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On Monarchy

“It is wise in human affairs, and in the government of men, to separate pomp from power.” —Winston S. Churchill¹

In an age of lampooning anything which smacks of tradition, the question arises: what good is monarchy? It comes up frequently nowadays, given the behavior of certain royal personages. Americans generally don’t understand it. They associate monarchy only with ceremony, or scandalous shenanigans picked up by the tabloid press. It’s the 21st century, for heaven’s sake! Surely the elevation of one personage to reign over everybody else is an anachronism?

Not so fast, said Winston Churchill. Are you sure the alternatives work better? “In this country,” he said, “we have known the blessings of limited monarchy. Great traditional and constitutional chains of events have come to make an arrangement, to make a situation, unwritten, which enables our affairs to proceed on what I believe is a superior level of smoothness and democratic progress.

Omit tyrant monarchies like the Kims in North Korea. We’re taking about ceremonial heads of state. In ordinary times, in eras of peace and prosperity, there is a commonality of purpose, in both a constitutional monarchy and a republic. In fraught times amidst poisonous politics, monarchy may have serviceable attributes. Stop and think about it.

Separation of powers 

The Canadian commentator Mark Steyn was asked: “If you could change one thing in the U.S. Constitution, what would it be?” He went right to Article II: “I’d separate the President from the Head of State.”

Now that would be separation of powers with a cleaver, and of course it’s not going to happen. In Britain, however, Churchill saw reason for the idea:

The joining together in a single person of the headship of the State and headship of the government, or any approach thereto, open or veiled, has always been odious in Great Britain. We have known how to preserve the old and glorious traditions of hereditary monarchy while slowly building up a parliamentary system which has hitherto met the needs of a growing people, and changing times.

Churchill praised separating “what is permanent from what is temporary.” The common inheritance of a nation, he argued, is beyond dispute. Law, language, literature; the contributions of past generations to a cultural ethos—nobody argues about that. (Well, not in his day.) But what about “those matters which must necessarily be in dispute between classes and parties and factions”? The unwritten British Constitution, Churchill said, “places the supreme position in the State beyond the reach of private ambition, but…assures to a political leader, in fulfillment of the wishes of the electors, a freedom and confidence of action unsurpassed in any land.”

“Parliaments talk, the Crown shines”

Churchill explained that “if the King does what is thought to be wrong, it is his bad advisers who are blamed. But to apply that doctrine to the controversial head of a political government would be an altogether undue extension of the principle.”  

There is utility in a system where Parliaments talk and the Crown reigns. When the Sovereign opens anything, from Parliament to a shopping mall, crowds cheer and the Sovereign is duly unifying. No monarchs walk on stage clapping their hands, as politicians often do in other places. It’s inappropriate in a constitutional monarchy. In 1940 Churchill said:

When our beloved Sovereign and the Queen come from their battered palace to a building which is not without evidence of the strokes of war, when the Sovereign comes to open Parliament in person and all his faithful Commons to the discharge of their duties, at every step, in every measure, in every formality, and in every resolution that we pass, we touch customs and traditions which go back far beyond the great Parliamentary conflicts of the 17th century; we feel the inspiration of old days, we feel the splendour of our political and moral inheritance.

Bulwark against dictatorship

Constitutional monarchy, Churchill declared, was “a practical instrument and means of national self-preservation against every type of republic and every degree of dictatorship.” Hardly anyone, he added, “even the greatest simpleton,” believed any better system was available. “No one can presume to set himself up as national representative against the hereditary rights of the King.”

It would be a mistake, he wrote, for Britain to force her system on other countries.Yet he believed it would have been better on the whole if some countries had kept their monarchs. He offered as examples Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas. Writing after the First World War he said:

The unfortunate Tsar was endeavouring to create within the brief span of his own life a parliamentary system in Russia. Had he or had the Kaiser succeeded to their thrones under something like the British Constitution, and with the experienced political advisers at their side whom our constitutional system has always hitherto supplied, they might both be reigning peacefully at the present moment, and the world would have been spared the measureless calamities of the Great War and the still unmeasured calamities which may follow from it.

“The cost of government is greater under republics”

I once asked a British Member of Parliament how big a staff he had, and was told he had three. More recently a Swedish MP, staggered at the battery of aides grouped around U.S. representatives at a Congressional hearing, let on that she had a staff of one. Churchill maintained

that the cost of government is greater under republics than under monarchies, that there is more corruption, less freedom and less progress, both physical and intellectual. There are, of course, exceptions, and it would be wrong to generalize. Every nation is entitled to the form of government it chooses, and once the apparatus of monarchy has been overthrown in a country there are a few precedents for its restoration. The fact remains, however, that it has been the experience of many nations to have dwelt more happily, more safely, more prosperously and more progressively under a monarchy than either an oligarchy or a republic.

Will the Monarchy survive?

In The Dream, his 1947 conversation with the ghost of his father, Churchill explained that the monarchy had even survived socialism:

The Socialists are quite in favour of the Monarchy, and make generous provisions for it…. Of course they have a few rebels, but the old Republicanism of Dilke and Labby [Labouchère] is dead as mutton. The Labour men and the trade unions look upon the Monarchy not only as a national but a nationalised institution. They even go to the parties at Buckingham Palace. Those who have very extreme principles wear sweaters.

Neither Lord Randolph nor his son, of course, could have anticipated the trauma surrounding Princess Diana half a century later. Not to mention the subsidiary recent eruptions and narcissism of lesser royal progeny.

God Save The Queen

Bogdanor’s “period of magical monarchy,” writes Kevin Theakston, “reached its apotheosis in Churchill’s eyes in the early years of Elizabeth II’s reign.” That pinnacle, Pimlott wrote, was

the final disappearance of Empire; the transformation of media deference into media intrusion; the passing of an age of respect for authority and tradition and deference to hierarchy—these have eroded the old props and demystified the monarchy, with the royal family also making its own contributions to the spectacle of “royal soap opera.” The “fairy tale” aspects of Churchill’s conception of the monarchy may have gone for good, but the case he made for the important and positive role it plays in a democratic constitutional order remains a strong one.

Churchill praised “the wisdom which places the supreme leadership of the State beyond the reach of private ambition.”As long as royals remember that they are ceremonial figures not national nannies, the monarchy will survive. That’s the job. If one doesn’t like it, one may drop out and live in quiet obscurity, as many have before.

The British monarchy, Churchill continued, “has no interests divergent from those of the British people.”That is a principle Her Majesty The Queen has splendidly maintained through all the trauma and heartbreak, the highs and lows of her long reign. Churchill admired that. We should, too.

N.B. March 2021: The original post contains author Clark’s response, which is about the most cordial reply to a grumpy review I’ve ever read. He kindly takes heed of my criticisms and says he will attend to them in the paperback in due course. RML

Churchill’s Britain abridged

I did want to like this book. Having hosted ten tours of Churchill’s Britain, we’ve long hoped for a comprehensive travel guide to all the places in what Lady Soames called “The Saga.” But some improvements are needed to this one, to make it truly helpful.

The first thing one notices is: no photos. How can a book discuss Churchill’s Britain without depicting it? There is no admission information on places open to the public. The index is unhelpful. It lists names but not venues—not even London or Chartwell. To find, say, Ditchley, you have to know it’s in Oxfordshire. (Its map location is buried in the gutter—the maps are double-page spreads.) When you do get to what you want, you find that coverage is often sparse. Woodstock is there for Blenheim Palace; but nothing about its famous haunt the Bear Hotel, or Lord Randolph Churchill’s constituency, which drew young Winston’s close interest.

Churchill’s Britain says the West Country holds few places of interest. Yet a 1996 Churchill tour spent four days there, visiting places associated with Marlboroughs and Churchills. They included Round Chimneys, birthplace of the first Sir Winston; Little Churchill Farm, where the family had its earliest beginnings; Great Trill, birthplace of the First Duke of Marlborough; Ashe House, where Sir Winston thought the Duke was born; and other private homes and churches. Churchill’s Britain does mention Plymouth and Bristol University. Portland gets half a page, but omits the drama of Churchill sending the King’s ships to sea before the 1914 war.

Churchill’s London

London, to which Churchill’s Britain devotes 100 pages, receives good coverage but many omissions. I couldn’t find the Albert Hall or Guildhall, though lesser speech sites are included. In Hyde Park, we find nothing on the old London Magazine (right).

The two London chapters are organized by postal code: SW1 and “everything else.” So to find Winston’s nanny’s grave, you must know the City of London Cemetery is in NW12. From his office at Ministry of Munitions (Hotel Métropole), Churchill gazed with ominous thoughts on Armistice Day 1918. Where is it in Churchill’s Britain? You’ll find it if you can find “Northumberland Avenue” (not in the index).

Clubs and Eateries

Here too is the National Liberal Club (actually on Whitehall Place), celebrated haunt of the young Winston. A more precise account of this and nearby venues is on Hillsdale’s walking tour of Churchill’s Whitehall. The book omits most of Sir Winston’s clubs: Boodles, Bucks, the Reform, the Athenaeum. I could not find the Savoy Hotel’s Pinafore Room, home of The Other Club.

Whitehall is well covered, but omits the former Carlton Hotel (now New Zealand House), where WSC dined on the eve of war in 1914, and Ho Chi Minh cooked his vegetables. Included is the Foreign Office, where he didn’t serve, but not the Colonial Office, where he did. To its credit, Churchill’s Britain contains most of WSC’s residences (so long as you know the postal code), missing only four or five.

Round the Island

The 2019 Hillsdale College cruise circumnavigated Churchill’s Britain, passing or visiting many historic locations. The book omits several key ones. In Broadstairs, Kent, young Marigold Churchill died and WSC observed the planning for D-Day. Hartlepool, Whitby and Scarborough, Yorkshire were shelled by the Germans 1914, causing Churchill’s violent reaction. All go unmentioned.

Creditably Churchill’s Britain addresses all four of Churchill’s Parliamentary constituencies: Oldham, Manchester North West, Dundee and Epping/Woodford. But the discussion of Woodford (1945-64) mainly involves its underwhelming statue of him, not his long career there. The book misses St. Margaret’s Bay, near Dover, where a fine Nemon statue broods over the Channel. Statues are not the book’s forte, and are unindexed. Fortunately, there are good books on Churchill as MP for Dundee and Woodford.

