Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  “He is ambitious and he is calculating; yet he is not cold — and that saves him. His ambition is sanguine, runs in a torrent, and the calculation is hardly more than the rock or the stump which the torrent strikes for a second, yet which suffices to direct its course. It is not so much that he calculates how he is to make his career a success — how, frankly, he is to boom — but that he has a queer, shrewd power of introspection, which tells him his gifts and character are such as will make him boom.

  “What he will become, who shall say? At the rate he goes there will hardly be room for him in Parliament at thirty, or in England at forty.”

  Mr. Steevens’ paragraphs stand up after half a century as an almost unique piece of divination, comparable to the forward-looking flashes of Churchill himself. When the latter was twenty-six, and making his first considerable speech in the House of Commons, he said, in a general discussion of a national defense bill, “In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled against each other, each individual embittered and inflamed — when the resources of science and civilization sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.”

  This precocious warning, in 1901, or more than a decade before the sad, opening salvos of the first great “people’s war,” set a level of prediction beneath which Churchill has never fallen. His has been the voice of intelligent criticism, imperial Britain’s conscience, the court of last appeal in time of danger. His friends feel that he was born with an urge to improve and protect. At Harrow, the select boys’ school from which he was graduated well toward the bottom, he was regarded as interesting but a monumental nuisance. He was forever criticizing whatever fell within his view. In the biblical phrase of one of his contemporaries there, “Winston sat in the seat of the scornful.” Among the musty records of the institution is to be found a letter of Churchill’s, rather evasively signed “Junius Junior,” to the Harrovian, the school newspaper, in which he took up the cudgel against a correspondent known as “Aequitas Junior.” The bone of contention was the (to Churchill) inexcusable decay of the gymnasium. He wrote of the unhappy Aequitas, “I will not pause to criticise his style nor comment on his probable motives, though I am inclined to think that both are equally poor,” and he went on with such warmth that the dispatch ended on an editor’s note: “(We have omitted a portion of our correspondent’s letter, which seemed to us to exceed the limits of fair criticism — Eds. Harrovian.)”

  It is not too much to say that, down the years, Churchill’s critical warning voice, whether mild or intemperate, has often accomplished the salvation of an England seemingly bent on self-destruction. In August of 1939, nearly forty years after that wise, fledgling speech in the House of Commons, he was again hearing the alarms of war in the ill wind from across the Channel. In this he stood almost alone among the weak and deluded leaders of the world. Responding to a Government statement by Sir Thomas Inskip, who said that “War today is not only not inevitable but is unlikely,” he described the queer hush that had fallen over Europe:

  “What kind of hush is it? Alas! it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen carefully; I think I hear something — yes, there it was quite clear. Don’t you hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the parade grounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two-million German soldiers and more than a million Italians — ‘going on maneuvers’ — yes, only on maneuvers! Of course it’s only maneuvers — just like last year. After all the Dictators must train their soldiers. They could scarcely do less in common prudence, when the Danes, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Albanians — and of course the Jews — may leap out upon them at any moment and rob them of their living space, and make them sign another paper to say who began it. Besides, these German and Italian armies may have another work of Liberation to perform. It was only last year they liberated Austria from the horrors of self-government. It was only in March they freed the Czechoslovak Republic from the misery of independent existence. It is only two years ago that Signor Mussolini gave the ancient kingdom of Abyssinia its Magna Charta. It is only two months ago that little Albania got its writ of Habeas Corpus, and Mussolini sent in his Bill of Rights for King Zog to pay ... No wonder the armies are tramping on when there is so much liberation to be done, and no wonder there is a hush among all the neighbors of Germany and Italy where they are wondering which one is going to be ‘liberated’ next.”

  Churchill’s high intelligence is coupled to a memory of uncanny brilliance. The two qualities, so neatly supplementary, make it possible for him to adjudge the probable shape of the future in the light of what he remembers, and interprets, of the past. Whereas intellect is a gift from the gods, memory can be trained; however, Churchill’s powers of recollection, like his father’s, approach the abnormal. On a bet one time at the Carlton Club, Lord Randolph read a whole page of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and recited it verbatim. His son is no less endowed. As a schoolboy, Churchill once memorized 1200 lines of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome and rattled them off at a brisk gallop in class, to the amazement of his instructor and to the exhausted boredom of his fellows. (The Roman vinculum between father and son is incidentally without significance; memory knows no geographic limits.) One of his principal amusements in school was to memorize entire scenes of Shakespeare and catch up his teachers, with scathing comments. Nothing can be more dampening to a Shakespeare-fevered master, in the hot clutch of declaiming, say, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my head?” than to have a small child pipe up with “— ‘toward my hand,’ if you don’t mind.” Churchill’s devotion to off-center learning earned him frequent canings, but he continued, and continues, to exercise his peculiar skill.

