Believing that Churchill was not bright enough to go to university, his father successfully encouraged him to embark on a military career. At the age of fifteen, the young Winston began to prepare for the entrance examination to Sandhurst, which proved to be a challenge for him. Among the subjects he had to master was mathematics, obliging him to toil in its ‘dim chambers lighted by sullen, sulphurous fires . . . reputed to contain a dragon called the “Differential Calculus”’. When he passed the examination at the third attempt, he was relieved to have seen the back of mathematics for ever: ‘I am very glad that there are quite a number of people born with a gift and liking for [it],’ he later recalled. ‘Serve them right!’
As he later wrote, after he ‘passed out of Sandhurst into the world’ in December 1894, he was perpetually busy: he saw himself as ‘an actor’ in the ‘endless moving picture’ of life.14 Some of his pursuits were cerebral rather than physical – at the end of August the following year, when he was a twenty-year-old cavalry subaltern in Aldershot, he decided to read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, who soon became one of his heroes.15 A year later, in Bangalore, southern India, Churchill was still reading Gibbon’s volumes, while lying on his charpoy in the punishing afternoon heat, waited on hand and foot by servants. It was not until the winter of 1896 that ‘the desire for learning’ belatedly came up on him, he later recalled.16 In a six-month feast of reading, he gave himself something like the liberal education he wished he had received at university. While improving his polo skills, his intellectual focus was on the dozens of challenging books he approached ‘with an empty, hungry mind with fairly strong jaws’.17 At the end of March 1897, he wrote to his mother listing the books he had gulped down, including a translation of Plato’s Republic, twelve volumes of Macaulay and four thousand pages of Gibbon.18 Later, Macaulay and Gibbon were the most important influences on his literary style, their perspectives, rhythms and mannerisms imprinted on virtually every paragraph of his mature writings and speeches.
During his time in Bangalore, Churchill also read at least two science books: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the more superficial Modern Science and Modern Thought, a popular introduction by Samuel Laing, a politician and railway administrator.19 Laing’s colloquially written but dense text enabled Churchill to build on his schoolboy science without the pain of complicated mathematics. The author concentrated mainly on the life sciences, but did include an account of the fundamental contents of the material universe – ‘ether, matter and energy’ – including reverential passages on the progress scientists had made in probing the sizes and masses of atoms. The second part of the book, endeavouring ‘to show how much of religion can be saved from the shipwreck of theology’, may well have reinforced Churchill’s coolness about religious faith. In a letter to his mother, he looked forward to a time when ‘the great laws of Nature [are] understood’, when ‘the cold bright light of science & reason will shine through the cathedral windows’ so that ‘we can dispense with the religious toys that agreeably fostered the development of mankind’.20
Although enriched by this reading, he did not allow scientific methods to intrude on his personal life. He later wrote:21
I therefore adopted quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe, while at the same time leaving reason to pursue unfettered whatever paths she was capable of treading.
Almost everyone knew that Churchill was at heart a politician and a man of letters, not an academic and certainly not a scientist. Lindemann, however, claimed to regard him as ‘a scientist who missed his vocation’:22
All the qualities . . . of the scientist are manifest in him. The readiness to face realities, even though they contradict a favourite hypothesis; the recognition that theories are made to fit facts, not facts to fit the theories; the interest in phenomena and the desire to explore them, and above all the underlying conviction that the world is not just a jumble of events but that there must be some higher unity . . .
This was idiosyncratic to the point of perversity: Churchill was much more skilful as a rhetorician than as an analyst. Yet the Prof’s comment is perceptive. Churchill had the combination of imagination and – when it suited him – scepticism that characterises all good scientists. Even in his most partisan speeches, there is a sense that he knew he was advancing a theory of events that might well have to be revised in the light of evidence. ‘I have often had to eat my words,’ he once said, ‘and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.’23 Churchill consistently demonstrated that he wanted to keep one step ahead of orthodox thinking about the impact of new science and technology on the human race, especially when it was at war.
The Prof also cultivated Churchill’s interest in curiosity-driven science, and found him notably receptive in the spring of 1926 when he gave him a book on the new quantum theory of the atom. The account – whose title is not known – grabbed Churchill’s imagination and distracted him from the Budget he was to deliver a few weeks later.24 On the first Sunday of April, Churchill was at home with his family at Chartwell, his country seat, and spent much of that morning thinking about the book. He was working on the first floor in his spacious study, whose recent refurbishments included a moulded architrave installed in the Tudor doorway. The room – its walls lined with paintings and books – was dominated by a mahogany table, on which rested a porcelain bust of Admiral Nelson, and another of Napoleon.25
Chartwell is high on the North Downs in Kent, barely half an hour’s drive from Westminster but as quiet as a forest. Set in a little over eighty acres of wooded grounds, the rambling redbrick house then had five reception rooms, nineteen bedrooms and dressing rooms, and a dining room with a gorgeous view across the Weald.26 When Churchill was not in London, he lived there with his wife Clemmie and their four children, attended by a cadre of some eighteen servants, including a butler, a footman, a chauffeur, a chef and a few gardeners. He relaxed by painting in his studio, by building brick walls on the site, and by supervising the gardening or planning the construction of a new water feature. Yet on that unseasonably warm morning, the grounds of Chartwell coming into bloom, atomic science took precedence over the welcome of spring.
