Please send me some book recommendations on Churchill’s life for young readers. By young, I mean a boy of seven years old. My nephew asked me about the book I was reading (Churchill: The Unexpected Hero by Paul Addison), and after I told him a little about it, he wanted to know more. I’d appreciate any recommendations. —R.M., Mass. (Updated from 2009.)

Paul Addison’s Churchill: The Unexpected Hero is probably the best “brief life” in print. If your nephew was into that at seven,  he was far advanced. There are several other fairly short but excellent books of Addison’s quality, but they may be a shade advanced for readers so young. Among them, for the record:

Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Photographic Portrait
Douglas Russell, Winston Churchill: Soldier
Mary Soames, A Churchill Family Album—photo documentary

Number one for young readers

Fiona Reynoldson, Leading Lives: Winston Churchill. London: Heinemann Library “Leading Lives” series, 2001, 64 pp. hardbound, illustrated, later reprinted in paperback (currently more expensive on Amazon). Search also Bookfinder for clean used copies.

Targeted at the young (ages 8-15), now a quarter century old, this is still the best “juvenile” ever published anywhere, by anybody. The “Leading Lives” series mixes Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Arafat with Roosevelt, Kennedy and Gandhi. I know nothing about the other volumes, but Reynoldson’s Churchill is a masterpiece.

So much wisdom is attractively wedged into sixty-four pages! There’s a quality laminated cover; color throughout, including excellent photographs, cartoons, and posters. Sir Winston receives twenty brief chapters, including a summary, “Churchill’s Legacy.” There is an events timeline, a list of key people, good maps, a page showing how British government works, sources for further reading, a glossary and an index.

The glossary is one of this book’s fine features. Every time a word or phrase pops up that might be unfamiliar to young eyes—Nobel Prize, Boer War, Abdication, Home Secretary, VC, Bolshevik, DSO, Gold Standard, Home Rule, etc.—it is bold faced and referenced in a three-page appendix. This is not haphazard. There are over sixty entries, and every explanation is simple and accurate. It’s a wonder why more books for the young don’t offer this.

Sidebars that teach

Another special aspect is the set of sidebars that pace the story. These are carefully placed, written in precise English, and explain exactly what Churchill did and why. And Reynoldson is never wrong. Take his speech impediment, often misrepresented as a stutter. Reynoldson writes:

Churchill came home on leave in 1897 and went to see a doctor in London about his lisp. He pronounced ‘s’ as ‘sh.’ Nothing was found to be wrong, but the lisp never went away. Despite this, he made his first political speech during his leave and later became a great orator [glossary link] in the House of Commons.”

Perfect. Other sidebars offer rare insights to Churchill’s character. Take his letter to his wife in February 1945:

[M]y heart is saddened by the tales of the masses of German women and children flying along the roads…before the advancing armies…. The misery of the whole world appalls me, and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.

How well this dispels popular slander about how Churchill instituted and even enjoyed firebombing civilians.

The author delivers unadulterated, factual information. As with any good journalist, you have no idea how she feels personally about her subject. She deals in facts: entertainingly, even eloquently.

Writing a compact book, especially for the young, on a complicated subject is hard work. You must know what to highlight, what to jettison. To choose the right subjects, to represent them deftly, is a great achievement. Fiona Reynoldson’s young readers will develop their own perceptions of Churchill—thoroughly grounded in the education she provides. We should all buy five copies of this book and get them into the hands of schools, libraries and young people of promise.

Best for ages 12-18

John Severance, Winston Churchill: Soldier, Statesman, Artist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Clarion Books, 1996, 144 pp. hardbound, illustrated, $19.95 used from Amazon. Search also Bookfinder for clean used copies.

This one is even older, but bears mentioning. The first we heard of it was when Lady Soames remarked that someone had finally done her father justice in a book for young people. Soldier, Statesman, Artist was, she said, “intelligently written and beautifully printed.” Certainly the public must agree, for it was in print for more than a decade. Happily, copies are still available.

The target audience is older than Reynoldson’s. Like her book, there are no new revelations. Severance sets out to explain Churchill and his times to young people who have not heard much about them in school. Like Reynoldson, he acquaints non-British readers with how Parliament works. His tidy prose covers all the “great contemporaries”—Lloyd George, Stalin, Roosevelt, Gandhi, Hitler—and what they did.

