Of the traits that he passed along to Winston Churchill, perhaps the tendency toward boyishness, or impishness, is the most readily identifiable. “For Randolph could not grow up,” wrote the British historian Guedalla; “and in default of a more solid destiny he became the Peter Pan of politics.” The son’s enduring youth has fortunately been coupled to balance and self-control, but it has familiar facets. A few years ago, H. G. Wells wrote, of Winston, “There are times when the evil spirit comes upon him, and then I can only think of him as an intractable little boy, a mischievous, dangerous little boy, a knee-worthy little boy. Only by thinking of him in that way can I go on liking him.” In the view of another British writer, “as a criticism of a responsible statesman this has scant importance,” but it makes an interesting tribute to Lord Randolph’s son. In addition to his inheritance, Churchill’s unsatisfactory childhood doubtless gave him an urge to cling to exceptionally youthful ways. Several seasons past, at the height of the English mah-jongg craze, he attended the opening of the play Saint Joan. At a point when the character Dunois stood on the riverbank intoning “West Wind, West Wind, West Wind!” the audience was amazed to hear a hoarse, carrying “Pong!” issue from the dark recesses of the Churchill box. Even the Prime Minister’s appearance seems to remain little changed today. Not long ago, when he made one of his infrequent appearances at the swank but sleepy Carlton Club, to which he belongs, an aged member seated near a window turned to a friend and said, “Isn’t that young Churchill? I haven’t seen him since the Boer War.”
Chapter 5
CHURCHILL’S early school days have no counterpart in the annals of great men. Neither in fact nor in fiction is there to be found precisely that quality of volcanic rebellion which characterized nearly all his actions. Penrod Schofield’s departures were the accidental by-products of abstraction, and Tom Sawyer was a serious researchist. Whatever Churchill did (and he accomplished wonders) he did on purpose. His first consignment was to an expensive and fashionable seminary at Ascot, an institution that was critically shaken by the experience.
His mother took him to the train and gave him three half crowns for spending money. His humor has not been recorded for posterity, although intelligent guesses are possible. He had already declared against learning, a decision based on a fleeting brush he’d had with a tutor, who had essayed to teach him mathematics and then gone off for a rest cure. “... The figures were tied into all sorts of tangles and did things to one another which it was extremely difficult to forecast with complete accuracy,” Churchill later wrote in his memoirs. Like many another, he complained that it was not any use being “nearly right.” “In some cases these figures got into debt with one another; you had to borrow one or carry one, and afterwards you had to pay back the one you had borrowed. These complications cast a steadily gathering shadow over my daily life. They took away from one all the interesting things one wanted to do in the nursery or in the garden. They made increasing inroads upon one’s leisure. One could hardly get time to do any of the things one wanted to do. They became a general worry and preoccupation. More especially was this true when we descended into a dismal bog called ‘sums.’ There appeared to be no limit to these. When one sum was done, there was always another. Just as soon as I managed to tackle a particular class of these afflictions, some other much more variegated type was thrust upon me.”
It was expected by Churchill’s parents that Ascot would mend all this. Their expectations were not fulfilled. The boy arrived, stole a pocketful of sugar, was soundly birched, and, catching a moment free, kicked to pieces the headmaster’s hat, a straw boater he had bought only the previous week in London. Altogether, the faculty regarded the episode as an inauspicious start, even for a son of the titled gentry. We are indebted to Churchill for his first impressions of Ascot, and to other sources for his accomplishments there. “It [the school] modelled itself upon Eton and aimed at being preparatory for that Public School above all others,” he has written. “It was supposed to be the very last thing in schools. Only ten boys in a class; electric light (then a wonder); a swimming pond; spacious football and cricket grounds; two or three school treats, or expeditions as they were called, every term; the masters all M.A.’s in gowns and mortar boards; a chapel of its own; no hampers allowed; everything provided by the authorities.”
Besides these comforts, Ascot also had a “caning room,” not mentioned in Churchill’s memoirs. From the very beginning he was one of the most faithful pilgrims to this shrine. He quickly became notable for argument, and for marathon discourse in general. In the newcomer’s second month at the establishment, a visitor to the school, at recess, noticed a small red-haired boy running at full tilt in wide circles, spurred on by an under-instructor. “Who on earth is that?” inquired the visitor, and the headmaster replied, “Why, that’s young Churchill — it’s the only way we can keep him quiet.” The child took an abnormal dislike to Latin, viewing the subject as a piece of calculated persecution on the part of the authorities. He has preserved minutes of a session in which he catechized his unfortunate Latin teacher. The point under discussion was the vocative case of the noun mensa, meaning table, or “O table,” in this case.
“What does O table mean?” inquired Churchill.
“Mensa, O table, is the vocative case,” said the teacher.
“But why O table?”
“O table — you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table. You would use it in speaking to a table.”
“But I never do,” replied Churchill.
