The Churchill children were never spanked. The worst that could happen to them, according to Sarah, was banishment from his presence. Like many another great captain who has sent thousands of men to their deaths, he shrank from personal violence. This was most striking in his treatment of animals, even of insects. Since he detested fresh air—he had his bedroom windows sealed with putty—it was hard for bugs to get at him. But sometimes a bee, wasp, or moth flew in from another part of the house. “Don’t kill him,” he would tell his valet. “Make sure you put him out the window.” Once, during a division in the House, Anthony Head, the first man out of the chamber, spied a ladybug on the carpet. Realizing that a thunder of MP feet would soon pass this way, he bent down to rescue it. At that moment the prime minister arrived and instantly grasped the situation. Taking charge, he said, “Put her out the window.” But since the introduction of air conditioning the windows had been permanently locked. “Use the Chancellor’s office,” he said, “and report back to me.” Head did, but when he returned Churchill was in conference with the French foreign minister. The secretary told him he could look in for a moment. Head did and told Churchill: “She escaped. I let her out through Macmillan’s window. Nobody touched her.” “Good, good!” the prime minister boomed. To this day Head wonders what must have passed through the foreign minister’s mind.52
“Poor fox,” Churchill said brokenly when an MFH presented him with a mounted fox head. En route to Chartwell one night, his car ran over a badger. He ordered the car stopped, picked up the shattered animal, and carried the dead, bleeding body home in the lap of his striped pants. He would cry over the death of a swan or a cat; would leave the House chamber to telephone Chartwell, asking about the health of his goldfish. But his favorite pet was his little poodle Rufus. More accurately, there were two of them, Rufus I and Rufus II; the first was run down when a maid left him off his leash. (Churchill never spoke to her again.) Sometimes the Rufuses slept with him. After taking dictation—it might be 3:00 or 4:00 A.M.—his secretary would take the dog for his nightly walk. As Winston was about to drift off he would ask, “Did Rufus do his business?” and, assured that he had, would sleepily congratulate him. The poodle ate in the dining room with the rest of the family. A cloth was laid for him on the Persian carpet beside the head of the household, and no one else ate until the butler had served Rufus’s meal. One evening at Chequers the film was Oliver Twist. Rufus, as usual, had the best seat in the house, on his master’s lap. At the point when Bill Sikes was about to drown his dog to put the police off his track, Churchill covered Rufus’s eyes with his hand. He said, “Don’t look now, dear. I’ll tell you all about it afterwards.”53
Predictably, Churchill’s taste in entertainment was unpredictable. In literature it was excellent, though of course he preferred British authors. Music was another matter; aged eleven, he had asked his parents for cello lessons, had been turned down, and had developed instead a fondness for what his daughter Mary calls “somewhat primitive” tunes—such music hall favorites as “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-wow,” “Ta-ra-ra-boom-der-ay,” “Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line,” and a curious ballad about a husband who discovers that his bride has a wooden leg: “I Married Half a Woman and Half a Tree.” He enjoyed any movie about the Royal Navy; otherwise, his preference in films was less discriminating than one might expect. When he learned that Rudolf Hess had parachuted into Scotland, for example, he was watching the Marx Brothers. His favorite star was Deanna Durbin. His favorite motion picture—he must have seen it twenty times—was That Hamilton Woman with Laurence Olivier playing Lord Nelson and Vivien Leigh as his mistress. He was always lachrymose at the end of it. But probably the trashiest movie he ever watched was a sentimental pastiche based on a novel by Paul Gallico. Entitled Never Take No for an Answer, its chief character was a little Italian orphan whose donkey, named Violetta, helped him run a grocery stand. Violetta sickened. She could be healed, the boy believed, if he could take her to that hub of miracles, the Shrine of Saint Francis. So the orphan embarked on a journey, appealing in vain to a series of clerics: priests, archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, cardinals. Each time the boy was turned down the camera would flash back to Violetta, sprawled in her stable, ready for the last rites. Churchill wept inconsolably. “Oh, the donkey’s dead!” he would sob. The others would reassure him: “No, no, Prime Minister, she’s still alive.” Churchill would recover and declare firmly: “If the donkey dies, I shan’t stay. I shall go out.” Finally the boy, in his finest hour, was granted an audience with the pope. The pontiff reversed the lower rulings and made an appointment at the shrine for Violetta. In the last scene a blazing cone of light, slanting down from heaven, revealed the donkey, bursting with health, beside her loyal, trudging little friend. The prime minister arose slowly from his chair, his eyes luminous and his cheeks streaming.54
