Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  On the young and impressionable Winston Churchill this zealous attention to the great outdoors left its stamp. Until his adulthood he always thought of The Little Lodge as being situated in a vast game-ridden forest, miles from the main house, or Viceregal Lodge. When he became famous, at a comparatively early age, he revisited the Lodge in connection with making a speech at Dublin. “When I saw it again,” he wrote afterward, “I was astonished to find that the lawn was only about sixty yards across, that the forests were little more than bushes, and that it only took a minute to ride to it from the Viceregal where I was staying.” The spirit of the hunt was solidly bred into Churchill, who for years performed creditably as a pigsticker in India, a boar hunter in France, a fox hunter in several countries, and a nemesis of small animals and birds generally. He developed a' reverential feeling for the saddle, and worked hard to become expert. When he was a young soldier, and scheduled to take part in a steeplechase, he was sleepless for several nights beforehand. Sometime before dawn of the day in question, he arose, shook up his startled groom, and said, “We’d better have a secret rehearsal.” As the early mists rose from the course, he went over the entire route, fences, water jumps and walls. Then he turned in for a nap. That afternoon he finished third in a field of four, to the dismay of the groom, who felt that he had shot his bolt before the other contestants had eaten breakfast. Churchill was perfectly satisfied; he told his comrades he’d done better than he expected on an entirely strange course. George Bernard Shaw, to whom a fox hunter was something that ought to be placed under observation, was relieved when Churchill eventually took up other hobbies. “Churchill’s recreations are now civilized — painting and bricklaying rather than hunting and shooting,” he said in 1950, not long before he died. Churchill and Shaw maintained a curious friendship, on a basis of high cerebral sparring. Before one of his opening nights, Shaw sent Churchill a pair of tickets, with a note saying, “Come to my play and bring a friend, if you have a friend.” Churchill returned the tickets with the message, “I’m busy for the opening, but I’ll come on the second night, if there is a second night.”

  Chapter 4

  IN 1880 the Churchill family’s political world took a great fall. Disraeli, the English-Jewish Prime Minister, the leader of the Tory Party, was defeated by Gladstone, the Liberal, of whom Winston Churchill was later to write, “[He] was a very dangerous man who went about rousing people up, lashing them into fury so that they voted against the Conservatives and turned my grandfather out of his place as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.” The Churchills had affection and respect for Disraeli, but they cared nothing at all for Gladstone. “Lord Beaconsfield, then Mr. Disraeli, sometimes dined with us,” Lady Randolph remarked of that general period. “On one occasion Randolph and I were discussing the evening after our guests had departed, and he commented on Mr. Disraeli’s flowery and exaggerated language, saying, ‘When I offered him more wine, he replied, “My dear Randolph, I have sipped your excellent champagne, I have drunk your good claret, I have tasted your delicious port, I will have no more.”’ This greatly amused me, as having sat next to him at dinner I had particularly noticed that he drank nothing but a little weak brandy and water. Mr. Disraeli was always kind and talked to me at length, which occasioned much chaff among my friends ...”

  Disraeli, out of office, was able to return to his political novels, in which his perhaps exaggerated and flowery language was put to sharp effect, but the duke was obliged to go back to being a duke. He trooped home to Blenheim, with his shiny retinue, and his grandson accompanied Mrs. Everest, the nurse, to her family’s at Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight. This was a delightful time for Churchill, whose existence amid the pageantry and social hubbub of the Viceregal Lodge had been desperately lonely. Mrs. Everest played a role in his young life not unlike that of Peggotty in David Copperfield’s. She was devoted and faithful and had anecdotal relatives in interesting places. Whereas Copperfield journeyed to Yarmouth to hear Peggotty’s brother talk of the sea, Churchill went to Ventnor to hear Mrs. Everest’s brother-in-law talk about jail. He had been a prison warden and had a collection of first-class material on his charges. Churchill listened carefully and, again like Copperfield, grew up to be a writer. Besides the doings in the Big House, the brother-in-law was also posted on the Zulu War, which was then being fought in South Africa. In this prosperous phase of her empire development, England was obliged to wage a series of small wars dedicated to keeping various colonial tribesmen in line. The skirmishes were mostly on a nuisance scale and, in fact, contributed to the national health, since they provided a patriotic spark and kept people’s minds on the dangerous tribesmen and off their own troubles. Churchill’s companion related how the Zulus, in their war of aggression, had struck a number of Englishmen with ugly spears called “assagais,” and he even made some assagais for the boy out of fern stems. “I was very angry with the Zulus,” Churchill has written, “and glad to hear they were being killed; and so was my friend, the old prison warden. After a while it seemed that they were all killed, because this particular war came to an end and there were no more pictures of Zulus in the papers and nobody worried any more about them.”

