He also played war with his relatives and friends. At one of Churchill’s numerous childhood homes, Banstead Manor near Newmarket (which his parents rented briefly until money troubles supervened), he and his brother constructed a log fort complete with a moat and drawbridge and a siege catapult that fired green apples. “The Den” was carpeted with straw and defended by intricate fortifications and a gun. The Churchill boys were delighted to have a country home of their own to play in. They accompanied the keeper on rabbit-hunting expeditions, and Winston drilled his brother and other children, progressing from toy soldiers to live boys on a course that would eventually lead to the command of British troops in action. (Banstead also saw Churchill’s first experiments as a small farmer, involving chickens, ferrets, guinea pigs, and rabbits.)
True to form, in Ireland Churchill’s parents were heavily engaged in the elegant duties and pastimes associated with high society and social position. Although he probably saw more of them here than if they’d been closer to the magnetic distractions of London, Winston lived at one remove from his parents, an observer peering over the banister rather than a participant in their daily lives. “My picture of her in Ireland,” Churchill later wrote of his mother, “is in a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spotted with mud.” Nevertheless, and perhaps because of this distance, Churchill’s reverence for his parents, indeed his lionization of them, developed from an early age. “My mother always seemed to me a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power.” More regular and intimate companionship was provided by Winston’s adored nurse, Mrs. Everest. She was “very proud of Kent her home county, where there grew strawberries, cherries, raspberries and plums. Lovely! I always wanted to live in Kent,” and at a young age he went to stay with her and her sister on the Isle of Wight during the Zulu War (1879–80), and from the cliffs near Ventnor “saw a great splendid ship with all her sails set . . . a troopship . . . bringing the men back from the war”4 All of this augmented the significance and glory of war that Churchill’s wanderings around the tapestry-hung rooms of Blenheim Palace had inculcated. Clad in fancy-dress uniforms or a sailor suit, commanding armies in imaginary battles, it is easy to see why Churchill grew to believe that war and the conduct of war were natural to him.
School Days
Much is made of Churchill’s antipathy toward formal education, his dull-wittedness in certain academic directions, his misery and loneliness at school. Exaggerations, however, are made on all three counts. The simple fact is that, like thousands of others before and since, Churchill didn’t much like school and, as a result, school didn’t much like him. Winston’s pugnacious and rebellious nature, according to his son, never adapted itself to discipline.
Churchill himself encouraged the picture of unhappy school days in his later writings. “In retrospect these years form not only the least agreeable, but the only barren and unhappy period of my life. I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I have been happier every year since I became a man.” But Churchill’s school days were no worse than those of many children for whom severance from home and family came as a great trauma. His failures were balanced by successes on the sporting field and in the classroom—notably in history and English—and not all was gloom during his twelve-year school career. There is no doubt, however, that school did not best suit his precocious and independent-minded, gusto-fueled approach to life, and his natural penchant for buffeting against authority. But then, neither did the army, or political parties, or the established methods of cabinet government. Institutions and formal systems did not sit easily about him. He was never one to knuckle down, especially if he did not see the point, but was always one to question and seek ways to circumvent obstacles and free himself from structures that tried his poorly developed patience.
Even before school, the shadow of formal education had darkened Churchill’s life. Like most boys of his class, he had to endure educators invading his home to begin life’s instruction. What he termed the “dreaded apparition” of “The Governess” shook the security and irresponsibility of those early postnatal years, engaged in order to teach a young Winston the rudiments of reading. It was at about the age of five that Winston remembered being “first menaced by Education.” His initial reaction was to do “what so many oppressed peoples have done in similar circumstances: I took to the woods.”5
But soon “a much worse peril began to threaten: I was to go to school.” The prospect was viewed with excitement as well as agitation as Winston approached a milestone on life’s journey. He was a boy who, had he not been so combative, might have attracted bullies while at school: unable to pronounce the letter s, ginger haired (nicknamed, among other things, “Carrots”), and not particularly tall. It was at school that the intricacies and apparent irrelevancies of multiplication and grammar “cast a steadily growing shadow over my daily life.” The separation from home galled him, and he missed the nursery where he had been so happy with all his toys. “I had such wonderful toys,” he lamented, “a real steam engine, a magic lantern, and a collection of soldiers already nearly a thousand strong.” Now it was to be all lessons, interspersed with trials of strength with schoolmasters who did their level best to offer correction to naughty boys.
