Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  I am very, very sorry that it should have happened. But it is not the case with all my things. Everything else you have ever given me is in as good repair as when you gave it first.

  Please don’t judge me entirely on the strength of the watch. I am very very sorry about it.

  I am sorry to have written you such a long and stupid letter....

  Winston was a success at Sandhurst; he entered near the bottom of his class of 102 and graduated near the top. “At Sandhurst I had a new start,”41 he explained. “We had now to learn fresh things and we all started equal.” True, when he first arrived, his amazed officers found that he wanted to argue about the commands on parade-ground drill. But he persevered, became again a champion fencer and a passionate horseman. At Aldershot, where he joined a cavalry regiment after receiving his commission, he was in the saddle, either at drill or at polo, eight or nine hours every day.

  He learned to stand up to his mother on behalf of one he dearly loved, Mrs. Everest. Once Winston and Jack were away at school, Woom had passed into the employ of the boys’ grandmother, the Duchess of Marlborough. Facing a shortage of funds, the Duchess proposed to fire the erstwhile nanny, who had worked for the family for nineteen years. Winston rebelled and, once again, Jennie refused to read his letter. This time Winston stormed back: “It is quite easy, dear Mamma,42 for you to say that it is not my business or for you to refuse to read what I have got to say, but nevertheless I feel I ought in common decency to write to you at length on the subject.... She is in my mind associated—more than anything else—with home.... She is an old woman who has been your devoted servant for nearly 20 years—she is more fond of Jack and I than of any other people in the world and to be packed off in the way the Duchess suggests would possibly if not probably break her down altogether.... At her age she is invited to find a new place and practically begin over again.... I think such proceedings cruel and rather mean.... It is in your power to explain to the Duchess that she cannot be sent away until she has got a good place.... If you can’t, I will write and explain things to Papa....” There was no reply, and Mrs. Everest was let go. From Sandhurst, Winston regularly dug into his own skimpy funds to send money to his beloved Woom.

  Winston’s painful experience with parental neglect paralleled and was in part caused by one of the most dramatic stories in British political history. Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, soared briefly and brightly like a meteor over the political landscape. In 1886, at the age of thirty-seven, he was both Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in Lord Salisbury’s second government. A Tory democrat, restless under Lord Salisbury’s careful, conservative hand, Randolph let his own ambition ride too freely. Challenging the War Minister, the Prime Minister, and the whole Cabinet, he demanded that the Army Estimates be cut. To get his way, he talked of resignation. When that did not work, he did resign, confident that the party would turn to him. It did not. Lord Salisbury refused to reappoint him, explaining, “When you have had a boil43 on your neck and it has been removed, you do not wish it back.” Randolph slid into owning racehorses, party-going, and foreign travel. Gradually, his disease began to tighten its grip. His speeches, both in the House of Commons and on the stump, became embarrassing; he became confused and forgot the line of his argument; his friends discreetly stole away or sat in grieving silence. “There was no curtain,44 no retirement,” Lord Rosebery wrote of his friend. “He died by inches in public.”

  By the summer of 1894, when Winston was in his second year at Sandhurst, Lord Randolph’s condition could be hidden from no one. He was thin and pale, with deep lines in his face. His hair was mostly gone. His hands shook and his speech was slurred and stuttering. At dinner, a guest saw “gleams of hate,45 anger and fear in his eyes.” At one point, unable to speak, Randolph pointed to a dish and squealed “E-e-e-e-e-e!” The host asked what he would like. Randolph pointed and squealed again: “E-e-e-e-e-e! I want that!” The guest was convinced that Randolph had entered “what I called ‘the malignant monkey’ stage of insanity.”

