Reserved in public, he seemed a reliable, even-tempered statesman, but in private he was quick to let down his guard and indulge his weaknesses for strong drink, good food, a relaxing game of bridge, an easy round of golf, or a stolen moment with a pretty girl.
Winston had little trouble getting along with Asquith in purely social settings, but he always found the older man hard to read when the talk turned to the business of state. Henry was wary of confiding in him, but—unlike Margot—he was delighted when Violet began to grow close to Winston. He would listen patiently to her enraptured accounts of his latest comments or activities. On the first occasion when she told him that Churchill was a “genius,” he laughed and said, “Well, Winston would certainly agree with you there.”11
Yet he understood her enthusiasm and was affected by it. There was something in Churchill’s boundless drive that reminded him of his own youthful ambitions. As a young lawyer he had spent many years waiting for the chance to move up in his profession, and he still could recall the painful frustration of those years. To a friend he confided, “No one who has not been through it can know the chilling, paralysing, deadening, depression of hope deferred and energy wasted and vitality run to seed.” The press and many of his colleagues would always have their fun ridiculing Churchill’s impatience, but Asquith had reason to be more sympathetic.12
Given Violet’s devotion, Churchill was well aware of the advantage she gave him where her father was concerned. Henry might even have been agreeable to the idea of Violet marrying her new hero. But from Winston’s point of view, it was debatable whether the advantages of being Asquith’s son-in-law would outweigh its disadvantages. The Liberals weren’t likely to start their own version of the Hotel Cecil and hand out political plums to relatives, so Churchill could easily imagine that marrying Violet might hamper his career instead of help it. If he attached his star to Asquith’s, he might rise by it; but he could also fall with it.
In the Liberal ranks, however, Asquith was generally recognized as the favorite to be the next prime minister. And by June 1907 Churchill and others in the party had good reason to believe that a change at the top wasn’t far off. In that month Campbell-Bannerman suffered a heart attack, his second in nine months. There were attempts to play down the seriousness of his condition, and he was soon able to resume work, though his doctors tried to make him slow down. But the decline in his health couldn’t be disguised, and many worried that he couldn’t last much longer in the job. If C.B. suddenly resigned or died, Churchill fully expected the successor to be Asquith. As he remarked to a colleague later in the year, “Asquith must be the heir: and I am sure no better workman will have been installed since the days of Sir Robert Peel.”13
The question for Churchill was whether the inevitable Cabinet reshuffle would bring him into that body. His chances looked good, for he already had the high opinion of the future prime minister and the warm approval of his daughter. At this point it made sense for him to remain unmarried and to see where he stood when the next government was formed.
Of all the great Liberal families in the land, Winston had both the good fortune and the misfortune to attract the support of the Asquiths. They would play a crucial part in his rise to power and would often treat him like one of their own. But their help would come at a considerable emotional and professional cost. It would draw him into a complex drama full of high expectations and hidden dangers. In their rich and troubled complexity the Asquiths resembled a family in an Elizabethan tragicomedy where bright surfaces slowly dissolve into dark undercurrents.
Violet provided an opening for Winston to enter the family’s intimate circle, but once inside he needed to tread carefully.
* * *
In the spring of 1907 a rumor did emerge linking Churchill romantically to a young woman, but it wasn’t to Violet. On April 27 the editors of the Daily Mail and the Manchester Chronicle wrote Churchill asking him to confirm or deny a story that he was going to become engaged to Miss Helen Botha. He denied it, but the story was picked up by other papers, and for a few days it provided a good laugh to his enemies, who probably started the rumor in the first place. To all those Conservative critics who had condemned Churchill for supposedly belittling Lord Milner’s service in South Africa, there was nothing more comic than the idea that he would marry the daughter of the once-feared commander of the Boer resistance, General Louis Botha.
The Bothas—father, daughter, and other relatives—were in London for a conference of prime ministers from the empire. Thanks to the self-government act for the Transvaal, elections had been held and General Botha was the new prime minister. He was now enjoying the respect shown to him by an imperial power that had wanted to kill him not that long ago. The newspapers seemed surprised that his daughter was not only attractive but well-dressed and reasonably sophisticated for a girl brought up in a remote colony. They praised her pretty hair and her “coral pink dress” and her excellent English as though such things were wonders to behold in a Boer maiden. Churchill seems to have met her during the conference, which he helped to organize, but he knew very little of her.
For many of the embittered Tories the spectacle of Churchill and the Liberals giving Botha and his family a warm reception was like rubbing salt in their wounds. They looked on Botha and Winston as traitors who deserved each other, and thus for them it was mordantly amusing to think of Churchill marrying what they would have considered the half-civilized daughter of a man who had shed so much British blood. It was what Churchill deserved for his treachery, they would have said, snickering over the prospect of Winston fathering a lot of little Bothas. (These critics seem to have been unaware that the force that captured young Winston in South Africa was led by the general.)
It was embarrassing enough for Churchill to see himself portrayed as a hapless bachelor reduced to begging engagements from colonial women passing through London, but then the rumor reached the one woman he did want to marry, and she couldn’t resist teasing him about it. Muriel Wilson knew the story was false and that Winston wasn’t going to run away with a provincial girl he hardly knew. But she liked to toy with his emotions.
