Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  Winston’s general air, when he first arrived at Harrow, made his father’s and uncle’s Etonian behavior seem effeminate by contrast. In a word, he took exception to everything. His family had selected Harrow because of its location. The child was supposed to have weak lungs (this was later proved sensationally fallacious), and the doctors advised that he be kept on high ground. Harrow is situated on a hill, while Eton is situated in a bog. Despite their difference in elevation, the two schools are on a basis of near-parity in a social way. They are the leaders, where the sons of dukes, the obscure relatives of kings, the young moneyed and the wellborn are trimmed and polished into that ineffable enigma, the English gentleman. The term “public school,” as nearly all Americans know, is somewhat misleading, meaning, in fact, precisely the reverse. A public school in England is a private school, far too expensive for the children of the lower classes, who must go to state-run schools, where they doubtless have a better time. Among the best reasons advanced for the extra-human good spirits of the English gentleman is the fact that he has put public school behind him. Once the ordeal is over, nothing in his future life can seem really irritating. Being caught in a cloudburst, having a bucket of paint fall on him from a scaffold, walking into a manhole — these strike him as but the normal contretemps of a perfectly ripping day.

  Writing of Harrow in Churchill’s day, the present chaplain of the school has said, “... there still existed the age-old feud between masters and boys, for boys looked upon masters as their natural enemies; a master was seldom seen talking to a boy in the street, and in form he spoke with the air of a magistrate rather than of a friend.” Every sort of classism was encouraged: the boys in the upper forms detested the boys in the lower forms, the older boys beat the younger boys, various cliques rose in opposition to other cliques, and a general and merry warfare reigned. The accommodations at both Harrow and Eton, and at most public schools, offered the usual comforts of the average Trappist monastery. In an inmate’s room there was a wooden bunk, often equipped with springs and mattress, a chair, a kind of desk, and little else. The chamber itself was of no great size, providing only sufficient arm-room to swing a board, or a spike, or a mace, depending on the traditions of the school in question.

  The impact of these conditions on Churchill was jarring, but not as jarring as his impact on Harrow. Upon his arrival, he consented ungenially to an examination in Latin. He was handed a piece of paper, and some Latin paragraphs, and told to cough up a suitable translation within two hours. At the end of that period he turned in his results, which consisted, in toto, of a large blot, a classical smudge, a pair of brackets, and his name, printed in block letters. Dr. Welldon, the headmaster, studied the report, harking back frequently to the paragraphs, and found it inadequate. To his everlasting credit, he sat silently appraising the boy and then for some reason decided that he was eligible to pass into Harrow, notwithstanding the Latin fiasco. Churchill was assigned to a housemaster, H. O. D. Davidson, who took him in tow much as one might pick up a snake with a pair of tongs. What was Davidson’s astonishment, as they proceeded to the boy’s quarters, to hear him ask chattily, “And what did you think of the House of Commons vote on the last military bill?” Churchill was placed in the lowest form and never rose far above it in four and a half years. When he started, two boys were listed below him in scholastic capacity, but as he warmed to his work, he easily supplanted them, then for a space held supreme sway as school clown. “His lack of progress put him at least once in danger of compulsory removal,” an English journalist wrote.

  Since Ascot, Churchill had been opposed to education in general, but at Harrow he got his back up in earnest. As before, his pique centered on Latin. Somewhat later, he wrote down a few “general observations about Latin which probably have their application to Greek as well. In a sensible language like English important words are connected and related to one another by other little words. The Romans in that stern antiquity considered such a method weak and unworthy. Nothing would satisfy them but that the structure of every word should be reacted on by its neighbors in accordance with elaborate rules to meet the different conditions in which it might be used. There is no doubt that this method both sounds and looks more impressive than our own. The sentence fits together like a piece of polished machinery. Every phrase can be tensely charged with meaning. It must have been very laborious, even if you were brought up to it; but no doubt it gave the Romans, and the Greeks too, a fine and easy way of establishing their posthumous fame.”

