The Churchills

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by Mary S. Lovell


  As the enemy swept towards them, as inexorable as the incoming tide, Winston chose his place and galloped his troops forward into the mass of ‘blue-black bodies’ it was what they had been trained for. Men either side of him were killed – shot, or hacked to death with spears and gleaming curved swords – but Winston’s star held good. ‘My dearest Mama,’ he wrote on 4 September 1898, two days after the battle, ‘you will have been relieved by my telegram which I sent off at once. I was under fire all day and rode through the charge. You know my luck in these things. I was about the only officer whose clothes, saddlery, or horse were all uninjured. I fired 10 shots with my pistol – all necessary – and just got to the end of it as we cleared the crush. I never felt the slightest nervousness.’20 He anticipated that he would get leave immediately and would be home in a matter of weeks, so he asked her to arrange some political meetings for him in Birmingham and Bradford. ‘Sunny will help,’ he added confidently.

  When Jennie showed this letter to the Prince of Wales he replied: ‘It is a most interesting letter and he indeed had a charmed life to escape out of that charge without a scratch.’ But he was strongly of the opinion that Winston should remain in the Army and not go into politics.21

  Jennie was staying with relatives of Leonie’s husband on the Isle of Mull* when she received Winston’s note. George Cornwallis-West was also staying there, indicating that Jennie’s family, at least, had accepted the unlikely liaison. During the months after her return to London, George wrote daily letters of love which also detail his hunting, fishing, racing and shooting exploits and his participation in regimental races. They are the letters of a very young, very active man of the archetypal Victorian squirearchy. Jennie read his rather boastful reports – ‘We had a good day – about 1100 head all told, 700 pheasants and the rest rabbits and hares…my horse won the Regimental race in a common canter’ – in tandem with the letters from Winston who was now back in India and writing in much the same vein about sporting activities. But whereas Winston regarded these as mere pastimes and had visions for his future, as time went on George was still wedded to his youthful pleasures as if they were his raison d’être. And when Winston audaciously resigned his commission and returned to England in the spring of 1899 (at about the time that his formidable grandmother, Duchess Fanny, died†) he unfurled his colours by casting himself at once – if unsuccessfully – into a campaign for the vacant parliamentary seat of Oldham. Quite how he proposed to manage financially is unknown, for even had he been successful, MPs in those days received no salary.‡ He had hopes of some income from his writing but he was still deeply in debt with only the annual £400 from his father’s trust, which did not cover his Army expenses. However, he believed that he had done all he could usefully do in the Army; it was time to move forward.

  From the start Jennie knew that her relationship with George Cornwallis-West was impossible; she knew, too, that their liaison was the talk of London Society. The Prince good-naturedly advised her to end it; she was spared criticism from one quarter, at least, by the death of her mother-in-law. George was warned off by his superior officers, by his parents and by his godfather the Prince, but he would have none of it, saying that he wanted to marry Jennie – to the distress of his parents and of Jennie herself. She kept telling him to marry a young heiress (though probably without naming anyone). Jennie fell in love easily and she was genuinely in love now; her youthful lover made her feel young and desired. They saw each other constantly, though she continued to insist that marriage was out of the question.

  By the autumn of 1899 a war in South Africa was inevitable. Having failed to gain the seat at Oldham, Winston, though now a civilian, was suddenly on fire to join the British troops sailing for Cape Town and Durban. Alfred Harmsworth, the proprietor of the Daily Mail, cabled him asking if he would act as their war correspondent; Winston promptly used this offer to obtain a far more lucrative contract from the Morning Post* of £250 a month, which was then a record sum. With his military training, his natural ability as a strategist, his VIP contacts and his burning ambition, Winston was a new and different sort of war correspondent. One of his first actions, when appointed, was to write personally to the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, requesting introductions to people of importance in South Africa. Chamberlain duly obliged, saying he would do so ‘for the son of my old friend’.22

  While he waited to leave for Cape Town, Winston found time to coach Consuelo, who – without any qualifications – had agreed to give a talk about technical education to a club for the blind. Afterwards he bolstered her confidence, telling her that a professional speaker could not have done better. In this way Winston was an enabler, for his encouragement helped Consuelo to find her own path into public life, something Sunny would never have bothered to do. The continuing close link with Blenheim was important to Winston, and he was always affectionately tied to his family. He also maintained close links with the Dowager Duchess Lily, and often stayed with her at her seaside estate, Deepdene, on the Dorset coast.