“If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely,” said the teacher, taking the usual last resort in the school’s dealing with the boy.
Churchill steadily refused to learn Latin, or to have anything much to do with it at all, not only at Ascot but in later schooling, and he grew up with this dubious blank spot in his education. However, when he began making speeches he saw that the distribution of a few high-sounding Latin phrases was a prime asset, and kept most people sufficiently aggravated not to take exception to the speech as a whole. In true Churchillian fashion, never stumped for an expedient, he sat down and memorized an entire dictionary of Latin quotations. From then on he excelled in this department. “Ecce signum,” he would cry. “Look at the proof.” Or, in discussing the closed minds of the Labor Party, “ ‘Fas est ab hoste doceri — it is right to be taught even by the enemy,’ as the great Marlborough used to say.”
On November 12, 1936, he made a speech in the House of Commons that is interesting both quotationwise and for unerring prescience: “Let us now examine our own position,” he said. “No one can refuse sympathy to the Minister for the Coordination of Defense. From time to time my Right Hon. Friend lets fall phrases or facts which show that he realizes more than anybody else on [the Treasury] Bench the danger in which we stand. One such phrase came from his lips the other night [when he said nothing can restore us the years that are past].
“ ‘Eheu! fugaces, Posthume, Posthume,
Where are the years that are lost to me, lost to me?’
*
“From the year 1932 and certainly from the beginning of 1933 when Herr Hitler came into power, it was general public knowledge in this country that serious rearmament had begun in Germany. There was the change in the situation.”
Later in this same session, Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, commented gratefully on Churchill’s erudition, saying, “[Mr. Churchill] seldom speaks nowadays without a quotation from the Latin tongue and I rejoice that it should be so.”
The fault at Ascot was not all on one side. The headmaster was a sadist of a sort not uncommon in schools of that period, a man with whom flogging reached a religious fervor. He felt that he was scourging out devils, and he sang at his work. A former student at the place tells an illustrative anecdote about the “caning room.” Churchill and a group of boys were sent there one morning without explanation. A subordinate master, seeing them and wishing to keep thi
ngs moving, seized up a rod and gave them all a routine flogging. When the Head appeared, a few minutes later, the master said, “I’ve saved you the trouble, sir. I’ve dealt with them properly.” “It’s of no importance, Eubanks,” said the Head, “but this was my confirmation class. Good show!”
The headmaster’s meeting with Lord Randolph’s son represented an important setback for both of them. It was a collision of two inexorable forces. Unluckily for Churchill, the headmaster had a weight advantage of more than a hundred pounds. The canings became so numerous and spirited that the boy began to think in terms of long-range revenge. As previously mentioned, Churchill’s memory is phenomenally sound, and he clung to his project tenaciously. Biding his time, he hardened his muscles. Some years later, when he was a cadet at the nearby military academy at Sandhurst, he felt that the hour had struck. He was trained to a fighting edge. Accordingly, he mounted his horse and rode to Ascot, rehearsing in his mind several successful stratagems of the late Marlborough. The day was brilliantly fine, the turf had just that degree of sponginess which can spell victory for an athlete to whom footwork is paramount, and the breeze was fresh but not disturbing. Churchill reined up before the headmaster’s study, dismounted, and banged rudely on the door. A pale, begoggled stranger opened it timorously.
“Where’s old So-and-so?” asked the boy.
“Mr. — passed on to his reward a year ago the fourth of June,” replied the stranger, assuming a look of official prostration.
It was a stunning blow. Churchill reflected that the headmaster had taken typical unfair advantage, but there was nothing further to do. He thought briefly of thrashing the stranger, just for the record, but he dismissed the idea as unworthy.
In less than two years at Ascot, Churchill’s health had declined so alarmingly that his family thought it prudent to remove him. Arrangements were made to enroll him at a gentler establishment, one conducted by a pair of elderly ladies at the healthful seaside resort of Brighton. Neither of the proprietors being in especially good trim, canings were played down at Brighton. The emphasis was placed on getting educated. Before entering, Churchill was taken for a few weeks to the German spa of Gastein; it was his first visit to a people whose truculent habits he was to be called on frequently to curb in the years ahead.
From the very beginning, his school life at Brighton was a picturesque improvement on Ascot. He had not been on hand a week before the elderly ladies were thinking wistfully about engaging a caning-master. “Few days pass at Brighton when Churchill is not in trouble,” writes one of his biographers who had agents close to the school. All sources, including two or three of his schoolmates who are still living, agree that he constituted a plague spot at an otherwise serene institution. The dancing instructor, Miss Eva Moore, offered to resign and return to the stage if she was kicked once more on either shin. The football coach had him on the carpet for the use of questionable epithets. During a match in which Churchill participated, he had ranged up and down the field shouting a mysterious slogan of his own coinage: “St. George, St. Dunstan, and the Devil!” He was not a particularly good player, said the coach, but his frightful cries demoralized not only the opposing side but his own teammates, together with the spectators.
