The handling of troops stimulated Churchill’s desire to command large formations. As he wrote to Clementine on May 31, 1909, after leaving summer exercises at Blenheim, “I would greatly love to have some practice in the handling of large forces. I have much confidence in my judgment in things, when I see clearly, but on nothing do I seem to feel the truth more than in tactical combinations. It is a vain and foolish thing to say—but you will not laugh at me.”18 Winston’s drive had a purpose, for, with a future war in mind, he wanted his men to come up to the standard of the Regular Army’s cavalry. His efforts paid dividends, for when war came in August 1914, the Queen’s Own were pitched into the fray on the Western Front, gaining the distinction of being the first yeomanry unit to engage the enemy.
The regiment’s annual training exercises at Blenheim usually took place in the early summer, a forest of conical white tents appearing at the foot of the Column of Victory. The gathering was accompanied by the thunder of horses’ hooves, dinners, dances, and sport. But this was by no means toy soldiering in an insignificant rural regiment, as the unit’s deployment to France in 1914 was to show. The Queen’s Own was a fighting unit that expected to be deployed in the event of a general war, as, indeed, had been the case during the Boer War, when the horsemanship of the imperial yeomanry had been much in demand. The regiment enjoyed impressive royal patronage: Queen Adelaide had granted the use of the “Queen’s Own” title following a visit to Oxford in 1835 and had conferred her favorite color, mantua purple, as the regimental color. From 1896, the Prince of Wales, a close friend of the 9th Duke of Marlborough, was colonel in chief and remained so when he became King Edward VII. The regiment’s appearance matched this impressive pedigree. The full-dress uniform was extremely ornate: navy-blue tunics with elaborate silver braid on the chest, sleeves, and collar and mantua-purple facings; mantua purple trousers with a silver stripe on each leg and silver braid above the knee; black fur busby hats with plumes of short purple vulture feathers and fifteen-inch-long ostrich feathers; and highly polished Hessian-style boots with silver edging at the top, a purple boss, and pink heels.
Visits to Blenheim were frequent at this stage of Churchill’s life. He spent Christmas 1910 there and was there again in June the following year, writing to tell Clementine that “we are going to bathe in the Lake this evening.” On this visit, he was again in uniform, and Churchill and his men watered their horses at the lake’s edge, paraded in the stately courtyards of the palace, and charged across the broad acres of sculptured parkland. On one spectacular occasion, Churchill engineered a mass cavalry charge from one end of the park to the other. As he wrote to Clementine from Blenheim on June 6, 1911:
My dearest,
We all marched past this morning—walk, trot and gallop. Jack and I took our squadrons at real pace and excited the spontaneous plaudits of the crowd. . . . [A]fter the march past I made the general form the whole Brigade into Brigade-Mass and galloped 1,200 strong the whole length of the park in one solid square of men and horses. It went awfully well. He was delighted.19
During the First World War, Churchill’s visits to Blenheim were infrequent. He spent time there in 1916 after the Dardanelles campaign had caused him to leave the government, finding comfort by painting in the grounds. He happened to be at Blenheim when the war ended. It was Lord Blandford’s twenty-first birthday, an occasion marked by a paper chase on horseback and an ox roast. The day concluded with fireworks and a gigantic bonfire topped by an effigy of the kaiser. Winston continued to visit Blenheim throughout the interwar years. Photographs show him enjoying the delights of the gardens, often in company with Clementine. When ejected from office at the beginning of his “wilderness years” away from government at the start of the 1930s, it was at Blenheim that Churchill researched and wrote much of his biography Marlborough: His Life and Times, the 9th Duke giving him special access to documents in the palace archives, as well as living quarters and stabling for his hunters. Much of this biographical masterpiece was “dictated in the Arcade Rooms beneath the Long Library,” the research conducted during “many hours in the windowless strongroom” that is the palace’s muniment room.20 He was also able to indulge his passion for painting while at Blenheim. He would establish himself and his easel in one of the palace’s magnificent rooms or at a vantage point in the grounds and break out his paints, brushes, and palette. Many of his paintings of Blenheim were completed in the early 1920s, and a number were subsequently given to his host, the duke, and his own children. A view of the lake was given to Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, his champion at Alamein, and an enchanting study of Wooded Water near Blenheim was gifted to his private secretary, Sir Anthony Montague Browne.