Scotland

The Scottish coverage is somewhat uneven. Dirleton, East Lothian, an Asquith residence where Churchill was offered the Admiralty, goes unmentioned. Nevertheless there’s room for a mythical, story involving another Asquith abode, Slains Castle. Here, we are told, Violet Asquith nearly died of grief when she heard that Winston was going to marry that “ornamental sideboard,” Clementine Hozier. Peter Clark doesn’t, however, fall for the canard that the despairing Violet tried to throw herself from the cliffs.

Clementine’s ancestral home, Airlie Castle, is omitted, and other Scottish connections. A book more about people than places should include WSC’s friend Molly, Duchess of Buccleuch, who once informed him that Chamberlain was coming to speak.  “It doesn’t matter where you put [his podium],” Churchill advised her, “as long as he has the sun in his eyes and the wind in his teeth.”

Edinburgh needs more attention for Churchill’s early drive for devolution (long before it was fashionable); his visits to Scottish statesmen; the German Fleet surrender in 1919; his Freedom of the City in 1946. In Dundee, the story turns mainly on how he was pushed out of office by a Prohibitionist in 1922—never mind that he won five previous elections, one joyfully described by Luigi Barzini. Scapa Flow in the Orkneys is barely mentioned, with nothing about the tragic sinking of HMS Royal Oak, and how the Churchill Barriers prevented further attacks.

Still room for more

Martin Gilbert, on our second Churchill Tour, spoke of “Churchill’s London,” a lecture happily still online. Stefan Buczacki, in the Churchill Companion, admirably listed all of Churchill’s residences, owned, leased and borrowed. Sir Martin had long wanted to publish a book entitled, Churchill’s London in Maps and Photographs. Alas he didn’t have the time, and a truly comprehensive guide to Churchill’s Britain remains to be written. Peter Clark has opened the case for one, and may yet be heard from again.

We are often asked which historical and contemporary personages most influenced Winston Churchill’s thought and statesmanship. One is right to start with Lord Randolph Churchill, Napoleon, Clemenceau and Marlborough. The classics open another avenue. Readers can find pithy remarks by Churchill on many of the following figures in Churchill by Himself.

Lord Randolph Churchill

His father was the first of young Winston’s political inspirations, and the subject of his first biography. “Like Disraeli, he had to fight every mile in all his marches,” Winston wrote. “In his speeches he revealed a range of thought, an authority of manner, and a wealth of knowledge, which neither friends nor foes attempted to dispute.” Alas, Randolph died too young. His son remarked in My Early Life: “There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.” See also John Plumpton, The Writing of Lord Randolph Churchill.

Seekers of Churchill’s inspirations must read his essay “The Dream”—an imaginary 1947 conversation with the ghost of his father, who died in 1895. Read also the excellent appreciation of the piece by Hillsdale College Churchill Fellow Katie Davenport. “The Dream” originated when, at the dinner table, WSC was asked what historical figure he would like to see filling an empty chair. His reply was instantaneous: “Oh, my father, of course.”

Bourke Cockran’s oratorical inspirations

There is no doubting Cockran’s significance. Churchill was quoting him to a later Democrat politician, Adlai Stevenson, in the mid-1950s. (Stevenson had to look him up!) Cockran was vital not only to Churchill’s oratory, but to his political thought:

It was not my fortune to hear any of his orations, but his conversation, in point, in pith, in rotundity, in antithesis, and in comprehension, exceeded anything I have ever heard…. He taught me to use every note of the human voice as if playing an organ. He could play on every emotion and hold thousands of people riveted in great political rallies when he spoke…. Above all he was a Free-Trader and repeatedly declared that this was the underlying doctrine by which all the others were united. Thus he was equally opposed to socialists, inflationists and protectionists… In consequence there was in his life no lack of fighting.

Is this not the very description of Churchill himself? There is a fine book on the subject. Becoming Winston Churchill, by Michael McMenamin and Curt Zoller, is the standard work on their relationship. 

John Morley and “Mass Effects”

Like Cockran and Churchill, John Morley tried always to avoid war. Unlike Churchill, Morley was a pacifist. He resigned from the Cabinet when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. Earlier that year, Churchill paid Morley a fulsome tribute: “For many a year he was an ornament of our Debates, and his learning and intellectual elevation, his brilliancy of phrasing, and the range of his experience, constitute assets and qualifications which the Government value in the highest degree.”

Morley is Churchill’s first subject in his book Great Contemporaries. In it he refers to his famous essay, “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” which deplored the rise of the state and the homogenization of thought and politics:

Such men are not found today. Certainly they are not found in British politics. The tidal wave of democracy and the volcanic explosion of the war have swept the shores bare. I cannot see any figure which resembles or recalls the Liberal statesmen of the Victorian epoch….  The world is moving on, and moving so fast that few have time to ask, “Whither?” And to these few only a babel responds.

Clemenceau: faithful but unfortunate

Known as “The Tiger” for his aggressive politics, Clemenceau was twice Prime Minister, 1906–09 and 1917–20. His determination to win the war was legendary. In 1917 Churchill heard Clemenceau declare, “no more pacifist campaigns, no more German intrigues, neither treason nor half treason—war, nothing but war.”

One might say Clemenceau was a kind of French Churchill (or the nearest France came to one). They were alike in another respect: both were dismissed in their hour of victory. Churchill’s words about himself apply to Clemenceau, and remind us of the Churchill family motto, “Faithful but Unfortunate.” In 1940, Churchill wrote, “I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.” Thus also Clemenceau, shortly after his own world war ended.

Marlborough’s parallels

Churchill, a superb military historian, describes Marlborough’s campaigns with precision. But considering WSC’s inspirations, one might ponder the Great Duke’s geopolitical aspects. Leo Strauss, for example, called Marlborough: His Life and Times “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding.” His essay is in Harry Jaffa, ed., Statesmanship: Essays in Honor of Sir Winston Churchill (1981).

Andrew Roberts places Marlborough among WSC’s inspirations in his Churchill: Walking with Destiny:

Churchill’s strategic views, already profoundly affected by the Great War, were to develop significantly during his writing of Marlborough as he considered how his ancestor approached coalition warfare. “It was a war of the circumference against the centre,” he wrote of the War of Spanish Succession, just as it was to be for Britain after the Dunkirk evacuation…. [Churchill] admired Marlborough’s single strategy above the “intrigues, cross-purposes, and half-measures of a vast unwieldy coalition trying to make war…. Not for him the prizes of Napoleon, or in later times of cheaper types.”

Napoleon: writer and statesman

Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon vies with Walking with Destiny in quality, a fine source for naming Napoleon among Churchill’s inspirations. Dr. Roberts explained that Churchill’s admiration was for the statesman and writer, not the dictator:

As an English Tory, I was expecting not to like Napoleon when I took up my pen…. Yet it was one of the most enjoyable parts of researching this book to discover that of course the Emperor had a hugely engaging personality and attractive character…. I like to think of [him] as the Enlightenment on horseback. The builder, the educator, the encourager of science and industry, the self-made man, the thinker, the writer, the giant and the genius. Instead my countrymen only see the soldier, the conqueror, the invader. They blame all the Napoleonic Wars on him—ignoring his pleas for peace and despite the fact that many more wars were declared on France than he declared against others.

Classical philosophers

Churchill’s inspirations extend to several classical authors or philosophers, like Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Xenophon and of course Thucydides. Paul Rahe, in “Why Read The River War?”, compares Churchill’s book with Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War: “Nowhere can one find a subtler depiction of the moral and practical dilemmas faced by the statesman in a world torn by conflict. Moreover, Thucydides’ environment was bipolar—as was ours in the great epoch of struggles on the European continent that stretched from 1914 to 1989….”

See also Justin Lyons’ “On War: Churchill, Thucydides and the Teachable Moment”: “Like Thucydides, Churchill wrote to teach. To convey what should be done, how it should be done, and why it should be done is the essence of political leadership.”

The works of William Shakespeare figured high with Churchill, who knew many plays by heart. He alluded to Shakespeare more often than any source other than the King James Bible. Shakespeare probably doesn’t’ qualify among Churchill’s inspirations. Rather, he was a rich source of the deathless phrases that punctuated Churchill’s expression.

Churchill read many more classics in his self-education as a young man. (For the full list, see his autobiography, My Early Life, Chapter IX, “Education at Bangalore.”)

“How many speeches did Churchill make, and in how many words? Also, how many words did he write in his books and articles? [Updated from 2014.]

Word counts

Through the wonders of computer science (Ian Langworth and the Hillsdale College Churchill Project), we know that the present corpus of works by and about Winston S. Churchill exceeds 80 million words (380 megabytes). This includes 20 million (120 megabytes) by Churchill himself (counting his letters, memos and papers in the 23 volumes of Churchill Documents. Here are his the top word counts among his books:

The Churchill Documents: 10,000,000*

Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963: 5,200,000

The Second World War: 1,600,000 (not counting appendices)

The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill: 860,000

The World Crisis: 824,000

Marlborough: His Life and Times: 779,000 (not counting appendices)

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: 510,000 (not counting appendices)

Lord Randolph Churchill: 278,000

The River War: 200,000

*Total word count for the twenty-three volumes is 15.3 million; we estimate 10 million are WSC’s own words.

Word count: speeches

To be precise you’d have to count (I won’t!) the speeches listed in the Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963. Rough estimate: there are forty speeches per page of contents, about eight contents pages per volume, and eight volumes. So, at a guess, 2500 speeches.

But the Complete Speeches are not complete. Try to find his famous Durban speech after escaping from the Boers in 1899, for example. And some are only excerpts—as from his lecture tours of North America. Also, you must deduct notes by editors. But let’s add say 10% for missing speeches and guess that he made about 3000 in all.

The 5.2 million-word Complete Speeches, at eight volumes, is the longest book-length “work by Churchill.” Subtract 100,000 words of introductions and add missing speeches or verbiage. Let’s estimate six million words of speeches alone.

Official Biography

Some readers also ask about word counts for the Official Biography. The total for the eight biographic volumes is over 3,000,000 words. The twenty-three Companion or Document Volumes  add 15.3 million, for a grand total of over 18 million words (80+ megabytes). Of course, these include many million words not by Churchill.

Someone once told Sir Martin Gilbert,  “You’ve only published one-tenth of Churchill’s story!” Sir Martin replied: “Really? That much?”

Digital capacity

This doesn’t impress software engineers, but it does me: A single, old fashioned 250 gigabyte hard drive disk would hold over 1800 copies of all Churchill’s words and all the words in the Official Biography.