Good writing iaccompanies elegant book design: fine type, artwork and photos that are not “old chestnuts. Admirably there is an index, a bibliography and an appendix sampling of “Winston’s Wit.”

There is a small rash of errors, not engendered by malice, ignorance, or conspiracy theories. The book is too short to give much attention to episodic excitements like the charge at Omdurman, the escape from the Boers, Armistice Day or 10 May 1940. Severance has a different tactic in mind.

Myth busting

He focuses on and demolishes numerous myths. For example, he notes that Churchill sent policemen, not troops, to pacify the strikers in Tonypandy. Facts are pounded in: Churchill inspired but did not invent the tank. The Dardanelles campaign was conceptually brilliant and ruined by incompetent execution. Churchill opposed the India Act, but sent Gandhi encouragement when it passed. WSC clung to office in the Fifties only because he thought he might be able to save the peace. Not the kind of thing young people tend to hear a lot.

On the wartime “spheres of influence” agreement with Stalin, over which Churchill’s detractors consistently fulminate, Severance has a point worth considering—and not just by young people: “Perhaps Churchill thought this was the only sort of plan Stalin would understand and accept.” Got it in one.

Some day we may have a Prime Minister or a President who as a youth was inspired by one of these books. Fiona Reynoldson and John Severance have done history as well as Churchill a great favor. Everyone who appreciates the great man is in their debt.

The Eagle’s cartoon biography

Clifford Makins, The Happy Warrior: The Life Story of Sir Winston Churchill as Told Through Great Britain’s Eagle Comic of the 1950s. Delray Beach, Fla.: Levenger Press, 2008, 64 pp. hardbound, illustrated, with commentary by RML, $29.95 new from Amazon.

Levenger, the well-known purveyor of bookman’s accessories, was for a time in the publishing business. Their excellent editor, Mim Harrison, took an interest in Churchill, publishing The Making of the Finest Hour in 2006. This book, on how Churchill wrote his most famous speech, contained contributions by WSC’s late grandson Winston and me. Ms. Harrison then asked me to write a commentary for the Happy Warrior biography, which they were republishing.

David Freeman described this as a “graphic novel, in the argot of today’s youth.” Its origins were as a serialized Churchill biography in The Eagle, a comic magazine for boys. Published separately by Hulton Press in 1958, the story line was by Clifford Makins, with lifelike illustrations by Frank Bellamy.

The Levenger Happy Warrior  was of much finer production quality. Despite its plebeian origins as a cartoon series, it is an accurate account of Churchill’s life up to his retirement as Prime Minister in 1955. Bellamy’s illustrations of people are remarkably true to life, and the dialogue (invented, most of it) is believable. Levenger’s production assured that the quality of reproduction was far superior to the original.  The Happy Warrior is still available. It first sold for $39, but Amazon now sells new copies for $29.95.

Related reading

“A Sun That Never Sets: Churchill’s Autobiography My Early Life,” 2018.

“Myths and Heresies: Firebombing the Black Forest,” 2024.

“Paul Addison 1943-2020: What Matters is the Truth,” 2020.

“Churchill’s Escape from the Boers, 1899,” 2019.

“Winston S. Churchill 1940-2010: A Remembrance,” 2010.

* * * * *

(Updated from 2022.) Seasoned Churchillians had mixed reactions to the last celebration: the 50th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s death. While gratified that press and public still remembered, we were shocked at some of the ill-considered, long-disproven assertions. That was in 2015. This year marks the Sesquicentennial of his birth—and if you think 2015 was shocking, load up on Prozac.

Fortunately, Sesquicentennial attacks will be blunted by vast recent pushback from serious historians who’ve rebutted the worst slanders. So hopefully, the parrots will not squall down the eagles.

Call this a preemptive strike: with links to places where you can find the truth….

Sesquicentennial chestnuts

“The Ten Greatest Controversies of Winston Churchill’s Career,” (BBC) 

This has always been a popular performance. The tactic is well-worn. First, you tee-up Churchill as the savior of 1940. Then you tear him down with the familiar litany of charges. I do wish they’d come up with some new ones; the old chestnuts are getting shopworn.

One doesn’t mind the Britain Bashing Corporation floating harmless urban legends (“poison” gas, strikebusting, payola). But to offer Churchill’s supposed racist views, the rude things he said about Gandhi (but not the nice things–or what Gandhi said about him), or the Sidney Street episode as examples of the “top ten” is intellectually vacant.

