God and Churchill HB

by Jonathan Sandys

  One day as I walked through the seminary administration building, I spotted a noticeboard posting for an English-language Baptist church in Nuremberg, primarily serving the large American military contingent there. Nuremberg is close to Erlangen, the site of a university with a noted theology faculty. I had studied German for two years in college and was confident I could succeed there. Pastoring the Nuremberg church would provide support for my family while I was earning my European degree. I sent an application but never received a response.

  Almost a year later, in the autumn of 1965– long after I had put the matter out of my mind – a letter arrived from Nuremberg addressed to me as pastor of Antioch Baptist Church. Two weeks before Christmas 1965, Irene, our one-year-old daughter and I flew to New York to board the Holland America Line ship Princess Margriet.

  Even as we were headed for Nuremberg, many of the soldiers and their families in the small church we were going to serve were preparing to move out – the men to Vietnam and their wives and children back to the United States. Within four months of our arrival in Germany, the church informed me that there would soon not be enough money for my salary. Some of the soldiers were willing to get us groceries and gasoline from the PX, but with the black market still thriving in Germany twenty years after the war, I knew they risked a court-martial if they resold PX supplies. I began a futile search for work outside the church – teaching school, packing groceries, anything I could do to support my family and continue serving the small congregation as pastor. But my dream of studying at the University of Erlangen was now up in smoke.

  One day, I saw that our bank account had dwindled to five hundred dollars – a paltry amount by today’s standards, but in 1966 it was still enough to either feed and house us for a few months or get us back to America. The decision was clear, and I resigned from the church the next Sunday.

  We left Germany on 1 April 1966, and after a brief stopover in Iceland’s Arctic temperatures, we arrived in Alabama to a soft Southern spring and a room in my in-laws’ house. Feeling humiliated by our sudden and premature return from Germany and disillusioned about my calling as a pastor after feeling so certain that God had directed our move to Nuremberg, I started looking for a job again – doing anything but church work.

  I put in applications at three or four companies on that first day, and at my final stop, a box factory, I was told I could start the next morning. I jumped at the opportunity and was soon learning the value of good, hard work, even as I kept looking for better employment. Finally, in August I walked into the Birmingham News, told the interviewer that I loved to write, knocked out some sample copy and wound up in journalism, a profession I came to love. I started as religion editor, became a general reporter and ultimately was promoted to the editorial-page staff.

  As my assignments broadened, I began to contemplate the world on a larger scale. At the time, Birmingham was still sizzling with civil-rights protests – just three years removed from the Birmingham church bombing – and I had an opportunity over the next two years to observe the growing influence of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. This stared me thinking about the nature of leadership – especially as it affects societies.

  In August 1970, through circumstances too involved to describe here, I became assistant director for a White House task force working on the implementation of court-ordered school desegregation in eleven Southern states. Upon completing that mission, I moved directly into a job at the White House and spent the next two and a half years teamed with Harry S. Dent Sr, special counsel to President Richard Nixon.

  From this new vantage point, I began a serious observation of leadership styles and the contrasts between raw power and true authority. But the most important thing I did while working at the White House was to participate in a prayer breakfast every Thursday morning in the West Wing. Those gatherings brought me into contact with people who believed that God works through the events of history. I had never thought much about that, but I was intrigued. When Proverbs 21.1 says, ‘The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will,’2 was it more than simply beautiful poetry? Does God raise up leaders and bring them down, as the prophet Daniel says?3

  Such questions stayed on my mind in the years ahead, even as I again felt stirrings to become a preacher and took up my calling once more – a calling I pursued for the next twenty-five years before ‘retiring’ and re-entering the world of politics. After two years as district director and acting chief of staff for a United States congressman, I returned once again to church ministry. For the past thirteen years, I have served as a teaching pastor and senior associate pastor at Houston’s Second Baptist Church.

  In 1990, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Eastern European communism, I assisted a British agency in responding to numerous urgent requests from former Soviet bloc nations for conferences to equip leaders. Communism, I saw, had devoured the leadership infrastructure of the nations it had controlled – in families, churches, schools, governments and businesses. The Church had played a key role in the overthrowing of communism, and many people were now seeking help from the very institution that had once been all but banned in most of their nations. I even attended a conference that was held in a building that once housed the KGB.

  When Jonathan Sandys invited me to work with him on this project exploring the life of his famous great-grandfather, I felt as if my entire life had been a preparation for the task. As I mentioned, I’ve been fascinated with Churchill all my life, and I have studied his life in some depth. During the early 1970s, Churchill became almost an obsession for me. My White House experiences had impressed on me the enormous responsibility of leading a nation and having an impact on the world. As I observed world leaders up close, I realized there was another dimension to Churchill that made him historically exceptional, a dimension I could not fully describe but wanted to explore. I collected all the books I could find that dealt with Churchill’s life and leadership. For inspiration, I hung photos of the great man in my home study, which I dubbed the ‘Churchill Room’.

  When I listened to Jonathan’s vision for this book, I realized that even though we come from different backgrounds and perspectives, it seemed inevitable that our paths would converge. We had both spent many years of our lives searching for God, and we both viewed Winston Churchill, in many ways, as a God-haunted man. This book represents our efforts to understand this great leader in the context of God’s work in the world.