Observing the school’s experiments with a newspaper, Churchill began one of his own, not very surprisingly called The Critic. Its first issue was devoted to an imaginary yacht race, symbolized by a drawing intended to seed the most important people on the campus. The proprietors were shown in the lead, with Churchill close behind; the rest of the school was an indistinguishable jumble far to the rear. Perhaps the high light of his three years at Brighton was his appearance as Dick Dowlas in the school play, Colman’s Heir at Law. Churchill was authentically regarded as the best actor in the student body, his performance being marred only by his misreading of the repeated line, “I will send my carriage.” He had seen the last word as “carrot,” and since his hair was flaming red, the effect of his error was to produce uproarious laughter throughout the house. He was unmoved.
Churchill’s conduct was never dishonest, but it was frequently artful. It was the custom at Brighton, during roll call each evening, for a student to step forward when he heard his name and report his harvest of demerits for the day. Pretty generally, Churchill was in the forefront of this competition. One evening he responded with “Nine,” an unusual tally even for him. It then appeared that disciplinary action was being considered, since he was summoned next day by the authorities.
“Nine?” asked one of the ladies.
“The word I used was nein,” replied Churchill — “German for no.”
“Well, that’s different,” said the headmistress. “Dismissed.”
Churchill saluted smartly and returned to his room, where he had been engaged in opening a can of contraband sardines. Since his visit to the learned jailer of Ventnor, he had been inordinately interested in smuggling. Soon after his success with Dick Dowlas and carrots, he rewrote a play called The Smuggler and tried to produce it himself, with indifferent results. His mechanical ideas were so elaborate that nothing short of a professional company of great resources could have brought the production off. In this period, he had begun to read a good many plays, as well as novels and poetry. While Churchill reacted rather dangerously to the efforts of other people to educate him, he was not averse to undertaking the assignment himself. He read King Solomon’s Mines and found it entertaining, though no more expert than his rewrite job on The Smuggler. During a school vacation, one of his relatives, Lady Leslie, wrote on his behalf to the author, H. Rider Haggard, saying, “The little boy Winston came here yesterday morning, beseeching me to take him to see you before he returns to school at the end of the month. I don’t wish to bore so busy a man as yourself, but will you, when you have time, please tell me, shall I bring him on Wednesday next, when Mrs. Haggard said she would be at home? Or do you prefer settling to come here some afternoon when I could have the boy to meet you. He really is a very interesting being, though temporarily uppish from the restraining parental hand being in Russia.”
Haggard came over, and Churchill quizzed him about various obscure passages in the book. “Now what do you mean by this business?” demanded the child at one point, laying the book open. Haggard, very rattled, read it over and was obliged to confess, “Really, you know, I haven’t the slightest idea.” Churchill’s expression suggested that he’d suspected so all the time. Later on he wrote Haggard, “Thank you so much for sending me ‘Allan Quatermain’; it was so good of you. I like A.Q. better than ‘King Solomon’s Mines’; it is more amusing. I hope you will write a great many more books.” He read Treasure Island and was enchanted; he has gone through it nearly every year since then. In 1950, while making a critical speaking tour by train, he sequestered himself in one of the private coaches and left word he was not to be disturbed; he was preparing to “polish up” his remarks. When an important cablegram was delivered to the train, Gerald O’Brien, the Conservative public relations officer, tiptoed in to Churchill’s compartment. The great man was preparing for the political crisis by reading Treasure Island; the book was opened to the inspiriting fight at the stockade, when Silver’s group is routed. O’Brien dropped the cablegram and fled, while Churchill glared crossly, looking a little like a frustrated pirate himself.
In 1888, the future Prime Minister finished his far from exemplary preparatory tuition at Brighton. The school, though shaken, was still intact; the boy himself felt in splendid shape. There is a story that when Churchill had cleared the campus for the last time the lady proprietors declared a half holiday and ordered the janitor to break out the British ensign. Certainly it was one of the few authentically restful days at the school in several years. It was an uplifting time for Churchill, too. He was ready for the best, and worst, experience of every upper-class English boy’s young life — the ambiguous stint at Public School. He was headed for home, and Harrow, and adventures in education that will not soon be forgotten.
Chapter 6
BEFORE Winston, the male Churchills had traditionally gone to Eton, the symbolic pinnacle of the English public school system. Nearly all the members were troublesome. Lord Randolph’s fledgling air at that romantic establishment has been immortalized by a schoolmate, who remembered him as “a small boy in an extremely disreputable hat. Now the hat was at Eton in those days almost as notable a sign of condition as among the Spanish nobility. Moreover, his appearance was reckless — his companions seemed much the same; he was, in a word, but a pregnant word at Eton, a Scug. His elder brother had left Eton before I came, because, I think, of some difference with the authorities as to the use of a catapult. Randolph looked as if he too might differ with the authorities on any similar issue.”
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 6