  Jennie took him on a world cruise, hoping he might improve and, if not, to take him out of the limelight.fn3 By the time the party reached Madras, it was clear that Randolph was dying; the cruise was broken off and he returned to London. Winston, who had seen so little of his father that he was shocked to learn that he was ill, was in his last month at Sandhurst. The chance he had hoped for, to earn his father’s respect, to form a friendship, to stand at his side, now would never come. He had to cling to a single meeting when, after his father had raged at him for some offense, Randolph quieted down and said sadly to Winston, “Do remember46 that things do not always go right with me. My every action is misjudged and every word distorted.... So make some allowances.” In spite of his harsh and lonely childhood, Winston was stricken when on January 24, 1895, his father died. “All my dreams of comradeship47 with him, of entering Parliament at his side and in his support, were ended,” he wrote much later. “There remained only for me to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.”

  Within six months of Lord Randolph’s death, Woom also was dead. Winston’s devotion to her had never wavered. When she came in her old poke bonnet to visit him at Harrow and Sandhurst, he escorted her on his arm around the grounds and then, in sight of everyone, kissed her good-bye. In the summer of 1895, she was stricken with peritonitis. Winston rushed up from Aldershot, stopping in London to collect a doctor. He came to her bedside out of the rain and immediately Woom was worried. “My jacket was wet,”49 Churchill recalled. “When she felt it with her hands she was greatly alarmed for fear I should catch cold. The jacket had to be taken off and thoroughly dried before she was calm again.”

  Mrs. Everest died in Winston’s arms and he left immediately for Harrow in order to break the news in person to his brother, Jack. Winston organized the funeral and even provided a wreath in the name of his mother, who was in Paris, too busy to attend. These two deaths, Lord Randolph’s and Mrs. Everest’s, marked the end of youth for Winston Churchill. He commemorated his father with a two-volume biography; Woom’s picture remained in his room until his own death seventy years later.

  Randolph’s death gave Winston freedom. “I was now in the main50 the master of my fate,” he wrote. Lieutenant Winston Churchill was graduated from Sandhurst the winter his father died. “Raise the glorious flag again,”51 he later wrote, recalling his feelings at the time. “Don’t take No for an answer. Never submit to failure.... You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.”

  A description of the next five years of Churchill’s life reads more like the plot of a “tuppenny” Victorian novel than a true account of the adventures of a young British officer. Somehow, in this short span of time at the high-water mark of European colonialism, this young man managed to place himself under fire in four different wars in four widely separate corners of the earth. In the autumn of 1895, he campaigned with the Spanish Army against guerrillas in Cuba; in 1897 he fought in a campaign against Pathan tribesmen on the Northwest Frontier of India; in 1898 he served under Kitchener in the Sudan and participated with the 21st Lancers in the famous “last cavalry charge of the British Army”; a year later the British armored train in which he was riding in Natal province was ambushed by Boers, and Churchill was captured. He escaped, returned home a hero, wrote the third of three books about his adventures, and—now the most famous young man in England—was elected to the House of Commons in the Khaki Election of 1900.

  None of this could have happened without Winston’s relentless, thrusting ambition and Jennie’s formidable help. Almost from the moment of Randolph’s death, his relationship to her changed. Churchill himself summarized their new connection: “I was now in my twenty-first year52 and she never sought to exercise parental control. Indeed, she soon became an arde
nt ally, furthering my plans and guarding my interests with all her influence and boundless energy. She was still, at forty, young, beautiful and fascinating. We worked together on even terms, more like brother and sister than mother and son.” Winston knew about her lovers: at sixteen he wrote to his brother that he had arrived home unexpectedly from Harrow and “found Mamma and Count Kinsky53 breakfasting.” He seems not to have minded, and eventually he employed his mother’s lovers on his own behalf with the same insistence he used on her.

  In arranging his first war, the campaign in Cuba, Winston required no more of his mother than her consent. His new regiment, the 4th Hussars, was scheduled to sail for nine years’ service in India and all the officers were granted ten weeks’ leave. Most went off to fox hunting, steeplechasing, or racing yachts, but Winston decided to visit a war.

