While accompanying the campaign of his old friend Ian Hamilton, who was marching on Johannesburg, Churchill concocted a typical escapade. With Hamilton’s troops, he found himself on one side of the city, and Lord Roberts, at the only telegraph outlet, was cut off on the opposite side. It seemed vital to send a dispatch to the Morning Post, which had been scooping London on things like loitering soldiers, geese, and miscellaneous flaws in the high-level planning. Churchill was sitting at a roadside, wondering what to do, when two civilians came riding along on bicycles. They were conversing in French. He jumped up promptly and hailed them in his Harrovian approximation of the subtle Gallic language. Did they think it possible, he asked, for him to cycle through the city dressed as a civilian? Whatever their answer, Churchill cried “Splendid!” and fastened onto one of the wheels, giving the owner a fistful of bank notes as rental. As if the fellow’s plight were not sad enough, he soon saw himself talked out of a first-rate seersucker suit and garbed in the faded drab of the Cockyolibirds. The exchange took only a few moments. Without rightly knowing what had hit him, the peasant came to seated in Churchill’s old spot and, for all general purposes, on the reverse side of the struggle. He waved in halfhearted fashion as his comrade and the cyclone from the north rode off toward Johannesburg.
Churchill’s tactic en route through the city was to shout what he considered to be French to his bewildered partner. In order to gesticulate in the accepted fashion, he frequently rode with no hands, and why he was not apprehended has never been cleared up by the Johannesburg authorities, for he was not only suspicious-looking, he was a municipal nuisance. However, he got through town all right and dragged the unwilling cyclist with him. At Roberts’ headquarters he paid off his helper, shook his hand, and sent him reeling back. He himself recounted his adventures with such bumptious good cheer that Roberts stood him a bottle of wine and put him up for the night.
At one time, Churchill’s path crossed that of his brother Jack, who happened to be spending his first day under fire. The veteran of three continents had the uncomfortable experience of seeing his young brother shot in the leg; he assisted him back to the rear and by dint of addressing a stripling surgeon as “Major” got him the best of care. It also occurred that, simultaneously, his mother, ever busy, had put in to Durban with a hospital ship she had casually outfitted. The Lady Randolph continued to be a handsome and persuasive woman. She had just talked a pliable American millionaire into making a staggering anti-Boer donation. Using the money to equip a vessel of mercy, she found, in Durban, that the first patient admitted for treatment was her son Jack. Her son Winston, to whose ears had come a rumor that the ship was rich in provisions, arrived soon afterward. He stayed some days, dining in style and recounting his vivid adventures. Altogether, it was a warm, if uncommon, reunion.
Before quitting the war, Churchill arranged a transfer from the Light Horse to resume his duties as general correspondent, in order to have a wider range. The old trouble of confinement to a single unit had been plaguing him again. But in transferring he had run into unexpected and severe resistance, provided by his former campmate, Kitchener, who had taken over one of the highest commands in the South African Army. The ex-Egyptian Sirdar was piqued on two counts; one had to do with the many generous hints Churchill had given him in the Sudan, via the Morning Post, and the other was of more recent origin, resting on a dispatch that Churchill had written about chaplains. In the course of his young career it was difficult for Churchill to keep out of religious squabbles. For a man not especially devout, he expended a lot of time on theology.
The immediate friction involved a blend of religious and military theory. Listening one Sunday to an earnest army chaplain preach, Churchill took umbrage at the reported tactics of the Israelites in felling the Walls of Jericho. He saw the account as a garbled piece of journalism, and said so, in the Post. Possibly fearing a libel action by a descendant, he did not come out openly and charge the man at the scene with distortion; instead, he laid the heaviest burden of error on the chaplain. “These strictures,” he afterward wrote, “had, it appeared, caused commotion in the Established Church.” Kitchener took the line that the chaplain was doing his best and did not deserve to be called down on a point that was basically military. He implied that he, unlike Churchill, was satisfied with the siege of Jericho, and indicated that anyhow it was too late to change it: the walls were gone.