  Even when he was told that Gladstone read Homer for fun, the boy made no improvement, but only commented that it “serves him right.” Altogether, his condition was so static that Dr. Welldon, a conscientious man, volunteered to tutor him. Three times a week, despite his heavy schedule, the headmaster fired Ovid and Caesar at an obdurate Churchill, and three times a week he retired from the field not having scored a single hit. As commonly happens, though, Churchill eventually found a way to absorb a minimum amount of Latin with which to satisfy the authorities. He dug up a wonder child to whom the reading of Latin was no more vexing than reading a paperbacked novel in English. He filled the bill exactly. After a little persuasion, and a few threats, he agreed to drop around and run over each day’s lesson. It was no trouble for Churchill, with his dazzling memory, to fix the translations in mind for twenty-four hours and thus get by. In return, he provided essays for the linguist, cranking them out on any subject at half an hour’s notice. One of these struck the fancy of Dr. Welldon, who summoned the panic-stricken youth to his study. “This is a splendid effort,” said the doctor. “I was especially interested in your point here, though I think you didn’t carry it far enough. Precisely what did you have in mind?”

  “No more than that, really,” said the boy. “That just about states the case, in my view.”

  “You wouldn’t want to elaborate on it?” asked Welldon.

  “Not just at this time,” said the boy.

  He was allowed to return to his room, but he told Churchill he’d have to play down the ideas in the future. “Write them mediocre,” he said.

  The few remaining authorities have differing versions of this story. Sir Cyril Norwood, the former president of St. John’s College, Oxford, writes, “In the form in which the tradition came to my ears, it is related that Mr. Welldon summoned the Sixth Former, and pointing out that the essay was obviously beyond his unaided standards, demanded the source of his inspiration. There was as a result produced from the School’s under-world Winston Churchill as the only begetter. Mr. Churchill did not deny this story when I put it to him, but merely said that knowing these things Harrow did nothing about it, but left him where he was. It is only fair to say that the story as related by himself in his ‘My Early Life’ is somewhat different, and perhaps the authorities knew nothing about this early precocity ... The little Churchill was a pretty tough proposition for an organized system of education.”

  On his first Sunday at Chapel, the boy was instructed to sit on a bench in front of the monitors, the house being full. When the service was ended, the monitors, august and privileged, arose to file out by themselves, in accordance with ritual usage. Churchill got up and, yawning, filed out with them. The gasp heard over the room made no impression on him; he waved in very democratic style to two or three fellow sufferers and walked on down to the village to lay in some sweets.

  As a general thing, the village was proscribed territory to the boys of Harrow. At certain times they were permitted to visit shops and attend to necessary business. Churchill was well known in the village, and used it freely. A week after his arrival at school, he learned that it was forbidden to keep dogs. As soon as he could get two dogs, an hour or so later, he arranged to have them quartered at a house on West Street. He and his best friend in town, the local detective, enjoyed walking the dogs and talking about current events, which Churchill considered to be over the heads of both masters and students up on “the hill.”

  In 1941, E. D. W. Chapl
in, one of the most ardent Harrovians in the history of the school, drew up a collection of anecdotes and reminiscences about Churchill. His excellent little book, called Winston Churchill and Harrow, was published by the school Book Shop “in aid of the hospital on the Hill” and adds famously to the outstanding lore about this phase of the statesman’s tutelage. Several townspeople were then living who remembered the mischievous red-haired son of Lord Randolph. Wright Cooper, whose family lived over a sweet shop (called a “Tuck Shop” by the boys), saw him as “honest and generous in a day when robust appetites were not always accompanied by well-lined pockets ... When Churchill was downstairs we all knew it. Boys always crowded round his table. He talked loudly and usually led the conversation. He knew, too, what he was talking about, and nothing came amiss to him. He was witty and critical and kept the other boys in roars of laughter. He was exceedingly popular and even the seniors sought his company.”

