One bright spot for Winston that fall was that Jack was now a twelve-year-old Harrovian, and the brothers were allowed to share a room. (“We have now quite settled down,” he wrote home. “The room is very beautiful. We purchased in London sufficiency of ornaments to make it look simply magnificent.”) Moreover, Winston had finally mastered skills which won him the admiration of his peers. He made the swimming team, led the School Rifle Corps, starred in boxing, and became the fencing champion of Harrow. “I have won the fencing,” he wrote his mother, then in Monte Carlo. “A very fine cup. I was far and away first. Absolutely untouched in the finals.” Then he accomplished something spectacular. He was chosen to stand for Harrow in a tournament at Aldershot, the winner to be England’s public-school fencing champion. He wrote excitedly: “My fencing is now my great employment out of school as now that I represent the School it behoves me to ‘sweat up.’ ” On the great day he crossed foils with boys from Eton, Winchester, Bradfield, and Tonbridge and beat them all. His victory, the Harrovian reported, “was chiefly due to his quick and dashing attack which quite took his opponents by surprise.” The school paper commented: “Churchill must be congratulated on his success over all his opponents in the fencing line, many of whom must have been much taller and more formidable than himself.”108
He ought to have left Harrow on a rising tide of hope. Instead, he departed in despair. The second Sandhurst examination had not gone well. Traditionally, seniors passing out entertained their friends at a “Leaving Breakfast” in Hance’s Tuck Shop: mutton cutlets, steak and onions, ham, mushrooms, eggs, sausages, and deviled kidneys—all for sixpence. Winston wouldn’t have it. In December he quietly bade farewell to Jack and then slunk off to the station alone, like a fugitive. Sandhurst posted the exam results the next month; they then appeared in The Times. As he feared, he had failed again. His performance had actually worsened in Latin, French, and—the cruelest cut—English composition. It is astonishing that in this, of all subjects, the boy who would become one of the greatest masters of his native language scored 53 percent. Randolph pondered putting him out as a commercial apprentice to Rothschild, Farquharson, or Cassel, but relented when Welldon told him that he felt certain Winston would make it on the third try. The headmaster urged tutoring. There was no disgrace in this. In 1870 Lord Dufferin’s Royal Commission on Military Education had “earnestly” deprecated “the irregular system of ‘cramming’ ” because, as one member explained, they feared that the acceptance “of such a large proportion of crammed candidates would cause the Army to lose its ‘tone.’ ” Nevertheless, in Winston’s day seven out of every ten successful candidates for admission to Sandhurst had been rigorously tutored. Spencer Coyle, in Henry James’s story “Owen Wingrave,” was a typical Victorian crammer. The character was inspired by Captain Walter H. James, who, Welldon wrote Lord Randolph, was “the most successful ‘crammer’ for the Sandhurst Examination.” Randolph approved, and James then wrote him from 5 Lexam Gardens, London: “I shall be very happy to receive your son and should be pleased to see you at 12:30 on Monday next.”109
Winston didn’t keep the appointment. He was near death. In their study of boys marked for future greatness, the Goertzels found that among adventurous youths “there is almost always a history of accident-proneness.” Sometimes the youthful Winston seemed to move from crisis to crisis, risking his life in pointless adventures. That was true of him that year. His second failure as a Sandhurst candidate had left him tense and distraught, which probably contributed to his flirtation with disaster. Randolph’s sister-in-law, the “Duchess Lily,” had given his family the run of Deepdene, her estate at Branksome Dene, near Bournemouth, for the winter. Its fifty acres of pine forest, sloping down to the Channel, offered endless opportunities for the daring games Winston loved to play in the woods. Each morning he briefed Jack and a fourteen-year-old cousin on his newest game plan while the servants, Woom among them, wrung their hands and prayed for the children’s safety. In the wildest corner of the estate, a thicket was split by a deep cleft called the “chine.” The chine was bridged by a crude fifty-yard bridge. The boys were playing fox and hare, with Winston the hare, when he found himself in the middle of the bridge with a foe at either end. He contemplated jumping down into the cleft. It was thick with fir trees; he thought he might leap to one and slide down, snapping off tiers of branches as he descended and thus breaking his fall. In his words: “I looked at it. I computed it. I meditated. Meanwhile I climbed over the balustrade. My young pursuers stood wonderstruck at either end of the bridge. To plunge or not to plunge, that was the question! In a second I had plunged, throwing out my