Even when away from Blenheim, his place of birth and his ancestor’s significance in European history were seldom far from Churchill’s mind. At Chartwell, the house in Kent that he made his home for over forty years, an enormous painting of Blenheim Palace hung before his desk, above the fireplace, and beneath the Union Jack hoisted in Rome by British soldiers in 1944. In his London home at 28 Hyde Gate Park, SW7, a canvas depicting the Battle of Blenheim loomed over the dining room table. When the queen made him a Knight of the Order of the Garter in 1953—the most distinguished commoner to join this, the highest class of knighthood—he was invested at Windsor Castle with the insignia worn by his forebear, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, in 1702.
World-changing battles of his own were to bring Churchill back to this corner of England when he acceded to the highest office of state in 1940, and the Battle of Britain and the Blitz dominated the skies above southern England. Even with the war focusing his tremendous energies on London and the world beyond Britain’s shores, he spent a significant amount of time in the environs of Blenheim. He was instrumental in getting over four hundred schoolboys and their masters established at Blenheim to continue their studies when Malvern College was requisitioned by the Admiralty. In November 1941, Churchill took the future 11th Duke, then a schoolboy, on a visit to the city of Liverpool to inspect the damage wrought by Nazi bombs. As the duke recalls, his parents, aware that it would be cold, ensured that coupons were rounded up and a new overcoat procured, albeit two sizes too big for him.
War also forged a new link with Oxfordshire. Looking due northwest from Blenheim’s Column of Victory, along the lengthy Grand Avenue of nearly seven hundred elms, lay the elegant Ditchley Gate. Beyond this began the land of Ditchley Park, and it was here that Churchill was able to establish a secluded home-from-home during the Second World War. It was owned by the millionaire Conservative MP Ronald Tree. With the onset of the Blitz, the prime minister’s official country residence, Chequers in Buckinghamshire, was considered too dangerous for its intended purpose: a weekend escape from the pressures of official life in London. It was too visible and too well known, a tempting target. Ditchley, however, was not too distant from London, was unlikely to be known to the Luftwaffe, and was surrounded by a park of mature trees, making it inconspicuous from the air. The house, indeed, has an aura of rustic isolation and peacefulness unusual even in the tranquil setting of the English country house. As Tree was to write of his beloved home, “cut off from the main stream of life, the beauty of the place with its great avenues and woodlands of bluebells and primroses in the spring was to be an island of pure delight.”21 Having been advised not to visit Chequers “when the moon is high,” Churchill asked Tree for the use of Ditchley. He readily consented, and Churchill subsequently found some of that tranquillity away from the maelstrom of war.
Churchill first visited Ditchley on the weekend of November 9, 1940, accompanied by Clementine and their daughter Mary. Special telephone lines were erected and a scrambler system installed, and accommodation was provided for Churchill’s administrative staff and secretary, as well as billets for a full company of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry detailed to guard the premises during Churchill’s stay. During that first weekend at Ditchley, Churchill was aware of the Royal Air Forces’s at
tack on Munich that was then taking place. On the following weekend, the city of Coventry, barely thirty miles from Ditchley, was visited by over five hundred German aircraft in a reprisal attack.
Churchill was to use Ditchley for twelve weekends in the following two years. The Trees were model hosts, going to considerable expense to entertain the Churchills and any guests Winston elected to bring, providing food, including vegetables and game from the estate, and wines from the excellent cellar. Guests included President Roosevelt’s special envoy, Harry Hopkins; Averell Harriman; Anthony Eden; General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff; General Vladislav Sikorski, prime minister of Poland; Edvard Beneš, prime minister of Czechoslovakia (for whom a Czech guard of honor was present); Lord Lothian, British ambassador to America; and people invited by the Trees, including the actor David Niven, whom Winston complimented for having given up his film career in order to join the army. (“Young man,” he growled, “you did a very fine thing to give up a most promising career to fight for your country.” After Niven had “stammered some inane reply,” Churchill continued with a twinkle, “Mark you, had you not done so—it would have been despicable!”***)22 It was from Ditchley that Churchill wrote a long letter to Roosevelt, “one of the most important I ever wrote,” that resulted in “the glorious conception of Lend-Lease.” It was also at Ditchley that Churchill received a dramatic visit from the Duke of Hamilton to tell him of the arrival by parachute of Rudolf Hess in Scotland.