From her villa on Cap Ferrat, where spring was already in its full glory, she wrote Winston to wish him well with Helen Botha, joking that she could already imagine the day when he would come to the villa and pay her a call with his new family. She couldn’t wait for him and “Miss Botha & all the little Bothas” to “come & see me & my garden.” He was used to her teasing, and may have smiled when he read her letter, but no doubt it also hurt.14
* * *
Helen Botha returned to obscurity in South Africa, but her father offered the king a spectacular gift that Churchill saw as a tribute to all who had urged a full reconciliation between the Boers and the British. With the approval of his parliament, Botha proposed giving the king on his sixty-sixth birthday the uncut Cullinan diamond—considered the largest in the world, weighing just over three thousand carats. It had been discovered in a South African mine in 1905 and was estimated to be worth at least £500,000. The Tories disparaged the gift, suspecting some darker motive behind it. Churchill described their objections as “sneers & snarls of disappointed spite.” But many Liberals also had doubts, questioning the propriety of accepting such a valuable stone. Churchill dismissed this lukewarm response and was the most vocal advocate in favor of its acceptance.
In the House of Commons he praised the announcement of the gift as “a wonderful event” and declared, “It will probably be remembered for hundreds of years after a great deal of the legislation on which we are engaged has been forgotten.”
Still, the government wavered. “Believe me,” Churchill urged in his official advice to the king, “it is a genuine & disinterested expression of loyalty & comes from the heart of this strange & formidable people.”
The king agreed, the Cabinet slowly arrived at the same decision, and on November 9, 1907—the monarch’s birthday—the Colonial Office sent an official under heavy gu
ard to deliver the diamond to Edward. It was later cut, and two extraordinary stones were among those added to the royal jewels: the First Star of Africa—which was mounted on the scepter, and is still the largest cut diamond in the world; and the Second Star of Africa, which was mounted in the Imperial State Crown. As a keepsake, Churchill received a glass model of the uncut diamond.
Years later, during a long lunch at his home, he wanted to show off the model and asked for it to be brought to the table. When, after a long search, it arrived on a tray, one of his guests looked down at the white lump, and—thinking it was some sort of hardened jelly—said, “No, thank you.”15
XIV
A PLACE IN THE SUN
The autumn of 1907 found Churchill taking another break from politics, touring once again in France and Italy to see friends and relax. One of his stops was Venice, where Muriel Wilson happened to be staying with her wealthy friend Helen Vincent, who owned the magnificent Palazzo Giustinian on the Grand Canal. In 1904 John Singer Sargent had painted Helen in Venice leaning seductively against a wall near one of her balconies. Revealing her white shoulders in a black silk dress with gold and white trim, she looks in this portrait every inch the Edwardian goddess of Churchill’s dreams, and with the same remote air that he found in Muriel.
He was in heaven on a warm day in late September when Helen Vincent invited him to lunch, and then Muriel joined him in a gondola for a tour of the canals.
“Such a dream of fair women,” he wrote Pamela, who belonged in the same class. “You will think me a pasha. I wish I were.”1
It would have tormented him to stay and watch the spell dissolve as Muriel and Helen turned their attention to other interests, but on this autumn break he had business as well as pleasure to occupy him. In two weeks he was due in Malta, where he would start a long voyage taking him to British colonies in the Mediterranean and East Africa. The trip didn’t start out as anything official, because he led Lord Elgin to believe it was merely “a private expedition.” But behind his back, Winston turned it into a fact-finding mission that had all the appearances of an official tour. It was a kind of “royal progress,” to use Jennie’s lighthearted description of it, with her son playing the part of a minor prince inspecting various outposts of the empire.
Before Elgin realized what was going on, Winston had arranged for Eddie Marsh to accompany him, and for a navy cruiser to take them everywhere they wanted to go. Almost four hundred feet long and armed with eleven six-inch guns, HMS Venus looked like the kind of ship a prince would have at his command. Two cabins were reserved for Churchill’s personal use, and he was allowed to observe all the ship’s operations from the bridge. As he sailed into the Red Sea in late October, he boasted to Jennie that he was “becoming quite a mariner.” (After it was reported in Britain that the Admiralty was “lending” Churchill the use of the cruiser, an old Tory supposedly joked, “I hope the Admiralty will get her back.”)
Lord Elgin never did understand how Churchill pulled all this off. He was still confused many months later, when he wrote of the tour, “I really don’t know how it drifted into so essentially an official progress.”2
As always, Churchill had big ideas and wanted to act on them without delay. At every opportunity he dutifully sent reports to London on colonial affairs, explaining the latest thing he had learned about Cyprus or the Somaliland Protectorate, and proposing administrative reforms. But the civil servants in his office dreaded receiving each new report because it added significantly to their paperwork. “8 letters from Winston on Saturday!” cried one senior official, who complained to Elgin that Churchill was “most tiresome to deal with.”3
Unlike the colonial officials in the old days who might have needed a few minutes to find “these places” on a map, Winston actually wanted to visit them and talk to the people who lived there. If, as he expected, there was a Cabinet reshuffle next year, his first choice was Elgin’s job, and this trip was meant to strengthen his qualifications. There were lots of Liberals who knew the older, well-established colonies, but the ultimate object of Churchill’s trip was to explore vast, unfamiliar reaches of Kenya and Uganda, and to do it partly on horseback and on foot.
