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.”

Malakand Field Force?

Without consulting references, I thought the “advice” line involved The Story of the Malakand Field Force (Churchill’s first book, 1898). I was influenced by its last chapter, “The Riddle of the Frontier.” Plenty of advice there, though it is as much political as it is military.

I also remember the fine biopic Young Winston (1972). Here General Kitchener picks up a copy of what looks like a first edition Malakand, scans its cover, and hurls it into a wastebasket!

Churchill was at the time lobbying for appointment as a war correspondent on Kitchener’s expedition to recapture Sudan. Dalton Newfield, the second editor of Finest Hour, wrote in his column, “75 Years Ago” FH #28 (1973):

[Churchill] gathered his forces for a tremendous effort to join Kitchener’s forces In Egypt, after which he would return to England and politics. He unashamedly pulled every string known to him or [his mother] Lady Randolph, but Kitchener remained obdurate. He had read the Malakand, often referred to in military circles as “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals.” He wanted no part of the brash young lieutenant.

Surprisingly, there are few appearances of “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals” in the Churchill canon. Ted Morgan, in Churchill: The Rise to Failure, alludes to it in passing:

Kitchener listened in absolute silence as Winston told him that the enemy was advancing in large numbers between the British position and the city of Omdurman. “You say the Dervish [Sufi Muslim] army is advancing,” Kitchener said. “How long do you think I have got?” The commander-in-chief was asking a subaltern’s advice, which Winston did not hesitate to give. “You have got at least an hour—probably an hour and a half, sir, even if they come on at their present rate.”

The River War?

But that reference proves nothing, really. Churchill historian Paul Courtenay thought “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals” refers to Churchill’s second book, The River War.

Mr. Courtenay based his answer on Richard Harding Davis’s Real Soldiers of Fortune (London: P.F. Collier & Sons, 1906), 108. Admittedly his Churchill chapter contains several inaccuracies, but this reference to River War looked right:

Equally disgusted [with The River War] were the younger officers of the service. They nicknamed his book, “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals,” and called Churchill himself a “Medal Snatcher”…. But Churchill never was a medal hunter. The routine of barrack life irked him…. Indeed the War Office could cover with medals the man who wrote the Malakand and River War and still be in his debt.

I appealed for adjudication to a judge, the Hon. Douglas Russell, who is not only a judge but the author of a distinguished book, Winston Churchill Soldier: The Military Life of a Gentleman at War. Judge Russell replied in detail (reprinted by kind permission)…

Douglas Russell:

If we conclude that the “subaltern’s advice” quip was the reason Kitchener did not want Churchill in the Sudan, the book has to be the Malakand. It could not be The River War, which was published after Churchill left the Sudan campaign. By that time, young Winston was trying to get into the Second Boer War, and the general making the decision was Roberts, not Kitchener.

It is not clear that Churchill’s critiques in the Malakand caused Kitchener’s resistance to him joining the Sudan campaign. I have never verified that. I do not know if Kitchener even read the book. It is clear that Kitchener did not like journalists generally. He certainly knew of Churchill. In August 1898 Winston wrote to his mother:

F[rancis Rhodes, correspondent for The Times] v[er]y kind and amiable. He talked to Sirdar [leader] about me. Kitchener said he had known I was not going to stay in the army—was only making a convenience of it; that he had disapproved of my coming in place of others whose professions were at stake….

This may be the real reason Kitchener did not want Churchill. I do not give great weight to Richard Harding Davis and his Real Soldiers of Fortune. His Churchill chapter has several basic errors on other topics. I have looked at the 1914, 1941 and 1981 editions and there are no footnotes. Davis was a popular rather than a scholarly writer. The subaltern’s advice quip is the sort of thing that would appear in a soldier’s memoir, as something that he had heard someone else say without disclosing the individual who actually said it.

Subaltern’s Advice

So which book contained Lieutenant Churchill’s Advice to his Generals? We concluded that the best reference available is Davis (his errors elsewhere notwithstanding). A war correspondent himself, Davis associated with military types. The wisecrack could have been going around, and if he heard it about The River War, so be it. Churchill in that book deplored certain of Kitchener’s actions after the victory at Omdurman, such as destroying the Mahdi’s tomb.

Still, one could use this humorous subtitle for any of his four war books, all published before he had turned twenty-six. Forever fascinated by war strategy, Churchill never hesitated to speak his mind, whether he was twenty-five or seventy.

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!