Action and inaction

Q: Could you verify the correct wording for the Winston Churchill statement:  “I never worry about action, but only inaction.” There are various iterations among the sources. —S.D.

From Churchill by Himself, page 190 (note he placed quotemarks around “worry”): “I never ‘worry’ about action, but only about inaction.”

Reference: 1940s, passim. Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Vol. 15: Never Surrender, May 1940-December 1940 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2011). In his preface, page xvi, Sir Martin writes of Churchill:

Inefficiency, incompetence and negative attitudes roused his ire…. He did not take kindly to what he called “a drizzle of carping criticism.” [He despised those who] “failed to rise to the height of circumstances.” Among his injunctions to his Ministers were, “Don’t let this matter sleep,” and, “I never ‘worry’ about action, but only about inaction.”

There are several appearances of the quotation. Here is one in a letter, on page 1184 of the above work: Concerning “Operation Compass,” the first major British offensive in North Africa. Churchill wrote to General Dill on 7 December 1940:

…If, with the situation as it is, General Wavell is only playing small, and is not hurling on his whole available forces with furious energy, he will have failed to rise to the height of circumstances. I never “worry” about action, but only about inaction.

“Religion of blood and war”

Q: Did Churchill refer to Islam as “the religion of blood and war”?  —I.L.

Yes, in his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (London: Longmans Green, 1898). Quoting from a newer edition (London: Leo Cooper, 1991), page 27:

But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance…. The prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such.

While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting…. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.

It would be inappropriate to quote these words out of context because they referred to Pathan warriors 100 years ago. Their worst atrocities, Churchill went on, were against fellow Muslims. There are many examples of his praise of Muslim fighters, notably those in the World War II Indian Army. He considered Muslim Dervishes pictured above “as brave men as ever walked the earth.” Context matters.

Connoisseur’s Guide

My Early Life appeared a year before the last volume of The World Crisis. The subtitle, “A Roving Commission,” is from the first chapter of Churchill’s Ian Hamilton’s March. It seems he took it from an earlier novel by G.A. Henty, one of his favorite authors. The titles changed places in the first American edition.

A wonderful treat is in store in this most approachable of Churchill’s books. Harold Nicolson in his 1930 review likened My Early Life to “a beaker of champagne.” His bubbly expression is not shy of the mark. If the reader was drawn to Churchill by his war memoirs, his autobiography will come as a revelation. The memoirs chronicle a very public struggle against national extinction. The autobiography charts a young man’s private struggle to be heard. But the same style and pace is there, the same sense of adventure, the piquant humor. We readers are enabled to peer over Churchill’s shoulder as events unfold.

Vanished Age

Of course he was born with certain advantages,” as William Manchester put it in his foreword to a 1980s edition:

…his youth was virtually incomprehensible to most people then alive. He had been born into the English aristocracy at a time when British noblemen were considered (and certainly considered themselves) little less than godlike. His grandfather was Viceroy of Ireland….These dominant forces—the class into which he had been born—were masters of the greatest empire the globe has ever known, comprising one-fourth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of the world’s population, thrice the size of the Roman Empire at full flush. They also controlled Great Britain herself, to an extent that would be inconceivable in any civilized nation today. One percent of the country’s population—some 33,000 people—owned two-thirds of its wealth, and that wealth, before two world wars devoured it, was breathtaking.

Nevertheless, Churchill had little handed to him, once family influence had placed him where he wanted to be. He could not have embarked on those thrilling war junkets abroad without the influence of his mother and other great personages. But once there he was on his own, and he acquitted himself well.

Life cycle

My Early Life begins with Churchill’s first memories at the “Little Lodge” in Dublin. Here his father lived as secretary to his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough. Winston’s description of his nurse, Mrs. Everest, is heartwarming. The accounts of the Royal Military Academy; his adventures as a war reporter in Cuba, India and South Africa; his escape from the Boers in 1899, and charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, will hold the reader’s attention to the end. Here and in his later account of entering politics and Parliament, we can see Churchill’s emerging political philosophy, studded with remarkably advanced views on British society and the Empire.