The real controversies of Churchill’s career include the Dardanelles (but not Gallipoli), intervention in Russia, reorganizing the Middle East, the Gold Standard, Disarmament, the Rhineland, the Abdication of Edward VIII, Munich. Singapore, strategic bombing, the atomic bomb, and postwar summits with the Russians, among others.

On these there is much legitimately to say in criticism as well as in praise. (Click on the links above for reliable information.)

Perhaps the BBC was catering to its perceived audience, which dotes on popular canards. They’ll probably try some of these again on his Sesquicentennial.

Eagles reply

“We shall fight them on the BBC”  

This was a mock interview of Churchill, striving to answer some of the detractors. It is more amusing than the usual defenses. Sadly, though, author Richard Littlejohn was careless with his quotations.

Churchill never said he could only deal with one s*** at a time. And “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war” was said by Harold Macmillan, not WSC.

Still, it was entertaining to read that his words, “an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent”—applied to the European Union. Whoops!

True words of wisdom

One misses the company of eagles. Sir Martin Gilbert and Lady Soames regularly confronted these stories. But no one has the energy to tackle them all.

I was always encouraged by a wise and balanced historian, the late and much missed Professor Paul Addison, whose books on Churchill remain standard works:

Don’t worry about attacks on Churchill.  He is alive and kicking and haunts the British imagination like no other 20th century politician.

He will always be caricatured, as he was in his lifetime. But freedom of speech and expression was one of the things he fought for, and in his time he gave as good as he got.

The more provocative comments about him are a backhanded tribute, as they work on the assumption that most people admire him.

My own personal view is that he was even greater as a human being than he was as a politician—a role in which he did make mistakes, as we all do.

Further reading

“Current Contentions: Surrender Nothing, Defend the Whole,” 2021. Part 1 and Part 2.

“Hearsay Doesn’t Count: Churchill’s Racist Epithets are Remarkably Rare,” 2020.

“The Myth of Dresden and ‘Revenge Firebombing,'” 2023.

“Bucknell University’s Panel on ‘Churchill: Hero or Colonialist,'” 2022.

“Brian Cox as Churchill: An Interview on Charlie Rose,” 2017.

Paul Rahe, “Review of Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality,” 2017.

I published in 2010 an account of Churchill’s youthful (circa 1910-12) fling with Eugenics, a pseudo-science popular at the turn of the century. Eugenics favored sterilizing or confining the “feeble-minded” to “maintain the race.”

This drew an irate letter from a reader who said he will never think the same of Churchill, knowing that he could have supported such horrendous ideas:

No truly educated intelligent person, even in those early years, can have bought into Eugenics. Churchill’s was not just a fling of youth or immaturity but the decided opinion of a nearly middle-aged man. His support of Eugenics could only lead to the extremities practiced to by the Nazis.

Our article simply outlined the factual history of Churchill’s youthful Eugenics fling. It certainly was a fling, because he abandoned it quickly. So indeed did most intelligent people, though not all of them. Proponents included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis Brandeis, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft. Holmes wrote the famous 1927 Supreme Court opinion in Buck v. Bell that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

To say that “no truly educated intelligent person” could adopt such views reminds me that a terrible lot of educated intelligent persons quite happily adopted Nazism and Bolshevism.

Eugenics in retrospect

That aside, students of Churchill need always to consider the wider picture. A good start is the excerpt we published with that article, from Paul Addison’s Churchill on the Home Front:

Churchill’s intentions were benign, but he was blundering into sensitive areas of civil liberty. Yet it is rare to discover in the archives the reflections of a politician on the nature of man. Churchill’s belief in the innate virtue of the great majority of human beings was part and parcel of an optimism he often expressed before the First World War.

Professor Addison was always a go-to authority for balanced, thoughtful reflections on Churchill. He implies that the First World War tempered Churchill’s optimism. Certainly the Second did.

To assert that a fleeting belief in Eugenics disqualifies Churchill as a hero is to surrender his legacy. In current contentions, our maxim is: Surrender nothing, lest you lose everything. A brief encounter with bad science is a mistake many make. Few however can sensibly claim to have saved civilization.

Concluded in Part 2...

A Corpus of Excellence

Paul read for an undergraduate degree at Pembroke College, Oxford before moving to Nuffield College, Oxford for postgraduate study. In 1967 he became a Lecturer at Edinburgh University and subsequently a Reader for twenty-three years. He became an Endowment Fellow in 1990, and Directed the Centre for Second World War Studies from 1996 to 2005.

