Churchill's Black Dog

by Anthony Storr

  In Churchill, this characteristic was evident. During one of his illnesses he required two nurses. His wife told Lord Moran: “Winston is a pasha. If he cannot clap his hands for a servant he calls for Walter as he enters the house. If it were left to him he’d have the nurses for the rest of his life. He would like two in his room, two in the passage. He is never so happy, Charles, as he is when one of the nurses is doing something for him while Walter puts on his socks.”35 Churchill’s arrogance, impatience, and lack of consideration for others must have made him extremely difficult to live with; but these traits were softened by his magnanimity. How did so egocentric a man inspire devotion in those who served him, whose immediate needs he seldom considered, who might have to stay up till all hours to suit his own peculiar timetable, and who were often exposed to his formidable temper? It is not an easy question to answer; but it is often true that men who demand and need a great deal of attention from others are manifesting a kind of childlike helplessness which evokes an appropriate response, however difficult they may be. His wife recorded that the only time he had been on the Underground was during the general strike. “He went round and round, not knowing where to get out and had to be rescued eventually.”36 As with a small child, omnipotence and helplessness went hand in hand. There are a good many characters in public life who would be totally nonplussed if they had to get their own meals, darn their own socks, or even write their own letters.

  The fact that Churchill was an aristocrat must have been of considerable service to him. However neglected he was by his parents, there was Mrs. Everest to minister to him: and she was later succeeded by his wife, his valet, his doctor, and innumerable attendants and servants. Those of us who are old enough to remember the days in which the aristocracy and the upper middle class took it for granted that the ordinary details of living, food, clothes, travel, and so on would be taken care of by some minion or other, and who have since adapted to fending for ourselves, can without difficulty recall that the existence of servants did minister to our sense of self-esteem. Churchill was not rich in early life. He had to make his living by his pen. But he knew nothing of the lives of ordinary people, and, like other members of his class, grew up with the assumption that he was a good many cuts above the general run of the population. This assumption has stood many of his ilk in good stead. The English upper class have been notorious for handing over their children to the care of servants, and, in the case of boys, disposed to send them to boarding schools at an absurdly early age. The sense of belonging to a privileged class is some mitigation for the feeling of early rejection; and the Churchill family was, of course, of particular distinction within that privileged class. The young Winston Churchill may have felt lonely and unloved, but it cannot have been long before he became conscious that he was “special” in another, less personal sense: the scion of a famous house with a long line of distinguished ancestors behind him. The fact that he chose to write biographies both of his father and of the first Duke of Marlborough shows how important this was to him.

  When a child’s emotional needs are not met, or only partially met, by his parents, he will generally react to this frustration by hostility. The most “difficult,” badly behaved children are those who are unloved; and they tend to treat all authority as hostile. Winston Churchill was no exception. But even the most rebellious and intransigent child retains, in imagination, a picture of the parents he would have liked to have. The negative image of authority as rejecting, cruel, and neglectful is balanced by a positive image of idealized parents who are invariably loving, tender, and understanding. And the less a child knows or has intimate contact with his real parents, the more will this double image persist. Real parents are real people: sometimes loving, sometimes impatient; sometimes understanding, sometimes imperceptive. The child reared in the intimacy of an ordinary family soon amalgamates the images of “good” and “bad,” and comes to realize that, in other human beings as in himself, love and hate, goodness and badness, are inextricably intermingled. Psychiatrists have often observed that delinquent and emotionally disturbed children who have parents who are actually neglectful or cruel still maintain that these “bad” parents are really “good,” and blame themselves for the parents’ faults. This idealization of parents serves a defensive and protective function. A small child, being weak and defenseless, finds it unbearable to believe that there are no adults who love, support, and guide him; and if there are not, he invents them.

  Winston Churchill showed this idealization very clearly. Of his mother, he wrote: “She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly—but at a distance.”37 This romantic view of his mother gave way to a more realistic appraisal of her, when, as a young man of twenty-three, he was compelled to recognize her financial irresponsibility, and to write to her about her extravagances. But the images formed in childhood are not so easily dispelled; and Churchill, at least in his early years, retained a romantic view of women which was derived from his idealization of his beautiful mother. Violet Bonham Carter draws attention to this:

  This inner circle of friends contained no women. They had their own place in his life. His approach to women was essentially romantic. He had a lively susceptibility to beauty, glamour, radiance, and those who possessed these qualities were not subjected to analysis. Their possession of all the cardinal virtues was assumed as a matter of course. I remember his taking umbrage when I once commented on the “innocence” of his approach to women. He was affronted by this epithet as applied to himself. Yet to me he would certainly have applied it as a term of praise.38