Wanting to make sure that he had correctly grasped the book’s gist, Churchill dictated a summary to an assistant and arranged for a typed transcript to be sent to Lindemann for checking. The Prof did not have to make many annotations, as Churchill’s distillation was accurate enough to do credit to a scholarship student. In his summary, he pictured electrons in a typical atom moving rapidly around, some of them able to make quantum jumps from one allowed orbit to another – an idea introduced a decade earlier by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Churchill’s summary includes his first written reference to the atomic ‘nucleus’, whose existence had been deduced in 1911 by the experimenter Ernest Rutherford, Bohr’s mentor. This atomic kernel, as Churchill had read, is tiny and extremely dense, occupying typically only about a billionth of the atom’s volume, and almost all its mass. It is the energy stored there that is released in radioactivity and that, in H. G. Wells’s imagination at least, might conceivably be used to make weapons.
Most atoms of the known chemical elements are completely stable and hold together for ever, Churchill noted. But some of the elements, such as uranium and radium, undergo radioactive decay, their nuclei transmuting into other varieties and ejecting a few other smaller particles, while releasing huge amounts of energy by atomic standards. At the end of his notes, when he comes to the subject of nuclear disintegrations, he lets loose his imagination and draws an analogy with geopolitics: ‘[The process of radioactivity] . . . constitutes a liberation of energy at the expense of structure. It suggests the breakup of Empires into independent States, and the breakup of these again into village communities.’
‘There are a great many points I want to ask you about,’ Churchill wrote in a covering letter to Lindemann, mentioning one that especially preoccupi
ed him. ‘Have the relations between music and mathematics been examined in the same way as those between mathematics and physics? If so, there will be a correspondence between music and physics other than mere sound wave [sic].’27 He had grasped that great advances in theoretical physics sometimes invite an aesthetic response, as Einstein had shown when he commented that Bohr’s atomic theory exemplified ‘the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought’.28
This summary of Churchill’s reading in atomic theory is one of the best testimonies to his scientific curiosity. Although his detractors could reasonably complain about his impetuosity and egocentricity, his intellectual energy was undeniable. Lindemann was one of the few who knew that this vitality extended to science.
After the General Election of May 1929, Churchill’s fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse – the electors ejected the Conservatives, and Ramsay MacDonald, no admirer of Churchill, again became Prime Minister. Churchill left 11 Downing Street and would be out of ministerial office for over a decade.
He had starred in Parliament for twenty-seven years, and played ten leading roles on the Commons stage, but now he had only a walk-on part. A small consolation was that he now had much more time for lucrative journalism. One of his most widely reprinted articles was an appreciation of George Bernard Shaw, whom Churchill regarded as ‘the greatest living master of letters in the English-speaking world’ but also as ‘the world’s greatest intellectual clown’.29 Churchill predictably took the opportunity to take a swipe at the government of Communist Russia, Shaw’s ‘spiritual home’.
After quarrelling with Stanley Baldwin over economic policy, Churchill took a break from politics in the summer of 1929 and went on a three-month lecture tour of North America. He was usually well disposed to the United States – his mother had been born there, and used to unfurl the Stars and Stripes and wave it in front of her two sons every Fourth of July.30 American culture had long been one of his interests: at twelve, he had seen his hero Buffalo Bill perform in London, and thirteen years later he had been introduced to an audience in New York by Mark Twain.31
Churchill’s wife once remarked with a smile, ‘Winston is half-American and all English.’32 In the 1920s, however, he – like many of his Commons colleagues – sometimes took a dim view of American foreign policy. As a new Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924, he rejected the American claim for a share of Germany’s war reparations, on the grounds that the US had not signed the Treaty of Versailles.33 More seriously, he was angry with President Coolidge’s administration for having the temerity to seek parity with Britain’s naval power, as he told the Cabinet in July 1927:34
No doubt it is quite right in the interests of peace to go on talking about war with the United States being ‘unthinkable’. Everyone knows that this is not true . . . We do not wish to put ourselves in the power of the United States. We cannot tell what they might do if at some future date they were in a position to give us orders about our policy, say, in India, or Egypt, or Canada . . .