After much talk and wirepulling, Churchill finally got himself detached, and went on to riper glories. He was the first man in at the capture of Pretoria, from which he had been the first man out. The joyous deliverance has been described by him in My Early Life:
“The prisoners rushed out of the house into the yard, some in uniform, some in flannels, hatless, coatless, but all violently excited. The sentries threw down their rifles, the gates were flung open, and while the last of the guard (they numbered 52 in all) stood uncertain what to do, the long penned up officers surrounded them and seized their weapons. Someone produced a Union Jack, the Transvaal emblem was tom down, and amidst wild cheers from our captive friends, the first British flag was hoisted over Praetoria. Time: 8.47, June 5. Tableau!”
There followed a fitting carouse at the State Model School. An old boy had come back for Class Day, and the long term was over.
It was the emotional climax of Churchill’s deeds of derring-do. Ahead lay the safe but vexing problems of a life in public service.
Chapter 16
CHURCHILL’S trip from Capetown to Southampton, made in July of 1900, is worthy of passing note. He was an object of immense curiosity to his fellow passengers, whose interest was not lessened by his conduct during the voyage. His plans had crystallized: he would return to Oldham and take it by storm. To this end he had written several speeches with which to sow the wind. Cramped as he was, and with time short (for an election impended), he had little opportunity for proper rehearsal, so he stationed himself in the prow of the ship and, in the words of a fellow passenger, borrowing from Demosthenes, “harangued the waves and winds.”
Characteristically, he was wholly oblivious of the eccentric spectacle he presented, nor was he regardful of the excited buzzing from the onlookers. Gesticulating wildly, with red hair flying, tossed up and down with the motion of the ship, he shouted out his emphatic platform, which went about as follows: “My Liberal opponents will tell you [glaring into the frightened face of some unoffending planter or missionary] that this war is unjust and unnecessary. Now I say to you that their opposition, their unreasonable hampering of its prosecution from start to finish, have jeopardized the very roots of empire. It must be fought to an indisputable conclusion. Do you agree?”
At this point, a number of the less hardy among the passengers would retire to their cabins, preferring to hide rather than make a public statement of policy.
By the time they reached England, Churchill was elocuting smoothly; the rest of the ship’s company was exhausted but sold on his candidacy. He stepped ashore to a unique and unremitting ovation. Indeed, it went on so long that several of the Conservative leaders were fearful that he might try to buck for Prime Minister.
In London he attended the wedding of his mother to the career soldier, George Cornwallis-West, and then went on to Oldham, where he plunged immediately into the campaign. The line-up this time was only slightly different. Representing the Liberals were still Emmott and Runciman, but Churchill’s running mate was now Charles B. Crisp, a broker who was later to found the British Bank of Foreign Trade and achieve world-wide fame as a financier. James Mawdsley, the secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Operative Spinners, had met with a regrettable accident. He was an enormous man and had been gaining a little more weight each year. A large china tub in which he was accustomed to bathing had at last collapsed under the growing avoirdupois and Mawdsley was destroyed in the wreckage. Replacing him, Crisp had no utopian program for labor, but he was an able speaker, could foot his own bills, and was respectful toward Churchill, the lion of t
he hour. It was a strong ticket.
Eleven other constituencies had invited Churchill to stand, but he gave out an interview in which he said that he preferred to avenge the “smack in the eye” of the year before. All the bands in town were assembled when he arrived, and the prevailing melody was “See the Conquering Hero Comes.” Through streets lined with cheering thousands, he rode in an open carriage to the Town Hall, where he made his first address. It was observed that, when somebody opened a door to hand him down, Churchill vaulted to the street over the other side. He related the story of his escape from the Boers and laid the credit almost entirely to Mr. Dewsnap, the former resident of Oldham. This was remarked as odd in view of the fact that the mine manager, Howard, had engineered the whole business. Dewsnap had, in fact, contributed little more than a handshake. However, the revelation brought down the house, and a number of small girls in the front row, wearing sashes that said, “God bless Churchill, England’s Noblest Hero,” arose and sang a song in which he was described as the savior of the downtrodden. This was a far cry from the sentiment of the previous election, in which he and the ill-fated Mawdsley were branded as creatures of the vested interests.