  J. F. Moore, who retired as manager of the Harrow Book Shop after fifty-three years of service, recalled that Stanley Baldwin, another Harrovian of that period, “was a boy of retiring disposition and was in great contrast to Mr. Churchill. The latter in his schooldays already showed evidences of his unusual command of words. He would argue in the shop on any subject, and, as a result of this, he was, I am afraid, often left in sole possession of the floor. Mr. John Galsworthy was a thoughtful boy. He walked about looking at the ground, as if thinking deeply. Was he, one wonders, even then meditating upon the novels and plays which have since made him so famous? Mr. Amery (a senior boy in Mr. Churchill’s time), small and alert, was a brilliant scholar, and was well known at the Book Shop.

  “Visitors were always interested in the old Book Shop, and well they might be, for it was in this house, then tenanted by the Rev. Mark Drury, that the great Sir Robert Peel spent his terms at Harrow, and in which Byron lived.

  “The room which Peel occupied was long kept in its original state, and a brick on which he had carved his name was taken from the outer wall and preserved for a time, but it is now lost. Among visitors, I remember Lord Randolph Churchill, and Mr. Horace Annesley Vachell, the author of ‘The. Hill,’ who had left before my time at the Book Shop, but who often came to see his son Richard, who was a boy in the School.”

  Of the great men whose footprints are left in the drafty corridors of Harrow, Churchill is the only one who refused categorically to conform. Peel, Byron, Baldwin, Galsworthy — these were children who bent to their studies, were in awe of their masters, obeyed the rules, and hoarded their energies for the circumstantial days ahead. Overendowed with energy and hostile to education, Churchill had ample resources for mischief of an unbelievable variety. He was known as “Carrot Top” to the boys of Harrow, who quickly learned that he had the explosive qualities thought to accompany red hair. An instructor’s son made the mistake of selling him, for a shilling, a sparrow’s egg advertised as a “cuckoo’s egg.” When Churchill discovered the fraud, by checking his purchase with a local bird-walker, he gave the instructor’s son a brisk drubbing, and took his shilling back. He frequently went off half cocked, and as frequently made amends. One day while dickering for some peas for his peashooter, with which he hoped to immobilize a particularly offensive member of the faculty, he got into a row with a woman shopkeeper. He suddenly dashed a handful of peas over the front room of her tiny establishment and ran. A male bystander overtook him and gave him a shaking up. Far from being resentful, Churchill went up to the woman and apologized handsomely. She forgave him, and they became good friends.

  “Churchill as a schoolboy was always of an inquiring mind,” says E. D. W. Chaplin, with Harrovian restraint. The lad’s inquiries about a haunted house nearly got him killed. A massive residence called Roxeth House, empty since 1861, stood at the junction of West Street and Bessborough Road, near the school, and was reputed to be a popular hangout of ghosts. Several recognizable ghosts had been spotted in the upper rooms by men going home from taverns, and there was much rattling of chains, groaning, winking of sickly lights, and other activity typical of high spirits. Churchill determined to get at the truth. In the bottom of an old trash-filled well on the grounds, there was said to be a secret tunnel to the house, a suitable starting point for his investigations. He quickly saw that the trash could be removed only by a good-sized bomb, upon which he set to work. He spent all his allowance on chemicals and additional materials and finally, after several false starts, assembled a genuinely formidable-looking machine, about the size of a pumpkin and with a foot or two of fuse sticking out. Tucking it under one arm without any attempt at concealment, he made off toward the house. It is a peculiarity of Harrow villagers that they stare when they see a child on the street with a bomb, and a good many stared nervously at Churchill. His old friend the detective nodded and said laughingly, “That’s quite a parcel you have there — looks like a bomb.”

  “Oh, it’s a bomb right enough.”

  “Quite so, a bomb, to be sure,” said the detective, and he waved absently as Churchill hurried on his way.

  An aunt of one Mr. Harry Woodbridge, a former Harrow resident, had just finished hanging out her laundry and was looking over a fence to the grounds of Roxeth House. She takes up the narrative. “I was gazing out at nothing in particular,” she said, “when all of a sudden there was a deafening explosion and a big pall of black smoke, and one of the Harrow boys seemed to come flying up out of the old well. I rushed over and helped him to his feet. His face looked badly scorched and his clothing was a ruin. I got him into my home and bathed his face, which was not greatly damaged after all. He seemed in a splendid humor and said only, ‘I expect this will get me the bag.’ ”

  The trouble was, Churchill had lit the fuse; then, when nothing happened, had begun to lower himself into the well. At that moment, the pumpkin disintegrated brilliantly, easily justifying all of his trouble. The authorities took a sour but resigned view of the case, and he failed to raise any ghosts, but he wrote down the explosion as a successful adventure, despite everything.