A modern hard drive holds about 3 terrabytes (3000 gigabytes). Therefore, your personal computer could house about 200,000 copies of Churchill’s works and the Official Biography.

What would Sir Winston Churchill make of this? No one can say, except to remember one of his maxims: “Words are the only things that last forever.”

The Fleming myth is updated from an article originally published in 1998.

Is it true that Lord Randolph Churchill financed the education of Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, as a result of Fleming (or his father) rescuing Churchill from drowning in a swamp when young Winston was a youth—and a Fleming discovery, penicillin, saved Churchill’s life years later in 1943? A friend of mine has sent me this email regarding it and I wanted to verify . —L.M.

This question comes up regularly, but both parts of the story are untrue. Neither Alexander Fleming nor his father were with Churchill at the times suggested. Official biographer Martin Gilbert investigated, and found that the dates did not coincide. Nor was penicillin used to cure Churchill when he fell ill in Carthage in 1943.

“Saved from drowning”

The first part of the story often adds that in gratitude for Alex’s saving Winston’s life, Lord Randolph Chrchill paid for his eduction. It is all imaginary. Official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert notes that the ages of Churchill and Fleming (or Fleming’s father) do not support the idea. Alexander Fleming was seven years younger than Churchill. If he was plowing a field at say age 13, Churchill would have been 20. There is no record of Churchill nearly drowning in Scotland at that or any other age. Nor is there record of Lord Randolph paying for Alexander’s education.

“Saved by penicillin”

The Struggle for Survival, based on the recollections of Churchill’s doctor Lord Moran, say nothing about a need for penicillin, during Churchill’s illness in 1943. Dr. John Mather, who has researched Churchill’s medical history in detail, explains: “Churchill was treated for this very serious strain of pneumonia not with penicillin but with ‘M&B,’ a short name for sulfadiazine produced by May and Baker Pharmaceutical. Since he was so ill, it was probably a bacterial rather than a viral infection, and the M&B was successful.”

Origins

For years I thought this story originated in 1950. That was when an American religious house published Worship Programs for Juniors, by Alice A. Bays  and Elizabeth Jones Oakbery. It appeared in a chapter entitled “The Power of Kindness.”

But in 2009 a Churchillian reader, Ken Hirsch, used Google Book Search to track a much earlier appearance. This was “Dr. Lifesaver,” by Arthur Gladstone Keeney, in the December 1944 issue of Coronet, pages 17-18. Mr. Hirsch also tracked author Keeney (1893-1955). He was a Florida and Washington newsman who served during World War II in the Office of War Information. “Keeney published his story only a year after Churchill’s pneumonia,” Mr. Hirsch wrote. “So I think it may be the first appearance of the myth.”

Alistair Cooke…

…led with this story in his 15 August 2003 “Letter from America.” I was the Churchillian he mentions consulting, although at the time we only tracked the myth to 1949. Alas he died six months later, before we knew of the 1944 appearance. He was a lovely man, and truly irreplaceable. See “Alistair Cooke: An Introduction and an Appreciation.”

* * * * *

Mandalay as dog whistle

Mandalay as progressive poetry?

A friend who never read the poem before sent me his impression: “It seems to recall the allure and beauty of a country where a soldier was asked to do a dangerous job, and a people he later longed to be with again.”

Let’s go even further. If we want to be fair, isn’t Mandalay a remarkably progressive 1890 endorsement of interracial harmony? Interpreting it as mere lust after “an exotic object and someone to be ‘civilized'” only displays ignorance. Clearly the writer didn’t read it well. It contains no expressions of lust, only loneliness. That is what Kipling’s soldier is saying. He wants to go back to a land and a girl he loves, and both are Asian.

Mandalay even indulges modern readers with a gesture of Political Correctness. The soldier says, “We useter watch the steamers an’ the hathis pilin’ teak.” Then he hastens to explain: “Elephints a-pilin’ teak.” (The Hindi word for “elephant” is “haathee.”) That is no less a bow to P.C. than our modern haste to call Burma by its new name Myanmar—proclaimed in 1989 by the ruling military junta.*

Postcolonial studies can have few richer specimens to tease apart in the space of 51 lines: race, class, power, gender, the erotic, the exotic and what anthropologists and historians call “colonial desire”…. Kipling wrote poetry and prose that certainly deserves the epithet, notably The White Man’s Burden. He was a child of empire, and became the empire’s laureate. But Mandalay isn’t so much an argument for colonialism as an evocation of its personal effects….

There is always, eventually, an awkwardness with Kipling: the race and empire issue. [Historian Geoff] Hutchinson got round it by having his Kipling say something to the effect that he knew his views grew out of different time—though even in that different time, Kipling was unusually committed to mystical ideas of national character and destiny. [Emphasis mine.]**

“A different time” is how unread people try to excuse what others call the racist imperialism of Churchill. But like Kipling, Churchill had more admirable and deeper motivations. Ideas about liberty and human rights. Among them were “the mystical ideas of national character and destiny.”

Appreciating The Road to Mandalay 

Endnotes

Bad luck…always pursues people who change the names of their cities. Fortune is rightly malignant to those who break with the traditions and customs of the past. As long as I have a word to say in the matter Ankara is banned, unless in brackets afterwards. If we do not make a stand we shall in a few weeks be asked to call Leghorn Livorno, and the BBC will be pronouncing Paris “Paree.” Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names. I date this minute from St. George’s Day.

Further reading

Ian Jack in The Guardian: “Boris Johnson was unwise to quote Kipling, but he wasn’t praising empire.”

Grad-Saver: The Poems of Kipling: An Analysis of Mandalay.

Wikipedia carries a balanced set of pro and con arguments on this subject.

Red Herrings: Quotes not by Churchill (or things he said quoting someone else), continued from Part 3.  Compiled for the next expanded edition of Churchill by Himself. Chapter references are to present editions of that book.

Earthy or sexist gags were not really Winston Churchill’s métier. His daughter Mary doubted an alleged crack to Bessie Braddock MP, who accused him of being drunk: “And you, my dear…are disgustingly ugly, but tomorrow I’ll be sober….” But I produced the Scotland Yard bodyguard who was standing next to him during the Braddock encounter. Lady Soames reluctantly agreed. “Well, maybe, under those circumstances….!” (It proved to be a wisecrack her father had remembered from a movie starring W.C. Fields.)

Sexism – Simple Tastes

Sexism: A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest. 

Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds? [Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill…Well, I suppose.”] Would you sleep with me for five pounds? [“What kind of a woman do you think I am?”] We’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

• No attribution and both quotes are out of character. WSC was not given to misogynistic wisecracks.

Seymour Cocks: Yes, Seymour Cocks and hear more balls.

• Ripe for Churchillian Drift (WSC might have repeated it), this was attributed by Anthony Montague Browne to the Foreign Office’s Orme Sargent (Long Sunset, 58). Piers Brendon suggests Aneurin Bevan (Churchill’s Bestiary, 295).

Shooting his son-in-law: Ah! but Mussolini has this consolation, that he could shoot his son-in-law!

• Supposedly said 20 July 1944 to Duncan Sandys, Chequers. Cecil King wrote (267): “Churchill’s favourite theme is of the great burden resting on him and of the unfairness that any one man should have to bear so great a responsibility. He was groaning away on the usual lines, so Duncan Sandys, to cheer him (according to the story), pointed out that Hitler had an even greater burden to bear—so had Mussolini—because, after all, everything was going wrong for them.” Quotes usually relate this as a crack to Vic Oliver, a less beloved son-in-law than Duncan Sandys. However, I cannot find reliable attribution to the Oliver remark. See Chapter 20, People…Mussolini.

Shy a Stone – Simple Tastes

Shy a Stone: You will never get to the end of the journey if you stop to shy a stone at every dog that barks.

• Shepherd’s Bush Empire Theatre, London, 3 December 1923. Among his quotes of someone else. He preceded this by stating, “As someone said…” A similar statement urging courage “when the dog growls” is in Chapter 29, Leadership, Courage.

Simple Tastes: I am a man of simple tastes—I am quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.

• According to Sir John Colville, F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead said “Winston is easily satisfied with the best” (without “man of simple tastes” or “of everything.”) Churchill with his great memory could have repeated this to the manager of the Plaza Hotel in New York, as is sometimes said. 

Sleeping – Something vs. Norhing

Sleeping to Noon: A man who gets the reputation of rising at dawn can sleep to noon. • No attribution.

Socialist and Capitalist: “If a man is 20 and not a Socialist, he has no heart. If a man is 40 and not a Capitalist, he has no head.”

• No attribution. A variation on “Liberal and Conservative.”

Socialism: You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. • No attribution.

Something vs. Nothing: It is better to do something than to do nothing while waiting to do everything. • No attribution.

Soviet politics – Strategy

Soviet politics: It’s like dogs fighting under a carpet.

• Although WSC compared British party politics to a dog-fight on occasion, there is no attribution for this expression to describe Kremlin in-fighting. Nor is there any occurrence of the phrase “under the carpet.”

Speeches: A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest. • No attribution.

What if, instead of “We shall fight on the beaches,” I had said, “Hostilities will be engaged with our adversary on the coastal perimeter”? • No attribution.

I am going to make a long speech today; I haven’t had time to prepare a short one.

• If he said it (there is no evidence), WSC borrowed the idea from Blaise Pascal who, in 1656, wrote: “I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.” 

Stalin and Russia: The core of Stalin’s historic achievements consists in this, that he had found Russia working with wooden ploughs and is leaving her equipped with atomic piles. He has raised Russia to the level of the second industrial Power of the world. This was not a matter of mere material progress and organisation.

• Circa 1953, quotes by Isaak Doitcher, Ironies in History: Essays in Contemporary Communism. Supposedly a tribute by WSC after Stalin’s death , it has no relation to any known statement by Churchill. For his actual appraisal see Chapter 20, People, Stalin.

Statistics: Do not trust any statistic you did not fake yourself. [Or: The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.]

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.

• No attribution. Mark Twain credited the last to Benjamin Disraeli.

Strategy – Submarines

Strategy: However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. • No attribution.

Street-sweeper’s tale: You see, if you had married him, you would be the wife of a street-sweeper today. [Clementine Churchill: “No, if I had married him, he would be prime minister today.”