  There was a tradition in the army of officers, bored by peacetime routine, traveling at their own expense to war zones, where they waited and pleaded to be taken into combat in almost any capacity. Winston’s approach was through an old friend of his father’s who was the British Ambassador in Madrid. Once permission to observe the war in Cuba was arranged with the Spanish authorities, he persuaded his mother that, at £37 for a round-trip ticket to New York and Havana, the excursion would cost less than two months of fox hunting. On November 30, 1895, he celebrated his twenty-first birthday by listening to bullets whistle over his head and thunk into the trunks of palm trees. He found he liked it: “There is nothing more exhilarating54 than to be shot at without result,” he wrote. His accounts, published as Letters from the Front, brought him five guineas apiece from the Daily Graphic.

  Winston was thrilled to be under fire, but back in London he reflected gloomily on the prospect of an army career. Nine years in India, barracks life without action, without advancement, without celebrity, palled even before it began. Through his mother’s connections, he met and dined with Chamberlain, Balfour, Asquith, and other leading politicians. He planned to succeed his father, to be elected to Parliament. But how could he escape the army; where would he find the money to enter politics? He turned to Jennie: “I cannot believe55 that with all the influential friends you possess and all those who would do something for me for my father’s sake,” she could not arrange something. He asked to go to South Africa or Egypt. This time, she could not help him. He went to India. He was stationed at Bangalore in the southern Indian hills, three thousand feet above sea level, where mornings and evenings were fresh and cool. Winston lived in a “palatial bungalow,56 all pink and white” with a tile roof, and a columned veranda set in a garden of purple bougainvillea. Officers drilled for an hour and a half every morning; afterward Winston played polo and read. Doggedly, the young man who had never attended a university worked his way through twelve volumes of Macaulay and four thousand pages of Gibbon. He practiced elocution; all his life Churchill suffered from a speech impediment, part stammer, part lisp. He had difficulty pronouncing the letter “S” and used to pace his room repeating, “The Spanish ships I cannot see57 for they are not in sight.” Bored, he bombarded his mother with appeals to find him a war. In April 1897, when fighting broke out between Greece and Turkey, he thought he saw his chance. He would take leave and cover the war as a special correspondent. He didn’t care which side he was on, he wrote to Jennie. “If you can get me good letters58 to the Turks—to the Turks I will go. If to the Greeks—to the Greeks.” The war ended before he could get to either.

  In August 1897, Winston was in England on leave when the Pathan tribesmen on the Indian-Afghan frontier revolted. A British-Indian force of three brigades, the Malakand Field Force, was to be sent to put down the insurrection. Churchill had met the commander of the force, Major General Sir Bindon Blood, and extracted a promise that if he ever took troops into action on the frontier, he would permit Churchill to join him. Seizing on Blood’s commitment, Winston cut short his leave and took the first steamship for Bombay. Behind, he left instructions for his mother to find a paper for which he could act as correspondent. Jennie found the Daily Telegraph, and Blood, having no room for Churchill as an officer, agreed to take him along as a journalist. The Pathans could not tell an officer from a journalist and, when the force was ambushed near the Khyber Pass, Winston fought them off with his revolver. When the campaign was over, he returned to Bangalore and began working on a book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. His descriptions brought the terrain vividly before the reader’s eye: “The Himalayas59 are not a line, but a great country of mountains. Standing on some lofty pass or commanding point... range after range is seen as the long surges of an Atlantic swell, and in the distance some glittering snow peak suggests a white-crested roller yet higher than the rest.”... “Bright sunlight shining60 on the swirling muddy waters; the black forbidding rocks; the white tents of the brigade a mile up the valley; the long streak of vivid green rice crops by the river; and in the foreground the brown-clad armed men.” He wrote it in two months and sent it to his mother to find a publisher; Jennie asked Arthur Balfour’s advice and a publisher was found. Speed was paramount—another book on the expedition was being written—and when Winston saw the proofs, he writhed in embarrassment and shame. It was filled with “about 200 misprints, blunders,61 and mistakes” which “destroys all the pleasure I had hoped to get from the book and leaves only shame that such an impertinence should be presented to the public—a type of the careless, slapdash spirit of the age and an example of what my father would have called my slovenly, shiftless habits.” Churchill was too sensitive. The book had an enthusiastic reception. Reviewers and readers alike skipped over the errors to hail the author’s “wisdom,” “comprehension,” and “style.” Churchill was surprised and moved. “I had never been praised before,”62 he wrote. “The only comments which had ever been made upon my work at school had been ‘Indifferent,’ ‘Slovenly,’ ‘Bad,’ ‘Very bad,’ etc. Now here was the great world with its leading literary newspapers and vigilant erudite critics writing whole columns of praise.” The Prince of Wales read the book and sent a copy to his sister, the Empress Victoria. “My dear Winston,”63 he wrote to the author, “I cannot resist writing a few lines to congratulate you on the success of your book! I have read it with the greatest possible interest and I think the descriptions and the language generally excellent. Everybody is reading it and I only hear it spoken of with praise.”

