Mastery of the House has been given to few. Its moods arch the British spectrum, from cockney vulgarity through Midlands stolidity and Scottish skepticism to Welsh emotionalism and, in those days, Irish mysticism. It can be frivolous, irresponsible, and grave on occasions which any other body would treat with hilarity. No new member can be expected to hold it spellbound, but on the evening of February 18, 1901, when Churchill’s maiden speech was scheduled, the chamber was full. Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and Grey faced him on the front Opposition bench. Balfour and Joe Chamberlain sat on the Treasury Bench. Mrs. Chamberlain was in the gallery. So were Jennie and four of her sisters-in-law—Lady Howe, Lady Tweedmouth (Fanny Marjoribanks), Lady de Ramsey, and Lady Wimborne—and the Duchess Consuelo. Winston was known as “Randy’s Boy,” and, in his own right, as a gifted journalist and a hero of the South African war. Moreover, in his first “division,” or vote—MPs vote by streaming from the chamber and into two different lobbies, Yes and No—he had sided with the radicals and the Irish. At home, as abroad, he was already magnetic. The Morning Post reported that his audience was one which “very few new members have commanded.” The Yorkshire Post observed: “In that packed assembly, everybody a critic, watching to see what sort of start he made in politics, Winston Churchill made his debut.”3
He had decided to speak on the war, ignoring the advice of older Tories who had warned, “It is too soon; wait for a few months till you know the House,” and crossing the lobby he had been disconcerted to learn that, contrary to his assumption, not all these people were here just to hear him. Lloyd George was also expected to rise. He would, indeed, be Churchill’s immediate predecessor. Winston suffered from a parliamentary weakness and knew it: “I had never had the practice which comes to young men at the University of speaking in small debating societies impromptu upon all sorts of subjects.” He had spent days in front of a mirror, committing every word he intended to say to memory as his father had. But a House speech cannot stand alone; it must dovetail into the previous remarks, and Lloyd George, as usual, was unpredictable. He had been called to move an amendment, which would have been an easy thread for Winston to pick up. Instead, he was delivering a wide-ranging attack on the government’s record in South Africa. Its truce terms were vague: “Does anyone think the Boers will lay down their arms merely to be governed from Downing Street?” Losses were appalling: “There have been 55,000 casualties; 30,000 men are in hospital.” Kitchener’s burning of Boer barns was barbarous: “It is not a war against men but against women and children.” Every time Winston prepared an appropriate opening, the Welsh firebrand, egged on by radicals and Irish Nationalists, switched to a new tack. Churchill felt “a sense of alarm and even despair.” At that point an elderly member beside him whispered: “Why don’t you just say, ‘Instead of making his violent speech without moving his moderate amendment, he had better have moved his moderate amendment without making his violent speech’?”4
When Lloyd George sat down Churchill said precisely that, drawing chuckles. His spirits rising, he continued: “I do not believe that the Boers would attach particular importance to the utterances of the hon[orable] member. No people in the world received so much verbal sympathy and so little support. If I were a Boer fighting in the field…” He paused dramatically. Then: “And if I were a Boer, I hope I should be fighting in the field…” Balfour groaned; Chamberlain muttered, “That’s the way to throw away seats.”* The radicals cheered, then found he had trapped them, for he went on, “I would not allow myself to be taken in by any message of sympathy, not even if it were signed by a hundred hon[orable] members.” The Tories laughed—four years earlier a hundred radical MPs had sent an ineffectual cable of support to the king of Greece, immediately after which he had been obliged to capitulate to the Turks. Winston advocated a generous peace in South Africa, drawing a scowl from the Conservatives around him. Of course, he quickly added, the Boers might reject the offer “and stand by their old cry, ‘Death or Independence.’ ” This drew applause from the Irish Nationalists. But he had set another trap: “It is wonderful that hon[orable] members who form the Irish party should find it in their hearts to speak and act as they do in regard to a war in which so much has been accomplished by the courage, the sacrifices, and, above all, by the military capacity of Irishmen.” Kitchener’s scorched-earth policy was no worse, he said, than the German practice in the Franco-Prussian War of “throwing shells into the dwelling houses of Paris and starving the inhabitants of that great city to the extent that they had to live upon rats and like atrocious foods in order to compel the garrison to surrender.” Indeed, the British under Kitchener had done nothing not “justified by precedents set by European or American generals during the last fifty or sixty years.” Not that he thought Britain wholly in the right. He took a middle course: “I do not agree very fully with the charges of treachery on the one side and barbarity on the other.” Having established his independence—he had deftly said that the Boers were not traitors, that they were right to fight, that they deserved mercy—he drew to a graceful close, evoking his father’s name by attributing “the kindness and patience with which the House has heard me” to “a certain splendid memory which many hon[orable] members still preserve.”5
Older members led him to the House bar, where, in his words, “Everyone was very kind. The usual restoratives were applied, and I sat in a comfortable coma till I was strong enough to go home.” Before he left, Lloyd George told him, “Judging from your sentiments, you are standing against the Light,” and Churchill replied, “You take a singularly detached view of the British Empire”—an inauspicious opening to what would become the strongest political friendship of Churchill’s early career. Lloyd George had missed the mutinous notes in the speech. So had most of the press. The Liberal (anti-imperialist) Daily Chronicle dismissed the new member as “a medium-sized, undistinguished young man, with an unfortunate lisp in his voice.” The Conservative papers approved of his remarks. He had “held a crowded House spellbound,” said the Daily Express, had “satisfied the highest expectations,” said the Daily Telegraph, had delivered a speech “worthy of the traditions of the House,” said Borthwick’s Morning Post. But Hugh Massingham noted in the Liberal (imperialist) Daily News that “this young man has kept his critical faculty through the glamour of association with our arms.” Not only had he kept it; it grew. As the weeks passed, and he listened to the Opposition members, he felt himself drifting steadily to the left, feeling, as Simone Weil did, that “one must always be ready to change sides with justice, that fugitive from the winning camp.” To intimate friends he confided that he now thought barn burning in the Transvaal and Orange Free State was “a hateful folly.” He had come to feel “sentimental about the Boers” and was both in revolt against jingoism and “anxious to make the Conservative party follow Liberal courses.” Outside his circle this was unknown. In public he remained a staunch Tory back-bencher. Yet all the while, cold as malice, unsuspected but deadly, the vengeful hand of Lord Randolph Churchill was reaching out of the grave to smite those who had struck him down fifteen years earlier, when his son had been twelve years old.6
Over the next three months Winston established himself as a rising political star. In the House he spoke frequently, with wit and apparent ease—few knew in those early days of the exhausting rehearsals in Mount Street, the infinite pains that went into each polished performance—and his fame grew. He became one of those rare celebrities who are identified by first names alone; “Winston said,” like “Jackie wore” in America seventy years later, brought instant recognition. Gossips were alert to news of him. Punch and Vanity Fair cartoons depicted him as a slight, fastidious youth with an impish smile. A Daily Mail parliamentary reporter noted that “he follows every important speech delivered from the Opposition with an alertness, a mental agility,” that he often scribbled notes and passed them forward to Tory ministers about to speak, that “occasionally a mischievous, schoolboy grin settles over his face as he listens
to some ridiculous argument.” Julian Ralph, an American journalist, prophesied: “Already Mr. Churchill’s head is carried with a droop which comes to those who read and study hard. When he is thinking he drops his head forward as if it were heavy. That is how you see him at one moment, a pose prophetic of what is too likely to fasten itself upon him before he reaches middle age. But… the next time you look at him he has sprung to his feet with the eagerness of a boy, his pale blue eyes are sparkling, his lips are parted, he is talking a vocal torrent and hands and arms are driving home his words.” The Press Gallery delighted in his mots. Already he was displaying a puzzling contradiction which would endure throughout his public life. He could not address the House without intensive preparation. Yet no member could be quicker on his feet. He said: “Politics is like waking up in the morning. You never know whose head you will find on the pillow.” And, in another moment, he described the plight of the genus politicus: “He is asked to stand, he wants to sit, and he is expected to lie.”7