arms to embrace the summit of the fir tree. The argument was correct; the data were absolutely wrong.” He tumbled twenty-nine feet to hard ground and lay insensible. Jack and their cousin ran back to the mansion, crying, “He won’t speak to us!” This was real trouble, and it brought his parents flying. Jennie arrived first; Randolph, who had been spending Christmas at one of Lord Fitzgibbon’s interminable wild parties in Ireland, took the next express from Dublin. Dr. Roose appeared with Dr. John Rose, a Harley Street specialist. They found, among other things, that Winston had a ruptured kidney. He did not recover consciousness for three days. The physicians recommended three months in bed, Rose adding that “young Mr. Churchill should not return to hard study any more than he should take vigorous exercise.”110
Unfortunately, abstinence from study was out of the question. Winston’s last chance at Sandhurst loomed in June, and in Lexham Gardens Captain James sat waiting, pencils sharpened, textbooks open. Some forty years later Winston decided that he understood why this obscure half-pay officer had stood at the top of his small, curious profession. James, he wrote, had studied the minds of the men who drew up civil service examinations and could predict “with almost Papal infallibility the sort of questions which that sort of person would be bound on the average to ask on any of the selected subjects.” His skill lay in anticipating such questions and how best to answer them. He was “really the ingenious forerunner of the inventors of the artillery barrages of the Great War,” Churchill wrote. “He fired from carefully selected positions upon the areas which he knew must be tenanted by large bodies of enemy troops…. He did not need to see the enemy soldiers. Drill was all he had to teach his gunners. Thus year by year for at least two decades he held the Blue Ribbon among the Crammers.”111
But he had never dealt with anyone remotely like Winston. The crammer represents everything the creative youth despises: drill, contempt for intuition, slavish fixation on meaningless, unrelated facts. Winston, in his own words, found himself in “an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ world, at the portals of which stood ‘A Quadratic Equation,’ ” followed by the “dimchambers” inhabited by the “Differential Calculus” and then a “strange corridor” of sines and cosines “in a highly square-rooted condition.” Of mathematical skills he wrote: “I am assured they are most helpful in engineering, astronomy and things like that. It is important to build bridges and canals and to comprehend all the stresses and potentialities of matter, to say nothing of counting all the stars and even universes and measuring how far off they are, and foretelling eclipses, the arrival of comets and such like. I am glad there are quite a number of people born with a gift and a liking for all this.” He, however, was not one of them. The Goertzels found that most boys pregnant with genius have serious problems with school curricula and dull, irrational teachers. James was a distillate of these. He was concentrating on the courses Winston had found pointless, using the very methods Winston hated most. By March he must have wished that this exasperating boy had killed himself in his fall. Reporting to Randolph on March 7, he deplored his pupil’s “casual manner.” Winston was “distinctly inclined to be inattentive and to think too much of his abilities.” He had been “rather too much inclined up to the present to teach his instructors instead of endeavouring to learn from them.” In fact, “he suggested to me that his knowledge of history was such that he did not
want any more teaching in it!… What he wants,” he concluded, “is very firm handling.” Unfortunately, James could not provide it for the moment. He was literally sick of Winston, “confined to my room.”112
Staggering to his feet, he plodded on. But he deceived neither himself nor his ward’s father. He was making little progress. In an April 29 report he gloomily warned his employer: “I do not think that his work is going on very satisfactorily.” Although the boy “has good abilities he does not apply himself with sufficient earnestness to his reading” and “I doubt his passing if he does not do this.” James delicately hinted at one difficulty. Randolph was making his last attempt at a political comeback, and his son could think of little else. The crammer realized that “at a time like the present it is difficult for him not to take an interest in current political topics, but if this be done to an extent which takes his mind away from his studies, the result is bad for the latter.” Every attempt must be made to impress upon him “the absolute necessity of single-minded devotion to the immediate object before him, and the extreme desirability of thoroughness and detail [sic] attention to all he attempts.”113
