Despite these lofty ambitions, however, the tedious gap that often exists between income and expenditure was a significant inconvenience to Churchill. Much of his correspondence with his mother revolved around money, or rather the lack of it—Churchill cast in the role of the schoolboy writing home for seedcake and yet another postal order. Jennie scolded him, not without affection, for extravagance, thoughtlessness, and pomposity. The admonishments increasingly went the other way, too, Churchill chastising his mother (sometimes in bullying tones) for her renowned extravagances and financial mismanagement while reminding her of her duty to both him and Jack. While Jennie might bemoan a bounced check, Churchill pointed out her responsibility for squandering the family’s limited fortune. He could be both ungenerous and ungrateful but sometimes had good cause. A consolidation loan of £17,000, which he was roped in to help secure, gave him a legitimate voice as the Churchills’ battered finances soldiered on. As Winston wrote to his mother, “The pinch of the matter is that we are damned poor,”53 not poor like farm laborers, but poor in a world where ball gowns and cavalry chargers at £200 a go were considered necessities. Though Churchill’s renowned insensitivity shaded his financial dealings with his mother, to his considerable credit he worked hard throughout his life to earn the money to support his family, all the more creditable because his parents had set such a bad example. As he ruefully remarked, “Saving is a very fine thing. Especially when your parents have done it for you.”54 But Lord and Lady Randolph hadn’t. Upon their marriage, the Duke of Marlborough and Mr. Leonard Jerome had between them settled £3,000 a year on the couple, a princely sum, yet one they had consistently managed to live beyond, partying, horseracing, and keeping up with the Prince of Wales’s social set.
For the time being, Churchill remained discontent with the routine of army life, though there was triumph on the polo field when the 4th Hussars team won a first-class tournament at Hyderabad. After this, he was allowed three months’ leave, sailing from Bombay in May 1897. Always espying windows of opportunity, Churchill conceived the idea of stopping off en route in order to cover the Greek-Turkish War for a newspaper. As he wrote to his mother on April 21, he would view the imminent conflict from whichever side he could gain the best vantage point, and he asked her to use her contacts, including the king of Greece. Unfortunately for Churchill, however, the Greeks had already been defeated by the time his ship reached Port Said. Ever ready to leap from one opportunity to another, he decided instead to spend two weeks in Italy, visiting the monuments of ancient Rome, about which he had been reading, before returning to England for another crack at the London Season (including an appearance at the famous fancy-dress ball thrown each year by the Duchess of Devonshire, an invitation obtained by his mother).
It was from the manicured lawns of Goodwood during another fine English summer that Churchill heard that the Pathan tribesmen of India’s North West Frontier were revolting. He read that a field force of three brigades was being gathered under the command of Sir Bindon Blood. Opportunity knocked. Churchill telegraphed the general, reminding him of the promise he had made at Deepdene the summer before, enlisted other worthies to lobby in his cause, and headed off for India. He left England with unseemly haste, forgetting items of equipment, including his polo sticks and his dog Peas, which he cabled for from Aden. Thus, on an outside chance of being near the action, Churchill forewent three weeks of leave, playing for medals and experience that could then be converted into a political career. Blood’s response was discouraging, but not an outright rejection. “Very difficult; no vacancies; come up as a correspondent will try to fit you in. B. B.”55 And so Winston Churchill entered the first of three wars in which he was to occupy a remarkable position as free-ranging soldier cum newspaper reporter. In each of these skirmishes on the frontiers of Britain’s expanding empire, Churchill was driven by his desire to make a name for himself in the papers back at home while earning extra cash on the side.