  The first shots of the Boer War were fired on 10 October and within two days Winston was on his way to South Africa rejoicing, despite being seasick for most of the early part of the journey. With him went his valet – his father’s former manservant, Thomas Walden – and a huge quantity of luggage including seventy-two cases containing fine French wines, vintage port, Vermouth, ten-year-old Scotch whisky, eau de vie, fruit brandy and Rose’s lime juice. As Winston’s son Randolph would later write, ‘He never believed that war should be needlessly uncomfortable.’23 His fellow passengers aboard the ship Dunottar Castle included Sir Redvers Buller, commander of the British troops in South Africa, accompanied by his ADC Lord Gerard, who by serendipity had been one of Lord Randolph’s closest friends. Winston intended to ask Lord Gerard for a temporary commission in the Yeomanry.

  Fourteen days into the voyage he was cast into despair when they passed a homebound ship from which they obtained news that three battles had been fought in which the Boers had been easily defeated. He worried that it might be all over before he even arrived. But he realised his fears were unjustified when he and two fellow journalists disembarked at Cape Town and started asking questions. From the answers they received the three men concluded that there was plenty of fighting still to be done, and that they could yet make a name for themselves if they grasped every opportunity. This was all Winston asked.

  10

  1899–1900

  National Hero!

  As a result of the intelligence they gleaned, Winston and the other two journalists agreed to leave the ship and make the remainder of the journey together overland by train and steamer. This would enable them to reach Durban a full three days before Buller and his staff. When Winston arrived he found his old friend Reggie Barnes, with whom he had travelled to Cuba, wounded in the thigh and resting aboard a hospital ship waiting to be shipped home. Barnes told him that the Boers were courageous, skilful and successful fighters – an opposing view to the received image of the Boers in England that was not lost on Winston.

  Realising that Buller would need to spend time, when he arrived, in establishing a general headquarters before moving towards the front at Ladysmith, Winston and his companions decided to go on immediately, before the enemy could consolidate their gains. J.B. Atkins of the Manchester Guardian was one of the two fellow journalists travelling with Winston. He left a useful sketch of him: ‘skin, slightly reddish – hair, pale, lively’ he walked about ‘with neck out-thrust’ and often sat in deep meditation folding and unfolding his hands ‘as though he were helping himself to untie knots’.

  When the prospects of a great career like that of his father, Lord Randolph, excited him, then such a gleam shot from him that he was almost transfigured…it was as though a light was switched on inside him which suddenly shone out through his eyes. I had not before encountered this sort of ambition, unabashed, frankly egotistical, communicating its excitement and extorting sympathy. He had acquired no reve
rence for his seniors as such and talked to them as though they were of his own age or younger.1

  Atkins recalled that from Pietermaritzburg they had hired a train to take them on to Ladysmith, but they were still many miles short of it, at a ‘tin township’ called Estcourt where a small British force was camped, when their train was halted. The line ahead of them was closed because the Boers were in control of most of the area as far as Ladysmith and they held the bridge over the Tugela River between Estcourt and Ladysmith. Ladysmith itself was blockaded and the Boers were not far ahead of them. ‘At any moment,’ Winston wrote, ‘ten or twelve thousand mounted Boers might sweep forward to attack us or cut off our retreat. Yet it was necessary to hold Estcourt as long and in as firm a posture, as possible.’2

  Wars were fought at a different pace in the nineteenth century, and Winston’s ample stores were evidently put to good use. ‘We pitched our tents in the railway yard,’ Atkins wrote:

  We found a good cook and we had some good wine. We entertained friends every evening, to our pleasure and professional advantage…one memorable evening we entertained the officer commanding…While we were dining the clang of field guns being loaded into trucks went on unceasingly…the officer, as he told us, had decided the position at Estcourt could hardly be held and that a retirement…was necessary.