  Certainly he remembers his old friends. In 1949 he heard that the bricklayer who had tutored him years before in that first, frenzied struggle with the outhouse had become ill and fallen upon hard luck. Churchill, who loves money, made him the beneficiary of a tax-free pension of eight pounds, thirteen shillings, fourpence per month and wrote him the following note: “I hope this will help you in the difficult times. I look forward to some more bricklaying with you soon.”

  Chapter 2

  THE London Times of December 3, 1874, included in its list of births for the week the modest announcement, “On the 30th November at Blenheim Palace, the Lady Randolph Churchill, prematurely, of a son.” From this brief newspaper debut, the son, named Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, was to go ahead and attract more space in the Times than that cautious journal has ever devoted to any other person.

  A good deal has been made, principally by his enemies, of the fact that Churchill was born prematurely. Because of his early ambition, and the accelerated character of his birth, he was given the name “Young man in a hurry” by a no doubt indolent writer of the late 1800s, and the phrase stuck. A magazine article at the beginning of the recent war described him as “Old Man in a Hurry.” Between these two pieces of composition, and since, the subject has indeed appeared to be in a fearful rush, in a general way, although he has seldom been known to turn up on time for any specific engagement, large or small. As a very young subaltern, he once kept the Prince of Wales and a dinner party of twelve waiting for nearly an hour. The prince, a grand eater and in the blackest kind of mood, refused to go in until the chancy number of thirteen was made fourteen by the dilatory guest. When Churchill arrived, he was asked the meaning of this unseemly breach of good manners. “Do you hav
e an excuse, young man?” inquired the prince, before a drawing room full of starved nobility. “Indeed I have, sire,” explained the unusual boy. “I started too late.”

  Very few of Churchill’s ancestors ever wasted much time. On both sides the lines have been busy, dedicated to toil, quick advancement, and high living. On his father’s side, he is descended directly from the first Duke of Marlborough, England’s greatest soldier, who showed such genius for incurring royal favor that he survived several changes of crown and wound up with huge estates, vast wealth, and a fame that has only recently been surpassed, in England, by that of his latter-day kinsman, the infant mentioned in the Times dispatch. On Churchill’s mother’s side he is American; she was Jennie Jerome, of New York, the reigning international beauty of her day. Many years ago, when he was on a speaking tour in the United States, Churchill was introduced by Mark Twain, who said, simply, “Ladies and gentlemen, the lecturer tonight is Mr. Winston Churchill. By his father he is an Englishman, by his mother an American. Behold the perfect man!” An English journalist, attempting to assay Churchill’s inherited traits, wrote, “from his father he derives the hereditary aptitude for affairs and the grand style of entering upon them, which are not the less hereditary in an English family because they skip nine generations out of ten ... From his American strain he adds to this a keenness, a shrewdness, a half-cynical personal ambition for advertisement, and, happily, a sense of humor.”

  Old British records yield up an abundance of material pertinent to the Churchills. It is of interest not only because of its relevancy to the present statesman, but also because it throws light on the business of how great families are founded. In America, the forebears of today’s impeccable aristocrats achieved the color of their blood by hawking tinware and furs; in England, men became noble by inventing pretty sayings and powdering the King’s wig. A few others added to these useful amusements a conspicuous enterprise at arms. Churchill’s formidable ancestor, the first Marlborough, may be counted among the latter group. It is conjectured that the line sprang from the Barons of Courcil, or Courselle, in Normandy and that one or another of them drifted over with that hungry nuisance, William the Conqueror. But the first Churchill of which history takes much note was an early Winston Churchill, whom a seventeenth-century historian described as “a brilliant but erratic Cavalier.” The historian Macaulay, presumably in the light of later news, modified this view by calling him “a poor Cavalier who haunted Whitehall and made himself ridiculous by publishing a dull and affecting folio.” Still a third historian, the pseudonymous “Ephesian,” rather unkindly wrote in 1927 that both of these characterizations “were not altogether inapplicable to his modern namesake.”

  The first Winston married a Miss Drake, who was related to Sir Francis Drake, the navigator and gentleman of fortune, and also to George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. When the English Civil War of 1642 broke out, he stoutly took up arms for the King, and was soon chagrined to see that he had backed the wrong side. The winners, the Roundheads, fined him the somewhat curious sum of £4446, which he was able to meet only by forfeiting his estate to the Commonwealth. As the present Winston Churchill has so frequently done, he found himself unhorsed but not discouraged. He went to live with his wife’s family, at Axminster, and awaited developments, which were not long in coming. The Restoration of 1660 returned him to high favor with the authorities, got him back his property, and saw him knighted, no petty accomplishment in those days. The system of honors has undergone some changes, not entirely for the better. The royal sword lays about with indiscriminate gusto, prodded into action by whichever politicians happen to be in power. Men are knighted for capering on the stage, for accumulating more butterflies than their neighbors, and for encouraging coal miners to dig at an improved tempo.