  PART I

  THE REMARKABLE PREPARATION

  1

  A Vision of Destiny

  This country will be subjected somehow, to a tremendous invasion, by what means I do not know, but I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London, and I shall save London and England from disaster.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, AGE 16

  ON A SUMMER SUNDAY EVENING IN 1891, with the echoes of chapel evensong still resonating in their minds, sixteen-year-old Winston Churchill and his close friend and fellow Harrow student Murland de Grasse Evans sat talking in what Evans would remember years later as ‘one of those dreadful basement rooms in the Headmaster’s House’.1

  The conversation focused on destiny – more specifically, their own. Churchill thought that Evans might go into the diplomatic service, or perhaps follow his father’s footsteps into finance.

  Then Evans asked Churchill, ‘Will you go into the army?’

  ‘I don’t know’, young Winston replied. ‘It is probable; but I shall have great adventures soon after I leave here.’

  ‘Are you going into politics? Following your father?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it is more than likely because, you see, I am not afraid to speak in public.’

  Evans was quizzical as he gazed back at his friend. ‘You do not seem at all clear about your intentions or desires.’

  ‘That may be,’ Winston shot back, ‘but I have a wonderful idea of where I shall be eventually. I have dreams about it.’

 
‘Where is that?’

  ‘Well, I can see vast changes coming over a now peaceful world; great upheavals, terrible struggles; wars such as one cannot imagine; and I tell you London will be in danger – London will be attacked and I shall be very prominent in the defence of London,’ Winston said.

  ‘How can you talk like that?’ Evans asked. ‘We are forever safe from invasion, since the days of Napoleon.’

  ‘I see further ahead than you do,’ Winston replied. ‘I see into the future.’

  Murland Evans was so ‘stunned’ by the conversation that he ‘recorded it with utmost clarity’, in a letter he sent to Churchill’s son, Randolph, who in the 1950s was given the responsibility of writing his father’s biography.2

  Churchill continued, undaunted, as he would many times throughout his career. ‘This country will be subjected somehow, to a tremendous invasion, by what means I do not know, but I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London, and I shall save London and England from disaster.’

  Evans remembered Churchill as ‘warming to his subject’ as he spoke.

  ‘Will you be a general, then, in command of the troops?’ Evans asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Britain’s future leader replied. ‘Dreams of the future are blurred, but the main objective is clear… . I repeat – London will be in danger and in the high position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the Capital and save the Empire.’3

  NEED FOR AFFIRMATION

  Were it not for events almost fifty years later, young Winston’s prediction might be dismissed as the desperate effort of a lonely adolescent with a need for affirmation to assert his significance. That need would have been understandable, given the relationship between Churchill and his physically and emotionally removed parents. Of his mother, Churchill wrote later in life, ‘I loved her dearly – but at a distance.’4 And once, after an extended conversation with his own son, Churchill remarked, ‘We have this evening had a longer period of continuous conversation than the total which I ever had with my father in the whole course of his life.’5

  Today, social conventions are often determined by their political correctness. In Churchill’s day, especially for people of his class, it was ‘Victorian correctness’ that set the standard. VC demanded a certain aloofness of parents towards their children. In some households, parents met with their offspring by appointment only (determined by the parent) and in the presence of a servant. If the child became too troublesome, obnoxious or impolite, the help could quickly take charge.

  As a boy, Winston romanticized his parents at times. He saw his father as a champion of ‘Tory democracy’. History focuses on Lord Randolph’s personal morality, but Winston saw his father as a good and loyal politician who stood on principle. He noted his father’s courageous stands as Chancellor of the Exchequer – and how, when Lord Randolph’s voice was ignored, he offered his resignation. Churchill admired the fact that Lord Randolph was sometimes unpopular and that he placed the nation’s needs above those of his own Conservative Party when he perceived a conflict. Winston believed his father to be a ‘people’s politician’, not a party hack. He concluded that Lord Randolph sincerely desired to serve the people he represented and was not in politics for himself, for power or for accolades.

  Churchill’s mother, Jennie, was an active socialite, if not a libertine, with many (some would say scandalous) involvements; but her relationship with her young son was not especially close. Still, Churchill remembered her as ‘a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power’.6

  ‘Emotionally abandoned by both [parents], young Winston blamed himself,’ writes the historian William Manchester. ‘Needing outlets for his own welling adoration, he created images of them as he wished they were, and the less he saw of them, the easier that transformation became.’7 Aristocratic families sent their boys to private boarding schools – for Winston, it was Harrow – and at a distance, Winston’s fantasized image of his parents was quite easy to maintain because he did not see them often or receive communications from them.