• Supposedly Clementine Churchill, after greeting a street-sweeper, says to her husband: “He was in love with me a long time ago.” Manufactured quotes without attribution.

Submarines vs. U-boats: Enemy submarines are to be called “U-boats.” The term “submarine” is to be reserved for Allied underwater vessels. U-boats are those dastardly villains who sink our ships, while submarines are those gallant and noble craft which sink theirs.

• Widely quoted by numerous books on the naval war, not one of which carries a footnote to a valid attribution. While Churchill expressed the same view in other ways, we must regard this as apocryphal.

Success – Trees

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. • No attribution.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

• Broadly attributed to Churchill, but nowhere in his canon. An almost equal number of sources credit I to Abraham Lincoln; but none provide attribution.

Suicide: It is never necessary to commit suicide, especially if you live to regret it. • No attribution. Such quotes sound more like Yogi Berra than WSC.

Sweden: The Swedes ignored the greater moral issues of the war and played both sides for profit. • Quoted by Wikipedia, but without any valid citation.

Taking office: Take office only when it suits you, but put the government in a minority whenever you decently can.

• Published in Lord Randolph Churchill, I, 188. WSC put this in quotes because he did not claim it; he ascribed it to his father.

Tardiness: I am a sporting man. I always give them [trains and planes] a fair chance to get away.

• Often ascribed to WSC, actually said about him (in the third person) by his wife Clementine. See “Faults, but remarked by his wife (misquoted here). See Chapter 31, “Personal Matters….Faults.”

Temptation: Don’t worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, she will avoid you. • No attribution.

Trees Growing to the Sky: The trees do not grow up to the sky.

• Described by WSC as an “old German saying,” on 25 September 1938 in “The Effect of Modern Amusements on Life and Character,” in News of the World, following his concerns about dramatic falls in future birth rates. Also deployed with slightly different wording over bombing London. See Chapter 22, Politics; The Home Front, Insurance, Blitz. Frequent among his quotes: Churchill used this on thirteen later occasions

Troubles – Umbongo

Troubles: Most of the things I have worried about never ended up happening.

• Quotes by WSC but not original. (See Chapter 31, Personal Matters, Troubles.) Fred Shapiro (Yale Book of Quotations), believes the originator was Mark Twain (“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened”) or Thomas Jefferson: (“How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!”) A similar remark, attributed to an anonymous octogenarian, appeared in The Washington Post, 11 September 1910.

Umbongo: Umbongo, umbongo, they drink it in the Congo

• Reported by the Daily Telegraph during the Brexit debate, 27 February 2019. No attribution. Brexit cynics might prefer: “General Monro was an officer of swift decision. He came, he saw, he capitulated.” (See Chapter 20, “People.”)

Virtues and Vices – Whisky

Virtues and Vices: He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. [Or: he was possessed of all the virtues I despise and none of the sins I admire.]

• Often and prominently quoted, with respect to Stafford Cripps and Edwin Scrymgeour; no evidence of this or similar quotes in Churchill’s canon.

Never trust a man who has not a single redeeming vice. • No attribution.

While England Slept 

• The American edition of Arms and the Covenant was not entitled by Churchill. WSC’s cable, suggesting The Locust Years to publisher Putnam, was garbled to read The Lotus Years. Baffled, Putnam’s staff looked up “lotus,” finding “a plant inducing dreaminess.” Then one director said, “I’ve got it: While England Slept.” WSC was delighted. —Robert Bruce Lockhart, Comes the Reckoning, 1947, 201 (confirmed by Clementine Churchill).

Whisky: If you mean whisky, the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates  misery and poverty…I am opposed to it with every fibre of my being.” However, if  you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the elixir of life…Then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally in favour of it. • No attribution, though he might have shared the sentiment.

White Meat – “Winston is Back”

White Meat: [After asking for a chicken breast at a Virginia buffet, Churchill was informed by his genteel hostess that Southern ladies preferred the term “white meat.” The next day he sent her a corsage, with a card:] I would be much obliged if you would pin this on your white meat. • No attribution.

Wine: A magnum of claret is the perfect size for two gentlemen to share over lunch—especially if one isn’t drinking. • No attribution; indeed claret was not a common lunchtime tipple.

Winston is Back: I therefore sent word to the Admiralty that I would take charge forthwith and arrive at 6 o’clock. On this the Board were kind enough to signal the fleet, “Winston is back.”

• Mentioned by Churchill (The Gathering Storm, 320, 1948) and repeated by Lord Mountbatten at Edmonton in 1966. Sir Martin Gilbert and others find no record of such a signal when Churchill returned to the Admiralty in 1939.

Women

Women and Children First: There are three things I like about being on Italian cruise ships. First, their cuisine is unsurpassed. Second, their service is superb. And then, in time of emergency, there is none of this nonsense about women and children first.

• All over the Internet after the 2012 wreck of the Italian liner Costa Concordia, but Churchill’s entire makeup excluded such sentiments. The Quote Investigator ascribed the remark to travel writer Henry J. Allen in 1917. (For Churchill on loss of life at sea, see Chapter 15, Naval Person…Titanic Sinking.)

Women’s Suffrage: The women’s suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands.

• Allegedly to Asquith, 21 December 1911. But his letter was on political tactics, not suffrage, and it is tendentious to suggest he would oppose liberal causes since he was then a Liberal. He wrote something similar to this in 1897, when he was 23: a private note pasted into his copy of the 1874 Annual Register. By 1911 he had come a long way; he never overtly opposed suffrage in the 20th century.

Words – Ypres

Words: We are the masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out. • No attribution.

            Someone—I forget who—has said: “Words are the only things which last for ever.” That is, to my mind, always a wonderful thought.

• In this first appearance of a repeated phrase, to the Author’s Club, London on 17 February 1908, Churchill credited the quote to someone else.  (CS I, 905). In a 10 June 1909 press conference, he remarked: “It has been said words are the only things that last forever.” (CS II, 1262).  But by the 1930s he had adopted the line as his own. See Chapter IV Writer and Speaker…Language.

Yale and MIT: An after-dinner speaker was giving the audience at least 15 minutes for each of the four letters that spell “Yale”… “Y is for Youth…A is for Achievement…L is for Loyalty…E is for enterprise,” etc. Halfway through “enterprise” a member of the audience said: “Thank God he didn’t go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” • No attribution.

Ypres, Belgium: I should like us to acquire the ruins of Ypres.…a more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world.

• Allegedly 1918. Widely attributed with no reliable source. These were certainly Churchill’s sentiments, according to his private secretary Eddie Marsh’s diary of 29 October 1918: “Winston wants to turn that group of buildings into a cemetery, with lawns and flowers among the ruins, and the names of innumerable dead.” (Hassall, 455).

End of “All the quotes he never said” — for now!

“No Cutlet Uncooked”

He lies at Bladon in English earth, “which in his finest hour he held inviolate.” He would enjoy the controversy he still stirs today, in media he never dreamed of. And he would revel in the assaults of his detractors, the ripostes of his defenders. The vision “of middle-aged gentlemen who are my political opponents being in a state of uproar and fury is really quite exhilarating to me,” he said in 1952. (Yes, and the not so middle-aged, too.) Most of all, Winston Churchill would love this noble book. It peers into every aspect of a career six decades long, and not, as he once quipped, “entirely without incident.”

In 1960 General Lord Ismay, the devoted “Pug,” said an objective biography could not be written for fifty years. Andrew Roberts weighs in at year fifty-eight. The delay paid off. Roberts was able to access sources only recently available. Not least of these are The Churchill Documents—invaluable papers in print through World War II. Roberts researched the Royal Archives at Windsor, the private papers of Churchill’s family. He quotes diarists like Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s ambassador to Britain. With his gift for separating wheat from chaff, this accomplished historian boils the saga down to digestible size.

* * *

Full disclosure: This writer labored for over a year as one of Roberts’ readers, sifting every word of his manuscript. Our emails, as he kindly notes, reached four figures. Together with the tenacious Paul Courtenay, we tackled every question. We ran down facts and factoids, arguing out every conclusion. With Hillsdale’s help, we checked unpublished parts of Sir Martin Gilbert’s “wodges.”  These are documents, clippings and letters, compiled by Sir Martin, for almost every day of Churchill’s life.

Mr. Roberts, to quote his subject, “left no cutlet uncooked.” This is the first biography I’ve proofed since Manchester’s The Last Lion, so I am perhaps qualified to compare. No one will ever reach the lyrical heights of Horatius at the Gate, like Manchester did. Roberts is far more illuminating, accurate and up to date. Walking with Destiny is a masterpiece—the finest single Churchill volume you can hope to read. To paraphrase Simon Schama on Gilbert’s volumes, it is a “Churchilliad,” and Andrew Roberts is its Bard.

Seeing the Whole Man

Roberts captures the essence of his subject, beginning with courage. How many 40-year-olds, sacked from their job, go off to fight in a world war? “You must not let this fret you in the least,” Churchill nonchalantly assured his wife. Fret she did: “…you seem to me as far away as the stars, lost among a million khaki figures.” He left the trenches in 1916, Roberts notes. “He had written over 100 letters to her, which allows us to peer into his psychology better than at any other period of his life.”

Clementine Churchill never begrudged his predilections, from battle to politics, where somehow he managed to remain friends with opponents. He even socialized with them, in a club he invented for the purpose: “With Churchill there was very often a political angle to friendship. An extraordinarily large contingent of Other Club members came together to help make Churchill prime minister in several different ways, and then to serve in his wartime Government…. Churchill had built something that by 1940 was to make a very real contribution…”

The great man’s courage vied with his emotion, Roberts writes: “Lady Diana Cooper left a charming account of [a wartime] weekend at Ditchley…. ‘We had two lovely films after dinner…. Winston managed to cry through all of them, including the comedy.’ She told him that night that the greatest thing he had done was to give the British people courage. ‘I never gave them courage,’ he replied. ‘I was able to focus theirs.’” Exactly.

Canards fall like matchsticks…

 … as Roberts methodically writes them off. It was not true, as Lord Mountbatten said, that young Winston left Cuba in 1895 with a liking for siestas and cigars. He already smoked cigars, did not start his afternoon nap until 1914. Regarding his overblown spells of the blues: “Churchill was not a depressive at all, let alone a manic one.” More likely he was a hypochondriac, “a man who took his own temperature daily and believed he had a sensitive cuticle.” His references to his “Black Dog” were part of “the sheer exaggeration to which he was prone. (Amateur diagnoses of him being bipolar can be even more easily dismissed.)”

