Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  Churchill was touched by the quick response to the news. “This city far away among the snows,” he later remarked, “began to hang its head and hoist half-masted flags.”

  He had received word that Parliament would not be dissolved, and that he would be able to complete the remaining ten days of his tour. His passage was booked on a ship leaving New York at the beginning of February. For two months of work his total earnings would amount to £1,600—far below the £5,000 he had hoped for at the outset. Yet, when all his lecture money was combined with payments for his writing over the past two years, he had every reason to be happy with the total sum. “I am very proud of the fact,” he wrote his mother, “that there is not one person in a million who at my age could have earned £10,000 without any capital in less than two years.”17

  This was the money that would sustain him over the next few years as he worked to establish himself as a prominent figure in the House of Commons. He now seemed to have everything he needed to rise in the new age of Victoria’s successor, King Edward VII—talent, ambition, courage, connections, a small fortune, and one or two lucky stars. Only Pamela—or perhaps someone very like her—was missing from the picture.

  In New York a reporter asked him to clarify a detail in the story of his South African escape: “It has been said that a Dutch maiden fell in love with you and assisted you to flee. You yourself have said it was the hand of Providence. Which is true?”

  Churchill was prompt in his reply. “It is sometimes the same thing,” he said, laughing good-naturedly over the intriguing link between love and the stars.18

  II

  A FAMILY AFFAIR

  After five years of chasing adventure in various parts of the globe—with more than sixty thousand miles of travel behind him—Churchill returned home exhausted on the night of February 10, 1901. His cozy chambers were waiting for him at the stately terra-cotta building in Mayfair where cousin Sunny was the leaseholder, and there were bundles of mail and newspapers needing to be sorted and read. He deserved a few weeks of leisure to catch up on his affairs and renew his acquaintance with life in London—“that great rain-swept heart of the modern world,” as H. G. Wells called it. There was also the novel pleasure of regularly occupying the same bed. As he later observed, “For more than five months I had spoken for an hour or more almost every night except Sundays, and, often twice a day, and had travelled without ceasing, usually by night, rarely sleeping twice in the same bed. And this had followed a year of marching and fighting with rarely a roof or bed at all.”1

  But he had timed his return so that there was little chance of enjoying anything more than a brief rest. When King Edward—bearlike in his huge ermine cape—opened Parliament four days later, Winston was there looking appropriately solemn and dignified in mourning clothes for the late queen. After taking the oath as a new member that afternoon, he waited less than a week to deliver his maiden speech. For less celebrated newcomers, months and even years might pass before they dared address the House, but Churchill couldn’t wait to capitalize on the whirlwind of publicity that preceded him and to show that he was worthy of the attention. After all, he had spoken to much larger audiences in recent times, so he wasn’t daunted by the glare of the Parliamentary spotlight.

  This, however, was an audience like no other. The House of Commons was home to many of the best speakers in the land, sophisticated debaters who knew all the rhetorical tricks, and who had been sharpening their skills against each other for years. Some of the most distinguished had given their own maiden speeches when Churchill was no more than a toddler. The leader of the House of Commons, the lean, unflappable patrician Arthur Balfour, had won his first election just before Winston was born and had long ago established his reputation as a sophisticated debater whose nimble reasoning could quickly cause an opponent’s argument to unravel. On the opposition bench the generally acknowledged master was forty-nine-year-old Herbert Asquith, an Oxford-educated barrister whose blunt, methodical style had prompted his fellow Liberals to call him “the sledgehammer.”2

  Having demonstrated on his lecture tour that he could spin a good tale, Churchill now meant to show how well he could drive home an argument. He had been looking forward to this moment for years and spent the days leading up to it polishing his remarks and committing them to memory, making sure that nothing would go amiss. At his chambers he stood before a mirror pretending he was addressing the House. This became a common method of preparation for him, to the annoyance of others nearby. “All day,” recalled a friend, “he might be heard booming away in his bedroom, rehearsing his facts and flourishes to the accompaniment of resounding knocks on the furniture.”

  Everything had to be perfect, from the way he tugged at the lapel of his long frock coat to his manner of beating the air with a clenched fist. As a final safeguard, he decided to write out a short list of his major points and keep them handy while he spoke. But he had great confidence in the power of his memory. “If I read a column of print four times over,” he boasted to a parliamentary sketch writer, “I commit it so perfectly to memory that I could forthwith recite it without an omission or error.”3

  A few years earlier, he had put together some of his views on oratory in a manuscript he called “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric,” concluding that all great speeches use common words in pleasing rhythms to cast complex ideas in memorable images. He was especially fond of William Jennings Bryan’s impassioned criticism in 1896 of the gold standard: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” From early adulthood to old age, Churchill’s eye and ear were attuned to the discovery of arresting analogies that might become, as he put it in his essay, “the watchwords of parties and the creeds of nationalities.”