The text was not entirely fresh when the book appeared in 1930. Churchill had been writing autobiographic books since 1898. But the book melded his experiences together, added a lot, and had a huge printing over the years. There is a copy for every reader, be it a cheap paperback or a rare first edition.

It is notable that My Early Life was one of the two Churchill works excerpted by the Nobel Library—for Sir Winston’s 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature. Churchill is at his dazzling best as chronicler and memoirist. Freshly entered in the political wilderness, he wrote thinking that his political career was over.

—from Richard M. Langworth, A Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill (London: Brasseys, 1998, reprinted 2002).

An appreciation by Henry Fearon

Churchill’s dedication of My Early Life  “To a new generation” confesses his view that he had given a picture of a distant time. How far away those late Victorian years are now.

His account of childhood, school, the Army, and his first arrival at the House of Commons never flags in its interest or importance. Yet even at the time of its writing, Churchill could never have foreseen the enduring weight of Fortune which was to settle upon him.

Fine and interesting as the My Early Life is, there is one small drawback to seasoned readers. Just as we are expecting the author’s politics to entertain us, we are hurried backwards to tales already told in the Malakand Field Force, The River War, Ian Hamilton’s March, and his escape from the Boers in London to Ladysmith via Pretoria. Yet this is a tale well worth reading—or re-reading. My Early Life will always be, I believe, the most readable of Churchill’s books.

* * *

Mr. Fearon was a distinguished bibliophile and collector. Years ago left me a copy of his unpublished commentary on Churchill’s books. He had, I think, a way with words. His full account of My Early Life is a click away.  —RML

Young Winston Churchill’s second speech in Parliament was a bravura performance taking up his father’s theme for economy in the budget.

In Churchill in His Own Words (p 45) I date this quotation 12 May 1901 and cite Churchill’s Mr. Brodrick’s Army, his 1903 volume of speeches (facsimile edition, Sacramento: Churchilliana Company, 1977), 16:

Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time, and I am very glad the House has allowed me, after an interval of fifteen years, to raise the tattered flag I found lying on a stricken field.

The “tattered flag” was Lord Randolph Churchill’s campaign for economy in the late 1880s. (Thirty-nine years later to the day, in his first speech as Prime Minister, his son would raise another tattered flag upon a very stricken field.)

My colleague Andrew Roberts writes to advise that date was May 13th not 12th, and that “stricken field” is absent in Sir Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963 vol. 1, p 79:

Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time, and I am very glad the House has allowed me, 
after an interval of fifteen years, to lift again the tattered flag of retrenchment and
 economy.

This is confirmed by Hansard (13 May 1901, paragraph 1566). So when and where did Churchill actually deploy “stricken field”?

Here is another case of our boy embroidering Hansard in one of his speech volumes (and mis-dating it, which he did occasionally). Mr. Roberts reminds me that speakers were allowed to alter Hansard entries if they did so within 24 hours, but obviously our author did not change his wording until 1903.

Churchill, never forgot a melodious phrase. It is likely that he recalled “stricken field” from a poem by the Canadian John McCrae (later famous for “In Flanders Fields”). In “The Unconquered Dead” (1895), first stanza, McCrae wrote:

Of we the conquered! Not to us the blame                                                                                 Of them that flee, of them that basely yield;                                                                           Nor ours the shout of victory, the fame                                                                                    Of them that vanquish in a stricken field.

Churchill’s first usage (properly within quotes) was in The River War (London: Longmans, 1899) II 255-56, regarding the Battle of Omdurman:

The Emir [Ahmed Fedil] had faithfully discharged his duty, and he was hurrying to his master’s assistance with a strong and well-disciplined force of not less than 8,000 men when, while yet sixty miles from the city, he received the news of “the stricken field.”

Churchill again used “stricken field” in reference to the Battle of Majuba (The Boer War, 275); to the Dervish empire (My African Journey, 117); to Marshal Foch (Blood Sweat and Tears, 166); and to Charles II (History of the English-Speaking Peoples, II, 298).

I will add this to the corrections for my next edition of Churchill in His Own Words—”if there is one.”