  Winston wanted to be where the fighting was fiercest, but as a correspondent, not as an officer. Already, before his book was published, he had raged at Jennie for permitting his Daily Telegraph dispatches to be published anonymously. “I had written them64 with the design... of bringing my personality before the electorate,” he told his mother. “If I am to do anything in the world, you will have to make up your mind to publicity.... Of course a certain number of people will be offended.” Because of the anonymous byline, he said, “I regard an excellent opportunity of bringing my name before the country in a correct and attractive light—by means of graphic and forcible letters—as lost.”

  The next famous campaign was to be Kitchener’s march up the Nile to reconquer the Sudan and avenge the death of General Gordon. In April 1898, even as The Story of the Malakand Field Force was being devoured in London drawing rooms, Churchill was imploring his mother to pull every string she could reach. “You must work for Egypt65 for me.... You have so many lines of attack.... I beg you—have no scruples but worry right and left and take no refusal.” Two months later, still in India, he was growing desperate: “Oh, how I wish66 I could work you up over Egypt. I know you could do it with all your influence—and all the people you know. It is a pushing age and we must shove with the best.” Jennie took up the challenge and—Winston wrote later—“left no wire unpulled,67 no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked.” The Prince wired Kitchener on Winston’s behalf; the Sirdar, who did not like junior officers writing campaign accounts in which senior officers were criticized, refused. “Do not want Churchill68 as no room,” he declared. Jennie went to
Cairo to fire at close quarters. No effect. In June, Winston took more leave and came home from India to plead his case in person. He found two hundred other officers at the War Office urging themselves for the campaign. Then, fate intervened. Lord Salisbury had read The Story of the Malakand Field Force and invited Lord Randolph’s son to come and tell him more. The Prime Minister received the Lieutenant in his large Foreign Office room overlooking the Horse Guards Parade, and with Old World courtesy led him to a small sofa. He told Winston that he had found the book fascinating “not only for its matter69 but for its style,” and said that he had been able “to form a truer picture of the kind of fighting that has been going on in these frontier valleys from your writings” than from any official documents he had been given to read. At the end of the interview, leading his visitor to the door, Lord Salisbury added, “If there is anything70 at any time I can do which would be of assistance to you, pray do not fail to let me know.” Winston marshalled his courage and three days later wrote, “Dear Lord Salisbury:71 I am very anxious to go to Egypt and to proceed to Khartoum with the Expedition.” His purpose, he explained, was to write another book. “I am loath to afflict you with this matter,” he concluded. “Yet the choice lies between doing so and abandoning a project which I have set my heart on for a long time.... I venture to think that no hurt will result but rather benefit. The affair is after all of extreme insignificance to any but me.” A few days later, Lieutenant Churchill was assigned as a supernumerary officer to the 21st Lancers for the Sudan campaign. Winston made an arrangement with the Morning Post to write a series of articles at £15 apiece, and then bolted for Egypt. He took a train to Marseilles and a “filthy tramp”72 steamer to Alexandria, and joined the 21st Lancers in Cairo just as they were embarking by riverboat and railroad fourteen hundred miles up the Nile to join the Sirdar’s army.