  Churchill’s visit to Ventnor had been occasioned chiefly by the birth of a brother, John (called Jack), who was named for the first duke. The year 1880 was an eventful one for the family in several ways. In addition to seeing the Tory collapse and the arrival of John, it marked the real beginning of Lord Randolph’s vivid but ill-fated political career. Wood-stock (the village near Blenheim) had returned him to Parliament, but his duties as secretary to the duke, who sat in the House of Lords, had curtailed his parliamentary activity. Now all was changed. To secure his seat in Commons, Lord Randolph had defeated the Liberal candidate, W. Hall. It was a fairly narrow squeak; the people at Woodstock had been chafed by the family’s long absence. It was felt that a duke, if he was any kind of duke at all, had better stay home and look after his parish. But the villagers, a fair-minded lot, eased up sufficiently to give his son another try. They were not disappointed; the Woodstock M.P. was to provide political fireworks that kept the nation richly entertained for nearly a decade.

  Lord Randolph became the most beloved man in England, far better known than his father. Although a Tory, he differed with the leaders of his party and led a faction of his own, called the Fourth Party and devoted to a platform of what he described as social reform. Even those of his contemporaries who liked him best agreed that he was a marvelously peculiar man. Lord Rosebery, the Tory minister, with whom he had grown up, wrote, “From the first moment that I can remember him there was a tinge in him of the eccentric, the petulant and the unexpected.” Winston Churchill, who was to write his father’s biography, said of him in another book, “I have heard that on neutral ground [unsocial occasions] he was incredibly fierce, and affronted people by saying the most blunt or even savage things. Certainly those who did not know him well approached him with caution or heavily armed.” In appearance, Lord Randolph was bald, slight, sallow, drawn, popeyed and had a gigantic walrus mustache. Despite this essentially ungorgeous inventory, he was curiously dapper and prepossessing. The protrusive eyes were an inherited characteristic. At Blenheim, which was periodically opened to the public, Lady Randolph and two or three other girls of the family used to join the gaping queues incognito and make the rounds, now and then offering up acidulous comments on the décor. They once broke into merriment and fled when a frank visitor, gazing at the frowning gallery of portraits, cried out, “What popeyes these Churchills have!”

  Shortly after Ireland, Lord Randolph moved his family to London and rented a small house in St. James’s Place; then he bore down on politics in earnest. “I met at my father’s house many of the leading figures of the Parliamentary conflict,” Winston Churchill has written, “and was often at luncheon or dinner when across the table not only colleagues, but opponents, amicably interchanged opinions on the burning topics of the hour. It was then that I first met Mr. Balfour, M
r. Chamberlain, Mr. Edward Carson and also Lord Rosebery, Mr. Asquith, Mr. John Morley and other fascinating ministerial figures. It seemed a very great world in which these men lived; a world where high rules reigned and every trifle in public conduct counted; a duelling ground where although the business might be ruthless, and the weapons loaded with ball, there was ceremonious personal courtesy and mutual respect.”

  In the main, Lord Randolph established his reputation by cursing out Gladstone. Theretofore, the eloquent and sulphurous Prime Minister had raged inviolate over a trembling House, few members of the Opposition daring to come within range of his guns. In Randolph, the great Liberal leader found a foeman disturbingly worthy. The newcomer had a vast and available vocabulary of billingsgate, a genius for denunciation. He was happy in the role of giant killer. Gladstone began to find himself hounded and harried throughout England. Of his mercurial father, Winston Churchill later wrote, “Although he was only a private member, and quite isolated, everything he said even at the tiniest bazaar was reported verbatim in all the newspapers, and every phrase was scrutinized and weighed.” The public weighed, and found diverting, such appraisals of Gladstone as: “The Prime Minister, his colleagues and his party — these children of revolution, these robbers of churches, these plunderers of classes, these destroyers of property, these friends of the lawless, these foes of the loyal.”

