Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  Innocent devotion seems to have been what the duchess wanted from her admirers, and in Churchill she had such a follower. From the start, his unconventional character intrigued her. Much as she enjoyed her parties, she wanted to be known for much more than her social skills and good looks. She saw herself as a social reformer and in recent years had been striving to help working-class families obtain better housing, medical care, and employment. One of her pet projects was reviving the cottage industry of spinners in Scotland who produced the Harris tweed. For her pains, the duchess, whose first name was Millicent, was ridiculed in the popular press as “Meddlesome Millie.” She shrugged off the criticism and continued her good work, encouraged in no small part by her stout defenders in the mainstream press. One of the more persuasive was Winston Churchill, who wrote a letter to the Times praising her activism and damning an anonymous critic’s “sneers about ‘versatile duchesses.’ ”

  She liked to challenge the views of the more reactionary members of her upper-class set and was curious to see if the Hooligans could do anything to shake up the Tory party. “As far as a miserable duchess could be an agitator,” she said several years later, “I strove to be one.” Her much older husband—whom she had married when she was only seventeen—didn’t share her curiosity about Churchill’s group. He thought they were up to no good, and in a fit of temper told his wife to cancel party invitations she had sent to Hugh and Winston. The old duke soon softened his resistance, however, and Millicent was fond of recalling the incident in later years because she was so amused by the different responses from her two young friends. She told a confidante:

  I still have in my possession the letters they wrote to me in reply. I kept them because they were so characteristic of these two contrasting temperaments. Hugh Cecil wrote: “My dear Millie, I understand and I am sorry. Will you do me a great favour and tell me what day next week you will be free to have lunch with me?” As to Winston, who was entirely lacking in the proverbial urbanity of the Cecils, he wrote such an angry letter that it made me laugh, declaring roundly that he would not set foot in my house as long as the duke lived.8

  As a show of their political independence, the Hooligans met several times with the former Liberal prime minister Lord Rosebery, sometimes spending weekends at his country homes in Surrey and Buckinghamshire. Churchill turned these weekend visits into real adventures by driving to his destination in a recently acquired automobile. He was so inexperienced behind the wheel, and the vehicle was so noisy, that none of the other Hooligans would ride with him. “I am afraid I disturbed your horses with my motor-car,” he wrote Lord Rosebery after one visit. “I am learning to drive at present, so this is rather a dangerous period.”

  Rosebery wined and dined the group and took delight in the knowledge that the youngest son of old Salisbury—his longtime rival and his successor as prime minister in 1895—was coming to him for political wisdom. Hugh Cecil, however, was embarrassed by his fellow Hooligans’ free-spirited enjoyment of the Liberal statesman’s hospitality. Churchill said that his friend suffered “from the inconvenience of high moral principles in social matters.” Indeed, fastidious Hugh felt compelled to apologize for the Hooligans. “My colleagues behave very badly I am sorry to say,” he wrote their host.9

  But Churchill found these visits reinvigorating, not least because his father had been a close friend of Lord Rosebery. He liked hearing stories about his father’s career and was welcomed as a proud son eager to honor Randolph’s memory. At a party where many guests besides the Hooligans were present, Rosebery often interrupted the discussions to point affectionately at Winston and announce to everyone: “Pray do not let us come to any conclusion until we have asked the Boy.” Few men could have addressed him this way and escaped his anger, but Rosebery could get away with it because of who he was, and because he so clearly admired Winston’s precocious intelligence. He and his circle agreed that Randolph’s son had “a very old head on young shoulders.”

  In Rosebery’s presence Winston felt in close touch with not only his father’s past, but also the grand sweep of historical forces dating back to ancient times. “The Past stood ever at his elbow,” he later wrote of the former prime minister, “and was the counsellor upon whom he most relied. He seemed to be attended by Learning and History, and to carry into current events an air of ancient majesty. His voice was melodious and deep, and often, when listening, one felt in living contact with the centuries which are gone, and perceived the long continuity of our island tale.”10

  Winston was dazzled by Rosebery’s elegant homes and priceless possessions. One large painting in particular caught his eye. “I carried away quite a queer sensation from the Napoleon picture yesterday,” he wrote Rosebery. “It seems pervaded with his personality; and I felt as if I had looked furtively into the very room where he was working, and only just got out of the way in time to avoid being seen.”

  Because his image of Napoleon had been shaped mostly by his reading, Churchill was dumbstruck when he suddenly encountered the life-like image of his hero staring at him from the canvas of Jacques-Louis David’s The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries. Painted only three years before Waterloo and standing about seven feet high, the painting was acquired in the 1880s by Rosebery, whose marriage to a Rothschild heiress had given him the means to buy almost any treasure he wanted. He was known on occasion to rehearse his speeches standing in front of this picture and another one—even larger and just as striking—of George Washington, by Gilbert Stuart (the so-called Lansdowne portrait). “He would use them as the chorus,” a family member recalled. Winston’s expression of wonder at the magical effect of the Napoleon picture prompted Rosebery to offer him an uncharacteristically candid admission. “I find it,” he said of the vivid image, “sometimes coming out of the canvas.”11

  Churchill may have been hoping that the visits to Rosebery’s homes and Blenheim would inspire the Hooligans. But his friends regarded these expeditions as larks and weren’t looking to cultivate a sense of destiny. They didn’t share his particular passion for great men and great monuments. And they lacked his urgent desire to mount a sharp attack on the complacency of the Tory leaders.