  The first Winston, receiving the title, took as his heraldic motto the Spanish phrase, “Fiel pero desdichado,” or “Faithful but unfortunate.” The gloomy inscription was handed on down, long after it had become richly incongruous on the shield of the triumphant Marlborough, and remains today the official family slogan. It may be seen emblazoned on the arms at Blenheim Palace, the massive ancestral seat of the Churchills, where the subject of this biography was born, as stated in the Times. The present proprietor, the tenth Duke of Marlborough, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill’s obscure and unambitious cousin, may in justice be said to claim some slight merit in the motto, living as he has done for several decades in the shade of his illustrious but untitled kinsman.

  The mighty Marlborough, the first duke, was the second son of that early Winston, or Sir Winston Churchill. With him began the real fame of a notable English family. His name was John Churchill and he was born in 1650 in the manor house of Ashe, in Devonshire; his rise to a position of power and command was a triumph of honest skill and sly bravado. At the age of fifteen he talked himself into a job as pageboy to the Duke of York, while his sister, Arabella, a very toothsome girl, became maid of honor to the duchess. Arabella was admired exceedingly by the males of the court and added a fresh stroke of beauty to an otherwise hard-faced collection, if we are to credit the surviving portraits of the period. In those days, as at present, the countries of Europe were periodically going to war against one another, to liven up the dull times and keep the nobility from getting rusty. In 1672, Holland was declared to have become commercially aggressive, and the British sent 6000 troops to join the French in crushing the land of tulips. The Duke of York went along and took young Churchill, who soon became a captain of foot soldiers and appeared in the forefront of every battle, fighting like a maniac. Among other exploits, he saved the life of the Duke of Monmouth, recaptured with a handful of men a position lost by a noted French colonel, and personally killed great numbers of Dutchmen, helping to put a speedy end to the war.

  The former pageboy was now covered with glory and he returned home to marry Sarah Jennings, the favorite lady in waiting to Princess Anne, daughter of the Duke of York. It was one of the best-calculated matches in English history. When the duke, as James II, succeeded to the throne, in 1685, the Churchills emerged as court pets, as much through the wirepulling of Sarah as through the political endeavors of John. Like all kings, James shortly found himself in hot water, besieged by his old friend and ally, the Duke of Monmouth, who stated that he was anxious to sit on the throne himself. Churchill had only recently saved Monmouth’s life, and now he was asked to go out and extinguish it. Nothing loath, he took the field, second in command to a general named Feversham, to whom the King owed an old debt. In a praiseworthy action, Churchill proved the foolishness of this alignment when he got up very early one morning and trounced Monmouth while Feversham was being shaved. King James, quickly seeing that his old pageboy was a strategist who placed victory ahead of a clean chin, elevated him to be generalissimo. But what was the poor King’s confusion, in 1688, when Churchill deserted to the banner of William of Orange, another nosy continental, who was coming over to stamp out the growing Catholicism in England. William only partially succeeded in stamping out Catholicism, but he did kick out James, and Churchill was made Earl of Marlborough. And then, because he kept in touch with the deposed monarch, naturally wishing to copper every bet, he got himself thrown into the rather social Tower of London, where nearly all Englishmen of any account spent some time at one point or another.

  The present-day Winston Churchill has written brilliantly about the energetic feats of his famous ancestor, in an epic four-volume biography published between 1933 and 1938. His Marlborough, His Life and Times, is filled with detail gleaned from the family papers and is altogether one of the most exhaustive and affectionate works ever turned out. A great many of Churchill’s friends believe that he has always identified himself with the first duke. To be sure, the two have much in common — a passionate curiosity about the military, political ambition, a keen regard for money, and a tendency to switch parties now and again. To write the big biography, Churchill designed and built with his own hands a special wor
kroom in the attic of his house at Chartwell. It included a broad inclined shelf that ran all along one side, so that he could lay out his multitudinous references. Then he hired a zestful bunch of secretaries and began to write, working them until three and four each morning. Churchill fortified himself repeatedly during these ordeals by nipping at some handy beverage, but many of the secretaries didn’t drink. They began to fall by the wayside and, at length, were walking off in groups. The biographer, undismayed, bought a newfangled dictaphone and announced to his family that he would probably be stepping up his output. He came down the next day very jubilant, holding a disc and saying, “I got a whole chapter finished.” Everybody was anxious to hear it, so he put it on the machine, and they all took chairs, hoping to get some information about William of Orange and those early troubles. Nothing came out of the machine but a sort of scratchy whir, unsuitable for biographical use. They tried several times, but it wasn’t any good — the record was entirely blank. Churchill had forgotten to switch on the button. He put on his hat and coat and went out to look for some more secretaries.

  By the time he finished the biography, which took several years, Churchill was thoroughly saturated with ancestral lore. He had raised the ghost of Marlborough; those similar kinsmen had walked together night and day. The famous soldier and his equally famous descendant had indeed become almost inseparable. Churchill began to insert harkbacks to his subject in many of his speeches. “As the great Marlborough did —” or “As the great Marlborough said —” became familiar allusions in the House of Commons, and are still frequently heard there. It is a kind of retroactive nepotism, healthy and inoffensive since nothing much can ever come of it, outside of promoting the sale of the book.