He was commissioned as a correspondent by the Calcutta Pioneer, a result of Blood’s good offices, and his mother secured £5 a column from the Daily Telegraph. Churchill was subsequently annoyed that, when published, these letters bore only his initials: “I had written them with the design, a design which took form as the correspondence advanced, of bringing my personality before the electorate.” A peeved Churchill carried on, revealing the essence of his approach to life at this time: “If I am to avoid doing ‘unusual’ things it is difficult to see what chance I have of being more than an average person. I was proud of the letters and anxious to stake my reputation on them.”56 Jennie Churchill helped oil the works for this latest assault, writing, for instance, to the Prince of Wales, telling him to keep an eye open for her son’s newspaper reports. Thus continued what had begun in Cuba: the turbocharged progress of the warrior-writer. Churchill was off to the wars, and he was in a hurry to reach them. With his dressing boy and campaigning gear in tow, Churchill “sped to the Bangalore railway station and bought a ticket for Nowshera,” 2,028 miles away. From there he traveled forty miles across the plains in great heat before beginning the climb upward to the Malakand Pass. Here he had to buy two horses, engage an attendant, and assemble military effects from dead brother officers, sold at auction, as was the grim but eminently practical army custom.
It was on one of his newly purchased mounts that Churchill set about getting himself noticed, riding up and down the skirmish line on a striking gray. He wished to create the impression that he was impervious to enemy fire, desperate for a reputation for bravery (juxtaposed, in a letter to his brother, with his self-confessed cowardice while at school). As he put it squarely, when there was an audience, there was “no act too daring or noble.” Personal distinction was Churchill’s goal, and danger wasn’t going to be allowed to stand in the way. “I am so conceited I do not think the gods would create so potent a being for so prosaic an ending.”57 By his dashing about, Churchill certainly did manage to get himself noticed while also performing valuable battlefield tasks; General Blood told Churchill’s commanding officer that he was worth two junior officers and even mentioned him in dispatches. This delighted Churchill no end.
The campaign was a pretty standard North West Frontier affair. Tribesmen had attacked the garrisons holding the Malakand Pass and the fort at Chakdara. Therefore, across a swinging rope bridge, a punitive force of about twelve thousand men and four thousand animals marched into the mountains. Churchill joined a brigade sent to retaliate after an attack by tribesmen. “At earliest dawn on September 16 our whole Brigade, preceded by a squadron of Bengal Lancers, marched in warlike formation into the Mamund Valley.”58 Churchill left his horse and joined some Sikh infantrymen and their British officers climbing a hill at the head of the valley to “punish its farthest village.” The village was deserted, and the captain ordered a withdrawal. But he had been mistaken. As Churchill recorded, “Suddenly the mountain-side sprang to life. Swords flashed from behind rocks, bright flags waved here and there.” Churchill tried to rescue wounded soldiers, taking a Martini Henry rifle from a stricken comrade and brandishing a revolver amid the yells, powder smoke, and calls to withdraw. It was a very close-run thing, the Buffs (East Kent Regiment) arriving in the nick of time and putting in a charge to drive the enemy off. Churchill marched back to camp with the Buffs and the much-mauled 35th Sikhs. The brigade commander exchanged messages by heliograph with his superior, General Blood, and was ordered to stay in the Mamund Valley and lay it waste in vengeance. This the brigade set about “in punitive devastation,” destroying crops, felling shady trees, breaking reservoirs, and burning homesteads.
Given its significant losses, General Blood emergency-posted Churchill to the 31st Punjab Infantry. All of this made good copy for Churchill’s two newspapers, and he managed to successfully file his reports even though under field conditions. While naturally not revealing the full horrors of the battlefield, Churchill’s experiences here contributed to his growing and vocal disapproval of the British governmen
t’s “forward policy” (the belief that the passes leading from India into Afghanistan needed to be held by the British and their allies, particularly in order to forestall Russian penetration southward) in imperial affairs, and he offered brave criticism of this policy in the books that described the first two campaigns in which he was engaged, The Story of the Malakand Field Force and The River War. As Richard Toye makes clear, however, Churchill objected more to the forward police on grounds of cost and because he believed the government should be honest with the public on this score.