  In any case Lord Salisbury wasn’t worried about the group. He never thought the Hooligans would amount to much, perhaps because he knew his son too well. According to Ian Malcolm, it was the prime minister himself who came up with a clever way to make light of their activities. He jested that they should be rechristened “the Hughligans after his youngest son.” The name stuck, and led many Tories to regard the group as merely an object of derision.12

  Churchill tried to maintain a good relationship with the quirky Hugh long after the Hooligans went their separate ways. But during the year or so when the group was most active, Winston was often frustrated by his friend’s tendency to waste time on minor issues. A political dabbler, Hugh was happiest when confronting tangled questions involving fine points only he seemed to understand. With the grave resolve that others brought to questions of war and peace, he opposed a much-debated measure allowing widowers to marry a sister-in-law. Thirty years afterward, Churchill was still shaking his head in amazement over Hugh’s “vehement resistance” to the awkwardly titled “Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill.” (The issue had been debated for so many years that Gilbert and Sullivan found time to create a mocking rhyme for it: “He shall prick that annual blister/Marriage with deceased wife’s sister.”)13

  * * *

  In the spring of 1901, while bachelor Hugh was busy warning the House of Commons that allowing a man to marry his dead wife’s sister would bring the ways of “the stud farm” to a sacred institution, Winston was preparing to launch an assault on one of his party’s most important legislative items. “I was born for opposition,” Lord Byron famously declared, and now Churchill was ready for some Byronic drama of his own. He wanted to show Salisbury and the rest of the Hotel Cecil that he was no ordinary backbencher they could take for granted.14r />
  The matter at hand was the government’s plan for reforming the army, whose reputation had suffered from numerous failures in the Boer War. Everyone knew that a reorganization was needed to weed out incompetent officers and eliminate outdated practices. As H. G. Wells later remarked, “Our Empire was nearly beaten by a handful of farmers amidst the jeering contempt of the whole world—and we felt it acutely for several years. We began to question ourselves.” By the time a peace agreement was reached in May 1902, what had begun as a “tea-time war” against a “trumpery little state” had cost the lives of twenty-two thousand British soldiers.

  Military and political misjudgments at every level had caused the war to drag on much too long. The problems undermined Churchill’s confidence in the army, prompting him to complain privately that the war was “inglorious in its course, cruel and hideous in its conclusion.” Commanders who had won fame decades earlier in Queen Victoria’s “little wars” had shown themselves ill-prepared to deal with the new weapons and unconventional tactics used by the Boers. General Sir Redvers Buller made so many mistakes in the early period of the war that he came to represent the incompetence of the top brass and was ridiculed as “Sir Reverse Buller.” During a dry parliamentary discussion of the number of horses and mules sent to the troops in South Africa, the Irish MP Tim Healy expressed the disillusion of many when he stood up and asked a government minister, “Will the rt. Hon. Gentleman state how many asses were sent to South Africa?”15

  Churchill thought the government’s plan for reforming the army was a costly expansion masquerading as a reform, and on the first night of the Commons debate he spent an hour tearing it apart. This was one of the best speeches of his career—forceful, practical, and prescient. He sounded like a veteran of the House instead of someone in his first year. The plan involved creating a new expeditionary force to deal with potential threats from a European foe. He thought the proposed force was far too small to be effective. Yet the government seemed to think that the troops could strike selective blows against an enemy and return home triumphant in a few days.

  “A European war cannot be anything but a cruel, heartrending struggle,” he warned, “which, if we are ever to enjoy the bitter fruits of victory, must demand, perhaps for several years, the whole manhood of the nation, the entire suspension of peaceful industries, and the concentrating to one end of every vital energy in the community.”

  As a result of his experiences under fire, he understood far better than most of his colleagues the dreadful consequences of modern combat. The fighting in South Africa, he told the House, had provided only “a glimpse” of the slaughter awaiting future armies. A real conflict would swallow up the proposed expeditionary force in no time. It would be wiser to spend the money on the navy, he suggested, insisting that sea power was the safest way to defend the British Isles and the empire.

  He conjured a picture of a grim new reality, making it clear that the days when kings could spend years toying with their armies like pieces on a chessboard were gone forever. “Now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other . . . when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. . . . The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.”