His first experience of school, at an institution specializing in the preparation of boys for Eton (Randolph’s school), justified his allergic reaction. It epitomized the worst elements of a system of boarding school education widely pilloried today. In Philip Guedalla’s words, St. George’s School, Ascot (which Churchill entered in November 1882), “divided its attentions between corporal punishment and the classics; and its latest pupil did not take to either.” But then, he was a naughty boy, apt to be slovenly, and guilty of offenses such as putting his foot through the headmaster’s straw hat after receiving a thrashing for stealing sugar. Anthony Storr suggests that the “intransigent disobedience” with which Churchill reacted to authority “was not only a way of discharging hostility, but a means of self-assertion . . . [for] a boy who, at that stage, felt himself to be weak physically, and who showed no disposition to excel.”6 Under the heading “general conduct,” his school report stated that he was “very bad—is a constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape or other. He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere.”7 There was not the slightest chance of such behavioral defects going unpunished at St. George’s. Here, flogging with the birch was a great feature. Boys were “flogged until they bled freely,” punishment reinforced by frequent religious services in the school chapel. The headmaster was a generously bewhiskered sadist, the Reverend H. W. Sneyd-Kynnersley, who on one occasion continued beating a boy even though he had a spasm of diarrhea, “until the whole ceiling and walls of his study were spattered with filth.”8 Even by the standards of the day, this was a school marked by outrageous brutality. “How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years,” Churchill wrote. But escape was eventually achieved; it appears that Mrs. Everest saw the welts left by the cane, showed Lady Randolph, and the boy was removed from the school.
Thus at the end of the summer term 1884, Churchill was transferred to a much gentler, less prestigious, school in Brighton. It was near the seaside and therefore considered good for his health, which at this stage of his life was frail. Here he remained for three years and did well enough at his studies to be positioned near the top of the class. He was allowed to study a range of subjects that interested him, such as “French, History, lots of poetry by heart, and above all Riding and Swimming.”9 “He lapped up the patriotic and imperial history that was usual in those years, mostly kings and queens, wars and battles and heroes.”10 But examinations, he ruefully recorded, remained “a great trial to me.”
He threw himself into a range of extracurricular activities, including amateur dramatics and the preparations for the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (June 21, 1887). He also got stuck into sports other than tho
se with which he became associated in adult life; he made it into the first XI football team and took up cricket (even witnessing a W. G. Grace half-century for Gloucestershire against Sussex in May 1887). He read classic boys’ literature of the period such as Henry Rider Haggard’s She and Jess, both titles hot off the press in 1887. He took up stamp collecting while at this school and often wrote to ask his father for autographs, as his schoolmates wanted them as a result of Randolph’s growing political celebrity (“I only want a scribble as I know that you are very busy”).
His time in Brighton was marred by a life-threatening case of pneumonia in March 1886 (“my boy at school at Brighton nearly died of inflammation of the lungs last week,” wrote Randolph to the Conservative leader, Lord Salisbury). Despite the seriousnesses, his parents weren’t around, and the trusted family doctor, Robson Roose, kept Randolph informed through regular bulletins (March 15: “we are still fighting the battle for your boy”). Winston maintained affectionate correspondence with Mrs. Everest and his aunt the Countess of Wilton, a kind benefactress, while his parents remained detached, continuing his semirelationship with his mother and his nonrelationship with his father. According to Churchill’s son, “the neglect and lack of interest in him shown by his parents were remarkable, even judged by the standards of late Victorian and Edwardian days.”11 His father was a clever, insolent, sometimes charming, often offensive individual who coveted attention, a shooting star popular with the newspapers he sedulously courted, though his physical deterioration and suicidal political tendencies ensured that he never became a fixture in the political firmament. Jennie Churchill was a fleeting mother when Churchill was a schoolboy. Both parents were too self-obsessed to really cater for another being clamoring for their attention. While they did not lack affection for their son, they seldom saw him, and as a consequence he felt profoundly neglected. Churchill’s letters to his parents, until well into his teens, told of this. “Please do do do do do do come down to see me. . . . Please do come I have been so disappointed so many times about your coming.”12
It is no surprise that his attachment to his nanny lasted for so long, and that as a schoolboy, Churchill was willing to court the jeers of his fellows when showing Mrs. Everest around Harrow, walking with her arm in arm. As a result of their neglect, both parents were viewed through roseate lenses by the young Winston: his father adored and revered, compensating for the absence of sustained contact and love; his mother idolized as the epitome of womanhood. Nevertheless, perhaps another way of looking at Churchill’s relations with his parents is to emphasize the point that he was an extremely demanding child, emotionally undernourished yet emotionally insatiable. The arrival of a brother in 1880 cannot have suited Churchill, and he would tease and torment him. Throughout his life he remained demanding and prone to selfishness, and those who found themselves in his way, and often mishandled as a consequence, were only ever partially mollified by his humor, self-effacement, and kindness. There is little doubt that, in later life, an embellished story of adversity in childhood was a useful sympathy winner.
