The Marlborough fortune—greatly enhanced by a few million dollars when Consuelo Vanderbilt married into the family—was in the hands of Winston’s cousin “Sunny,” otherwise known as Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough. For a couple of years—until Consuelo gave birth to the first of her two sons in 1897—Winston was next in line to inherit the title and all the riches that came with it, including his birthplace, Blenheim Palace. But he didn’t show much interest in becoming a mere duke when so many other paths of glory seemed open to him. Even his own grandmother—a Victorian relic who wore lace caps and used an ear trumpet—didn’t think he would make a good nobleman. He was too ambitious and driven. “Your first duty,” the old dowager duchess had solemnly informed Consuelo when she married Sunny, “is to have a child, and it must be a son, because it would be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston become Duke.”4
To most people, Sunny seemed a prickly and condescending character, but Winston—who was three years younger—was one of his few loyal friends and always tried to see the best in him. “Sunny and I were like brothers,” Churchill later said of their early relationship. The young duke was proud of his cousin and was happy to allow him the freedom to come and go at Blenheim more or less as he pleased. In 1900 he even allowed him to take over his old bachelor chambers in fashionable Mayfair at 105 Mount Street. Churchill moved there just one month before proposing to Pamela.5
A new job also came to Winston at this time, but it didn’t do anything to improve his financial prospects. In fact, it didn’t pay a penny. At the beginning of October the young hero of the Boer War successfully launched his political career by winning a seat in the House of Commons as a Conservative member for the Manchester suburb of Oldham. Churchill’s victory was an early signal of the party’s great triumph in the autumn general election of 1900, and he was immediately hailed as a rising political star who would do much to enliven the Commons when it met in February. In these circumstances proposing to Pamela may have seemed a good idea. But with no sign yet that MPs would one day be paid for their work, he couldn’t offer a new bride much in the way of security.
Pamela’s close friend and great benefactor in society, Lady Granby, later Duchess of Rutland—and a second mother to Pamela, whose own mother had died of a snake bite in India several years earlier—had no doubt advised her to wait for a proposal from a more prosperous suitor. Churchill knew that he was at a disadvantage. Before he went to South Africa, he wrote Pamela in reference to their relationship, “For marriage, two conditions are necessary—money and the consent of both parties. One certainly, both probably are absent.” Unable to win her consent, he did at least make a gallant effort to prove he could earn a small fortune if he needed to. He devised an ambitious plan immediately on his return from South Africa.
In demand as a speaker, he arranged to spend an entire month after the general election giving talks on the Boer War in more than two dozen British towns. He boasted that he could make £2,000 from the tour, which in those days was equal to the annual salary of the typical editor of a London newspaper. As it happened, the audiences were so large in November that he earned twice that figure. And this paled beside the riches he hoped to make from his North American tour, which began that December and was nearing its conclusion when he boarded the train taking him to frosty Winnipeg.6
* * *
Wearing a derby and a stylish double-breasted overcoat with a fur collar, Churchill arrived in Winnipeg around lunchtime on Monday, January 21, 1901. He was welcomed by a small committee that included a dapper grain tycoon who had become the province’s lieutenant governor. The temperature was around ten degrees Fahrenheit, a bitterly cold wind was scattering snow in the streets, and the mood of the city was grim. The weather wasn’t the cause of the long faces among the residents. They were used to the cold.
It was the latest news of the day that had cast a shadow over this remote outpost of the empire—“fourteen hundred miles from any British town of importance,” as Churchill described it. The big headline in the morning paper announced the impending event that had unsettled so many loyal Canadians: QUEEN VICTORIA ON DEATHBED. HER LAST HOURS.