  These were powerful words, and though many in the chamber chose to shrug them off as mere rhetoric, others gave them serious thought. Even the sleepy old Victorian statesman Sir William Harcourt was moved to shed his usual complacency and marvel at the young man’s stark description of total war. He wasn’t sure of all the implications, but he did understand one thing clearly—Churchill would be a forceful voice in the House for years to come. The next day he dashed off a note congratulating him for “the brilliant success of your speech which has established your future in the H of C on a foundation which cannot be shaken.”16

  Arthur Balfour was not impressed. As leader of the House, his job was to win approval for the plan as it stood, yet every word of criticism from Churchill cast doubt on the soundness of the reform. A comfortable majority supported Balfour on the issue, but that didn’t prevent him from being angry at his wayward colleague. He told a friend that Winston’s “amazing conceit quite staggered him,” and that this show of opposition was no more than a stunt “because it was without conviction or argument, and was mere self-advertisement.” For much of the speech he directed “a glare of wrath” at the young troublemaker. But Churchill had made his point. He wouldn’t be ignored.

  “A new personality [has] arisen to enliven a moribund House,” the weekly magazine Black & White announced a few days later. A veteran political observer called him a “party prodigy” and vowed he would never forget the sight of “this boy lecturing his elders.” It was true that Churchill had important things to say, and wasn’t afraid to say them; but, more to the point, he wanted important work to do. “The earnest party man becomes a silent drudge,” he would soon conclude, “tramping at intervals through lobbies to record his vote and wondering why he came to Westminster at all. Ambitious youth diverges into criticism and even hostility, or seeks an outlet for its energies elsewhere.”17

  The question now for the Tory leadership was what to do with him. Should he be given some minor position to keep him quiet for a while? Or should the party be patient and slowly try to isolate him until he realized the error of his ways? For the time being Balfour decided that the best course was to do nothing.

  But expecting Churchill to bide his time wasn’t a good idea. Left on his own, he would not limit his criticism of the government to military affairs. In fact, he soon made the whole question of efficiency and economy his special subject. But it was obvious that he had larger plans, as Punch noted in a comic sketch that listed his interests as “the House of Commons—and its reform. The British Army—and its reform. The British Navy—and its reform. The Universe—and its reform.”18

  IV

  THE DUKE’S SMILE

  As a growing object of curiosity in society, Churchill began receiving so many letters and invitations that he was overwhelmed and complained to his mother that he was “hunted to death,” with at least a hundred letters unanswered. Yet he couldn’t resist the attention, and his engagement diary overflowed in 1901 with various social events he had agreed to attend. Several nights a week there were dinners at homes or clubs, and the rest of each month was crowded with banquets, luncheons, speeches, bazaars, and other festivities.1

  One afternoon in May, at a lunch hosted by a newspaper editor, he found himself seated between the creator of Sherlock Holmes and the vicereine of India. With Arthur Conan Doyle—who had served briefly in the Boer War—there was much to discuss, and the two men enjoyed each other’s company. But Churchill was just as happy to try his luck at charming Mary, Lady Curzon, who was taking a long holiday in England while her husband—to whom she was devoted—remained in India performing his duties as viceroy.

  A delicate beauty with a lively sense of humor, Mary liked to tease, and to be teased. Winston held a special fascination for her because of his mother. Like Jennie, she was an American who had married into the aristocracy at a young age. She was only twenty-eight when she became the youngest vicereine in the empire’s history. Her letters to Lord Curzon during her long holiday often include playful references to Winston, whose egotism both amused and irritated her.

  In trying to explain the Hooligans to her husband, she took delight in writing that the group’s “object” was “to teach Winston not to talk too much.” Typically, however, he did nothing but talk during their lunch together, telling her of “his great speech” on army reform, which he had given the night before. He was brimming with confidence, she wrote Curzon, so much so that “he seems to consider [the speech] a greater success than any one else does!”

  Still, Winston had qualities that she admired enough to make her wonder what kind of wife he might be
looking for. By the end of her holiday she had delved into the question and picked up a few hints. She loved romance, gossip, and scandalous tales, and shared everything with Curzon, who was eager to know the latest details of the social and political news back home. Her first discovery was that Winston had finally given up any hope of winning Pamela’s love. In June, after spending an evening with Jennie and Winston, she wrote her husband that a new woman had entered the young man’s life: “Now for a bit o’gossip. Ettie has appropriated Winston & he is now in her train—Pamela Plowden quite cut out.”2

  For temporary comfort after the unhappy end of a romance, more than a few Edwardian men found the generous attentions of Mrs. Ettie Grenfell to be just the right medicine. She was, in the words of one young friend, “the tenderest of all companions to a broken heart.” Blessed with a magnetic pair of dark blue eyes, Ettie had little trouble snaring a man’s heart when she lowered her gaze seductively, and then looked up at just the right moment to whisper some emotionally charged remark.

  That she was happily married and a doting mother of several children did little to inhibit her desire to have many men in her life, though she seems to have carefully avoided a full-fledged affair with any of them. In a thinly veiled social satire the writer and artist Max Beerbohm portrayed Ettie as a collector of fine examples of manhood. Like a queen, he suggested, she “sat aloft and beckoned desirable specimens up.” Her amiable husband, Willie Grenfell (later Lord Desborough), showed little interest in her relationships with other men. He was content to amuse himself in harmless pursuits. When weary of conversation at Ettie’s parties, he would sometimes move his arms up and down rhythmically, happily pretending that he was punting on the Thames—one of his favorite activities.