Joyously human, anachronistic and wise, capable of willful misjudgment and blinding vision, dwarfing all those around him, he was the most benevolent of statesmen and the most gifted. Today the ordinary Englishman lives a better life than his fathers did, and for that he is largely indebted to Labour. But the extraordinary man has a harder time of it. He is trapped in regulations, his rise is impeded; his country pays a price. And even the masses seem to sense that while the socialists love ideas, Churchill, the unrepentant Victorian Tory, loved life. Since that love was balanced by a hatred of injustice, the average Briton owes him more than a higher standard of living. He owes him his very liberty.
“History,” wrote Aristotle, “is what Alcibiades did and suffered.” Social scientists impeach that, but Churchill never doubted it. Because the man was matched by his times, he achieved immortality and changed the world, for good or for ill—though not as he had expected or would have wanted, for he was not the only giant in the century. In the long reach of events the impact of the Churchillian era upon his island was decidedly mixed. Hitler lost the war but he didn’t lose it to Britain alone. Churchill, in desperate need of allies, forged a coalition with the United States and the Soviet Union and then had to make concession after concession to them. They emerged in 1945 as superpowers, while Britain, formerly Great Britain, lost its Empire, lost its independent and decisive role in world affairs, and sank to the level of a second-rate power. Of course, that, too, was Aristotelian. Alcibiades routed the Spartans, but in the end he was dismissed and fled to Asia Minor, where he was murdered by Spartan agents. Tragedy is the wasting shadow always cast, sooner or later, by towering heroism. Therein lay the terrible grandeur in Churchill’s funeral, a quarter-century after Dunkirk. The nation was bidding farewell both to a great Englishman and to the greatness of England. When his flag-draped coffin moved slowly across the old capital, drawn by naval ratings, and bareheaded Londoners stood trembling in the cold, they mourned, not only him and all he had meant, but all that they had been, and no longer were, and would never be again.
PROLOGUE
LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY
ON February 4, 1874—the year of Winston Churchill’s birth—British troops led by General Sir Garnet Wolseley entered the small African city of Kumasi, now part of central Ghana, and put it to the torch, thereby ending the Second Ashanti War and winning the general a handsome spread on the weekly page devoted to the Empire in the Illustrated London News. He had worked for it. A melancholy martinet with spaniel eyes and a long drooping mustache rather like that of Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, Wolseley had joined Victoria’s army—“putting on the widow’s uniform,” as they later said—while still in his teens. Convinced that the surest way to glory lay in courting death at every opportunity, he had been felled by a severe thigh wound in the Second Burmese War, lost an eye to a bursting shell in the Crimea, and survived hairbreadth escapes while relieving Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny, capturing the Ta-ku Forts and Peking during Britain’s 1860 dispute with the Chinese, and suppressing an insurrection in Canada. After finishing off the Ashantis he fought Zulus and dervishes, and organi
zed campaigns against Boer guerrillas. His concern for soldiers’ welfare won him a reputation among England’s upper classes as a dangerous radical. London’s cockneys loved him, however; their expression for topnotch was “all Sir Garnet.” His great ambition was to die a heroic death in action against the French. That failing, the general, who ended up a viscount, planned to enrich his heirs by writing his memoirs after his retirement. Unfortunately, by then he had completely lost his memory. Visitors who mentioned his conquests to him were met by blank stares. He died in 1913, the last year of England’s golden age.