News of the eighty-one-year-old monarch’s failing health had spread widely during the last few days, and now that her end seemed near, the queen’s many subjects in the empire were trying to come to grips with the realization that the old order was fading fast. “It appeared as if some monstrous reversal of the course of nature was about to take place,” one historian later observed. “The vast majority of her subjects had never known a time when Queen Victoria had not been reigning over them.” Her death was seen as a monumental event even by those who watched at her bedside as she endured the common suffering of a last illness. Her final hours, said the Duke of Argyll, were “like a great three-decker ship sinking. She kept on rallying and then sinking.”7
Before starting off on his journey to Canada, Churchill had seen the first reports that the queen was gravely ill, and he had mentioned this in his letter to Pamela. Though he knew only a few details of the unfolding drama back home, he was already trying to imagine what lay in store for the post-Victorian world.
In the short term he worried that Parliament would be dissolved and that he would have to stand for election again in the coming weeks. That would mean canceling what remained of his tour and losing the lecture fees. He was trying to put a lighthearted spin on this unhappy prospect when he wrote Pamela: “See how [the queen’s death] complicates and clouds all my plans, disturbing not only nations but Winstons.”8
For the moment, however, the imperial drama was good for business at the Winnipeg Theatre’s box office. In a city of only fifty thousand people, more than a thousand tickets had been sold for Churchill’s evening lecture, and so few regular seats were left that extra chairs were being added at the back of the hall and down in the orchestra pit. For these Canadians living so far away from the little world of British royals, aristocrats, and MPs, Lord Randolph’s son represented the closest link to the ruling class of the empire. It was worth a hard-earned dollar to listen to this celebrated figure who had traveled five hundred miles overnight to speak to them at a time when great change was in the air.
The high expectations of his visit delighted Churchill, for his lectures had not gone well on the other side of the border. Instead of improving on what he had earned from his talks in Britain, his American tour had experienced so many setbacks that he was making less than half of what he had collected at home. In some cities the audiences had been sparse or unsympathetic, or both. In Washington, D.C., his share of the box office receipts was the equivalent of only £50; in Baltimore it was £35; in Hartford it was an embarrassing £10.
Many Americans of German and Dutch descent identified with the independent Boers and didn’t look kindly on an Englishman who had made a name for himself fighting for the colonial power. As for Irish-Americans, many of whom nursed long-standing grievances against the English, Churchill found that they “showed themselves actively hostile. . . . In Chicago I encountered vociferous opposition.” On more than one occasion an audience cheered when Churchill’s illustrated lecture included a “magic-lantern” slide of a fearsome-looking Boer farmer armed for battle. Churchill’s response was to admit the fighting prowess of the old Dutch settlers, but also to point out that he had not been able to admire the Boer warriors at a safe distance. “You are right to clap them,” he said, “[but] you haven’t got to fight them.”9
(Churchill proved early on that he could handle disruptions. During his election campaign in October someone had made fun of his youth by shouting, “Does your mother know you’re out?” to which he replied, “Yes, sir, and what is more, when the poll is declared, my mother will know that I am in.”)10
Churchill’s tour was managed by a flamboyant American promoter named Major James Pond, who was himself a war hero (he won the Medal of Honor in the Civil War). The old major had a habit of making exaggerated promises
to his star lecturers, boasting of full houses and rich returns, and then offering elaborate excuses when the results proved otherwise. His most famous client, Mark Twain, once remarked to another lecturer, “If you got half as much as Pond prophesied, be content & praise God—it has not happened to another.” But Churchill learned the truth the hard way, discovering too late that he wasn’t being properly promoted, and that the major was taking an unfair share of the ticket sales. A quarrel broke out between the two, and the young lecturer threatened to abandon the tour when it was only half finished. For his part, “the vulgar Yankee impresario,” as Churchill called him, complained that his client was taking advantage of him by living lavishly on the road and sticking him with the bills.
“Do you know what that young man did?” an indignant Major Pond asked a friend. “He drank a pint of champagne for breakfast every morning, and I had to pay for it.”11
The feud escalated on Churchill’s December tour of eastern Canada. Thinking that he now enjoyed a “home” advantage over his Yankee impresario, he made it clear that he wouldn’t come back to finish the tour in the States unless he received more of the profits. The major surprised his rebellious client by showing up at the lecture in Ottawa on December 27 and confronting him backstage.