  The culmination of Lord Randolph’s tirades, in 1885, was an address which, said Lord Rosebery, “as a specimen of political invective is not likely soon to be outdone. It was justly censured for violence and extravagance. But coming from Randolph, whose seasoning was always high, and issued at a moment of fierce and seething excitement, it was, I thought, not ill-calculated for its purpose.” The Government of Gladstone came tumbling down, and Lord Randolph, with his wild but popular eccentricities, was awarded a Cabinet post as Minister to India and a year later succeeded to leadership of the House of Commons. When a friend asked him how long he thought his tenure might endure, he replied flippantly, “Oh, about six months.”

  “And then?”

  “And then? Why, Westminster Abbey.”

  At this bright point in his career, when his face and name were familiar to everybody in Europe, Randolph made a remarkable decision. He elected to take a long walking trip under the name of “Mr. Spencer.” He wanted quiet, he said, choosing a method certain to result in notoriety. “His holiday consisted of a passage from one hornet’s nest to another,” observed Lord Rosebery, who added that the English papers were hard-pressed for an explanation. For three days the management of a Vienna hotel addressed him determinedly as “Lord Randolph” but he made a correction each time by saying, “Mr. Spencer, a private citizen.” “... the incident illustrates a certain perversity of character, not unlike that popularly attributed to the ostrich,” wrote Lord Rosebery. “He was determined to be incognito, therefore he persuaded himself that he would be incognito.”

  In the history of Winston Churchill, Lord Randolph’s traits and actions are of pointed significance. Throughout this period of the father’s ascendancy, the son came to be a close observer of politics. Only infrequently was lie encouraged to play with other children; his manners, tastes, recreations, his thinking in general were shaped by his scrutiny of the thrilling adult drama being performed so close at hand. For most children this would have meant a disastrous start in life, and even Churchill was often miserable. “All the great men of my acquaintance are the products of unhappy childhoods,” he was to remark long afterward. In his own case, though, he was peculiarly well adapted to a boyhood of partial neglect. His competitiveness, his indifference to authority, and the especially robust constitution with which he seemed to have been blessed at birth combined to give him an extraordinary determination to succeed over everything. He was seldom abashed. As he watched his father’s progress, with its frequent small setbacks, he felt a surge of filial sympathy. He offered to help write Lord Randolph’s speeches. The offer was refused. For the most part, his father was unapproachable. On one occasion, quite early in the morning, Churchill fired off a double-barreled shotgun beneath Lord Randolph’s bedroom window. The boy was astounded, and uplifted, by the brilliant torrent of abuse which promptly issued from the room. Randolph under full steam was a rich and rewarding entertainment, no matter what the circumstances. Churchill stood silently, reloading his shotgun and committing to memory various crushers in the high-sounding blasphemy. A short while later, his father unexpectedly descended to apologize. “Do remember things do not always go right with me,” he told his son. “My every action is misjudged and every word distorted. So make some allowances.” Then, for a great change, he talked in what Churchill has described in his book A Roving Commission as a “wonderful and captivating manner” about school, the Army, “and the grown-up life which lay beyond.” It was to prove virtually the sole occasion when the boy and Lord Randolph ever chatted on terms of father-and-son intimacy.

  The diligence with which Churchill studied his father’s public and private blasts paid dividends in after years. His own style was influenced by the fine early training. “This boneless wonder,” he was to say in Commons, waving toward Ramsay MacDonald, and again (to friends), eulogizing a jubilant Neville Chamberlain, who was waving a paper signed by Adolf Hitler, “See that old town clerk looking at European affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.” During the last war, Churchill, as Prime Minister, asked Sir Duff Cooper to find a good man to place in charge of his News Division. Cooper selected a former director of London transportation, and took him along to No. 10 Downing Street. The director was considered to be an outstandingly sharp dresser and a man of vocal staying power. Wearing flawless morning attire and carrying a newly shined topper, he arranged himself in front of the Prime Minister and delivered an impassioned twenty-minute statement of intentions, touching on Freedom of the Press, the Honorable Name of British Journalism, and other hogwash. Churchill, who is one of the world’s poorest listeners, writhed in agony, chewing to bits two expensive cigars. The door had scarcely closed behind the visitor when he cried out to Cooper, “Never send that impeccable bus conductor to see me again!”