  Though proud of his reputation as a young man of adventure, he also wanted to earn respect as a man of learning. He regretted not having a university education, but he was always his own best teacher, and had made good use of his independent reading. In political battles he wanted to excel by making knowledge his sword, entering each fray with more facts and a deeper understanding of the issues than his opponents. While other politicians were content to get their information from a scattering of newspapers and party pamphlets, he devoured whole shelves. As an early observer of his career amusingly noted, Churchill began “living with Blue Books and sleeping with encyclopedias.” And some of those close to him doubted that he slept much. “His power of work is prodigious,” wrote a family friend, “almost commensurate with his passion for it. Whether he ever rests or ever sleeps I do not know.”4

  * * *

  On February 18 both Asquith and Balfour were in their usual places in the House when MPs began returning from dinner for the evening session. Gaslights hidden behind glass panels high overhead illuminated the narrow debating chamber, dominated at one end by the canopied Speaker’s chair and the long table with its books and brassbound oaken boxes. Debates could last until midnight—or much later on occasion—and some visitors to the House thought it looked best at night with “lights blazing and the Chamber full of warmth and glow and animation.” When word circulated that Lord Randolph’s son was going to speak, the five rows of benches on either side of the floor filled quickly, as did the surrounding galleries for journalists and guests.

  Entering the chamber, Churchill found that everyone was watching him closely, curious stares following him as he walked toward his seat clutching a single page of handwritten notes. A reporter thought that the new man was being “eyed as a new actor is eyed on the stage during rehearsals, and of whom a great deal is expected.” Several members took note of Winston’s choice of a corner seat in the second row behind the government bench, where they had once been accustomed to seeing his father. The son was happy to invite the inevitable comparison with Lord Randolph, whose marble bust adorned a spot only a short distance away in the entrance to the members’ lobby.5

  In his maiden speech Churchill wisely chose
to play it safe, avoiding any appearance of a forced effort at eloquence. As friends and family had advised him, it was best to stick to a single subject he knew well and to seem modest in manner and tone if not in fact. The Boer War was continuing to drag on, so he addressed the problem of bringing the struggle to a swift conclusion and creating a just peace. First, the remaining pockets of resistance had to be subdued. He urged a renewed effort that would overwhelm the diehards with greater force and cut off their supplies. It was a reasonable strategy, but he found a way to make it seem the only natural response by describing the effects in terms that anyone in an island nation could understand.

  “The Boers,” he said near the end of his speech, “will be compelled, with ever-diminishing resources, to make head against ever-increasing difficulties, and will not only be exposed to the beating of the waves, but to the force of the rising tide.”

  He made it clear, however, that he had no interest in humiliating or wiping out the enemy. Any plan to make their resistance “painful and perilous,” he declared, should also “make it easy and honourable for [them] to surrender.” He was willing to concede that the other side had its own sense of duty to consider. “If I were a Boer,” he said, “I hope I should be fighting in the field.” This provoked a few muttered complaints among fellow Tories, but his was a balanced view that won him respect from critics of the war on the opposition benches.

  For the close of his speech, he put aside politics to pay tribute to his father’s memory, and his words were widely praised afterward as a touching expression of filial piety. He didn’t mention Lord Randolph by name, but his reference was all the more effective because it assumed a shared awareness of the Churchill legacy. “I cannot sit down,” he said, pausing to look around the packed chamber after speaking for almost three-quarters of an hour, “without saying how very grateful I am for the kindness and patience with which the House has heard me, and which have been extended to me, I well know, not on my own account, but because of a certain splendid memory which many honourable members still preserve.”6

  All in all it was a promising debut and was judged a success by many. The Daily Telegraph said that Churchill “satisfied the highest expectations,” and the Daily Express reported that “he held a crowded House spell-bound.” After getting into the flow of his speech he was fine, but he struggled a little at first, folding his arms to hide his nervousness. Some observers were struck by the youthfulness of his appearance, noting that with his smooth, fair complexion he could easily be mistaken for “a lad of eighteen.” Others were disappointed to find that he showed few traces of the heroic figure whose adventures they had followed in the press. “There are dozens of men in the House of Commons who look more like the ideal of a daredevil fighter and traveller,” complained one reporter. “Perhaps his tailor does not do him justice, but as he stood up in the House of Commons tonight he certainly had little of the taut smartness of the well-knit soldierly figure one expected to see. To be quite frank, he was scholarly and limp.”

  It didn’t help that the young man also had trouble pronouncing the letter s, despite taking great pains to overcome the problem. He would struggle with it for years, seeking advice from specialists and endlessly rehearsing tongue-twisters such as “The Spanish ships I cannot see, for they are not in sight.”7

  It was easy to underestimate Winston Churchill. Anyone who knew him well understood that there was much more to him than met the eye. Those who found little evidence of the hero in his appearance couldn’t see, for example, that under the supposedly ill-fitting frock coat was a scar on his arm where a doctor at a dusty field hospital had removed a strip of flesh after the Battle of Omdurman. A fellow officer who had suffered what was later called a “shocking sword cut on his right arm” needed a skin graft, and Churchill had volunteered a piece of his own flesh. It was done with a razor, and without anesthesia, and “hurt like the devil.” Winston rarely mentioned it, but there had been nothing “scholarly and limp” about his bravery on that day. By comparison, addressing the House was a picnic, and he later described it as an experience both exhausting and inspiring—“terrible, thrilling yet delicious.”8

  * * *

  Several spectators who had paid especially close attention to Winston’s speech watched him from a cramped row of seats behind a brass screen high above the floor in a gallery reserved for female visitors. Accompanied by Consuelo Marlborough and other women of the Churchill clan, Winston’s mother had come to the House to show her support; but in accordance with the rules, her group was tucked away almost out of sight behind the grille of the Ladies’ Gallery. It was a dark area filled with grand women in silks and satins and plumed hats—some occupying a “privileged section . . . to which only the Speaker’s order admits.” But to the members below all these female spectators were merely, as one contemporary novelist put it, “dusky forms, invisible, save as a dim patchwork.”