In the early summer of 1929, he was nonetheless looking forward to being among Americans, whom he believed to be ‘a frailer race’ with ‘more hopes and more illusions’.35 During his tour, he took full advantage of the money-making opportunities the United States afforded and also experienced the nadir of the Crash, when he walked down Wall Street aware that he was about to make huge losses. At today’s prices, they were about half a million pounds.36
In late 1929, when he returned to the UK, which was also plunging into a depression, he found himself excluded from the Conservative Party’s inner quorum. There was even talk that he might quit Parliament. But plans discussed in Parliament to give Dominion status to parts of India outraged his imperialist sensibilities. ‘I shall certainly not retire from politics’, he said, ‘while the question of our retention of India is still to be decided.’37
In the Commons tea room, his critics muttered that he came to the House only to hear the sound of his own voice.38 It was pointless to spend much time there, he decided – he would be better off developing his career outside Westminster. Having become a ‘fan of the wireless’ in 1927, his authoritative and witty delivery made him a popular attraction on radio – one producer called him ‘the perfect broadcaster’ – though he complained that the monolithic British Broadcasting Corporation was muzzling him.39 During these ‘locust years’,40 he continued to live well, dining high on the hog at the Savoy, drinking the finest champagne and running Chartwell in style. By all accounts it was a happy home, though he had his share of sadness, having to cope with the antics of his bumptious son Randolph and the frequent absences of his wife. While he worked long hours in his study and fraternised with his associates, she often took off on vacations alone.
Most of Churchill’s time in the decade from 1929 onwards was consumed with literary projects. He wrote a charming memoir, My Early Life, a multi-volume biography of his ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough, and began what would become his elephantine History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Another money-spinner was Great Contemporaries, a collection of essays he had written over the previous few years on ‘Great Men of our age’ including Bernard Shaw, Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt.41 In addition to the million or so words contained in these books, he contributed hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics, many of them spun to bolster his nationalistic creed: ‘I am all for old England going on, year after year, century after century, building up each generation, and losing nothing.’42 Editors got used to him barking down the phone with both a proposal for a new series of articles and a statement of his eye-watering fee.43 Clemmie knew that these assignments were completed mainly to fund his extravagant lifestyle – most of these journalistic pieces, she complained, were beneath him.
Shortly before he fell out of political favour, he published the penultimate volume of his account of the First World War, The World Crisis: The Aftermath, which includes some uneasy reflections on the future of human conflict. In the opening chapter, he dreams of what might have been, given that ‘science had produced weapons destructive of . . . whole cities and populations, weapons whose actions were restricted by no frontiers’.44 He imagines the victorious leaders meeting promptly and resolving that ‘the new instrument of world order should be armed with the new weapons of science’. Under the auspices of the League of Nations, an ‘International Air Force’ is set up, its pilots dedicated to maintaining peace, like latter-day knights of the air. The difficult question of chemical warfare is handled through ‘a universal decree forbidding any nation to practise it’.
These ideas were faithfully echoed sixteen years later, when the victors of the Second World War had to consider the most destructive of the next generation of weapons, nuclear bombs. Churchill considered them explicitly for the first time in his article ‘Fifty Years Hence’, published towards the end of 1931. This was a year of international upheaval, when the world’s banking system almost fell apart and Japan seized Manchuria, the first act of what would become a long conflict in the Far East. In January, the commissioning editor of the Strand Magazine Reeves Shaw had written to Churchill suggesting a series of articles including ‘Fifty Years Hence . . . a forecast of the state of affairs all over the world – Britain, America, India’.45 Churchill accepted immediately but changed the focus to ‘science, morals and politics’.46 He was taking a shot at a subject recently covered by his best friend, the rapier-tongued Earl of Birkenhead, who had just completed The World in 2030 AD, a book Churchill almost certainly read and discussed with him over dinner at the Savoy Hotel during the fortnightly meetings of The Other Club, which they had co-founded two decades before.47 If so, Churchill will have read about the changes that might come if nuclear energy were to supersede fossil fuels, making electrical power much cheaper. He will also have seen that Birkenhead’s opening chapter ended with a warning about the coming of nuclear weapons: ‘As you are reading these words, some disinterested researcher may detonate an atomic explosion which will involve the wo
rld, and reduce it to a flaring vortex of incandescent gas.’48
To help with the writing of ‘Fifty Years Hence’, Lindemann sent Churchill an eleven-page draft.49 The Prof’s ideas ranged from mobile phones to the rudiments of a new biotechnology, and he looked forward to a time when ‘we shall escape the absurdity of growing whole chicken in order to eat [just] the breast or the wing’. Most important, ‘New sources of power, vastly more important than any we yet know, will be discovered,’ enabling human beings to have unprecedented control over their environment – he was thinking of nuclear energy. It will not have taken long to adapt the draft – it needed only an inviting introduction, a satisfying conclusion and a few editing tweaks to give the piece a Churchillian sheen.50
Among the cultural references in the article was the recent London premiere of the play RUR by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, who popularised the word ‘robot’ coined by his brother, and Olaf Stapledon’s new science-fiction novel Last and First Men, which explored the development of the human race over the next two billion years. The book left Churchill cold. He was more taken with the melancholic wisdom of the prophetic poem ‘Locksley Hall’, written in 1835 by Alfred Tennyson.51 Churchill quoted six of its couplets and praised the accuracy of its predictions, including the conquest of the air for commerce and war: ‘the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails’.
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