  As dinner proceeded, Winston, with an assurance which I partly envied and partly deprecated, argued that [Piet] Joubert [the Boer commandant] was probably too cautious to advance yet; that he was no doubt delighted with the security of the Tugela River; that it would be a pity to point the way to Maritzburg, and so on. Shortly after our guest had left us the clanging in the trucks, which had ceased, began again. The trucks were being unloaded. Winston gleamed. ‘I did that!’ he said; but added gracefully, ‘We did that!’3

  Within a short time Winston had met two old acquaintances at Estcourt. One, Leo Amery* the correspondent for The Times, had been a fellow pupil at Harrow, where Winston had once pushed him into the swimming pool; they were never friends. The other man was a close friend and a fellow polo player from Winston’s days in India, Captain Aylmer Haldane. Haldane had just been ordered to take an armoured train and reconnoitre the line towards Ladysmith, and he asked Winston to accompany him. Winston was not at all sure that an armoured train would provide much protection if they were trapped on it, but he agreed to meet Haldane at dawn next day.

  The expedition soon ran into trouble: the Boers had sabotaged the line and the rear part of the train was derailed. Under heavy fire Haldane, Churchill and about fifty men escaped from the upturned section and put up a brave fight, but they were captured – in Winston’s case by a Boer commander named Louis Botha.† Winston had already reached a position of safety by the engine, but had hurriedly returned to assist those left behind in the fighting, accidentally leaving his pistol lying on the engine plate. The captives were transported ‘hundreds of miles into the heart of the enemy’s country’4 to a prisoner compound at the officers’ camp based in the State Model School in Pretoria, the capital of the enemy-held Transvaal.

  Winston was held there for three weeks, hating every moment – ‘more than I have ever hated any other period in my whole life,’ he wrote.5 He described his surroundings vividly in letters to Jennie and Pamela (whose lucky charm he still wore, at her request), ending his letter to Pamela with the words: ‘I write you this line to tell you that among new and vivid scenes I think often of you.’ On 30 November he added a postscript to a letter to Bourke Cockran: ‘I am 25 today – it is terrible to think how little time remains.’6

  His first inclination was to try to talk his way out of what he saw could be a lengthy and ignominious incarceration, by presenting his credentials as a civilian war correspondent and claiming to have been an ‘unarmed non-combatant’ when captured. This failed, because he had been widely reported by those who had escaped as not only leading the fighting but rousing the men on the train to fight. So he and Haldane hatched an escape plan with a fellow prisoner who knew the country well and spoke Afrikaans and Dutch. In the event, on 11 December Winston hopped over the wall using a ledge in the latrines to give him a spring, and was waiting on the other side when a sentry became suspicious and the other two men had to give up their escape attempt.*

  It does not take a great deal of imagination to work out what thoughts must have raced through the young man’s mind at that moment, as he crouched alone in the night under leafless thorn bushes. He could not return unnoticed because there was an overhang at the top of the wall on his side and no ledge to help him get back. He had only recently arrived in the country so he had no reserve of knowledge, and his only assets were some English money and bars of chocolate in his pockets. He had no maps, no compass, no supplies or weapons, and no knowledge of Afrikaans or Dutch. He concluded that he had two options: to give himself up and risk spending the war in even closer confinement as a would-be escapee, or try to make his way alone to the border with Portuguese East Africa, taking him three hundred miles through hostile territory. He made his decision instantly and began to make his way through the darkened streets of Pretoria by the simple expedient of walking confidently in the centre of the road, humming a tune, appearing as though he knew where he was headed. There were townspeople about but no one looked at him twice and he judged his direction by the stars, until he reached the railway line which, he reckoned, must run towards the East African coast.