Paul wrote for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and the London Review of Books. Primarily, his wife Rosy remembers, he aimed “to make making history accessible, understandable and comprehensible to his fellow human beings.”

We met in mid-1994, when Barbara and I hosted our seventh Churchill Tour. Our second in Scotland, it was a notable adventure, taking us all the way to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. There we saw, on full-color sonar, the shape of HMS Royal Oak on the bottom—torpedoed by U-47 in 1939. It was an eerie image, like that of USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. Our tour began with a vast exhibit of Churchill in political cartoons, organized for us at Edinburgh University by Paul, and David Stafford, his longtime colleague. From then on, I paid attention, and read every book of theirs I could lay my hands on.

Paul Addison wrote and edited ten Churchill works, listed below. His classic, still a “standard work,” was Churchill on the Home Front (1992). Atypically for most Churchill writers then, Paul took the approach of studying the domestic side of WSC’s politics. Until this book, the prevailing impression was that Churchill was bored with domestic issues. Methodically Paul showed how completely wrong that was, weighing the evidence with  grace and understanding.

“High sense of the British moment”

Paul understood the statesman’s greatness, warts and all. “Which warts,” William Buckley said, “do not deface Churchill because of the nobility of his cause, and his high sense of the British moment.” Nothing will ever surpass 1940—but Churchill accomplished much else. Paul limned the peaks, and the valleys. Churchill’s faults like his virtues were on a grand scale, he would say. But there’s no doubt that the latter heavily outweighed the former.

Here is an example: Churchill’s youthful fling with Eugenics, and the idea of sterilizing the mentally incompetent. There was quite an uproar about this when it was “discovered.” (Read: someone finally found it in the public records.)

Churchill’s Eugenics was a fling because he abandoned it quickly, along with most intelligent people. But some readers were outraged. “I can never think good things of him again,” one said. “No truly educated intelligent person could adopt such views.” (Well…a lot of educated intelligent persons happily adopted Nazism and Bolshevism.)

Dr. Addison showed us the balanced way to look at this issue. Churchill’s intentions were benign, he wrote. “but he was blundering into sensitive areas of civil liberty.” Then he drew a deeper lesson no one else had contemplated:

Yet it is rare to discover reflections of a politician on the nature of man. Churchill’s belief in the innate virtue of the great majority of human beings was part and parcel of an optimism he often expressed before the First World War.

This was perceptive, broadminded and fair. And Paul also explained why Churchill was unique. Few politicians reflect on “the nature of man.” Fewer still  believe “in the innate virtue of human beings.” Such understanding is a rare thing among writers of history.

His Work Abides

Books by Paul Addison

The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War 1 (1977, rev. 1994). A rigorously researched study of the crucial moment when political parties put aside their differences to unite under Churchill and focus on the task of war. But the war years witnessed a radical shift in political power, dramatically expressed in Labour’s decisive victory in 1945.

Now the War Is Over: A Social History of Britain, 1945–1951 (1985, rev. 1994). Vast changes in British society followed the most destructive war ever known. Britain reshaped itself with high ideals and a collective desire to enjoy the fruits and opportunities of peacetime.

Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 (1992). “A tour de force on Churchill as a domestic figure rather than as the bulldog wartime leader, and a subtle portrait of him as a politician. Addison revises the view of Churchill as uninterested and out of his depth in domestic affairs, painting a nuanced picture of a canny parliamentarian.” —Kirkus

Churchill: The Unexpected Hero, Lives and Legacies Series (2005). In the Second World War, Churchill won twice: over Nazi Germany, and over a legion of sceptics who derided his judgement and denied his claims to greatness. One of the best “brief lives” ever published on Winston Churchill.

* * *

Winston Churchill, Oxford VIP Series (2007). Text from Dr. Addison’s Churchill entry for the new Dictionary of National Biography. Hailed as a miniature masterpiece, an even briefer life than Unexpected Hero. It is dramatic and penetrating despite fewer than 150 pages. The ideal book to read if you read nothing else about Churchill.

No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain (2010). Studies the vastly changing character of British society since the end of the Second World War. A series of peaceful revolutions transformed the country. The peace and prosperity of the second half of the 20th century appear as more powerful solvents of settled ways of life than the Battle of the Somme or the Blitz.