  Like many another romantic, Churchill was in youth somewhat awkward in his approach to women, although he was emotionally involved with at least three girls before he married. In his latter years he took little notice of women, and indeed would hardly speak to them. But the romantic vision persisted, attaching itself to the figure of Queen Elizabeth II. When contemplating the Queen’s photograph, he is reported as saying: “Lovely, inspiring. All the film people in the world, if they had scoured the globe, could not have found anyone so suited to the part.”39 Royalty never lost its magic for him; and, like his ancestor in the time of the Civil War, he remained an ardent Royalist throughout his life, despite the declining popularity of the monarchical principle among the sophisticated. When Churchill spoke of himself as a servant of the Queen, he undoubtedly felt that he was. His idealization of the monarchy, which extended itself to the kings and queens of other states besides Britain, meant that he seldom saw royalty as creatures of flesh and blood, any more than he saw his parents as human beings. It is a characteristic that he shared with many others in Great Britain.

  Winston Churchill’s idealization of his father was even more remarkable. It is not surprising that a small boy should see so beautiful and elegant a young mother as a fairy princess. But his father, though a notable public figure and a highly gifted man, was so consistently disapproving of, or uninterested in, his small son, that Churchill’s hero worship of him can only be explained in terms of the psychological mechanism outlined above. As Violet Bonham Carter writes: “The image remained upon its pedestal, intact and glorious. Until the end he worshipped at the altar of his Unknown Father.”40 And his father remained entirely unknown to him, never talked intimately with him, and seldom wrote to him except to reprove him. After Lord Randolph’s death from general paralysis of the insane, when Winston Churchill was twenty, he learned large portions of his father’s speeches by heart, and, in 1906, published a two-volume biography of him. Filial devotion could hardly go further; but it was devotion to an image, not to a real father whose life he had shared.

  Children whose emotional needs have been insufficiently satisfied by their parents react to the lack by idealization on the one hand, and hostility on the other. Winston Churchill’s obstinacy, resentment of authority, and willfulness were manifest very early in his life. He was sent to boarding school before his eighth birthday; and it is evident from his earliest reports that the scho
ol authorities became the recipients of the hostility which he must have felt towards his parents, but which was never manifested because of his idealization of them. He was repeatedly late: “No. of times late. 20. very disgraceful.” From being described as “a regular pickle” in his earliest report, he is later designated as “troublesome,” “very bad,” “careless,” “a constant trouble to everybody,” and “very naughty.”41 He remained at this school from November 1882 till the summer of 1884, and himself recorded how much he hated it. It is likely that he was removed because of the severe beatings he received, for the headmaster was a sadistic clergyman who would inflict as many as twenty strokes of the birch upon the bare buttocks of the little boys under his care, and who clearly enjoyed this exercise of his authority. But savage punishment failed to cow Winston Churchill, and probably served to increase his intolerance towards authority.

  It is interesting to note that, in his early letters from school, he did not complain, but reported himself as happy; although, as he later admitted, this was the very opposite of the truth. Small boys who are miserable at boarding school very frequently conceal the fact from their parents. Ignorance of what the world is really like may lead them to suppose that ill-treatment and lack of sympathetic understanding is the expected lot of boys; and that, if they are unhappy, it is a sign of weakness and their own fault. This is especially true of those with a depressive tendency, for the hostility they feel towards parents and other authorities easily becomes turned inward against themselves. They therefore report themselves as happy because they feel they ought to be so, and easily deceive imperceptive parents who are not concerned to discover the truth.

  There is, indeed, an intimate connection between depression and hostility, which was not understood until Freud had unraveled it. The emotionally deprived child who later becomes prey to depression has enormous difficulty in the disposal of his hostility. He resents those who have deprived him, but he cannot afford to show this resentment, since he needs the very people he resents; and any hostility he does manifest results in still further deprivation of the approval and affection he so much requires. In periods of depression, this hostility becomes turned inward against the self, with the result that the depressive undervalues himself or even alleges that he is worthless. “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end.”

  It is this difficulty in disposing of hostility which drives some depressives to seek out opponents in the external world. It is a great relief to find an enemy on whom it is justifiable to lavish wrath. Winston Churchill was often accused of being a warmonger, which he was not. But there is no doubt that fighting enemies held a strong emotional appeal for him, and that, when he was finally confronted by an enemy whom he felt to be wholly evil, it was a release which gave him enormous vitality. Hitler was such an enemy; and it is probable that Churchill was never happier than when he was fully engaged in bringing about Hitler’s destruction. For here, at last, was an opportunity to employ the full force of his enormous aggressiveness. Here was a monstrous tyranny, presided over by an archdemon who deserved no mercy, and whom he could attack with an unsullied conscience. If all depressives could constantly be engaged in fighting wicked enemies, they would never suffer from depression. But, in day-to-day existence, antagonists are not wicked enough, and depressives suffer from pangs of conscience about their own hostility.