  After hiding in the freight yard, Winston scrambled aboard a train going in the right direction. He abandoned it just before dawn and spent the day hiding in undergrowth and drinking from pools. When night fell he walked along the railway line hoping to repeat his success of the previous day, but no trains came. He became very dehydrated until eventually, near dawn, seeing a house near a mine he tentatively knocked at the door. By almost incredible luck the house was occupied by a pro-British manager – the only non-Boer sympathiser for miles – who hid and fed him. While he was eating his first meal Winston discovered that one of his protectors came from Oldham, and having listened to Winston’s story of his defeat in the election there, the man pressed his hand and said he was not to worry – ‘They’ll all vote for you next time,’ he promised.

  Winston then spent over a week uncomfortably hiding deep in a mineshaft, mostly in the dark, with rats – who ate his candles – for company, during which the countryside and every building was scoured for him. Posters offering a reward of ‘£25* dead or alive’ were everywhere, and ensured the search was very thorough. He was described as ‘about 5 ft 8" or 9", blond with a light thin moustache. Walks with a slight stoop, cannot speak any Dutch’. When at last the hunt for him moved on, he was transferred to a remote safe-house for a further few weeks while his protectors organised his escape route. Eventually he was told he was to stow away under bales of wool on a train bound for Lourenço Marques,† where he would be met by a trustworthy contact. It was a crude and simple plan – Winston was afraid even to fall asleep during the overnight stops in case he snored and was heard – but it worked. Having learned by heart the names of all the stations en route, he knew when he was near his destination; but he was still not safe, for even though he had reached Portuguese territory he had been warned that Lourenço Marques was crowded with Boers and Boer sympathisers. However, he was met and safely guided to the British Consulate and by that evening was on board the weekly ferry to Durban, where he was able to read the news. A few weeks later he sent fifteen suitably engraved gold pocket watches to the men who had helped him evade recapture, and his 1930s memoir of his adventures still provides a beautifully written and thrilling read.7

  In the month that had elapsed since Winston was taken prisoner, the British forces under Buller had suffered serious reverses as well as casualties on a scale unknown since the Crimean War: three thousand deaths occurred in seven days, which the newspapers dubbed ‘Black Week’. As an antidote to this dire news, in order to bolster public morale desperate editors had fastened on Winston’s ‘Boy�
��s Own’ escape and in triumphant headlines blazoned the story and the unsuccessful search by the Boers. In the absence of any news of him he was variously reported as recaptured or dead, but he was always portrayed as the daring English fox with a price on his head, evading the Boer hounds. The question on everyone’s lips was ‘Where is Churchill?’ As a consequence, when Winston arrived at Durban, much to his gratification he was given a hero’s welcome. ‘The harbour was decorated with flags. Bands and crowds thronged the quays,’ he wrote. ‘The Admiral, the General, and the Mayor pressed on board to clasp my hand. I was nearly torn to pieces by enthusiastic kindness…whirled along on the shoulders of the crowd.’8

  The popular press in England went wild with the story – how the young, good-looking, patrician officer had single-handedly defied the Boers. Within days he was back with the British Army promoted to the rank of lieutenant by Buller, without having to abandon his role as war correspondent, and posted to the South African Light Horse Regiment. In those few weeks since his capture and escape Winston had become a household name not only in South Africa, but – far more importantly for his future ambitions – in Britain. Two items of correspondence dating from that moment stand out among the mass of documentation. One is a letter from General Buller who wrote to Winston’s great-aunt Lady Londonderry, thus confirming that Winston’s objective to ‘be noticed’ had succeeded: ‘He really is a fine fellow…I must say I admire him greatly. I wish he was leading regular troops instead of writing for a rotten paper.’9 The other is a telegram to Jennie from the girl with whom Winston had ‘an understanding’, which read simply: ‘Thank God – Pamela.’10

 

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