  Churchill’s best friend at Harrow was Jack Milbanke, a pleasant and pliant but courageous boy, the son of a baronet of ancient family. His life previous to Harrow had been normally restricted; he had never seen anything even remotely like Churchill before. The association was a stimulating one, and kept Milbanke continually in hot water. One week his restless companion came into his room and said, “I’ve been digging into the old rules and have found a way to avoid playing compulsory football.”

  “Good-oh,” replied Milbanke, who loved football but who loved Churchill more. Churchill also rather enjoyed playing football, but he was opposed to playing, or doing, anything by command. He had discovered an elderly Harrow regulation stating that there should be no compulsory football during “trial,” or examination week. He instructed the agreeable Milbanke to refuse to play and, in fact, to climb into his bunk with a good book and enjoy himself. Churchill did likewise. “By doing so we courted a severe caning from the monitors,” he said later. The school was thrown into an uproar, the issue being, as he wrote, “gravely debated in the highest circles.” In the end it was decided that technically the miscreants were in the right, but the incident by no means solidified their popularity in high echelons. As usual, the son of Lord Randolph was undisturbed by public opinion. “I trust the precedent thus boldly established has not been lost in later generations,” he remarked blandly afterward.

  Churchill was at Harrow from April 1888 to December 1892, a period that embraced fourteen school terms. During three of these he was in H. O. D. Davidson’s Small House and for the rest he was in the headmaster’s. His last three years were devoted to Army Class, that is, he took the course aimed to prepare him for Sandhurst, the English equivalent of the American West Point and the French St. Cyr. Since the day of the toy-soldier review for his father, and Lord Randolph’s query about the Army, he had accepted it as decisive that he was headed for a career in the military. A. W. Siddons, a former master at Harrow, has w
ritten that he “never rose very high in the School, and consequently some people have thought that at that time he was stupid; but that is a mistaken idea. One of my correspondents writes of his school days, ‘he was not an easy boy to deal with. Of course he had always a brilliant brain, but he would only work when he chose to and for the masters he approved of.’ Another writes, ‘He was plainly uninterested in the academic subjects.’ Yet a third correspondent writes, ‘As a boy, I formed the highest opinion of his abilities and never ceased to wonder why he did not rise higher in the School. But he hated the Classics, and in his time that kept him down.’ ”

  In his book, My Early Life, Churchill has been wonderfully articulate on this subject: “By being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on learning Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. Mr. Somervell — a delightful man, to whom my debt is great — was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing — namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it ... As I remained in the Third Form three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learnt it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence — which is a noble thing. And when in after years my school fellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel at any disadvantage ... I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for would be for not knowing English. I would whip them hard for that.”

  In addition to Somervell, Churchill was devoted to two other masters at Harrow — C. H. P. Mayo, who taught him mathematics, and L. W. Moriarty, who headed the Army Class. Mayo performed the stupendous feat of giving the boy a respectable mathematical grounding in six months, a job that the people at Ascot might have sworn would take upwards of fifteen years. He later wrote of Mayo, “he convinced me that Mathematics was not a hopeless bog of nonsense, and that there were meanings and rhythms behind the comical hieroglyphics; and that I was not incapable of catching glimpses of some of these. Of course what I call Mathematics is only what the Civil Service Commissioners expected you to know to pass a very rudimentary examination.” Moriarty was greatly beloved by the whole school; he more than anyone else was responsible for easing the traditional class tensions. In the words of a man who knew him then, he had “such charm of manner and remarkable powers of conversation that the glacial distinctions melted away, and the springs of friendliness were soon apparent, the friendliness between masters and boys which is such a feature of Harrow life at the present day.”