The break came sometime in May. Winston gave ground. He yielded as little as possible, but he knew what was at stake, and though the job revolted him, he set his jaw and made some progress. Not much; just enough. On June 19, James wrote: “Without saying that your son is a certainty I think he ought to pass this time. He is working well and I think doing his best to get on but, as you know, he is at times inclined to take the bit in his teeth and go his own course.” The exam was upon them then, and this time Winston squeaked by. He came in too low to become an infantry cadet, but was admitted to the cavalry. He hadn’t changed much, even under his crammer’s pressure; most of the spring, when he should have been doing James’s lessons, he had been reading English history for pleasure, with the jarring effect—jarring for James, who had abandoned attempts to drill him in history—that he far outscored every other candidate in that subject. When the list of those who had passed was announced, Winston had left on a hiking trip in Switzerland with Jack and J. D. G. Little, a young Eton master. He was in Lucerne when he learned he had made it. Immediately he wired his father and then wrote him from the Schweizerhof Hotel: “I was so glad to be able to send you the good news on Thursday. I did not expect that the list would be published so soon & was starting off in the train, when Little congratulated me on getting in. I looked in the paper & found this to be true.” It was only fitting, he thought, that he should celebrate his achievement in such “a splendid hotel—lifts, electric light, & fireworks (every Saturday).”114
Other congratulations arrived from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, but there was an ominous silence from Bad Kissingen, where Lord Randolph and Jennie were taking the cure. Unknown to his son, Randolph had been counting heavily on an infantry cadetship. That would have relieved him of the cost of horses. It would also have brought a social dividend; a friend of his, the aged, royal Duke of Cambridge, commander in chief of the army, had promised, once Winston had been commissioned, to find a place for him in the crack Sixtieth Rifles. Now the humiliated father had to tell His Grace that his boy was too stupid to become an infantry officer. Jennie saw the storm gathering in her husband. She sent a warning to Lucerne: “I am glad of course that you have got into Sandhurst but Papa is not pleased at yr getting in by the skin of yr teeth & missing the Infantry by 18 marks. He is not as pleased by yr exploits as you seem to be!”115 That was putting it gently. A week later, in Milan, Winston received an extraordinary letter from his father.
Randolph was surprised that he had expressed “exultation over your inclusion in the Sandhurst list” instead of being ashamed of “your slovenly happy-go-lucky harum scarum style of work.” It was the same old story: “Never have I received a really good report of your conduct in your work from any master or tutor you had from time to time to do with. Always behind-hand, never advancing in your class, incessant complaints of total want of application, and this character which was constant in yr reports has shown the natural results clearly in your last army examination.” Thus “you have failed to get into the ‘60th Rifles’ one of the finest regiments in the army.” Furthermore, as a cavalry cadet, “you have imposed on me an extra charge of some £200 a year.” It got worse: “Do not think I am going to take the trouble of writing to you long letters after every failure you commit and undergo… I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say about your own acquirements & exploits.” Randolph predicted that “if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel one of the hundreds of the public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy & futile existence. If that is so you will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes yourself.” He ended venomously: “Your mother sends her love.”116
Little wrote Randolph that Winston had showed him this letter and “was a good deal depressed.” Actually, he was stunned. It never occurred to him that this philippic might be the work of an unstable mind. He considered his father’s judgment above reproach, and believed that he had failed him again. In his reply he wrote that he was “very sorry indeed that you are displeased with me,” that he would “try to modify your opinion of me by my work at Sandhurst,” that “my extremely low place in passing in will have no effect whatever on my chance there,” and that Randolph needn’t worry about expenses there because “all the necessary equipment & outfit are supplied at Sandhurst at a charge of £30.” Here he erred. All cadets were charged £120 tuition, in addition to the cost of their mounts, to screen out applicants who were not considered suitable. But in a larger sense he was right. Sandhurst fees were a pittance when set against the costs Randolph’s own father had paid for his Oxford education; Randolph had raised the issue only to justify his wrath. Winston closed his own letter pathetically: “Thank you very much for writing to me.” And, once again, “I am very sorry indeed that I have done so badly.” Yet on a deeper level he may have smoldered. At the bottom he wrote: “P.S. Excuse smudge &c as pens & blotting paper are awfully bad.” The page was a mess. Hostility, though repressed, must have been there. By now it should have been clear that the relationship between father and son would be abrasive for both until one of them lay in his grave.117