Churchill continued to visit Ditchley on a regular basis until 1942, by which time German bombing raids had become less severe. While there, he would sometimes take the opportunity to motor the four miles down the road to Blenheim in order to reacquaint himself with the park and the familiar haunts of his childhood. Ditchley became a welcome haven for the Churchill family away from the fatigued and battered capital. “Whenever the moon was high, we all repaired to Ditchley,” wrote Churchill’s daughter. “We were becoming so accustomed to the drabness and ugliness of war—khaki, mountains of sandbags, the blackout, and the dust and desolation of ruined buildings—that we gazed with keener appreciation on elegance and beauty, and glowing, lighted interiors.”23 And what interiors Ditchley possessed. The Trees had spent vast sums restoring the house to its original splendor, and Churchill must have wallowed in the peacefulness for which Ditchley is renowned as he wandered through the lofty Great Hall and the Velvet Room, its walls covered with Genoese silk since 1738, and enjoyed the view of the lake from his bedroom and of the Italian sunken garden and Jellicoe pool from his study. It was clear that, despite the ceaseless nature of his work, he was able to relax here. As Clementine wrote to Mary in 1943, “I am at Ditchley for the weekend. Papa has got ‘Prof’ [Frederick Lindemann] & Uncle Jack who is also having a rest cure—& masses of films—War & Hollywood.”24 Churchill’s main form of relaxation was watching films, and Tree remembers that he was particularly fond of Lady Hamilton, a film about the life and death of Nelson.
Following the war, Churchill had occasion to return to his birthplace when he was made a freeman of the Borough of Woodstock. Fatigued by the sheer number of invitations from communities eager to fête their war leader and share in his international celebrity, Churchill was at first reluctant to accept but was persuaded by Mary Marlborough, the mayor, and her promise of a political audience into the bargain. The day before the ceremony and his speech, Churchill spent the afternoon in the Grand Cabinet at Blenheim, relaxed with his shirt buttons undone. On the morning of Saturday, August 2, 1947, he received the Freedom of Woodstock from the borough council on a stage festooned with Union Jacks and bunting set up outside the main door of the eighteenth-century town hall. The party then processed along Park Street to enter Blenheim through the Triumphal Arch, cheered by ranks of townspeople lining both sides of the road. That afternoon Churchill addressed a Conservative Party rally held on the South Lawn of the palace, looking out from a high podium toward Bladon and its elegant little church tower, beneath which Churchill’s parents lay in the family grave. His speech, attended by a throng of forty thousand people, was broadcast on the BBC World Service. In it he attacked Clement Attlee and declared that “the Socialist belief is that nothing matters so long as miseries are equally shared, and certainly they have acted in accordance with their faith.”25 In 1953, Churchill was again at Blenheim, this time on official business as a guest at the Blenheim Commonwealth garden party held to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In the presence of Princess Margaret, he mingled with Commonwealth and Dominions visitors. His last visit to the place in which he had been born, and that had shaped his destiny, was in 1958.
In January 1965, Churchill came back to Oxfordshire for good when he was buried in the small churchyard at Bladon, within view of the palace where he had been born over ninety years before. They had been years of intense and extraordinary activity.