A tall man with broad shoulders and a long gray beard, he looked like a biblical patriarch towering over a cornered sinner as he wagged his finger at Churchill (who was just under five feet, eight inches tall) and demanded that the tour continue without any interruptions. The young man’s response was to dig in his heels, declaring that he was canceling his sold-out appearance the next night in the Ontario city of Brantford.
“Pond, I won’t go,” he said. “There’s nothing in it for me. Look at this great affair [his lecture in Ottawa], and I only get $300 out of it.”
“Do you refuse to go to Brantford?” asked Major Pond.
“I do. . . . I will not go there or anywhere else under present arrangements.”
The old major wasn’t used to such insubordination. He had won his Medal of Honor in brutal hand-to-hand combat with the band of Confederate raiders led by William Quantrill, a ruthless enemy, and he wasn’t about to defer to young Churchill without a fight.
He poured out his complaints to the press, and soon newspapers on both sides of the border were casting Pond as the victim of an ungrateful English aristocrat who cared for nothing but money, and who wouldn’t honor his obligations. “Winston Churchill is a thoroughly unpopular man in this city tonight,” wrote a Canadian reporter after refunds were given to the disappointed audience whose evening had been ruined.12
“Your statements to the press did considerable harm,” Churchill angrily told Pond, who quickly realized that the wave of bad publicity was threatening to get out of hand and damage his own reputation on the lecture circuit. In this standoff between the old war hero and the new, the old one finally blinked and surrendered to Churchill’s demand for a fair share of the profits.
“Peace has . . . been patched up on my terms,” Winston proudly reported in a letter to his mother, “and I propose to go through with the tour.”
Gritting his teeth, he prepared to resume the grueling schedule that would take him to Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, and Minnesota before returning him to Canada for his talk at Winnipeg. In the end he couldn’t afford to give up the fees for his remaining lectures. What he couldn’t fix was the damage done by Pond’s false portrayal of him, which was especially regrettable because there was one person in Canada whose good opinion he was desperate to have.
At the very time he was engaged in this public feud, he was staying at the governor general’s official residence in Ottawa, and among the other guests was Pamela Plowden, who was visiting her friend Lady Minto—wife of the governor general. Winston had known for weeks that he and Pamela would be in the same place in Canada at the same time, and that, if all went well in his tour, he would have another chance to show her that his success wasn’t fleeting, and that the problem of earning money was one he could easily solve. Instead, when he arrived for his stay with Lord and Lady Minto at elegant Rideau Hall, the tour was limping along, and he was caught in the unexpected storm of criticism over his dispute with Pond.
During their brief time together Pamela was polite but distant. “Very pretty and apparently quite happy” was Winston’s general observation of the woman who had turned down his proposal only two months earlier. “We had no painful discussions” was the best he could tell his mother when he wrote her about his talks with Pamela. He had been expecting to share a moment of triumph and wanted Pamela to see him basking in the praise of his Canadian audiences, and living well on a steady flow of dollars from his lectures. But, thanks to Pond, that triumph was diminished. Churchill left Ottawa under a cloud, and Pamela soon returned to her busy social life in London. The old major—who was to die less than three years later—never knew how much he had bungled his young Englishman’s tour.13
* * *
The long journey that took Churchill halfway across North America to Winnipeg also had its share of disappointments, including a controversy sparked by charges that he was rude to callers at his hotel in St. Paul. Without bothering to get his side of the story, a local newspaper called him a “cad of first water” and suggested that he suffered from “boyish petulancy.” For many Americans, Churchill was too sure of himself, and too proud of the British Empire, to be likable, and they were quick to find fault. Even the bighearted Theodore Roosevelt took an instant “dislike” to him when they met in the first week of his tour, later criticizing young Churchill for showing “an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety.” It was an odd charge coming from a man so fond of the attention given to his presidency that he famously exclaimed, “I have got such a bully pulpit!” When she was asked in old age why her father didn’t care for Churchill, Alice Roosevelt Longworth said, “Because they were so alike.”14
Though Winnipeg’s size and location may have seemed unpromising, the city proved to be the best stop on Churchill’s tour because it finally gave him the chance to address a large and fully sympathetic audience. When he arrived in the snowy darkness to give his lecture at the Winnipeg Theatre, he was encouraged by the sight of five hundred people waiting outside for standing-room tickets. Few noticed his arrival, but then he was almost unrecognizable bundled up inside a heavy fur coat he had purchased that afternoon at the Hudson’s Bay Company store on Main Street.