The Connell Guide to Winston Churchill (2016). A short, incisive guide based on the author’s Dictionary of National Biography entry. Text is arranged in Q&A format and designed to answer young people’s questions about Churchill. It analyzes his extraordinary career and looks at the radically different ways in which historians have seen him.

Editor – Contributor

Time to Kill: A Soldier’s Experience of War in the West (1997). Foreword by Len Deighton. Papers by numerous scholars. Based on a University of Edinburgh symposium on the Second World War seen through soldiers’ eyes, from Africans under European to command, to Soviet women fighting alongside the men, to ordinary “squaddies” on the front lines in all theaters of war.

The Burning Blue: A New History of the Battle of Britain (2000): Paul and Jeremy Craig compile the work of seventeen accomplished historians on every aspect of a history-changing battle. No survey could be more wide-ranging or fascinating. First published in 2000 to mark the 60th anniversary of the Battle, since reissued.

Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 (2006). Paul, Jeremy Craig and a panel of experts reassess the evidence and the issues, including whether the Dresden bombing constitutes a war crime. The book considers why Dresden has come to raise military and ethical questions on the waging of total war.

Further tributes

Ian S. Wood’s eloquent memorial in The Scotsman: “Paul had no time for some of the simplistic vilification of Churchill that crept into this debate. He saw Churchill as someone of ­volcanic energy and true courage, though ­unable to shake off the prejudices of the era which had formed him…. In the end, Paul wrote, ‘the recognition of [Churchill’s] frailties and flaws has worked in his favour. It has brought him up to date by making him into the kind of hero our ­disenchanted culture can accept and admire: a hero with feet of clay.'”

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project shortly publishes my separate tribute from a scholarly aspect, together with a compilation of all his Churchill writing from his university thesis to articles, contributions and chapters in other books by Professor Antoine Capet.

“Villain — Tonypandy”

Mr. McDonnell’s swipe at Churchill was brief. Asked if he saw Churchill as a hero or villain, he replied: “Villain—Tonypandy.” The Guardian completed the drive-by assassination, not only by headlining the remark, but with an inaccurate rehash of the Tonypandy riots in 1910.

Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, focused on McDonnell, calling him a “Poundland Lenin.” Maybe, but what about the Guardian? Ironically, at the time, the same newspaper had defended Churchill for his moderation.

There was one death at Tonypandy, but that occurred during the rioting and before Churchill was involved. However, troops did cause two to four deaths nine months later, during another strike at Llanelli. Quoting from my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, Chapter 8….

Rhondda Valley, 1910

For over a century the story has been part of socialist demonology. Churchill, as Home Secretary in 1910-11, “sent troops to attack striking coalminers” in the Rhondda Valley, Wales. In an otherwise generous tribute following Churchill’s death in 1965, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson found it necessary to remind Parliament of Sidney Street, Gallipoli, and “the sullen feet of marching men in Tonypandy.”

In concern over possible rioting during the Rhondda miners’ strike, Churchill met with Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane. They resolved to dispatch police constables, but no troops. Churchill declared the use of soldiers inappropriate in a civil disorder. He also promised the strikers an immediate Board of Trade inquiry into their grievances. He sent them this message:

[Your] best friends here are greatly distressed at the trouble which has broken out and will do their best to help [you] get fair treatment…. But rioting must cease at once so that the enquiry shall not be prejudicial and to prevent the credit of the Rhondda Valley being impaired. Confiding in the good sense of the Cambrian workmen we are holding back the soldiers for the present and sending police instead.

Lo the Poor Horses!

The Tory press attacked. The Times said that Churchill

hardly seems to understand that an acute crisis has arisen which needs decisive handling. The rosewater of conciliation is all very well in its place. But its place is not in face of a wild mob drunk with the desire of destruction. Men’s lives are in danger, not to mention the poor horses….

The Liberal press defended Churchill, praising his restraint. “The brave course was also the wise one,” wrote the Manchester Guardian: 

One can imagine what would have happened if the soldiers instead of the policemen had come on the rioters while they were pillaging. Bayonets would have been used instead of truncheons… Instead of a score of cases for the hospital, there might have been as many for the mortuary.