At Omdurman in 1898, “within shot of an advancing army,” Churchill exclaimed, “Where will you beat this!” Such outbursts gained him “the undeserved reputation for being a lover of war, even though he was at constant pains to point out that the warfare he was describing was a world away from the industrialized horrors of the First World War.” His exuberance as WW1 began is frequently excoriated. “But it was the exuberance of someone who had not wanted the war to break out, had offered Germany the most generous and comprehensive plan to prevent it, had nonetheless planned meticulously what his department would do if it did, and who commanded the weapon that he believed could end it.”

* * *

Another myth is that Churchill always overemphasized the interests of whichever department he headed. Yet in the 1920s, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he opposed deeper naval cuts than he’d budgeted: “Any other realistic alternative chancellor—Neville or Austen Chamberlain and certainly any Labour or Liberal one—would have been much tougher on the Admiralty…Overall, the naval budget increased during Churchill’s chancellorship.” (Italics mine.)

In World War II, Roberts explodes the myth that Churchill opposed a Second Front: “The very phrase Second Front was itself a term of Soviet propaganda, because Britain had already been fighting Germany on at least five fronts before the Soviets were forced by invasion to drop their pro-German neutrality; in Northern France, the air, the Atlantic, North Africa and the Mediterranean.”

“I want to see a great shining India…”

On India Churchill was partly influenced by diehards, like Beverley Nichols, author of Verdict on India. “It certainly shows the Hindu in his true character and the sorry plight to which we have reduced ourselves by losing confidence in our mission,” Churchill reported to Clementine.

But then his prescience surfaced: “Reading about India has depressed me for I see such ugly storms looming up…. still more about what will happen if [Britain’s connection] is suddenly broken. Meanwhile we are holding on to this vast Empire, from which we get nothing, amid the increasing abuse and criticism of the world, and our own people, and increasing hatred of the Indian population, who receive constant and deadly propaganda to which we can make no reply.” (And this long before the Internet!) Uniquely, Churchill saw and predicted India’s division: “…only a Muslim-majority state in the northern part of the Indian sub-continent would protect Muslim minority rights if and when the British left.”

* * *

He was right about that—and consistent. In July 1944 he told Sir Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, India’s representative on the War Cabinet: “It was only thanks to the beneficence and wisdom of British rule in India, free from any hint of war for a longer period than almost any other country in the world, [that India produced] this vast and improvident efflorescence of humanity…. Your people must practise birth control.” Then he added (and we will never see this quoted by his Indian haters) that the old idea that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must go. Specifically he said: “We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.” ** There is the true Winston Churchill.

** Duff Hart-Davis, ed., King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 173.

Roberts Insights

Churchill famously “ratted” on the Conservatives over Free Trade—but was that his only objection? No, says Roberts: “Years later Churchill admitted that such was his reaction against the party at the time, over the harsh treatment of the defeated Boers, Army reform and the way the 1900 election victory was being exploited, that ‘when the Protection issue was raised I was already disposed to view all their actions in the most critical light.’ Churchill was spoiling for a fight with his own party.” This is fresh, excellent analysis. I have never heard his change of parties so comprehensively explained.

Had the 9th Duke of Marlborough died without an heir in 1934, Churchill would have become Duke, losing his Commons seat and any chance at the premiership, Roberts notes wryly: “He could survive a school stabbing, a 30-foot-fall, pneumonia, [nearly drowning in] a Swiss lake, Cuban bullets, Pathan tribesmen, Dervish spears, Boer artillery and sentries, tsetse flies, a Bristol suffragette, plane crashes, German high explosive shells and snipers, and latterly a New York motorist, but such was the British constitution that he also required the fecundity of a duke and duchess to allow him to be in the right place to save Britain in 1940.”

* * *

Saved by fecundity, he went on to warn the country in the 1930s. “It was a fascinating dichotomy,” Roberts writes, “that the leading appeasers had not seen action in the Great War…. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, John Simon, Samuel Hoare, Kingsley Wood, Rab Butler and Lord Halifax did not serve in the front line or see death up close.” But the anti-appeasers, “Churchill, Anthony Eden MC, Harold Macmillan MC, Alfred Duff Cooper DSO, Roger Keyes KCB, DSO, Edward Spears MC and George Lloyd DSO all had.”

Another deft comparison: In India and the Sudan, young Winston had encountered Islamic fundamentalism, “a form of religious fanaticism that in many key features was not unlike the Nazism that he was to encounter forty years later. None of the three prime ministers of the 1930s—Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain—had seen true fanaticism in their personal lives, and they were slow to discern it in Nazi Germany. [Churchill] had fought against it in his youth and recognized its salient features earlier than anyone else.”

“Never Surrender”

Churchill’s attitude towards Russia is often warped by his critics. Roberts sorts it out. “He started with profound enmity of the Bolsheviks, then by the late 1930s advocated an alliance with them. Then in 1939-40 he supported Finland in its war against them, then in 1941 he allied Britain with them overnight. In 1946 he denounced them, only in the 1950s to seek détente with them.” His view of Russia changed five times. “Yet the explanation was not in any inherent lack of consistency, as is often alleged, but what was in the ‘historic life-interests’ of Britain.”

Deftly Roberts explains the peace chatter of late May 1940. With Britain’s back to the wall, Lord Halifax clamored for an armistice brokered by Mussolini. Halifax was “the only one who understood,” nodded French Premier Reynaud’s Anglophobic aide Lt-Col. Paul de Villelume. Churchill was “prisoner of the swashbuckling attitude he always takes in front of his ministers.”

Halifax first thought Churchill welcomed a deal which preserved Britain’s independence. Then he protested that the PM believed in nothing save a fight to the finish. “This was in fact always Churchill’s line,” Roberts explains. It’s quite clear “if all five days’ discussions are read in context.”

* * *

Six weeks before D-Day Churchill was cautious. “We can now say, not only with hope but with reason, that we shall reach the end of our journey in good order. [The] tragedy will not come to pass. When the signal is given, the whole circle of avenging nations will hurl themselves upon the foe.”

Roberts juxtaposes two reactions. “This was the speech of an old man,” said the King’s private secretary. “Someone who clearly did not think so was Anne Frank, the Jewish Dutch teenager, who wrote in her diary from her secret attic in Amsterdam, ‘A speech by our beloved Winston Churchill is quite perfect.’”

General Sir Alan Brooke’s late night fuming about Churchill is often held to show the PM’s feet of clay—and Lord knows he had them. But Roberts shows us a different Brooke. Take when the boss arrives in France after D-Day. “I knew that he longed to get into the most exposed position possible. I honestly believe that he would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success. He [had said] the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” Part of Churchill’s admiration for Admiral Nelson, Roberts suggests, “was for his glorious death at the moment of victory.”

Readers: Buy This Book

Space is running out and I haven’t told you the half of it. There are 78 illustrations, most of them unique even to jaded Churchillians. Roberts did his best to avoid “old chestnuts.” There are sixteen pages of clear maps. The 1950s Reader’s Union map of Churchill’s wartime journeys is worked nicely into the endpapers. The book weighs 3 1/2 pounds—don’t drop it on your foot. The page stock is thin, but well chosen to minimize bleed-through. The bibliography, attesting to its thoroughness, runs to 23 pages, the author’s notes to 37, the index to 60. Amazon offers an attractive 40% discount and a Kindle version. This is little to pay for the education you’ll receive.

Andrew Roberts has been book-touring Britain (as he soon will be in North America). His has encouraging news for all who “labor in the vineyard,” as dear Martin Gilbert always described it. “There’s an explosion of love of Churchill among ordinary people away from the London metropolitan bubble,” Roberts writes. “It’s like 1940 in terms of his popularity, whenever you get away from the smug elites. We sell out constantly. Very heartening. Sometimes one can feel down over the Internet attacks and the statue smearings. But out in rural England he’s as much loved as ever. Our life’s work has borne fruit.”

See also my tribute to Lee Remick as “Jennie.” and Part 1 of the film. 

David Lough…

…added significantly to our knowledge with No More Champagne (2015), his study of Churchill’s finances. Now he fills another gap in the saga with this comprehensive collection of Churchill’s exchanges with his mother Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill. They range from Winston age seven to the very last letters before Jennie’s death, aged 67, in June 1921.

On the surface it may seem an easy task. Most of the letters are at the Churchill Archives in Cambridge. What could be simpler than digitalizing and publishing the lot? Not so fast. To publish them all would overwhelm the reader, not to mention the publisher. David Lough had to eliminate (or insert ellipses in) many of Winston’s letters from school, for example. This was acceptable, especially for the mandatory weekly “letter home.” Repeatedly those ask for money or parental visits, or offer exaggerated tales of prowess at sport or lessons. Lough offers “a representative but not exhaustive sample.”

Jennie was much better at keeping Winston’s letters than he hers. As a result, “connecting tissue” is often required from the editor to explain the context. The dearth of Jennie’s letters requires familiarity with her own story. At this Mr. Lough excels, providing us with just enough narrative, without taking over and distracting the reader from his subjects. He also provides excellent maps and uncommon photographs.

“You are in danger of becoming a prig!”

Having David Lough as narrator is like having a skilled tutor guiding us through the four-decade relationship between mother and son. He never falls short. “If we accept that Jennie ‘forgot’ about Winston during his schooldays,” Lough writes, “the ease with which they took up the striking intimacy of their correspondence after Winston left school suggests that she must have forged a stronger bond in his pre-school years than was typical of Victorian parents.” She certainly did—witness her own diaries, and her loyal support of Winston when rebuked by his father. Do well in your grades, she wrote him, and it will eclipse your father’s low view of your prospects. Yet she didn’t hesitate to criticize. Once, finding him adopting a “pompous style,” she warned: “You are in danger of becoming a prig!” For the most part, though, she took joy in his letters.

There are early examples of Churchill’s wry wit and powers of observation. Take Calcutta—please: “A very great city and at night with a grey fog and cold wind—I shall always [be] glad to have seen it—for the same reason Papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbon—namely ‘that it will be unnecessary ever to see it again.’” On his grandmother Frances, 7th Duchess of Marlborough: “Old age is sufficiently ugly and unpleasing without its too frequent accompaniments, capriciousness and malevolence.” Ouch.