  Lord Randolph was named Secretary of State for India in 1885 and rose to the second highest political eminence in England in 1886, when he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, a post his son was to fill some years later. Under his first stewardship, Burma was annexed to the Empire and relations between India and England were tolerably calm, with a few modest uprisings but nothing compared to the rows that India could, and would, produce as an autonomous state. He became known as a fierce champion of the Indians and spoke out bitterly when he thought Parliament was neglecting them. He called on the House to watch “with the most sedulous attention, to develop with the most anxious care, to guard with the most united and undying resolution the land and the people of Hindostan.” Of the situation generally he said that “Our rule in India is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread out over a surface of, and keeping calm and quiet and unruffled by storms, an immense and profound ocean of diverse humanity.” The quotation is important, since it represents almost identically the view which Winston Churchill adopted, and still retains, of the reciprocal benefits from an Anglo-Indian connection.

  Randolph had hit on an uncommon device for getting his own way within the broad confines of the Tory Party. Whenever he was opposed, he resigned. He resigned one political post in 1884, another in 1885, and a third in 1886. For a while his system worked admirably; his popularity was such that he was regarded as essential to the party’s stability, and besides, he had ousted Gladstone and the Liberals almost singlehanded. But he finally became so boisterous that Lord Salisbury, the Tory Prime Minister, could stand it no longer. Lord Randolph was declaring in favor of such startling reforms, all grouped under his new term of “Tory Democracy,” that the old-line conservatives were horrified. In essence, he advocated a staunch maintenance of the class system together with a program of improving living conditions
in the lower brackets. Asked his views on Temperance, he said that “As long as we allow such an immense portion of our population to live in pigsties, the warmth and false cheerfulness of the public-house will be largely sought after. The two questions appear to me to be inseparable.” Some of his colleagues believed that Randolph, despite his aristocratic nature, would have switched to the Liberal Party had it not been for the problem of Irish Home Rule, which the Liberals supported and he opposed, coining the famous slogan of “Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right!” In any case, instead of working patiently within the party for his reforms, he behaved with such intractable violence that he accomplished nothing, a common failing of reformers everywhere. Upon the occasion of his third resignation, over a trivial point of budget economy, Lord Salisbury accepted with record dispatch. At the ripe age of thirty-seven, Lord Randolph found his political career finished and himself, in the words of a contemporary, “the chief mourner at his own protracted funeral.”

  In some ways, Randolph made an unusually gay mourner. He became subject to wild and unexpected whims. Sometimes these took the form of travel. He appeared before his family one day wearing a slouch hat, a pair of high leather boots, and a belt to which was affixed a frying pan. When he was (not unnaturally) asked where he was bound, he replied, “To South Africa to dig for gold.” The incredible fact is that he made the trip, joined the crowds at Johannesburg, and came up with seven thousand pounds, which he spent on a sight-seeing tour of Japan. Back home in England, he turned to horses. He bought up a large string and went at the sport with the same zest that had made things so brisk for the Irish foxes. His application bore fruit; he began to win races. But he was seldom on hand to receive the prizes. When his horse won the important Oaks, the stewards searched the crowd for Lord Randolph and learned, at length, that he had gone to Norway “for the spring canoeing.” To the end of his days, he was seen at the meetings at Epsom and elsewhere, often happy and debonair, again brooding, shaky, and silent. At rare intervals he attempted a public speech, but a kind of paralysis that was draining him of physical and mental vigor prevented his articulating clearly. He died in 1895, forty-six years old; his star had risen, and fallen, with a rapidity unprecedented in British politics. “It is a black moment when the heralds proclaim the passing of the dead, and the great officers break their staves,” said Lord Rosebery. “But it is sadder still when it is the victim’s own hands that break the staff in public. I wonder if generations to come will understand the pity of it, will comprehend the full tragedy of Randolph’s marred life.”