Tonypandy, 1910

The decision to withhold troops was short-lived. Rioting did not end, and spread to the town of Tonypandy, where one man was fatally injured and sixty-three shops were vandalized. The officer commanding the Southern Command dispatched 400 standby soldiers. On 8 November, Churchill ordered that “in no case should soldiers come in direct contact with rioters unless and until action had been taken by the police.” If police were overpowered, troops could be deployed. But even then, a number of police should remain, “to emphasise the fact that the armed forces act merely as the support of the civil power.”

“By preventing bloodshed,” Paul Addison wrote, “Churchill also prevented a debacle for Liberalism.” Writing to David Lloyd George the following spring, Churchill attempted to follow-up his November promise to address grievances. The government, he said, should institute stronger safety regulations and inspections. It should finance the expense with a surcharge on mineowners’ royalties.

His hopes were thwarted, Addison continued: “The soldiers did not kill anybody, but they remained in the Rhondda until October 1911 and as David Smith observes, their presence ‘ensured that the miners’ demands would be utterly rejected.’”

Llanelli, 1911

Nine months later at Llanelli, during a national railway strike, the only fatalities from the use of troops against strikers occurred. Ironically, they happened two days after the strike had ended. Rioters held up a train and knocked the engine driver senseless. Soldiers attempted to clear the track but looting began, and they fired into the crowd, killing either two or four rioters (accounts vary).

In handling the rail strike, Ted Morgan wrote, what Churchill’s critics could not see

was the number of saved, and the number of tragedies averted. In their drunken frenzy, the Llanelli rioters had wrought more havoc and shed more blood and produced more serious injury than all the fifty thousand soldiers all over the country.

Why use military force at all? Defending himself to William Royle, organizer of the Manchester Liberal Party, Churchill explained:

The progress of a democratic country is bound up with the maintenance of order. The working classes would be almost the only sufferers from an outbreak of riot & a general strike if it c[oul]d be effective would fall upon them & their families with its fullest severity.

Churchill told Royle, as he had Lloyd George, that wages were far too low. The rise in the cost of living, he wrote, required higher wages. “I believe the Government is now strong enough to secure an improvement in social conditions without failing in its primary duties.”

Old Men Remember

Among those interviewed by the BBC fifty-five years later for their memories of Tonypandy was W.H. (Will) Mainwaring, one of the youngest militants in the South Wales coalfields. He was subsequently co-author of a famous pamphlet, The Miners’ Next Step. Half a century on, he still spoke with pride of championing the miners and of his record as a protestor.

Of Churchill’s decision to send troops into the Rhondda in 1910 Mainwaring said on camera:

We never thought that Winston Churchill had exceeded his natural responsibility as Home Secretary. The military did not commit one single act that allows the slightest resentment by the strikers. On the contrary, we regarded the military as having come in the form of friends to modify the otherwise ruthless attitude of the police forces.

Further Reading

“Churchill, Troops and Strikers, Part 1”
“Churchill, Troops and Strikers, Part 2”

Turned Back: The Home Secretary and his Motor

Daily Herald, 10 April 1911— Mr. Winston Churchill had a curious experience on Saturday while motoring to Banstead. Part of Sutton High Street is under repair, and two barriers are erected. The first barrier does not completely bar the way.

Mr. Churchill’s car was able to proceed past the first barrier before having to stop. As the car stopped, Adams, the foreman in charge of the work, stepped out and told the chauffeur he would have to turn back as the road was stopped.

Mr. Churchill sent the chauffeur to ask permission of the constable on the beat for the passenger of the car, and the barrier was at once lowered. The foreman, however, placed himself in front of the car and said they would have to go over his body first.

“Don’t you know who it is?” whispered the officer.

“I don’t care who it is,” retorted the foreman.

Mr. Churchill, gently remonstrating, said, “Don’t get cross,” to which Adams responded, “You’re not going through here, whoever you are. Those are my instructions.”

After a few words with the constable, the car was turned round and proceeded on its journey through the side streets.

Pressing on Regardless

Churchill stopped driving himself in the late 1920s, after numerous hair-raising motor adventures between London and his country home Chartwell. When WSC decided to drive personally, his bodyguard Walter Thompson worried: “It either means that he is cross and subconsciously wants to smash up something, or that he is dangerously elated and things will get smashed up anyhow through careless exuberance.”

This didn’t make him any less a menace on the road, since he constantly urged his drivers to exceed speed limits and overtake frequently. Two anecdotes from Part 2 of my article, “Blood, Sweat and Gears”….