In the two months that followed, Churchill addressed 150 meetings, winding up one of the last in a half swoon, which was seized upon by the opposition as false, to his raging indignation. Indeed, the campaign was marked by surprising personal vilification. The other side went so far as to accuse him of both cowardice and the abandonment of his fellow prisoners at Pretoria. These charges set in motion the long, crowded train of Churchill’s libel actions. It is still merrily rolling.
To refute the slanderous indictments, he produced statements of prisoners and additional testimonials. A Captain Haserick wrote to the Daily Mail as follows:
Sir: I have been shown a letter which appeared in the Daily Mail a short time ago, and the subject of which is Mr. Winston Churchill. I regret that, owing to travel, I did not see it at an earlier date.
The writer says, inter alia; “Before his (Mr. Churchill’s) brief excursion to South Africa, when he escaped by prematurely leaving his fellow prisoners, with whom he had agreed to make the attempt co-jointly, we find him, etc.”
As one of these fellow prisoners — five of us intended to make the attempt, in two parties — I desire to state emphatically that there is no truth in this accusation.
We were at the time in the Model School, Praetoria, and the escape was to be made at night over the playground wall, at a very dark and badly guarded part of it. Mr. Churchill was the first to make the attempt, and succeeded in getting over safely. An officer who followed bungled, and the noise attracted the attention of a guard who ordered him off the wall, but fortunately made no further investigation. Mr. Churchill, I know for a fact, waited a considerable time in the garden into which he had dropped before making off.
I may add that one of the officers who was to have accompanied him, a Colonial, spoke the Taal fluently, and Mr. Churchill, who spoke not a word of Dutch, had naturally relied very much upon his officer for an escape from the Transvaal. Under the circumstances only a miracle could save him, and this took place, for, compelled by exhaustion to seek help, he approached a house the tenant of which happened to be the only Englishman in the district. I know that I can rely upon your sense of fairness to publish this letter.
A.E. Haserick, Captain
*
The Oldham voters apparently preferred this version of Churchill’s adventure to that of the Liberals, for Runciman was rudely unhorsed in the election. Emmott led the quartet with 12,947 votes; Churchill was a very close second, with 12,931; Runciman and Crisp, not elected, were third and fourth.
And now, on the first of October 1900, at the advanced age of twenty-five, and having already provided a rich legend for the minnesingers, Churchill was ready for his life of service. There was little faltering in his manner. Notwithstanding his youth, he was a master planner, and his next step was loudly applauded in a limited circle: he decided to go to America and make some money. The word had reached him that there was a gold mine in lectures. His informant pointed out somewhat impertinently that, since Churchill was in process of lecturing almost continuously, he might as well corral a formal audience and store up some cash before settling down in Parliament.
It was not a difficult choice. Despite his haughty lineage, Churchill was far from wealthy. Outside of a moderate allowance from his mother, and about twenty thousand dollars he had made from his books, he had no source of support. Furthermore, the Members of Parliament were then unpaid. As the congratulations poured in on his campaign triumph, Churchill went ahead with his scheme. Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, telegraphed him; Arthur Balfour, the Leader of the House, asked him to share a speaking platform; and Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, introduced him everywhere. Churchill concluded that an English lecture tour might be in order before he began his American journey. It was enthusiastically arranged. Lord Wolseley presided at his successful debut in St. James’s Hall in London.