Wolseley was one of the country’s imperial heroes—others included Clive, Stamford Raffles, Chinese Gordon, Richard Burton, and, of course, Cecil Rhodes—whose feats were held up to the nation as examples of how men of courage and determination could shape the destiny of that noblest achievement of mankind, the Empire. If their lives were metaphors of the Empire’s rise, that of Churchill, their rapt pupil, was the other way around. He entered the world in 1874, when the royal domain was approaching flood tide, and left it in 1965, as the last rays of imperial splendor were vanishing. That is one way of summing him up; it is, in fact, one of the ways he saw himself. Toward the end of his life he told Lord Boothby: “History judges a man, not by his victories or defeats, but by their results.”1 Yet the vitiation of the Empire does not diminish his stature. Alexander was driven out of India; Genghis Khan was undone by his sons; Napoleon lost everything, including France. Indeed, it may be argued that the greater the fall, the greater was a man’s height. If that is true, then Churchill’s stature rises above that of all other statesmen, for no realm, past or present, can match the grandeur of imperial Britain at its sublime peak.
It was the Tory journalist John Wilson of Blackwood’s Magazine who first observed, in 1817, that “the sun never sets upon the Union Jack.” At any given moment, wherever dawn was breaking, Britain’s colors were rippling up some flagpole. If one could have ascended high enough in one of those balloons which fascinated Jules Verne and were actually used in the Franco-Prussian War, the view of Britain’s colonial sphere would have been breathtaking. Victoria reigned over most of Africa, both ends of the Mediterranean, virtually all that mattered in the Middle East; the entire Indian subcontinent, from Afghanistan to Thailand, including Ceylon, which on a map appeared to be merely the dot below India’s exclamation mark but which was actually the size of Belgium; Malaya, Singapore, Australia, islands spread all over the Pacific and the Atlantic, and Canada. The Canadians, proud of their loyalty to the Queen, issued a stamp depicting a world map with the Empire’s lands colored red. It was a study in crimson splotches. Although the British Isles themselves were dwarfed by czarist Russia, and were smaller than Sweden, France, Spain, or Germany, their inhabitants ruled a quarter of the world’s landmass and more than a quarter of its population—thrice the size of the Roman Empire, far more than the Spanish Empire at full flush, or, for that matter, than the United States or the Soviet Union today.
To its classically educated patricians, London was what Rome had once been: caput mundi, the head of the world. The popular aristocrat Lord Palmerston said that colonies were multiplying so rapidly that he had to “keep looking the damned places up on the map.” Disraeli said: “No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a dominion so peculiar. Its flag floats on many waters, it has provinces in every zone, they are inhabited by persons of different races,… manners, customs.” All this had been acquired by imperial conquest, and young Winston Churchill, writing for the Morning Post from a colonial battlefield on September 12, 1898, took note of “the odd and bizarre potentates against whom the British arms continually are turned. They pass in a long procession. The Akhund of Swat, Cetewayo brandishing an assegai as naked as himself, Kruger singing a Psalm of Victory, Osman Digna, the Immortal and the Irrepressible, Theebaw with his umbrella, the Mahdi with his banner, Lobengula gazing fondly at the pages of Truth, Prompeh abasing himself in the dust, the Mad Mullah on his white ass and, latest of all, the Khalifa in his Coach of State. It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane.”2
All these suzerains lost, and all England rejoiced—loudly. The British were very vocal in their allegiance to their Empire. In public schools and public houses boys and men responded to “Three cheers for India!” and roared, to the music of “Pomp and Circumstance,” Edward Elgar’s patriotic hymn, composed in the last weeks of the old Queen’s reign:
Land of hope and glory, mother of the free,
How shall we extol thee, who art born of thee?
Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;
God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet;
God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!
On declamation days children recited, from Kipling:
Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year,
Our fathers’ title runs.
Make we likewise their sacrifice,
Defrauding not our sons.