Churchill’s subsequent writings on the action in which he had taken part reveal a great deal about his views on empire and war. He was not a jingo. Having seen action, he did not seek to glorify it, finding the realities of the battlefield repulsive, and wrestled with the ethical issues associated with war. In particular, he demanded the best treatment for a defeated foe. Though he was proud of Britain’s imperial achievements, he was very critical when the empire fell short of the “ideal.” He told his mother that the Malakand Field Force was “financially ruinous . . . morally . . . wicked, and politically it is a blunder,” made necessary only by the Government of India’s misguided “forward policy.”59
Churchill returned to his regiment at Bangalore in October 1897 after six weeks on the frontier. The more powerful Afridi tribes of the Tirah region east of the Khyber Pass had now joined the revolt. The Government of India decided to send an expedition comprising two whole divisions—about thirty-five thousand men—under Sir William Lockhart, to do what Blood had been doing in the Malakand region. Churchill made strenuous efforts to join the Tirah Expeditionary Force in order to be part of what promised to be the next high-profile frontier adventure. He knew none of the “high-ups” involved, however, and besides, the colonel of his regiment was pressing for his return to Bangalore, where the general sense was that he’d had quite enough leave and adventure and should now settle down to the routine of army life, for which he was in fact being paid. Thus, after seeing real war, “I found myself popping off blank cartridges in sham fights two thousand miles away.”
Meanwhile the Tirah campaign rumbled on, as did Churchill’s interest in it. Having largely failed to achieve its objective of cowing the Afridis, the Tirah Expeditionary Force planned a second round of hostilities, and Churchill made strenuous efforts to be involved this time around, dragooning his mother into helping with the lobbying. “Under my direction she had laid vigorous siege both to Lord Wolseley and Lord Roberts. These fortresses resisted obdurately.” Churchill therefore decided to go to Calcutta, the seat of Indian military command, where he engineered an introduction to the viceroy himself, Lord Elgin, and dined with the commander in chief, General Sir George White, as well as winning the fortnightly Calcutta point-to-point. But despite his social and sporting triumphs, his trip did not meet with success. All appointments were made by the adjutant general’s department, he was informed, and the adjutant-general refused point blank to see this pushy young junior officer. Churchill returned reluctantly to his regiment at Bangalore.
This setback did not prevent Churchill, ever active on a number of different fronts, from conceiving and successfully executing an excellent plan calculated to earn cash and win public attention. This was to convert his notes and dispatches from the Malakand Field Force into a book. Striking while the iron was hot, he wrote during the hours in the middle of the day that his peers devoted to slumber and cards, discovering “a great power of application which I did not think I possessed.”60 The manuscript was finished shortly after Christmas, and his mother, playing a stalwart role as business partner and career adviser in these crucial formative years, ensured the book’s rapid publication by Longman.
Churchill’s book about the frontier war, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, was published to great acclaim in the spring of 1898, achieving all that he could reasonably have desired from his first venture in this direction. The many glowing reviews gave great pleasure to someone who had, until now, received scant praise for his academic efforts. From the Prince of Wales down, he was widely congratulated, and this thrilled him. “I felt a new way of making a living and of asserting myself, opening splendidly out before me.” “Writing a book was an adventure. To begin with, it was a toy, an amusement; then it became a mistress, and then a master, and then a tyrant.”61 In a few months, the book had earned him the equivalent of two years’ pay. What is more, and typical of Churchill’s ability to short-circuit conventional customs of rank and propriety, the book meant that though only a lowly life form in army terms, he was able to communicate above the heads of his seniors. The book enabled him to address a wider audience and to censure the strategies and tactics of those at the military summit. He received invitations to write on military themes—the editor of the influential United Services Magazine, for instance, asking for articles on the ethics of Britain’s frontier policy. The book was written with astonishing speed, largely motivated by the desire to beat a competitor’s effort into the public domain. One of the prices for such a rapid publication, however, was that Churchill entrusted the proofreading to someone else (Morton Frewin, known by the sobriquet “Mortal Ruin”), who, alas, allowed errors to creep in, or to remain undetected. Churchill felt a sense of “disgrace” at the errors and the slovenly impression they might convey; “literary excellence is what I aim at.”62 But the errors did little to impede the book’s enthusiastic reception.