In this period, according to his contemporaries, Churchill’s lecture technique was the envy of his enemies and his imitators. He had adopted a style that, while sufficiently confident to prevent nervousness in his listeners, was yet tinged with a certain appealing timidity. This latter quirk might have been the result of his working with a magic lantern, which was apt to blow up in critical passages. He also had a careless habit of shoving the slides in upside down, and it is well known that neither Boers nor the African landscapes are at their best exhibited in this way. A journalist of the day was unkind enough to suggest that the shyness was “very largely humbug,” assumed for its effect on ladies. The old lisp was still in evidence, and here, too, a defect seemed to militate for the general good. In writing his speeches, Churchill continued to avoid beginning and terminal s’s and struck a rueful, boyish expression whenever one accidentally reared its hissing head. But it was probably in his sincerity, or vehemence (the quality lay somewhere between the two nouns), that his real strength was rooted. It has been suggested that had Churchill been selling medicine or razor blades he could have retired with a fortune. His evident belief in his words has perhaps never been surpassed by anybody before or since. In fact he is admired yet today for the way he can hold a hostile audience that is silently rejecting his offering in toto.
Even those Englishmen who opposed the Boer War, and there were many, enjoyed Churchill’s passionate remarks in favor of it. The audiences were gorgeous. Both society and the proletariat bought tickets with abandon. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle served as chairman at his second address; Lord Rosebery introduced him at Edinburgh, Lord Dufferin at Belfast, and his cousin, the incumbent Duke of Marlborough, at Oxford. As the acclaim and the money piled up, the Marlborough motto of “Faithful but Unfortunate” began to appear as though it had been chosen in sport. Churchill was hailed everywhere as the most fortunate man in all of Britain. His average take was the equivalent of $500 a night, a rare sum in those days of the honest pound and dollar. At St. George’s Hall in Liverpool, he hauled in $1500, and in the month of November he banked a cool $22,500, with only half of his English swing completed.
These golden successes continued until he left for America, where the climate unexpectedly frosted up. The former colony was not altogether imperialistic in its views, and a great many people, Churchill found, were hoping that the Boers would win. Taking the lead in this unfriendly contingent were the Irish, who had no use for the English then and have found little reason to thaw in the years that have passed. The opening lecture was in New York; the atmosphere was one of restrained cordiality. A fair crowd attended, perhaps partly out of a desire to see Mark Twain, who presided with good-humored finesse. In Baltimore no more than a comparative handful showed up, and in Chicago, a citadel of Hibernianism, there were indications that Churchill might be ridden out of town on a rail, a custom of the raw, new country. In this crisis, the visitor proved again that he was a man of more than ordinary m
ettle. Imperturbable on the platform, he placated the galleries with the laudatory observations on the Irish Fusiliers that were described in Chapter 2, and then, as he wrote later, “made a few jokes against myself, and paid a sincere tribute to the courage and humanity of the Boers.” From then on, the tour went smoothly, climaxed by a tremendous turnout, together with an organized pro-British demonstration, in Boston. “On the whole,” he has said, summing up, “I found it easy to make friends with American audiences. They were cool and critical, but also urbane and good-natured.”
The American tour had been organized by a Major Pond, an impresario of the period, who offered Churchill a guarantee of ten thousand dollars with clauses about percentages, etc. Pond was a man with dynamic qualities and ideas even larger than his client’s, as evidenced by some advance publicity he got out. It advertised the forthcoming lecturer as “the hero of five wars, the author of six books, and the future Prime Minister of Great Britain.” Officially horrified, Churchill ordered him to withdraw it. Pond did so, but under protest. Before returning, Churchill extended the foreign tour to Canada, where all was joyous welcome. He concluded his engagement in January and sailed for home. Altogether, he had managed admirably. For more than five months he had spoken every day except Sunday, had seldom slept twice in the same bed, and had saved his money prudently. The tour had been rigorous, but he had been fed and housed much better than during his preceding outing in South Africa. Besides, he now had nearly fifty thousand dollars put aside. Conditions were propitious for his fling at politics. Churchill journeyed to London and prepared for a kind of postscript lecture to the series — his maiden speech in the House of Commons.
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 21
