Labour MP “Curly” Mallalieu in 1962, when Churchill was in his eighties, though still an MP. There is, or was, a curious contraption called the “House of Lords Lift” in which peers were elevated to the upper floor of Parliament, mere MPs being allowed to use it only if injured or decrepit. Churchill had permanent permission, and Curly had hurt himself playing football. One day when he got in he found Churchill there. The old man glared and said: “Who are you? ” “I’m Bill Mallalieu, sir, MP for Huddersfield.” “What party?” “Labour, sir.” “Ah. I’m a Liberal. Always have been.” The fiendish glee with which he made this remark was memorable.
Churchill’s courage in crossing the floor made him a marked man, and it was no surprise when the prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, made him undersecretary to the colonies in 1905. He was only thirty-one, and the office was important, for his boss, Lord Elgin, was in the Lords, and Churchill had to do all the Commons business covering the entire world himself, and stand up to the Tory heavyweights, including Joe Chamberlain, the first to make the colonies a fashionable, key job, the road to the top. But standing up to this opposition from the front bench was precisely what Churchill was good at, then and always. He was fluent, resourceful, witty, and always well briefed. He enjoyed himself on his feet and did his best to interest, even enthrall, and always to entertain the House with his sallies and jokes, his moments of indignation, real or simulated, his obvious love of words and the relish with which he brought them out, not least his huge pleasure in the rituals of the Commons and his reverence for its traditions. Members always love those who love the House, and Churchill plainly did.