“Having contracted the habit of writing,” Churchill thought that, for his next trick, he’d try his hand at a novel, finished in two months and published under the title Savrola: A Tale of Revolution in Laurania in 1899. “I have consistently urged my friends to abstain from reading it” was his later judgment upon his first and last venture into fiction. But to have written a novel at all, at such a young age and with so many other calls upon his time, was amazing, and the novel itself was of sufficient quality to earn favorable reviews in a number of respected journals. It still reads well enough today, a tale of high politics and intrigue typical of its age, though rarely read by anyone “who does not have a greater interest in the author than in the book.”63 Meticulously well written by a man of twenty-three, perhaps somewhat wooden for modern tastes, it is an enduring testament to the remarkable energy, talent, and ambition of its author and provides a unique self-portrait and window into the mind of the young Winston.
Even though there was the serious matter of books and an interregimental polo tournament to keep him occupied, Churchill was still desperate to get to the Tirah. He contacted his friend Colonel Ian Hamilton, one of the expedition’s brigade commanders. It transpired that the only exception to the general rule that had prevented Churchill from being sent was in the case of people appointed to Sir William Lockhart’s personal staff. Churchill therefore decided to risk bunking off from his regiment in order to go to Peshawar and see what he could do to persuade Lockhart’s ADC (aide-de-camp), Captain Haldane, in his direction. This ploy worked, and he was appointed as an extra orderly officer on the general’s staff. Haldane’s opinion on first meeting him was that he was cut out on a vastly different pattern from any officer of his years he had so far met. Having stuck his neck out, Churchill behaved as demurely as possible among the more senior officers who comprised the general’s staff. His chance to get noticed came, however, when Captain Haldane revealed that a newspaper correspondent had written a critical account for the Fortnightly Review. Churchill advised on how best to respond in order to prevent its publication without the need to engage General Lockhart in an undignified correspondence on the matter.
The episode was a harbinger of much that was to come in Churchill’s career; while he earned the plaudits and gratitude of some, others were not amused. Important people in the War Office and the Indian Army thought the precocious junior officer had no business in the affair, and The Broad Sword (the organ of Britain’s military establishment) was hostile. As regards the campaign, to Churchill’s disappointment, negotiations soon won out over a retur
n to war, and the expeditionary force dispersed. Bangalore and regimental duties beckoned once again. He fared little better at polo. At the regimental tournament in Meerut in February 1898, the 4th Hussars team was knocked out by the Durham Light Infantry. As Churchill pondered intensely over the career choices open to him, Colonel Ian Hamilton offered some sagacious advice: “Art is long, life is short—so get on the right track as soon as possible and stay on it.” His point was that no one could do all things at once, and that Churchill needed to decide, now, whether he was to be a politician or a soldier.64
Fresh news was filtering through of war clouds in the Sudan, thousands of miles to the west. As we have seen, Churchill’s keen ear had been tuned to the heralds of this new conflict for some time, and a Churchillian campaign to secure his involvement commenced for the third time. On May 22, 1898 he wrote to his mother: “Redouble your efforts in this direction. My plans for the future will be much influenced by this.” Churchill’s apparently footloose ways, and his ability to persuade reluctant senior commanders and to follow the action while his regiment carried out its humdrum duty, were generating suspicion and animosity toward him. “A great sense of destiny, of power and of greatness was deeply impregnated in Churchill. He was, by this time, markedly egocentric and self-expressive.”65 He was a “self-advertiser” and a “medal-hunter.” Furthermore, many of his brother officers thought that the role of war correspondent sat ill alongside that of professional soldier and broke the unwritten code of officers not commenting on military affairs or publicly criticizing the actions of their superiors. Churchill lived, as his son put it, in “the twilight of a Victorian era in which many of his activities were regarded as ‘ungentlemanly.’”66 But Churchill was undeterred: enjoining his mother to pull strings as never before, he wrote: “It is a pushing age, we must push with the best.”67
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