“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 With Hillsdale’s help, we checked unpublished parts of Sir Martin Gilbert’s “wodges.”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.