After his navy cruiser landed him in Kenya at Mombasa, he and Eddie—with a small band of guides, servants, and various local officials—spent all of November and most of December traveling across East Africa to reach the Nile at the northern end of Lake Victoria, and then to the Murchison Falls, where they continued on to Khartoum and Cairo. They dressed in khaki and wore sun helmets, and when they were on foot, they had as many as 350 porters trailing behind with their gear and supplies. Eddie was worried about lions, and before leaving England had asked Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the darling of the London stage, what she would do if she heard that a lion had eaten him. “I should laugh first,” she said, “and then be very, very sorry.”4
The highlight of the trip for Churchill was Uganda, which he described as “one beautiful garden” from end to end. He loved the people, whom he called a “polite and intelligent race,” and was delighted to meet the eleven-year-old king, who later sent his portrait to Winston with a beautifully handwritten note saying, “The words on the fortographs mean I am your friend.” The place would be perfect, Winston believed, except for an entrenched enemy that posed an especially dangerous threat to Europeans. “Uganda,” he wrote succinctly, “is defended by its insects.”5
Churchill was troubled by Kenya, where he saw trouble brewing. He feared that inevitably the “fierce self-interest” of the white settlers would create conflicts with the native Africans, and that Britain would be caught in the middle trying to keep the peace. What impressed him in Uganda was the progress that education and self-government had made among the population, but he didn’t see the same sort of progress in Kenya, and took a patronizing view of the Kikuyu and other tribes of that land as “willing to learn” but in need “of being led forward.”
He ended his trip with one major piece of advice for the empire: “Concentrate upon Uganda.” He saw this part of Africa as a model for the future development of all colonies. It showed how a light helping hand from the British authorities could accomplish much more than the heavy fist used so wantonly by Frederick Lugard. At this idealistic period of his life, Churchill still believed that the cultural and racial differences within the empire could be bridged. But he thought it all depended on the mutual pursuit of three goals: “Just and honourable discipline, careful education, sympathetic comprehension.”6
These were the noble aims listed in his book My African Journey, a short volume published at the end of 1908. But colonial concerns interested his readers much less than his stories of hunting big game, escaping from crocodiles, and sightseeing from the cowcatcher of a locomotive. Purely as a travel writer, he was a hit, for his narrative and his prose sparkled. The latent poet in him almost ran away with the book, filling it with memorable images—Malta “glistening on a steel-blue Mediterranean”; the dry hills of Cyprus before the autumn rains; the “long red furrow of the Suez Canal”; the “vast snow dome of Kilimanjaro”; and the “rainbow spray” and “thunderous concussions” at the Murchison Falls.7
To Churchill’s amazement, Eddie Marsh loved the trip and held up well from start to finish. Because he was taller and was thought by the natives to have the fiercest look, Eddie was sometimes mistaken as the leader of the expedition. This amused Churchill to no end because Eddie was so hopeless as a big-game hunter that his rifle was more of a danger to his companions than to the wild animals. During one hunt he was told to put his weapon away after Churchill saw him waving it around as he marched along quoting passages from Paradise Lost. Winston later joked that Eddie was so happy in Africa that he stripped naked and “retired to the Bush, from which he could only be lured three times a day by promises of food.”8
By the end of the trip Churchill was amazed at how much territory he had covered in a relatively short time. He was back in London by the middle of January 1908, having
traveled more than nine thousand miles through a variety of warm climates in the past four months. He was a little surprised that he had survived the journey in one piece. It had not been without its dangers. Malaria and sleeping sickness were constant threats in East Africa, and he had feared that he might come down with one or the other. But he suffered no problems until he reached Khartoum, where his servant on the trip, George Scrivings, who had worked for him in London, fell ill and died of cholera the next day.
He was devastated by the death, and as he walked to the grave for the service, he couldn’t help thinking that the disease might have struck him instead. He was also reminded that earlier in his life he had attended another burial in this part of the Sudan. “The day after the Battle of Omdurman,” he recalled, “it fell to my lot to bury those soldiers of the 21st Lancers who had died of their wounds during the night. Now after nine years . . . I had come back to this grim place where so much blood had been shed, and again I found myself standing at an open grave, while the yellow glare of the departed sun still lingered over the desert, and the sound of funeral volleys broke its silence.”9
* * *
The wealth of the empire and the potential of its enormous resources had started Churchill thinking once more about that slum in Manchester he had visited with Eddie. Again, he wondered why Britain was building an empire overseas when so much rebuilding was needed at home. Pursuing the imperial dream, of course, was more exciting than struggling with the intractable problem of poverty, but his feuds with the Conservatives had opened his eyes about a lot of things. The Tories had pushed him so far from their camp that he was now thinking along more radical lines—at least by Tory standards.
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