Winston almost died first. His second skirting of the Styx immediately followed the posting of this response. He and a companion hired a boat on the shore of Lake Geneva and rowed out a mile. Stripping, they dove in for a swim. Suddenly a breeze sprang up and carried the boat away from them. Striking out desperately, Winston just managed to reach the hull, hoist himself aboard, and return for his friend. Afterward he wrote that he had seen Death “as near as I believe I have ever seen Him. He was swimming in the water, whispering from time to time in the rising wind.” Either because of this or because of Randolph’s tirade, he was still upset when he returned to London and found that the row over his poor showing in the exam had been entirely unnecessary. At 50 Grosvenor Square a letter from the military secretary awaited him, disclosing that several boys with higher scores than his had dropped out, so he needn’t go into the cavalry. He wrote his father: “I have no doubt that you will be pleased to find that I have got an Infantry cadetship and shall be able, after all, to enter the 60th.” Randolph’s pride enjoined an acknowledgment, but he wrote Duchess Fanny—as he had grown apart from Jennie, his mother had become the only woman he fully trusted—that “I am very glad Winston has got an infantry cadetship. It will save me £200 a year.”118
On the afternoon of Friday, September 1, 1893, Winston switched from train to carriage in the village of Camberley and rode into the grounds of the Royal Military College, passing through a forest of pine, birch, and larch before debouching on the plain where, every year since 1812, young members of England’s upper classes had been certified as “officers and gentlemen.” The landscape was inviting: two l
akes, athletic fields, rifle and revolver ranges, and, of course, parade grounds. As a “junior,” or plebe, he was assigned to “E” Company, led to the long, low, white stone building which would be his barracks for the next sixteen months, and measured for his cadet uniform, a gaudy costume featuring gold lace, pantaloons, and a pillbox cap. He studied the daily schedule he would be expected to meet, worried about his physical frailty, and wrote his mother, with a confidence he did not feel: “I suppose I shall get stronger during my stay here.”119 His physique was in fact unimpressive. He was only five feet, six and a half inches tall, and his chest measured but thirty-one inches, with an expansion of two and a half inches—inadequate, unless he could improve upon it, for a commission. To succeed at Sandhurst he would summon strengths which, until now, had been unrevealed.
Even before the tailor had finished outfitting him, he had again incurred his father’s displeasure. Lord Randolph had decided to give him a ten-pound monthly allowance and little leave. “I wont have any running backwards & forwards to London,” he wrote Duchess Fanny. “He shall be kept to his work so that he may acquire the elementary principles of a military education.” But since his arrival on the post, Winston had discovered that his financial expectations required revision. He needed a batman to black his boots, pipe-clay his belt, clean his rifle, and carry away slops. He thought he ought to have a horse; other cadets had them. His room needed furnishing, and he not only wanted to visit the capital regularly—“going up to town,” as they said at Sandhurst—he also meant to join clubs there. His father would have none of it. To Duchess Fanny, Randolph explained: “I have demurred to ‘unrestricted leave,’ and have told him he can come to town when his mother is there. I have declined paying for horses…. Winston’s letters are generally full of requests for unnecessary things and articles.” The youth begged his mother to intervene. Without a horse, he said, he would be excluded from polo classes. “As to leave—it is very hard that Papa cannot grant me the same liberty that other boys in my position are granted. It is only a case of trusting me. As my company officer said, he ‘liked to know the boys whom their parents could trust’—and therefore recommended me to get the permission I asked for. However, it is no use trying to explain to Papa, & I suppose I shall go on being treated as ‘that boy’ till I am 50 years old.”120 Actually, it would be only a short time longer. But Winston had been kept at such a distance from his family that he knew nothing of the tensions within it. He couldn’t understand the niggling over money. He was keenly aware of his father’s reentry into politics. He did not, however, grasp the futility of it.
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