Music hall favorites were “The Death of Nelson,” by S. J. Arnold and John B. Raham; “Annie Laurie,” the great hit of the Crimean War; and, later, the rousing “Soldiers of the Queen.” Today their great-grandsons wince at the public displays of patriotism, but the Victorians responded quickly to calls of Duty, the Flag, the Race, the White Man’s Burden; the lot. Far from feeling manipulated—which they were; most Victorians gained nothing from the nation’s foreign conquests—they memorized lines from W. E. Henley, the balladeer of England’s colonial wars:
What if the best our wages be
An empty sleeve, a stiff-set knee,
A crutch for the rest of life—who cares,
So long as One Flag floats and dares?
So long as One Race dares and grows?
Death—what is death but God’s own rose?
Her Britannic Majesty was “by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India.” In thatch-roofed villages of British North Borneo and the steamy jungles of Sierra Leone, her primitive vassals regarded her as divine and slit the throats of propitiatory goats before her image, usually a drab statue of a dowdy woman wearing a tiny crown and holding an orb and scepter. Elsewhere Anglican missionaries prevailed and read their Book of Common Prayer in hundreds of languages and dialects, from Swahili to Urdu, from Maori to Bugi, from Kikuyu to Mandarin, and even, in remote valleys on the Isle of Man, the ancient tongue of Manx. Information from Victoria’s twenty-five turbulent tribal possessions in the Middle East reached Britain from their only contact with the outside world, Aden, on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, which had been acquired as a coaling station for the British fleet. There an Englishman perspiring beneath a gyrating punkah sent the Queen all the news she needed from the sheikhs: “They are content to be governed from London.” No one in Whitehall paid much attention. The only resource the Arabs could offer the Empire was an unpleasant liquid, of limited value, called oil.
Most Englishmen were familiar with scattered facts about the Empire. They had only the haziest idea of where Borneo was, but they had seen its Wild Man exhibited in a traveling cage. They knew the silhouette of lion-shaped Gibraltar, knew the legend that if Gibraltar’s monkeys vanished from its caves, the Empire was finished. (In the midst of World War II Churchill found time to replenish the Rock’s supply of monkeys.) They were proud of the Suez Canal, then considered an engineering marvel, and they were under the impression that all Egypt belonged to them, too. That wasn’t strictly true; Egypt still flew its own flag and paid homage to the sultan of Turkey, but after the Queen’s fleet had pounded Alexandria into submission, the country was run by the British agent and consul general. Thomas Cook and Son, booking clerks for the Empire, reserved Shepheard’s Hotel’s best rooms for Englishmen on official business. Cook’s also ran steamers up the Nile for English tourists, though pilots turned back short of the Sudan border in 1885, after fanatic tribesmen of the Mahdi butchered Chinese Gordon in
Khartoum. This tiresome restriction ended in 1898 when Kitchener routed and humiliated the tribesmen under the critical eye of young Churchill.
The British public was aware of the tiny island of Saint Helena, in the middle of the Atlantic, because that was where imprisoned Napoleon spent his last years, but such possessions as Ascension isle, Saint Helena’s neighbor, which provided the turtles for the turtle soup at the traditional banquets of London’s lord mayor, and Tristan da Cunha, the most isolated of the Empire’s outposts, twelve hundred miles south of Saint Helena, in the broadest and most desolate reaches of the Atlantic, were virtually unknown outside the Colonial Office. Yet if ordinary Englishmen were confused about details of their realm, they can scarcely be blamed. The Empire itself was the vaguest of entities. Legally, under the British constitution, it did not exist. It was a kind of stupendous confidence trick. By arms or by arrogance, Englishmen had persuaded darker races that Britain was the home of a race meant to dominate the world. Therefore they ruled by consent. So successful was this bluff that the Mother Country held its possessions with an extraordinarily thin line of bwanas and sahibs; in India, for example, the rule of the Raj was administered by roughly one member of the Indian Civil Service for every 200,000 subjects.
Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 Page 6