Backstage, he rushed to the curtain and peeked out to get a preview of his audience. As the manager would later determine, it was the largest crowd in the theater’s history, and included all classes, from the civic leaders comfortably seated in the boxes to the farm laborers pressed against the back walls. The cream of society who sat closest to the stage presented an impressive view. Churchill joked that the men were in evening dress, and the “ladies half out of it.”15
“Crowds stirred his blood,” Churchill wrote of his hero in Savrola, and no doubt there was a stirring in his own veins as the lights went down, the curtain rose, and he took the stage. After “a liberal outburst of applause,” he began to tell the extraordinary story of how he had sailed to South Africa as a war correspondent, come under attack from well-armed Boer fighters while accompanying British troops on an armored train, been taken prisoner after a fierce battle, and escaped on his own after only three weeks in captivity. Caught up in the drama of the tale, the audience made hardly a sound as Churchill described his efforts to find his way to freedom by using the stars to guide his escape while the Boers searched for him in vain. Finding a temporary safe haven among civilian workers secretly supporting the British, he hid out for a few days in a coal mine.
“My only companions,” he told the hushed crowd, “were numbers of white rats with pink eyes. However, I was furnished every morning with copies of Boer newspapers in which I read accounts of my own capture in different disguises each day. The Boers have been reputed to be an ignorant and unci
vilized lot, but in the respect of intelligent anticipation and fertile imagination I can say as a journalist that their newspapers are the equal of anything produced in the civilized world.”
Witty at times, melodramatic at others, he kept the audience in suspense as he described being smuggled aboard a train headed to Portuguese East Africa, where he showed up a free man—though weary and unkempt—at the British consulate. Even now, he was still relishing his feat, obviously pleased with himself for having beaten the odds. “The stars in their courses,” he said of his escape in the darkness, “fought for me.” When his lecture came to a close, and the cheers and applause died away, some in his audience must have been wondering what the stars had in store for him next. At twenty-six he had already done enough to fill several lives.
That he was expecting big things, there can be no doubt. He knew from the news of the queen’s illness that great changes were coming soon. To his audience, he read out the latest bulletins about her condition, and when the lecture ended late that night, many expected to wake the next morning to hear Victoria was dead. Anxious for more news, Churchill went home with the lieutenant governor to spend the night at Government House. He was a good guest, singing the praises of Winnipeg. It was “a great city,” he said, and was vital to the empire’s future. “The Canadian west is Britain’s bread shop,” he declared, “and when I go back I shall tell the electors of my constituency that I have spoken to those who supply them with their bread.” These words, he later noted with satisfaction, made his listeners “purr” with pride.16
* * *
It was one o’clock the next afternoon when Winnipeg received the news by wire from Ottawa that the queen had died at her home on the Isle of Wight. “Our Good Queen Is Dead,” began one announcement. Mourning bells were already ringing when Churchill made his way to the station, where he was scheduled to leave town shortly after two on a train of the Great Northern Railway that would take him back to the States. Some merchants had placed black-bordered portraits of the queen in their shop windows. On a pillar in the city hall square a stone bust of her was draped in black.
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