Spy cartoon in Vanity Fair, July 10, 1900
Diarists began to take note of him. Beatrice Webb thought him “restless, egotistical, bumptious, shallow-minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magnetism, great pluck and some originality—not of intellect but of character.” Dilke, who had depicted Rosebery in his diary as “about the most ambitious man I had ever met,” now added: “I have since known Winston Churchill.” Rosebery, ironically, found Churchill’s emerging zeal distasteful. But he was far from alone; in the opinion of Robert Rhodes James, Winston was “brash, assertive, egocentric, wholly absorbed in himself and his own career, and unashamedly on the make.” Lloyd George misjudged him, however, when he wrote that “the applause of the House is the breath of his nostrils. He is just like an actor. He likes the limelight and the approbation of the pit.” Churchill wanted, not approval, but attention. He didn’t mind boos. He expected them, for he was preparing to hoist the banner of rebellion. Wilfrid Blunt, no parliamentarian, may have sensed this in describing Winston in his diary: “In mind and manner he is a strange replica of his father, with all his father’s suddenness and assurance, and I should say more than his father’s ability.” There was, he added, “just the same gaminerie and contempt of the conventional.” One would think Randolph’s old colleagues might have seen that. But having taught the mutinous father a lesson, they hardly expected that they would have to teach it again to the son. Besides, until now Winston had performed the rites of Tory loyalty. He had dedicated The River War to Salisbury, “under whose wise direction the Conservative Party have long enjoyed power and the nation prosperity.” Lord Randolph, the insurgent, had sat below the gangway, the customary seat for independent MPs. After being sworn in, Winston had chosen a spot directly behind the front government bench.8
With the arrival of spring, however, he moved. The alert correspondent for the Daily Mail noticed that the member for Oldham was now “sitting in the corner seat from which his father delivered his last speech in the House of Commons” and observed “a startling resemblance” between Winston and Randolph—“the square forehead and the full bold eye of his father,” and “the hurried stride through the lobby.” The lobby correspondent for Punch wrote that the resemblance lay “less in face than in figure, in gesture and manner of speech. When the young member for Oldham addresses the House, with hands on hips, head bent forward, right foot stretched forth, memories of days that are no more flood the brain.” The son now began to advocate tight budgets and isolation from quarrels outside the Empire. References to Secretary for War William Brodrick began to appear in his speeches—Brodrick, under secretary in 1886, had been an enemy of Randolph’s—and they were caustic. He was deeply offended, and said so, when Brodrick told the House: “It is by accident that we have become a military nation. We must endeavour to remain one.” Salisbury had grown inattentive in his seventies, but Joe Chamberlain observed Winston often conferring with Sir Francis Mowatt, who had been his father’s Exchequer colleague. Winston himself wrote: “Presently I began to criticize Mr. Brodrick’s Army expansion and to plead the cause of economy in Parliament. Old Mowatt said a word to me now and then and put me in touch with some younger officials, afterwards themselves eminent, with whom it was very helpful to talk.” Speaking to the Liverpool Conservative Association on April 23, Randolph’s son fired his first heavy warning shot. He deplored the large sums earmarked for army expansion. “Any danger that comes to Britain would not be on land,” he said; “it would come on the sea. With regard to our military system we must be prepared to deal with all the little wars which occur continually on the frontiers of the Empire. We cannot expect to meet great wars… for I think our game essentially is to be a naval and commercial power. I cannot look upon the army as anything but an adjunct to the navy…. I hope that in considering the lessons of the South African war we shall not be drawn from our true policy, which is to preserve the command of markets and of the seas.”9