Once commissioned, Winston was desperate for action: “scenes of adventure and excitement,” where he could “gain experience and derive advantage.” He felt hampered in “tedious” India, denied both “the pleasures of peace and the chances of war.” Before long, he was yearning for Crete. Why? Because, Lough explains, he hoped for assignment as a war correspondent during the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule. In a paragraph, Lough explains how this promising fracas was resolved, much to young Winston’s frustration. Yet India would soon provide plenty of war’s chances with the Malakand Field Force. It was the grist for Churchill’s first book.

“Your political career will lead you to big things”

Throughout his letters, notably in his soldier years, we see how Churchill planned his course, always aiming toward politics. “My soldiering prospects are a present very good,” he wrote Jennie from India. “I should continue in the army for two years more. Those two years could not be better spent on active service.” He would ride fame into Parliament. And he did. Politically, his mother’s predictions were more accurate than his. Winston was sure the Conservatives would lose power by 1902, for example. As Jennie expected, they hung on for another four years. Yet, with the sense of timing for which he was renowned, Winston managed to bolt to the Liberals in time for the 1906 election.

Jennie “did nothing to discourage a switch of careers,” David Lough tells us. Indeed his “political ambitions excited her after the premature end of her husband’s ministerial career.” This is exemplary of Lough’s penetrating observations. It is often overlooked that Lord Randolph’s precipitate political fall greatly depressed Jennie, more even than his death. Their son revived her hopes, especially after his hair-raising Boer War adventures: “I am sure you are sick of the war,” she wrote. Now “you will be able to make a decent living out of writings, & your political career will lead you to big things.” She was right again. He was also safer—relatively. In politics you can be killed many times, he later observed; but in war only once.

Separated as they were by oceans and continents, two-thirds of their letters span the years before Churchill entered politics. The rest are largely from early in his political career. There is much more than politics, including details of his romances. He broke up with Pamela Plowden, whom Jennie was sure he would marry, writing his mother in 1901: “We had no painful discussions, but there is no doubt in my mind that she is the only woman I could ever live happily with…” (Not quite.)

Disappointingly, there are no Jennie letters about Lord Randolph’s death. We have no inkling of what she thought: relief, grief, both? Neither will the prurient find the oft-rumored, unsubstantiated, Jennie letters about Clementine Hozier, another woman with whom Winston soon found he could live happily. Jennie had reintroduced them in 1908, after a bad start four years earlier. A long, happy marriage began that year. A fine coda to their early relationship is Winston’s letter to his mother a few days after she ceased being the most important woman in his life: “Clemmy v[er]y happy & beautiful…. You were a great comfort & support to me at a critical time in my emotional development. We have never been so near together so often in a short time.”

“I might have known that 50 miles behind the line was not your particular style…”

Nor do we find revealing letters at critical junctures to come: Churchill’s appointment to the Admiralty, the outbreak of the Great War, his abrupt fall from power. Only after he has resigned to join his regiment do we find him in Jennie’s thoughts again: “I might have known that 50 miles behind the line was not your particular style….It is no use my saying ‘be careful.’ It is all in the hands of God. I can only pray & hope for the best.”

God granted her prayer and he was soon back in the thick of politics. But they never indulged much in political exchanges, as Winston did with Clementine. Jennie’s few letters now were filled with family things: pride in grandchildren, happiness at Winston’s political success, her 1918 marriage to Montagu Porch. His step-father was actually three years younger than Winston, but the marriage worked somehow. Moreover, his mother was happy, and that was what mattered to her son.

This is quite a wonderful collection, shedding bright light on the youthful Churchill’s hopes and dreams, while revealing the worldly, solicitous, loving influence of his American mother. No son could wish for more. For those of us similarly blessed in our lives, David Lough conveys an understanding of why a man is fortunate if he is his mother’s son. As Jennie would write to him often, as our mothers wrote to us: “God bless you my darling and keep you safe.”

This book is both delightful and educational, a luxurious production for a modest price. Printed on thick, coated paper with many illustrations, it weighs over two pounds. The only technical complaint is that, with lots of white space available, the type could be larger.

Brough Scott, a horse racing journalist and former jockey, is ideally qualified to write. He is the grandson and biographer of Churchill’s lifelong friend Jack Seely, later Lord Mottistone (1868-1947). “Galloping Jack” led Canadians in one of the last great cavalry charges, at Moreuil Wood in March 1918. (That was two decades after Omdurman, which is usually and wrongly cited as the finale.)

Scott on Omdurman

Of the charge at Omdurman we are forcefully reminded on page 1. Scott makes the first of many penetrating observations. “Think about it,” he asks:

It is actually pretty difficult to do, and that’s if the horse is standing still. Without taking your left hand off the reins, you have to raise your cavalry sword in your right hand across in front of you, and resheath it in the scabbard attached to the near side of the saddle. At 8.40 on a steamy hot morning in the Sudan on 2 September 1898, Winston Churchill did it at a gallop…. To keep his seat as he and his horse crashed into, down and through the seething, hacking throng in that dried river bed where the main body of the enemy were concealed, took riding skills and dexterity with a pistol almost off the scale.

Before the autocar…

Such feats encouraged Scott to learn more about Churchill’s remarkable experiences with horses: “He rode more extensively than any British Prime Minister before or since. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Winston Churchill was born a full twenty years before the first car was driven on a British highway…”

He goes on that way for 230 pages, with fresh observations that cause graduate Churchillians to wonder: “why didn’t I think of that?” Take Scott’s analysis of young Winston’s letters to his mother to fund his polo (“the greatest of my pleasures”) at Sandhurst. One letter “may have included the programme for [a race meeting]…but it did not start with saddle talk. It began with acute observations abut the Sino-Japanese war over Korea…. ‘I take the greatest interest in the fleets and armies,’ he wrote.” Even as a skinny Sandhurst cadet, his interests were global.

Comprehensive and thorough

The photos of Churchill himself are mostly old chestnuts, but not all: there are charming post-World War II riding scenes with his daughter Mary. Scott’s “supporting” images include color prints of people and events, and the occasional surprise. (Did you ever see a carriage pulled a team of zebras?) Scott chooses well. A photo of Hadendoa tribesmen, who fought for the Mahdi at Omdurman, dramatically conveys the valor that won Churchill’s respect in his book, The River War.

Most of the sixteen chapters begin with arresting illustrations. A color cartoon depicts the startled young Winston in Ireland on his donkey, confronting what he thought were Fenians. A chapter on Cuba begins with sketches of the Spanish column Churchill joined. The resulting images illustrated his despatches for The Daily Graphic. Thus we proceed through Churchill’s life, Scott drawing out horse references from his writings and those of specialist historians, like Hal Klepak on the Cuban adventure.

Churchill’s campaigns in India, the Sudan and South Africa are nicely laid out with contemporary photos, maps and plans. Before and after the Great War, his pursuit of polo is adequately documented. The emphasis is always equestrian, but these are as good accounts as you can read anywhere. Thus the book delivers much more than its cover promises.

Skillful observation

Churchill was in his fifties before he played his last polo game, and was riding to hounds in his seventies. Of course, as he aged, his time in the saddle diminished. Scott covers his later years in fifty pages, not omitting his experiences as a thoroughbred race horse owner. The author has a facility for drawing out thoughtful conclusions. Discussing horses and racing in The Dream (WSC’s fictional conversation with his deceased father, 1947), Scott writes:

Winston’s parenting may have been unorthodox, not to say dysfunctional, by today’s standard, but there is no doubt that Jennie and Randolph left the deepest of impressions, and who is to say that he wasn’t reaching towards them in his diversions? He had long found precious solace in the painting at which his mother had so excelled, and now, in old age, he was about to re-register the chocolate-and-pink racing silks in which L’Abbesse De Jouarre [his father’s thoroughbred] had won the Oaks all those years ago.

* * *

Dear Martin Gilbert warned us all never to say “perhaps.” He would always retort, “Perhaps not!” Scott avoids that, but puts this conjecture in a way Sir Martin might let pass. Who indeed is to say the thought doesn’t fit? It seems to fit very well.

One wouldn’t expect it in a horse book, but Scott even manages to answer one of our most frequent questions, about WSC’s weight, at least in 1954. His wife had tried to put him on a diet, and Sir Winston was resisting. His scale read 14 1/2 stone (204 pounds), he wrote her, compared to 15 stone (212) on hers. “…if your machine is proved to be wrong you will have to review your conclusions, and I hope to abandon your regime. I have no grievances against a tomato, but I think one should eat other things as well.”

Scott adds: “That weedy 31-inch-chest Sandhurst cadet belonged to another age.”

==============

Churchill loved polo, which he called “The Emperor of Games.” A contemporary writer’s description of his polo tactics is remindful of much else in the statesmen’s approach to life and politics:

He rides in the game like heavy cavalry getting into position for the assault. He trots about, keenly watchful, biding his time, a matter of tactics and strategy. Abruptly he sees his chance, and he gathers his pony and charges in, neither deft nor graceful, but full of tearing physical energy—and skillful with it too. He bears down opposition by the weight of his dash, and strikes the ball. Did I say strike? He slashes the ball.

Sandhurst

Churchill first mentions polo in a letter to his father, seeking permission to ride in September 1893. He had just arrived at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. In the entrance exam, his final test score was too low for him to be accepted in the infantry and qualified him only for the Cavalry. This was a disappointment to his father Lord Randolph, who was troubled by the expense: “In the infantry one has to keep a man; in the cavalry a man and a horse as well.” His son recalled later: “Little did he foresee not only one horse, but two official chargers and one or two hunters besides, to say nothing of the string of polo ponies!”

In the spring of 1894, Colonel J.P. Brabazon expressed interest in having Winston join a cavalry regiment. He wrote his mother, Lady Randolph: “How I wish I were going into the 4th [Hussars] instead of those old [60th] Rifles. It would not cost a penny more & the regiment goes to India in 3 years which is just right for me.” Following Lord Randolph’s death in January 1895, Winston duly joined the 4th Hussars. On 12 February 1895 he received his commission as a second lieutenant.

Polo at Aldershot

At Aldershot the same month, Churchill began intensive training as a cavalry officer. As his father had feared, finances were a problem. It was a stretch for their mother to maintain Jack, Winston and herself in the way they would all like. And by now young Winston had discovered polo. In April 1895 he wrote his mother,

Everyone here is beginning to play as the season is just commencing. I have practised on other people’s ponies for 10 days and am improving very fast. If therefore, as I imagine—you have some ready money do lend me a hundred pounds…. I cannot go on without any for more than a few days unless I give up the game, which would be dreadful.