  At one point, he tried to tell his mother how lonely he was: ‘It is very unkind of you not to write to me before this, I have only had one letter from you this term.’8 In 1884, four years before he entered Harrow, nine-year-old Winston became sick. His doctor, who had a medical office in Brighton, felt it would be good for the boy’s health if he lived for a while by the sea. Thus, Churchill started that autumn as a student at a school there. But the new location made no difference in his parents’ attentiveness. In fact, when he read in the Brighton newspaper that Lord Randolph had recently been in town to make a speech, Winston wrote him a note: ‘I cannot think why you did not come to see me, while you were in Brighton. I was very disappointed, but I suppose you were too busy to come.’9

  Then there were the suffocating strictures of the upper-crust educational institutions. As William Manchester observes, ‘Youth was an ordeal for most boys of [Churchill’s] class. Life in England’s so-called public schools – private boarding schools reserved for sons of the elite – was an excruciating rite of passage.’10 Added to that misery was the continuing disregard by his parents. ‘It is not very kind darling Mummy to forget all about me, not answer my epistles,’ he wrote in one letter to his mother.11 On another occasion, Winston asked his father to come to Harrow for Speech Day and told him, ‘You have never been to see me & so everything will be new to you.’12

  As difficult as his parents’ seeming disinterest must have been for Churchill, it may have been a blessing in disguise. By default, his nanny, Elizabeth Everest, played a much bigger role in forming his vital foundational beliefs, and her perspective was decidedly Christian.

  WOOMANY

  Winston Churchill’s school experience was pathetic by any measure, but right from the start, even as a seven-year-old, he demonstrated the tenacity and determination that would come to characterize his life. Subjected to institutional acts of brutality that might have destroyed another boy’s morale, Churchill remained resolute. Once, after a particularly severe caning at St George’s School in Ascot, he got his revenge by defiantly stomping on the headmaster’s prized straw hat.

  At the bottom of his class – and also sorted towards the end of the list at roll call because of his name, Spencer-Churchill – Winston wrote pleadingly to his father to allow him to dispense with the Spencer and simply go by Churchill. Lord Randolph ignored the letter, just as he had failed to respond to the hundreds of earlier epistles in which the homesick young Winston begged them to visit for a weekend, Sports Day, Prize Giving or any occasion.

  During those dark eleven years of Churchill’s primary schooling, he had only one visitor: his nanny, Mrs Elizabeth Everest, whom he affectionately called Woomany. She was the one person to whom he ‘poured out [his] many troubles’.13 Churchill and Mrs Everest remained friends and confidants until her death in 1895, five months after Lord Randolph’s and three months after his grandmother’s, Clarissa Jerome. ‘I shall never know such a friend again,’ Churchill wrote of Everest in a letter to his mother.14

  During Churchill’s younger years, Mrs Everest loved him dearly and protected him as best she could. Years later, when he wrote his only novel, Savrola, Churchill no doubt had Mrs Everest in mind when he described the housekeeper character:

  It is a strange thing, the love of these women. Perhaps it is the only disinterested affection in the world. The mother loves her child; that is maternal nature. The youth loves his sweetheart; that too may be explained… . In all there are reasons; but the love of a foster-mother for her charge appears absolutely irrational. It is one of the few proofs, not to be explained even by the association of ideas, that the nature of mankind is superior to mere utilitarianism, and that his destinies are high.15

  Stephen Mansfield provides further insight into Elizabeth Everest’s influence on Churchill. She was a ‘low church adherent’, he notes, who wanted no part of the ‘popish trappings’ in the Anglican Church. ‘But she
was also a passionate woman of prayer, and she taught young Winston well. She helped him memorize his first Scriptures, knelt with him daily as he recited his prayers, and explained the world to him in simple but distinctly Christian terms.’16 Her role in the formation of Churchill’s world view was still evident later in his life when he often paraphrased or quoted Bible passages in his speeches. Even in seasons of doubt, he instinctively saw through eyes formed with a biblical outlook. This is why he could inspire hope, call for strength and faith and, most importantly, grasp the true meaning of Nazism and its threat to civilization.

  Throughout his life, Winston Churchill was a man of principle, even though his understanding and application of those principles were sometimes skewed – as they are in all of us. The academics under whom Britain’s future wartime leader studied would have been well acquainted with the writings of Jeremy Bentham, the prominent late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British philosopher who promoted the theory of utilitarianism and the idea that outcomes determined the ethical rightness of actions and philosophies. Churchill was a practical man, but he was not a mere utilitarian. Instead, he combined a mighty visionary perspective, strategic wisdom and tactical knowledge in ways rarely found in one person.

  Early in his political career, Churchill angered his friends and won only meagre approval from his former opponents when he changed political parties over policy principles. After the seeming collapse of his leadership reputation during the First World War, Churchill only dug the ditch deeper with his attempts to warn about the intentions of Adolf Hitler during the build-up to the Second World War. To regain his credibility and stature, it would have been much easier to give way to raw pragmatism and mute his message. The more comfortable course would have been to yield to Britain’s war-weariness and allow Hitler free rein in Western Europe. After all, key players in the British aristocracy didn’t think all that badly of Hitler, though his style was off- putting to some of their sensibilities. But as Winston had told his school chum in 1891, he could see ‘further ahead’. And what Churchill saw was the power of principle over sheer utility. In the absence of parental influence, some credit for this perspective must go to his ‘foster-mother’, Elizabeth Everest, who showed him that human nature is indeed superior to mere utility.