At 11:00 P.M. on Monday, May 13, he opened his offensive in the House. Realizing that this would be a watershed speech for him, he had been working and reworking it for six weeks, and like his father he had sent advance copies to the press, committing himself before he rose. Reminding them of “a half-forgotten episode”—his father’s fall—he read a few lines from Randolph’s letter of resignation and said he proposed “to lift again the tattered flag of retrenchment and economy.” In less than eight years, he noted, army costs had risen from seventeen million pounds to nearly thirty million. He wryly congratulated the secretary for war. This, surely, was a triumph of acquisitiveness. But now the minister had come to the well again. The House was being asked to vote on yet another rise, this one of five million pounds. Churchill’s voice rose: “Has the wealth of the country doubled? Has the population of the Empire doubled? Have the armies of Europe doubled? Is there no poverty at home? Has the English Channel dried up and are we no longer an island?” It was time “a Conservative by tradition, whose fortunes are linked indissolubly to the Tory party,” should protest this increase of the public burden. Brodrick wanted three army corps. Why? “A European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation of the conquerors.” Besides, the minister must know that “if we went to war with any great Power his three Army corps would scarcely serve as a vanguard. If we are hated they will not make us loved, if we are in danger they will not make us safe. They are enough to irritate; they are not enough to overawe. Yet while they cannot make us invulnerable, they may very likely make us venturesome…. We shall make a fatal bargain if we allow the moral force which this country has so long exerted to become diminished, or perhaps even destroyed, for the sake of the costly, trumpery, dangerous military playthings on which the Secretary for War has set his heart.”10
His friend Atkins described him in the Guardian as “a lonely but self-possessed figure as he stood there reproducing the sentiments which caused the dramatic resignation of his father.” Punch was jubilant. And the Opposition, of course, was elated; Massingham predicted that one day he would be prime minister. His own party was discomfited and resentful. The next day a Tory MP icily noted that it was a mistake “to confuse filial piety with public duty.” Brodrick, scornful, observed that the party, having survived without the father, could part company with the son, too. He hoped Winston would “grow up” to regret “the day when he came down to the House to preach Imperialism without being able to bear the burden of Imperialism, and when the hereditary qualities he possesses of eloquence and courage may be tempered also by discarding the hereditary desire to run Imperialism on the cheap.” Some Conservatives dismissed the speech as a publicity stunt. Violet Asquith heard talk that his conduct had been “based on an almost slavish imitation” of Lord Randolph. But the general feeling, once tempers had cooled, was that the incident was best forgotten and soon would be. A gifted young Tory had felt compelled to pay peculiar tribute to an unfortunate memory. Now that he had got it out of his system, he co
uld move forward with his own career, unfettered by the awkward past.11
Not so. Churchill had believed every word in his speech. He himself insisted on pointing out that it marked “a definite divergence of thought and sympathy from nearly all those thronging the benches around me.” The government seemed shaky to him; he was convinced he could influence it. To his mother he wrote: “There is a good deal of dissatisfaction in the party, and a shocking lack of cohesion…. The whole Treasury Bench appear to be sleepy and exhausted and played out.” He meant to rouse it by deliberately adopting an offensive manner, singling out a major minister, Brodrick, and baiting him. Once at Question Time the secretary for war was asked how many horses and mules had been shipped to the Boer War. He replied and Winston innocently raised a supplementary question: “Can my right honorable friend say how many asses have been sent to South Africa?” To those who cried foul, he said: “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary; it fulfils the same function as pain in the human body, it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things.” He called Brodrick’s army plan “a humbug and a sham,” a “total, costly, ghastly failure,” “the Great English Fraud.” Several other young Tories joined him, and they spoke in relays. Sir James Fergusson, a die-hard Conservative, was so upset that he wrote the Daily Telegraph, protesting that he had never known “an attack upon a Government so organized, and pressed with so much bitterness and apparent determination by members elected to support it.”12
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