Once, doing 80 on a curve, a rear tyre blew and “a van full of irate constables screeched to a halt alongside. They had been trying to catch the runaway for miles.” Realizing who it was, they helped fix the tyre. “Churchill stood off to one side, serenely puffing at a cigar. He made no sign of apology but only got in and cried, ‘Drive off!’ The constables saluted humbly.”

On a campaign trip to Wales, Churchill conversed garrulously with O’Brien, his PR officer. They passed the brandy back and forth. Churchill urged such reckless speed that Clementine Churchill cried: “Please let me out. I refuse to continue this ride.” With the utmost courtesy, Churchill stopped at a country railway station and escorted her to the platform. Then, plying the brandy bottle, he ordered the driver “down the road like a bat out of hell for Cardiff.”

By the time they arrived, what with the brandy and his nerves, O’Brien was “done up—out practically cold. Churchill supervised the laying out of his PRO on a table in the rear of the hall. Then he went ahead and made a rouser of a speech. Afterward, he appeared confused about the origin of O’Brien’s trouble, and expressed the opinion that it was ‘probably something he ate.’”

Llanelli and the Railway Strike: concluded from Part 1…

Throughout the August 1911 railway strike, troops stood by. Their orders were to interfere only against threats to public security. But there was another reason why anxiety ran high at that time. A few weeks earlier, the Germans had sent a gunboat to Agadir, French Morocco. Rumors of war with Germany were rampant. David Lloyd George said the Agadir Crisis was a threat to peace. The Germans, he warned, “would not hesitate to use the [strike] paralysis,,,to attack Britain.” Paul Addison, in Churchill on the Home Front, described the public mood. A simultaneous national railways stoppage alarmed the nation. Fear of German subversion also worried Churchill:

He was also informed by Guy Granet, the general manager of the Midland Railways, of allegations that labour leaders were receiving payments from a German agent….Conservatives applauded him for taking decisive action. But there were loud protests from the Labour party and left-wing Liberals, who accused him of imposing the army on local authorities against their will, and introducing troops into peaceful and law-abiding districts.

“Guilty with an Explanation”

What Churchill’s critics could not see, Ted Morgan wrote, “was the number of saved, and the number of tragedies averted. In their drunken frenzy, the Llanelli rioters had wrought more havoc and shed more blood and produced more serious injury than all the fifty thousand soldiers all over the country.”

After the deaths at Llanelli, Churchill was roundly condemned and the Manchester Guardian, which had praised him after Tonypandy, now turned against him. Keir Hardie, founder of the Labour Party, accused Churchill and Prime Minister Asquith of “deliberately sending soldiers to shoot and kill strikers.” That exaggeration has endured for a century. Yet Churchill in August 1911 was clear in the House of Commons. “There can be no question of the military forces of the crown intervening in a labour dispute.”

Why did they at Llanelli? Defending himself in a handwritten letter to a Manchester Liberal colleague, Churchill considered both sides of the argument:

The progress of a democratic country is bound up with the maintenance of order. The working classes would be almost the only sufferers from an outbreak of riot & a general strike if it c[oul]d be effective would fall upon them & their families with its fullest severity. At the same time the wages now paid are too low and the rise in the cost of living (due mainly to the increased gold supply) makes it absolutely necessary that they sh[oul]d be raised. a I believe the Government is now strong enough to secure an improvement in social conditions without failing in its primary duties.

 Old Men Remember

Among those interviewed by the BBC fifty-five years later for their memories of Tonypandy was W.H. (Will) Mainwaring, one of the youngest militants in the South Wales coalfields, who was subsequently co-author of a famous pamphlet, The Miners’ Next Step. Over fifty years later he still spoke with pride of his record as a strike leader.

Of Churchill’s decision to send troops into the Rhondda in 1910, Mainwaring said on camera:

We never thought that Winston Churchill had exceeded his natural responsibility as Home Secretary. The military did not commit one single act that allows the slightest resentment by the strikers. On the contrary, we regarded the military as having come in the form of friends to modify the otherwise ruthless attitude of the police forces.

Sources:

BBC documentary: The Long Street: Road to Pandy Square (1965)

Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 250-52, and correspondence with the author, 2014.

Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s Political Philosophy (London: British Academy, 1981), 96.

 Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 2, Young Statesman 1901-1914 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2007), 385-86.

Ted Morgan, Churchill: The Rise to Failure 1874-1915 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 328.