  It is not decrying Churchill to state that his magnanimity and generosity to his many enemies rested upon this basis. People with Churchill’s kind of early background know what it is to be insulted and injured; and, in spite of their internal store of hostility, they retain a capacity to identify with the underdog. It is unlikely that Churchill would have ever felt anything but hatred for Hitler, had the latter survived. But he showed an unusual compassion for the other enemies he defeated. Brendan Bracken reports that when Churchill sued Lord Alfred Douglas for making defamatory statements about him, he was not elated when he won the case. Indeed, he appeared depressed; and this was because he could not bear the thought of his defeated opponent being sent to prison.42 Although Churchill relished being in action against the enemies of England, compassion for them was equally in evidence, and he did not hesitate, at the age of twenty-three, to criticize Kitchener for the “inhuman slaughter of the wounded” at Omdurman and to attack him in print for having desecrated the Mahdi’s tomb.43

  This alternation between aggression and compassion is characteristic of persons with Churchill’s character structure. No one could have had more pride in the British Empire; and yet, when Churchill was twenty-seven, he was writing of “our unbridled Imperialists who have no thought but to pile up armaments, taxation and territory.”44 This criticism was prompted by his reading of Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty, which engaged his compassion for the underfed working class, neglected by Imperialist politicians. Churchill was highly aggressive, and in many ways insensitive, but he was far from ruthless, and when he could imaginatively enter into the distress of others he was genuinely concerned. This was especially so in the case of prisoners, with whom he could closely identify himself. Churchill’s period of office as Home Secretary was notable for the improvements which he introduced in the treatment of “political” prisoners, in his day the suffragettes; for the reform which allowed “time to pay” in the case of those who would otherwise have been imprisoned for the nonpayment of fines; and for the introduction of measures which reduced the number of young offenders sent to prison. He also advocated the introduction of lectures and concerts to prisoners, and insisted upon the provision of books for them.

  Churchill’s compassionate concern with prisoners originated in part with his generalized capacity to identify himself with the underdog, which we have already discussed. It also had a more particular root which sprang from his personal experience. During the Boer War he was captured by the Boers and incarcerated as a prisoner of war. Although his period of imprisonment was very brief, for he was caught on November 15 and escaped on December 12, this experience made an ineradicable impression upon him. In My Early Life he writes of his imprisonment as follows:

  Prisoner of War! That is the least unfortunate kind of prisoner to be, but it is nevertheless a melancholy state. You are in the power of your enemy. You owe your life to his humanity, and your daily bread to his compassion. You must obey his orders, go where he tells you, stay where you are bid, await his pleasure, possess your soul in patience. Meanwhile the war is going on, great events are in progress, fine opportunities for action and adventure are slipping away. Also the days are very long. Hours crawl like paralytic centipedes. Nothing amuses you. Reading is difficult; writing impossible. Life is one long boredom from dawn till slumber.

  Moreover, the whole atmosphere of prison, even the most easy and best regulated prison, is odious. Companions in this kind of misfortune quarrel about trifles and get the least possible pleasure from each other’s society. If you have never been under restraint before and never known what it was to be a captive, you feel a sense of constant humiliation in being confined to a narrow space, fenced in by railings and wire, watched by armed men, and webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions. I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I have ever hated any other period in my whole life.… Looking back on those days, I have always felt the keenest pity for prisoners and captives. What it must mean for any man, especially an educated man, to be confined for years in a modern convict prison, strains my imagination. Each day exactly like the one before, with the barren ashes of wasted life behind, and all the long years of bondage stretching out ahead.…

  Dark moods come easily across the mind of a prisoner.…45

  Not all persons react to imprisonment like this. There are some who actively seek prison as a refuge from the troubles of this world. Others spend their time more or less contentedly reading or engaged in solitary reflection. It is those who are liable to depression who most suffer pangs of the kind that Churchill described; for, deprived of the outside
sources of stimulation which sustain them and the opportunity for adventure and excitement which is a defense against their innate tendency, they relapse into that state above all which they most fear.

  Churchill was never happy unless he was fully occupied, asleep, or holding the floor. He had no small talk. It is impossible to imagine him being cozily relaxed. He had to be perpetually active, or else he relapsed into “dark moments of impatience and frustration,” as Violet Bonham Carter describes his moods.46 As early as 1895 he was writing to his mother from Aldershot: