As editor of the school paper, the Harrovian, Amery got even. Using the pseudonym “Junius Junior,” Winston sent, as a letter to the editor, an attack on the school’s gym policy. Amery thought part of it too abusive to print. He cut it, adding the note: “We have omitted a portion of our correspondent’s letter, which seemed to us to exceed the limits of fair criticism.” Winston was in tears; his best paragraphs, he protested, had been deleted. Actually, he should have been grateful for the blue-penciling. Even expurgated, the letter aroused Welldon; he resented its implied criticism of his authority. Amery quite properly refused to identify “Junius Junior.” The headmaster knew his boys, however; Winston was summoned and threatened with another swishing. By now he was regarded as the school subversive, a hoarder of grievances and defier of conventions. But some of his grievances were justified. Unreasonably, the school insisted upon listing him alphabetically under S—Spencer-Churchill instead of Churchill. Before his arrival, he had been promised a room in Welldon’s house; he had to wait a year for it. And in at least one instance his defiance was admirable. Public-school boys then were ashamed of their nannies. They would no sooner have invited one to Harrow than an upper-class American boy today would bring his teddy bear to his boarding school. Winston not only asked Woom to come; he paraded his old nurse, immensely fat and all smiles, down High Street, and then unashamedly kissed her in full view of his schoolmates. One of them was Seely, who later became a cabinet colleague of Winston’s and won the DSO in France. Seely called that kiss “one of the bravest acts I have ever seen.”73
Churchillian stubbornness, which would become the bane of Britain’s enemies, was the despair of his teachers. He refused to learn unless it suited him. Welldon put him in what today would be called a remedial reading class, where slow boys were taught English. He stared out the window. Math, Latin, Greek, and French were beneath his contempt. Questions “about these Cosines or Tangents in their squared or even cubed condition,” as he later called them, were in his opinion unworthy of answers. He repeated Horace’s Odes four times and remained ignorant of it. Looking back on those days, the man Churchill would write: “If the reader has ever learned any Latin prose he will know that at quite an early stage one comes across the Ablative Absolute…. I was often uncertain whether the Ablative Absolute should end in ‘e’ or ‘i’ or ‘is’ or ‘ibus,’ to the correct selection of which great importance was attached. Dr. Welldon seemed to be physically pained by a mistake being made in any of these letters…. It was more than annoyance; it was a pang.” His French accent was atrocious. It would always be atrocious. During World War II he remarked that one of the greatest ordeals of the French Resistance was hearing him address them in their own tongue over the BBC.*74
He had scarcely settled in at Harrow when he was put “on reports.” That meant that he had to acquire weekly accounts of his progress in each subject and discuss them with the headmaster. He begged his mother to come and “jaw Welldon about keeping me on reports for such a long time.” For once Jennie came, but the headmaster was immune to her charm; Winston’s status remained unchanged. The following week he wrote her: “It is a most shameful thing that he should keep me on like this…. I am awfully cross because now I am not able to come home for an absit [overnight leave] on Thursday which I very much wanted to do. I hope you don’t imagine I am happy here. It’s all very well for monitors & Cricket Captains but it is quite a different thing for fourth form boys. Of course what I should like best would be to leave this hell of a [italicized phrase underlined, then struck out] place but I cannot expect that at present.”75
One member of the faculty who looked forward to seeing the last of Winston was H. O. D. Davidson, who, as his housemaster, was responsible for discipline and therefore his natural enemy. On July 12, when Winston had been enrolled less than three months, Davidson sent his mother an extraordinary complaint. He was a seasoned teacher, and had been a champion shot-putter at Oxford, but this thirteen-year-old boy was clearly beyond his competence. “After a good deal of hesitation and discussion with his form-master,” he wrote Jennie, “I have decided to allow Winston to have his exeat [“day out”]; but I must own that he has not deserved it. I do not think, nor does Mr [Robert] Somervell, that he is in any way wilfully troublesome; but his forgetfulness, carelessness, unpunctuality, and irregularity in every way, have really been so serious, that I write to ask you, when he is at home to speak very gravely to him on the subject.” New boys, he conceded, needed “a week or two” to adjust to Harrow. But “Winston, I am sorry to say, has, if anything got worse as the term passed. Constantly late for school, losing his books, and papers and various other things into which I need not enter—he is so regular in his irregularity that I really don’t know what to do; and sometimes think he cannot help it. But if he is unable to conquer this slovenliness… he will never make a success of a public school…. As far as ability goes he ought to be at the top of his form, whereas he is at the bottom. Yet I do not think he is idle; only his energy is fitful, and when he gets to his work it is generally too late for him to do it well.” Davidson thought it “very serious that he should have acquired such phenomenal slovenliness.” He felt “sure that unless a very determined effort is made it will grow upon him.” Winston, he concluded, “is a remarkable boy in many ways, and it would be a thousand pities if such good abilities were made useless by habitual negligence. I ought not to close without telling you that I am very much pleased with some history work he has done for me.”76
Clearly there was something odd here. Winston, Davidson had conceded, was the ablest boy in his form. He was, in fact, remarkable. His grasp of history was outstanding. Yet he was considered a hopeless pupil. It occurred to no one that the fault might lie, not in the boy, but in the school. Samuel Butler defined genius as “a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds,” and it is ironic that geniuses are likeliest to be misunderstood in classrooms. Studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota have found that teachers smile on children with high IQs and frown upon those with creative minds. Intelligent but uncreative students accept conformity, never rebel, and complete their assignments with dispatch and to perfection. The creative child, on the other hand, is manipulative, imaginative, and intuitive. He is likely to harass the teacher. He is regarded as wild, naughty, silly, undependable, lacking in seriousness or even promise. His behavior is distracting; he doesn’t seem to be trying; he gives unique answers to banal questions, touching off laughter among the other children. E. Paul Torrance of Minnesota found that 70 percent of pupils rated high in creativity were rejected by teachers picking a special class for the intellectually gifted. The Goertzels concluded that a Stanford study of genius, under which teachers selected bright children, would have excluded Churchill, Edison, Picasso, and Mark Twain.
Winston at Harrow in 1889
None of this was known to Welldon and his staff, but as term succeeded term an awareness grew among them that Winston was a baffling boy. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn the ablative absolute—a minor feat of memory—but he could recite twelve hundred lines of Macaulay without missing a word, and at no one’s urging he memorized whole scenes from three Shakespeare plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry VIII, and The Merchant of Venice. There are learned men who do not know that byss is the opposite of abyss. He knew it; he had been haunting J. F. Moore’s bookshop and the school library. Teachers who misquoted English poets were corrected by him. He sat rapt through a lecture on the battle of Waterloo and then delivered a stunning critique of it, citing sources which were unknown to the lecturer but which, when checked, were confirmed. This merely convinced his masters that he could do the work if he wanted to and didn’t do it because he was obstinate. One of them would recall, “I formed the highest opinion of his abilities and never ceased to wonder why he did not rise higher in the School. But he hated the Classics, and in his time that kept him down…. On one field-day he came and asked me to let him ac
t as my aide-de-camp, and his alertness and zeal for action were amazing.” Another wrote: “He was plainly uninterested in the academic subjects.” A third teacher came close to the truth; with a fine disregard for prepositional precedence he observed that “he was not an easy boy to deal with. Of course he had always a brilliant brain, but he would only work when he chose to and for the matters he approved of.”77
That would have been the solution: to put him under the spell of gifted teachers who, shunning pedantry, could engage his interest and persuade him that the challenge of some courses, at least, deserved his best response. It was pointless to scold him, as Jennie did in her letters: “Your report which I enclose is as you see a very bad one. You work in such a fitful inharmonious way, that you are bound to come out last—look at your place in the form!… If only you had a better place in your form, & were a little more methodical I would try & find an excuse for you. Dearest Winston you make me very unhappy…. Your work is an insult to your intelligence.” He could only reply: “I will not try to excuse myself for not working hard, because I know that what with one thing & another I have been rather lazy. Consequently when the month ended the crash came I got a bad report & got put on reports etc. etc…. My own Mummy I can tell you your letter cut me up very much…. I knew that work however hard at Mathematics I could not pass in that. All other boys going in were taught these things & I was not, so they said it was useless.” Such sterile exchanges merely led him farther down the low road. Luckily there were three masters at Harrow who knew how to guide him upward. One taught math, the very subject Winston thought hopeless. In afterlife Churchill wrote: “All my life from time to time I have had to get up disagreeable subjects at short notice, but I consider my triumph, moral and technical, was in learning Mathematics in six months…. I owe this achievement not only to my own ‘back-to-the-wall’ resolution—for which no credit is too great; but to the very kindly interest taken in my case by a much respected Harrow master, Mr. C. H. P. Mayo. He convinced me that Mathematics was not a hopeless bog of nonsense, and that there were meanings and rhythms behind the comical hieroglyphics.”78
Robert Somervell deserves a footnote in history. When Winston was about to go down for the third time, this perceptive young master—“a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great,” Winston said of him—took over the remedial English class. His pupils were considered dolts too simple to learn Latin and Greek. They must continue to try, but Harrow would be satisfied if they mastered their own language. Usually such assignments fall to teachers who are inept themselves, and had that been true of Somervell, Winston’s life might have taken a different turn. But not only was he not dull; he thought English inspiring, and his enthusiasm was infectious. In the words of Churchill: “He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it.” First they learned to parse sentences thoroughly. Then they practiced continuing grammatical analysis, using a system of Somervell’s which appealed to the playful instinct in every boy: using a spectrum of inks, he would score a long sentence, breaking it up into subject, verb, object; relative clauses, conditional clauses, conjunctive and disjunctive clauses. Each had its color and its bracket. “It was a kind of drill,” Churchill recalled. “We did it almost daily.” Since Winston remained obdurate in his refusal to study the classics, he remained in Somervell’s class for three terms. As a man he would write that he went through the drills “three times as long as anyone else. I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage.”79
At Harrow his lifelong fascination with words grew. He was thirteen, and Somervell was introducing him to literature. Except for best-sellers like Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone, few Harrovians read for pleasure. Winston was soon deep in Thackeray, Dickens, Wordsworth, and every biography he could lay his hands on. He knew what was good and found he liked it. Inevitably his vocabulary increased. In his letters he wrote of a toy given him by his aunts as “a source of unparalleled amusement,” his funds needed “replenishing,” welcome news was “pleasing intelligence.” The bookseller Moore, who saw him almost daily, noticed that he was displaying “evidences of his unusual command of words. He would argue in the shop on any subject, and, as a result of this, he was, I am afraid, often left in sole possession of the floor.”80 At this point another teacher, L. M. Moriarty, Winston’s fencing master, suggested that he drop in on him evenings at home to discuss essays and history. They talked, not only of content, but also of form, particularly essay techniques then being developed by Stevenson, Ruskin, Huxley, and Cardinal Newman. None of this was reflected in the report cards sent to Connaught Place, but the autodidactic pattern was forming. Winston was being taught to teach himself. He would always be a dud in the classroom and a failure in examinations, but in his own time, on his own terms, he would become one of the most learned statesmen of the coming century.