Churchill played regularly during his eighteen months at Aldershot. By May 1896 he was hoping to make the regimental team. “I am making extraordinary progress at Polo,” he wrote his mother, “but I want very much to buy another pony, I wish you would lend me £200 as I could then buy a really first class animal which would always fetch his price.”

It bears mentioning, in those far off days, that £200 had the purchasing power of £20,000 today. It is like your son asking for a loan to buy a car…

For six months he lived in London and played polo at Hurlingham in Essex and Ranelagh. As summer ended the 4th Hussars gave up their cavalry chargers to a returning regiment, and sailed for India.

India

In Bombay a native regiment, the Poona Light Horse, was thought to have the best ponies. In what Churchill called an “audacious and colossal undertaking,” the 4th Hussars bought a complete polo stud of twenty-five horses. This gave them a huge advantage of well-trained ponies immediately upon arrival at their duty station, Bangalore in the south of India.

The Hussars were out to win, and Winston’s letters home were full of the sport. “I get up here at 5 o’clock every morning…ride off to parade at 6. At 8 o’clock breakfast and bath and such papers as there are: 9.15 to 10.45 Stables—and no other engagement till Polo at 4.15.″

A polo game lasts an hour and is divided into periods or chukkas of seven minutes each. Churchill played in every chukka he could get into. His prodigious efforts soon came to the notice of the Aga Khan. “It was at Poona in the late summer of 1896 that our paths first crossed,” the Khan wrote later:

A group of officers of the 4th Hussars, then stationed at Bangalore, called on me…. none was a better judge of a horse, than a young subaltern by the name of Winston Spencer Churchill. He was a little over twenty, eager, irrepressible, and already an enthusiastic, courageous, and promising polo player.

“Give your son horses”

In November 1896 Churchill’s team won a tournament at Hyderabad, a 24-hour, 700-mile train journey. Winston told his mother that the entire population turned out to watch, not infrequently betting thousands of rupees:

This performance is a record: no English regiment ever having won a first-class tournament within a month of their arrival in India. The Indian papers express surprise and admiration. I will send you by the next mail some interesting instantaneous photographs of the match — in which you will remark me—fiercely struggling with turbaned warriors….

Churchill was fond of other horse sports; he participated in steeplechases, point-to-points and pleasure riding. In a letter to Jack in November 1896, he proudly noted that their father’s racing colors, chocolate and pink, would appear on Indian soil for the first time at a pony race meeting. In his 1930 autobiography Churchill would advise parents:

Don’t give your son money. As far as you can afford it give him horses. No one ever came to grief— except honourable grief—through riding horses. No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them; unless of course they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die.

Expanding horizons

During leave in 1897, Churchill traveled in Europe and then went home to England. By September he was back in India, chasing fame and notoriety as a war correspondent with Sir Bindon Blood and the Malakand Field Force. From Nowshera he wrote polo team-mate Reginald Barnes, “Best luck at Poona. It is bloody hot.”

Lt. Churchill returned to Bangalore—“to polo and my friends”—in October 1897. But the success of his writing, and the realization that it could be a serious source of income, had taken the edge off his consumption with polo. “I am off to Hyderabad on Sat for a polo tournament,” he wrote his mother. “It is a nuisance having to go when I am so busy.” He referred to the writing of his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Hoping for more action in the Sudan, where General Kitchener had been appointed to reconquer that territory on behalf of Britain and Egypt, was later attached to the 21st Lancers. This adventure provided material for his second book, The River War.

* * *

Before he left India he got “rid of every polo pony I possess…. I hope to get rid of them all soon. They eat.” Churchill would not return to India again, and would soon leave the army. The Malakand Field Force “earned me in a few months two years’ pay as a subaltern.” He was about to publish his novel Savrola and had offers to write biographies of his father and his ancestor the First Duke of Marlborough. Above all, however, Churchill hungered for a seat in Parliament.

Concluded in Part 2.

_____

Barbara Langworth is a bacteriologist, editor and publisher in New Hampshire. Multi-talented, she runs everything.

The Dream…

… is the most mysterious and ethereal story Winston Churchill ever wrote. Yet the more we know about him, the better we may understand how he came to write it.

Replete with broad-sweep Churchillian narrative, The Dream contains many references to now-obscure people, places and things. The new online version published by Hillsdale provides links to all of them. You need only click on any unfamiliar name or term for links to online references. After reading the story, click here for a thoughtful appreciation by Katie Davenport, a Churchill Fellow at Hillsdale College.

Churchill wrote The Dream in 1947, a low point in his political career. Two years earlier, British voters had turned his Conservative Party out of office. The former Prime Minister was now a frustrated Leader of the Opposition. But political reverses often brought out the best in his writing. Churchill’s great war memoir, The World Crisis, began appearing at a similar low point, after he had lost his seat in Parliament in 1922-24. Marlborough, his noble biography, was written in the 1930s, as he grieved over the nation’s failure to heed his warnings about Hitler.

Origins

The poignancy of The Dream is heightened by the appearance of Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Dead in 1895 at the age of forty-six, Lord Randolph had not lived to see, nor indeed ever imagined, his son at the pinnacle of their country’s affairs.

Lord Randolph’s own career had lasted scarcely twenty years. Elected to Parliament in 1874, he rose meteorically. By 1884 he was Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer. But in 1886 he resigned over a trivial matter, never to rise again. Compared with Winston, Randolph was a footnote in British history.

The boy Winston worshiped his father from afar, but never conquered Lord Randolph’s disdain. It was his lifelong regret that his father did not live to see what he had achieved. It is part of the artistry of this tale that the inquisitive young father of forty never learns what his seventy-three-year-old son became.

The Dream was first mentioned during a family dinner at Chartwell, Churchill’s beloved home in the lush Kentish countryside, twenty-five miles outside London. He entitled the story “Private Article,” showing it only to his family, resisting their urgings that it be published. In his will he bequeathed the text to his wife, who donated it to Churchill College, Cambridge. On the first anniversary of his funeral, 30 January 1966, it was published in The Sunday Telegraph. The Dream has also appeared as a stand-alone volume in two private printings and a fine 2005 edition by Levenger Press.

Reactions

Winston Churchill was a man of transcendental powers. He could, it seems, peer beyond reality. Jon Meacham, author of the seminal Franklin and Winston, believes The Dream sheds light on Churchill’s ability to put a better face on things than they really were: to revere a father who overlooked him; to revere Roosevelt, who, in their later encounters, was less than forthright.

Margaret Thatcher, in my view the greatest British prime minister since Churchill, took a right and kind view of The Dream’s Victorian lurches—which are anything but politically correct. In 1993 I presented her with a private printing. She thanked me in her own hand the next day. “I read it in the early hours of this morning,” she wrote, “and am totally fascinated by the imagination of the story and how much it reveals of Winston the man and the son.” Later I asked what she thought of Churchill’s remark about women in the House of Commons: “They have found their level.” Lady Thatcher beamed: “I roared at that one.”

While vague about the hereafter, Churchill always held that “man is spirit,” and believed in a kind of spiritual connection with his forebears. On 24 January 1953, he told his private secretary, John Colville, that he would die on that date—the same date his father had died in 1895. Twelve years later Churchill lapsed into a coma on January 10th. Confidently, Colville assured The Queen’s private secretary: “He won’t die until the 24th.” Unconscious, Churchill did just that.

One question about The Dream that tantalized his family  is whether the story was really fiction. When asked this question, Sir Winston Churchill would smile and say, “Not entirely.”

Jennie’s Encounter

Winston on Blenheim

Her son inherited her way with words. He wrote in his biography, Lord Randolph Churchill, published in 1906:

The cumulative labours of Vanbrugh and ‘Capability’ Brown have succeeded at Blenheim in setting an Italian palace in an English park without apparent incongruity. The combination of these different ideas, each singly attractive, produces a remarkable effect. The palace is severe in its symmetry and completeness…. Natural simplicity and even confusion are, on the contrary, the characteristic of the park and gardens. Instead of that arrangement of gravel paths, of geometrical flower-beds, and of yews disciplined with grotesque exactness which the character of the house would seem to suggest, there spreads a rich and varied landscape…. And yet there is no violent contrast, no abrupt dividing-line betwee

n the wildness and freshness of the garden and the pomp of the architecture.

The whole region is as rich in history as in charm….. Here Kings—Saxon, Norman and Plantagenet—have held their Courts. Ethelred the Unready, Alfred the Great, Queen Eleanor, the Black Prince loom in vague majesty out of the past.

What we have lost

Lady Randolph’s and her son’s beautiful words always remind me of ​ David Dilks​’s remark in his discussion and later essay on The Queen and Winston Churchill:

…the monarchy signified for him something of infinite value, at once numinous and luminous; and if you will allow the remark in parenthesis, ladies and gentlemen, do you not sometimes long for someone at the summit of our public life who can think and write at that level?

The campaign to Leave is heating up. Take Grassroots Out, a “combined operation” supporting Brexit—the campaign for Great Britain to exit the European Union. G-O fielded a broad spectrum of speakers in London February 19th. Along with UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage were Conservative Sir William Cash, Labour’s Kate Hoey, economist Ruth Lea, and a London cab driver.

The most unexpected Leave speaker was the far-left former Labour MP and head of the socialist Respect Party. Mr. George Galloway was immediately queried about his new colleagues.

“We are not pals,” Galloway replied. “We are allies in one cause. Like Churchill and Stalin.” He did not say which was which. We report, you decide.

Leave colleagues? Mr. Farage offered Churchillian collegiality. “I don’t suspect there’s a single domestic policy, in many cases foreign policy, of which George Galloway and I would agree. But, look, sometimes in life an issue comes along which is bigger than traditional difference.” (See “The New Happy Warrior.”)

Boris = Lord Randolph?

The Leave campaign received more support February 21st. London’s then-mayor and Churchill biographer Boris Johnson announced he would campaign for Brexit, invoking his admiration for Sir Winston.

Anti-Leave Conservative MP Sir Keith Simpson retorted that Johnson’s decision was “more reminiscent of [Lord] Randolph [Churchill] than Winston. “Randolph was a more extrovert character. [He] made the political weather then catastrophically offered his resignation when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. [It] was accepted by the then-Prime Minister Lord Salisbury.”