  Jennie Churchill knew this spot well, having come to it frequently to hear Randolph in his heyday. She had learned to live with the inconvenience and indignity of the gallery, but was outspoken in her disapproval. “Hidden in Eastern fashion from masculine sight,” she wrote in 1908, “fifty or more will sometimes crowd into the small, dark cage to which the ungallant British legislators have relegated them. The ladies in the first row, in a cramped attitude, with their knees against the grille, their necks craned forward, and their ears painfully on the alert if they wish to hear anything, are supposed to enjoy a great privilege. Those in the second row, by the courtesy of the first, may get a peep of the gods below. The rest have to fall back on their imagination or retire to a small room in the rear, where they can whisper and have tea.”9

  Asked in 1885 if the gallery could have its own lights, Herbert Gladstone—the prime minister’s son—advised against it. According to the official record of the debate in Parliament, he dismissed the request because “ladies came to the Gallery to hear and see what was going on in the House, and he did not think that the question of light applied in the matter.” The record doesn’t include what the women sitting in darkness thought of this observation.10

  For some bachelor MPs the dark remoteness of the Ladies’ Gallery had become part of their courtship rituals. Attendants in the corridor separating the tea room from the “cage” were sometimes kept busy exchanging notes between members on the floor and the women they wanted to impress behind the grille. With a fanciful touch, one Edwardian authority on the House described a young member receiving a note after giving a strong speech: “On reading it he looks up with a pleased smile to the Ladies’ Gallery, where two bright eyes are gleaming through the grille.”

  The women were not supposed to talk in the gallery. No fewer than four notices commanding silence were posted there. But the whispered conversations were always a source of interest to Jennie. She thought they were an excellent guide to the changing fortunes of the politicians below and would listen carefully as society hostesses plotted their next dinner party or young beauties their next conquest. She had a good ear and, to the amusement of her friends, could mimic the conversations with devastating accuracy:

  “Is that Mr. ———?” exclaims a pretty blonde to her neighbor. “Do lend me your glasses. Yes, it is he. I wonder if he would dine with me tonight.” (“Sh!” comes from a relative of the man who is speaking.) “We are thirteen—so tiresome. I think I must send him a note by the usher.” (“Sh!”) “I can get the answer at once—so convenient.” (“Sh! Sh!”) “Who is that odious woman hushing me?”11

  It was partly to encourage an attentive and respectful audience among the ladies that Jennie arrived early in the gallery with a formidable party of titled relatives to hear Winston’s speech. In addition to Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough (stunning, as always, in her Vanderbilt jewels), she brought along four of Winston’s aunts in all their aristocratic finery. In youth these sisters of Lord Randolph—Cornelia, Rosamund, Fanny, and Georgiana—were much admired beauties, and each had married well. The one who h
eld Winston in the highest regard was Cornelia, Lady Wimborne, a wealthy and influential political hostess whose invitations to dinners at her London mansion overlooking Green Park were highly prized. In time Jennie and her well-connected relatives and friends would prove so effective in promoting Winston’s career behind the scenes that a political rival would complain bitterly, “There’s nothing in Winston. But he’s got some of the cleverest women in England at his back. That’s the real secret of his success.”12

  * * *

  Ever since Randolph’s death, Jennie had eagerly employed her influence on Winston’s behalf. With her charm and intimate knowledge of society, she had eased his adventures abroad and his political ambitions at home by putting in the right word at the right time to the most useful newspaper editor, general, or statesman. “She left no wire unpulled, no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked,” joked Churchill in middle age. When he had wanted desperately in 1898 to secure a position with Lord Kitchener’s army in the Sudan, it was Jennie to whom he turned for help in lobbying everyone from the Prince of Wales on down. “Your wit & tact & beauty,” he wrote her, “should overcome all obstacles.”13

  Though tact wasn’t usually her strong point, wit and beauty were hers in abundance. The daughter of a merchant and Wall Street speculator who lost fortunes almost as fast as he made them, she grew up in New York and Paris, and at twenty married Randolph—much to the disappointment of his family who had been hoping for a richer bride. Almost from the start the marriage was a troubled one, with much clashing of wills between a proud, erratic husband and a quick-tempered, passionate young wife. But everywhere she went she turned heads, and found admirers. One of those infatuated with her early on, Lord Rossmore, wistfully remarked of her in his old age, “Many Society beauties have come and gone, but I think that few, if any, have ever equaled her.”