Aware of his growing intellect and increasing flair for expression, he was exasperated by his dismal marks. Welldon was also frustrated, and for the same reason. Shortly after Winston’s fourteenth birthday, the headmaster told Seely that he had never seen a boy with “such a love and veneration for the English language.”81 When he received a sparkling paper from a Sixth Former who was a brilliant classicist but clumsy with his native tongue, Welldon called the boy in. He told him he didn’t believe he had written the theme. Churchill, he said, was the only pupil who wrote that well. Confession followed. Welldon had uncovered a conspiracy. The Sixth Former had been translating Winston’s elementary Latin assignments. Then he had sat at his desk with paper and pencil while Winston, pacing back and forth, dictated the theme. There is no record of disciplinary action, but the incident is striking. It is the first known instance of the technique Churchill would use in writing his greatest books. And it is a devastating comment on public-school values. Eloquent and lucid in living English, Winston was a scholastic failure because of his disdain for two languages which would be almost useless to him.
He was writing now, submitting further contributions to the school paper as “Junius Junior.” They seldom appeared. He didn’t fit here, either. A fellow Old Boy recalled: “From time to time he sent notes on current events to The Harrovian; these could not always be printed, but they were extraordinarily witty and well expressed, and often caused the editors to roar with laughter.” This is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Krupp cannon which was sent to Saint Petersburg as a sample in the hope of stimulating sales. It fired so well that the Russians put it in a museum. Laughing editors spiked Winston’s copy because they felt that passing their amusement along to their readers would be undignified. Of his contributions which were accepted, only one survives, a lugubrious poem inspired by an epidemic of influenza raging on the Continent:82
And now Europe groans aloud
And ’neath the heavy thunder-cloud
Husked in both song and dance:
The germs of illness wend their way
To westward each succeeding day
And enter merry France.
The flu hit Winston during his first Christmas holidays from Harrow. On December 30 Randolph peevishly wrote his sister-in-law, “Of course the boys have made themselves ill with their Christmassing, & yesterday both were in bed with [Dr.] Roose and [Dr.] Gordon hopping in & out of the house. Jack is better this morning but Winston has a sore throat & some fever. I hope it is nothing but biliousness & indigestion.” He and Jennie didn’t hover around to find out. They left that day on a vacation of their own. Meanwhile, Winston worsened. Two days later he wrote his mother: “My throat is still painful & swelled—I get very hot in the night—& have very little appetite to speak of…. It is awful ‘rot’ spending ones holi
days in bed or one room.” Another letter followed a few days later. He was “tired of bed and slops.” His new magic lantern didn’t work. The “Dr says I ought to go to the seaside, & then I shan’t see you at all.” He calculated that “1 week at the seaside leaves 1 week & that 1 week you will be away. It is an awful pity. I don’t know what to do.” Woom knew. She bundled him off to her brother-in-law’s cottage at Ventnor. Back at Harrow he wired her: “Am quite well.”83
But he wasn’t. Suffering a relapse the following month, he wrote his mother that he was “still far from well & am in bed because I can hardly stand. I am so weak as I have had very [little] food for 4 days.” Woom had come, and Mrs. Davidson had told him that “she hopes you will let Woomany come [again] tomorrow, because she says the company will do me good. I do not know how the day would have passed but for Woomany. I have had another big poultice on my liver to-day to make it worse [sic]. I hope you will allow Woomany to come tomorrow as I shall certainly be very disappointed if she does not turn up.” His need for his nurse is a thread running through his correspondence with his mother: “Thank you so much for letting Woom come down.” “Do let Woom come down tomorrow.” “Thanks awfully for letting Woom come down today.” Mrs. Everest, for her part, wrote him faithfully, but she couldn’t grasp his adolescent problems; she still thought of him as a small boy. She sent him “some fine flannel shirts to sleep in” and a new suit: “Winny dear do try to keep the new suit expressly for visiting, the brown one will do for everyday wear, please do this to please me. I hope you will not take cold my darling take care not to get wet or damp.” And: “I hope you have recovered from the effects of your dental operation deary…. I hope you wear your coat in this wet weather & change your Boots when they are damp, that is what gives you tooth ache sitting in wet boots.”84
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