Lord Randolph more extroverted than Winston? YGTBK, as they say on Twitter.

Johnson’s principled decision to support Brexit, defying his prime minister, is far more reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s resignation from the shadow cabinet in 1931. Churchill left over differences on the India Act. That cost Churchill eight years in the political wilderness. This might be Johnson’s fate if Prime Minister Cameron survives the June 23 referendum.

Lord Randolph’s 1886 resignation, by contrast, was thought to be less decisive. He quit over a trivial issue, expecting to be asked back with more power. Lord Salisbury made no such offer, destroying him politically. “Have you ever heard of a man who, having had a carbuncle removed from his neck, asking that it be put back?” Salisbury quipped.

Leave Pied Piper: The True Churchillian

… in this kerfuffle is Mr. Farage—not for representing Churchill’s view of European unity (a complicated subject), but for expressing Churchill’s attitude toward political opponents. (See also: “What Would Winston Do?“)

Mr. Farage invited Mr. Galloway to speak. He introduced Galloway as “one of the greatest orators in this country…a towering figure on the left,”  adding that they would work together in the Brexit battle:

On that night, yes, the Respect Party was on the platform, so was the Conservative Party [and the Labour Party]. The point about Grassroots Out is, we’re bringing people together from across the spectrum….[Mr. Galloway] said some very disabling things about me but, look, sometimes…etc.

Farage was displaying Churchill’s famous collegiality—a rare commodity among politicians today. Churchill based this on his belief that everyone in public office deserved respect for serving the country, regardless of how violently he disagreed with their politics.

Churchill and Bevan

Instead of Churchill and Stalin, Mr. Galloway might like to compare Mr. Farage and himself to Churchill and Bevan.

Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), socialist MP for Ebbw Vale, was a Welsh firebrand with whom Churchill frequently clashed. Bevan would label Churchill a servant of plutocrat oppressors of the workers. Churchill would call Bevan, founder of the National Health Service, “the Minister of Disease.”

Hearing that Bevan had died, Churchill launched into a soliloquy: “A great man, the founder of the National Health Service, a tremendous advocate for socialism and his party….”

Then he paused in mid-sentence. “Er, are you sure he’s dead?”*

_________

* Quotation from Churchill by Himself, 326.

Per the previous post, I append for reader comment the contents of my next book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality: What Churchill Stood For.

I have written on most of these matters in the past; the book recasts it afresh. I also acknowledge and cross-reference the work of experts who know far more than I, particularly in the fields of genealogy and medicine. I would be glad to hear your thoughts; please use the “contact” page.

The historian David Stafford wrote: “Myth only develops and takes hold when the time is right, and the climate has long been ripe for the emergence of myths about a wartime hero who stood firm against a totalitarian foe and smote an evil empire.”

Churchill myth is born both of exaggeration and criticism, created either to glorify the record or to belabor it. The former I suppose is somewhat less harmful, born of ignorance. The latter obfuscate the record and distract us from the truth, sometimes intentionally.

Paul Addison wrote, “Paradoxically, I have always thought it diminishes Churchill to regard him as superhuman,” Yet Professor Addison has no doubt about Churchill’s greatness. The most memorable words on that subject were by Churchill’s official biographer, the late Sir Martin Gilbert:

In every sphere of human endeavour, Churchill foresaw the dangers and potential for evil. Many of those dangers are our dangers today. Some writers portray him as a figure of the past, an anachronism, a grotesque. In doing so, it is they who are the losers, for he was a man of quality: a good guide for the generations now reaching adulthood.

The aim of this book is to skewer the most popular allegations about Churchill, to offer readers what he really thought and did, sometimes about matters that are still on our minds today—for as Twain wrote, history never repeats; but sometimes it rhymes.

Youth: Lady Randolph’s indiscretions…The parentage of Jack Churchill…The Menace of Education….The death of Lord Randolph…Women’s Suffrage.

Young Parliamentarian: The loss of  the Titanic…The unpleasantness on Sidney Street…”The sullen feet of marching men in Tonypandy“…Irish independence.

World War I: Warmonger image, peacemaker reality…Defense of Antwerp…Dardanelles and Gallipoli…Sinking the Lusitania…Chemical warfare...America’s involvement in the Great War.

Between the World Wars: “Taking more out of alcohol”…“The foul baboonery of Bolshevism”…Trial by Jewry…”Half-Naked Fakir“…”The Truth About Hitler.”

World War II: Broadcasting the war speeches…Refugees and enemy aliens…Torture as tool or terror…Bombing of Coventry…Pearl Harbor…The Holocaust…Famine in Bengal…Destruction of Monte Cassino…Overtures to Mussolini…Feeding occupied Europe…Firebombing Dresden.

Postwar Years: The fate of Eastern Europe…Nuking the Soviets…The Conservative Party…”Only to have accomplished nothing in the end.”

Appendix: “Things That Go Bump in the Night” (so far-fetched that they defy categorizing). Converting to Islam…A life twice-saved by Alexander Fleming...Engineering the Wall Street Crash…The myths of the Black Dog and an unhappy marriage.

There are many current anniversaries (Dardanelles 1915, VE-Day 1945, funeral 1965; Atlantic Charter and Pearl Harbor next year). So one-man Churchill plays are multiplying. I saw one recently in New Hampshire—and left grumbling. I will not criticize the actor, who made a passable attempt at impersonation. But his play script left much to be desired.

Who writes these scripts? Do they do any research? Typically, this one vacuums every famous quote it can cram into 90 minutes and gets so many wrong that one loses count. This is not new. Why meddle with Churchill’s immortal words—which are famous for way he expressed them? Why do writers, actors and politicians insist on misquoting him?

Mangled quotations mount up fast. The great speeches—Munich, Holiday Time in America (1939), Blood Toil Tears and Sweat, Fight on the Beaches—are sometimes convincingly delivered. But every one is spoiled by detail edits that occur willy-nilly. Example: it was “victory in spite of all terror,” not “all hardship.” Churchill was too good a writer to use “hardship” when he meant terror.

Setting’s Off

This presentation is set in the Cabinet War Rooms in April 1955. Churchill has gone there to ponder his decision to resign. But Churchill despised the War Rooms, spent only a few nights there during the Blitz. He left them, never to return, in 1945. Why not stick to the facts, and set the scene at Downing Street? Moreover, the date should be February or March, since he had long made his decision to resign by April—and did so on April 5th.

Churchill did not hesitate to go because of doubt about his successor, as the play suggests (though he later wondered privately whether Anthony Eden would succeed). He decided to leave after failing to engineer a summit conference with Eisenhower and the Russians. Curiously, one of the Russians mentioned is Gorbachev—who was 24 and just graduating from university in 1955.

As in many one-man plays, Sir Winston reviews his life, which in this play was nicely paced but full of errors. Lord Randolph Churchill did not die of syphilis. Nanny Everest was three years dead when Winston’s first book appeared. Omdurman was not the final charge of British cavalry. He became prime minister on May 10th not May 4th 1940, thirty not thirty-five years after 1910, and so on.

The play correctly suggests that Churchill held Prime Minister Baldwin, not Chamberlain, chiefly responsible for Britain’s insufficient rearmament in the 1930s, and repeats WSC’s private reflection that it would have been better had Baldwin never lived. But it misattributes Churchill’s 1938 remark “embalm, cremate and bury”—which referred to avoiding risks in national defense, not to Mr. Baldwin.

More Misquotes

More lines he never uttered: “if you’re going through hell, keep going”; “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”; and the famous exchange with G.B. Shaw over Shaw’s play (“Bring a friend, if you have one….I’ll come the second night, if there is one”). To be fair, it was only recently learned that Shaw and Churchill both denied that exchange. But it’s long established that Lady Astor threatened to poison F.E. Smith’s coffee, not Churchill’s. The famous Bessie Braddock encounter (“tomorrow I’ll be sober”) and the Attlee urinal crack likely did occur, but are so edited as to deprive them of their rapier impact.

There is no record that Churchill ever said God created France for its beauty and Frenchmen to balance it, or that Roosevelt told Churchill he used a cigarette holder to stay away from cigarettes. It is nowhere believed that the United States was “pro-Nazi” before Pearl Harbor. It is untrue that in 1955 Churchill was fretting over the costs of Chartwell (it was purchased by his friends for the National Trust in 1946, providing he could live out his life there); or that Churchill planned his own funeral.

What we watched in New Hampshire was a reasonably convincing portrayal, bringing out many of Churchill’s admirable characteristics, including magnanimity and appreciation for political opponents. But the counterfactuals and misquotes, together with the impossible setting, spoil this presentation for anyone with a little knowledge of the story.

It’s too bad, because the facts are broadly known, and a writer has only to run his screed past any one of a score of Churchill institutions or scholars, who would probably be happy to vet it for free. Get it right!

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.”

I have two questions. When Lord Randolph Churchill was banished to Ireland in 1876, after the Aylesford incident, did he remain a Member of the House of Commons?  And what were the rules in regard to a Peer of the Realm being a Member of the Commons? Since Randolph was elected to the House in 1874 I assume he could serve. On the other hand, when in May 1940 the question was whether Lord Halifax or Winston Churchill would become Prime Minister, Halifax demurred on the grounds that as a Lord he couldn’t be a member of Commons and that  would would hamper him as Prime Minister.  —S.N.

Protocol and Practice

Exile in Ireland

 

The uproar was over Randolph’s brother the Marquess of Blandford‘s affair with Edith, Countess of Aylesford, wife of the 7th Earl of Ayelsford, aka “Sporting Joe.” It would appear Lady Edith was equally sporting. She wished to divorce the Earl and elope with Blandford, with whom she had conducted a torrid love affair. Hearing of this, HRH the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) condemned Blandford as “the greatest blackguard alive.” Springing to his brother’s defense, Randolph threatened to reveal HRH’s own indiscretions with Lady Edith, whereupon HRH said he would appear in no place where Lord Randolph was present–effectively ostracizing Winston Churchill’s parents from London Society.

Aylesford Redux

By 1880 the waters had calmed and Lord Randolph and his father returned to England, patching things up with HRH. (Young Winston’s first memories were of Ireland.)

“Sporting Joe” emigrated to Texas where he bought a cattle ranch and died of drink and dropsy aged only 36.  Lady Edith went on to further sport, but not with Blandford. A movie could be made. Ah, the Victorians.