2
Cadet to Frontier Soldier: Warrior and Writer
Winston Churchill did not have an unusual childhood, as is sometimes claimed: thousands of other Victorian boys played with soldiers, had difficult and distant relations with their parents, inhabited nurseries and gardens in fashionable London squares and great country houses, and then endured, rather than enjoyed, a prolonged incarceration at boarding school (a background intended to produce independent-minded young men for the service of the empire). Overall Winston Churchill had a happy childhood, even when compulsory education and the manifold challenges of public school supervened. Before the legal violence of separation from family and home was visited upon him at the tender age of seven, Churchill’s early years were characterized by the privilege attached to his social class. This meant playtime in the nurseries and grounds of whichever London residence or stately home he happened to be stationed at by his peripatetic family. It also meant regular separation from his parents and the companionship and devotion of a nanny, Elizabeth Everest. In all of this, his childhood differed little in its main contours from that of the majority of boys born into the English ruling elite. Nevertheless, Churchill was throughout his life an exotic individual—reflecting the nature of his personality, his appearance, and mannerisms. His place of birth and the celebrity status of his parents further marked him out among the scions of the aristocracy. It meant that he was always something of a social maroon, an oddity. There was no one remotely like him. This fact alone, regardless of the various eminences achieved in his life, makes him a brilliant biographical subject.
A “child of the Victorian era,” as he described himself, Churchill grew up in an age that the First World War was to sweep away. He grew up in the “golden afternoon” of British world power, of Pax Britannica, of apparent stability in the world and security for Britain and its empire. In these halcyon late-Victorian days, he wrote, “the structure of our country seemed firmly set . . . its position in trade and on the seas was unrivaled, and . . . the realization of the greatness of our Empire and of our duty to preserve it was ever growing stronger.”1 From an early age, Churchill was alive to imperial and military matters, and the affairs of the British Empire and the British military formed a skein throughout his long life. Churchill came to view the British Empire, along with the “island story” of Britain’s historical evolution as a nation state and force for international progress, as the prime buttresses of world stability and prosperity.
Churchill was always more interested in the empire as an extension of British power in the world than in the empire per se. To the imperial manner born, he viewed Britain’s possession of a vast empire as part of the natural order of things. Both Churchill’s father and grandfather had occupied positions of responsibility within the empire, as secretary of state for India and viceroy of Ireland respectively. When Winston was two years old, Lord Randolph removed his family to Ireland when he became secretary to his father, the 7th Duke of Marlborough, who had been appointed viceroy, or lord lieutenant, of Ireland, that closest and most awkward of Britain’s imperial possessions. It was a move engin
eered to enable the family to evade the social ostracism resulting from a quarrel involving Randolph; his brother, Blandford; and the Prince of Wales—a quarrel that had almost led to a duel between Randolph and the prince. Disraeli offered the Duke of Marlborough the Ireland position as a way out of the impasse. The ostracism (marked by the prince’s announcement that he would visit no house that welcomed the Randolphs) lasted from 1876 until 1884.
Though reluctantly accepted, the viceroyalty was the choicest proconsular position the empire had to offer. The Marlboroughs and the young Winston traveled to Dublin in January 1877, where they took up residence in the Little Lodge near to the Viceregal Lodge. Born into a palace replete with depictions of war, Churchill’s earliest memory was also of a martial nature. When he was five, his grandfather unveiled a statue at which “I even remember a phrase he used: ‘and with a withering volley he shattered the enemy’s line.’ I quite understood that he was speaking about war and fighting and that a ‘volley’ meant what the black-coated soldiers (Riflemen) used to do with loud bangs so often in the Phoenix Park where I was taken for my morning walk.”2
Churchill later claimed that embarking on a military career “was entirely due to my collection of soldiers. I had ultimately nearly fifteen hundred.” Churchill’s collection had been inspired by the one at Blenheim. It was organized as an infantry division with a cavalry brigade, supported by field guns and fortress pieces. All other services were complete, short of transport, and his brother, Jack, commanded the hostile army. Even when he was fifteen, toy soldiers still turned his head, and he wrote to Jack from France in January 1892 that “I have seen here such beautiful soldiers,” telling him to send money if he wanted some. Churchill’s cousin remembered visiting his playroom, which “contained from one end to the other a plank table on trestles, upon which were thousands of lead soldiers arranged for battle. He organized wars. The lead battalions were manoeuvred into battle, peas and pebbles committed great casualties, forts were stormed, cavalry charged, bridges were destroyed.” Toy soldiers, as Churchill put it, “turned the current of my life.”3
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