Though Churchill’s relationship with his father was always distant and strained, he inherited his desire to cut a dash in society, an urge that was supercharged from 1895 by the conviction that he might, like his father, die young. During his son’s school days, Lord Randolph became convinced that Winston had little academic ability, though it was clear that where he enjoyed a subject, he attained excellent marks. But Randolph was usually willing to see the worst in his son and to pointedly rake over his misdemeanors, possibly projecting onto Winston a chastisement of himself. Those with more patience and less self-absorption than Randolph Churchill looked beyond the cheekiness and naughtiness. The Duchess of Marlborough wrote to her son Randolph on January 8, 1888, remarking that Winston was “a clever Boy & really not naughty but he wants a firm hand.” But even indulgent souls were tired by Winston’s incessancy; two weeks later the duchess wrote: “Winston is going back to school today. Entre nous I do not feel very sorry for he is certainly a handful.”13
Coming to the end of his primary education, Churchill sat the entrance examination for Harrow, an inauspicious experience involving a Latin paper on which he was able to answer not a single question but only, he later claimed, to write his name. He was admitted anyway by a headmaster who saw, Churchill speculated, his innate talent shining through. A more likely explanation is that he was a headmaster unprepared to turn down the son of a famous politician. At first, Churchill was put into a small house, but with the promise that he would transfer to the headmaster’s, the Reverend J. E. C. Welldon’s, in due course. Churchill was placed in the fourth form, the school’s lowest.
At Harrow, which he entered on April 17, 1888, Churchill did not excel, though he swam for his house and won the boarding school fencing championship in 1892, as well as achieving proud distinction by winning a prize for reciting 1,200 lines of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome to the headmaster without making a single mistake, a phenomenal achievement. But Churchill continued to perform indifferently at his books, finding it almost impossible to enthuse or excel at subjects in which he saw little purpose, such as quadratic equations and differential calculus. “I have never met any of these creatures since,” he later wrote, as if confirming their intrinsic irrelevance. In short, this stubborn and questioning youngster was a typical schoolboy of the individualist mold, tending toward the slovenly, flouting rules, getting into trouble for throwing stones and misbehaving, and rarely ready to submit humbly to his just deserts without indignantly defending his actions. He was “Just Winston,” and these traits remained with him for life. Be it at school, in the army, or in Parliament, Churchill had a peculiar capacity for behaving in a manner most likely to offend against rules of propriety, showing scant regard for rank or seniority. As his first housemaster, H. O. D. Davidson, put it, he was not “wilfully troublesome: but his forgetfulness, carelessness, unpunctuality, and irregularity in every way, have really been so serious, that I write to ask you, when he is home to speak very gravely to him.”14 Nevertheless, such written evidence did little to diminish Churchill’s irrepressible, and defiant, optimism—one of his most important character traits. Upon being scolded by his mother for a “very bad” report one week, in the following week he told her that next time round he was “bound to get a good report.”15 It also failed to dampen his zeal for impromptu adventure, leading into trouble when, for example, he and a group of friends decided to smash the windows in a disused factory in Harrow.
At Harrow, the martial and imperial themes already noted in Winston’s life were nurtured. He enjoyed school songs, with their “tales of great deeds and of great men,” which caused him to wonder “with intensity how I could ever do something glorious for my country” (as he told his son Randolph in 1940), and remembered particularly in later life a celebratory account of Waterloo. A lecture on Imperial Federation made a deep impression upon him, G. R. Parkin telling the school how “at Trafalgar, Nelson’s signal—‘England expects that every man will do his duty’—ran down the line of battle, and how if we and our Colonies all held together, a day would come when such a signal would run not merely along a line of ships, but along a line of nations.”16 He won a prize for composing a poem that features the verse “God shield our Empire from the might / Of war or famine, plague or blight / And all the powers of hell, / And keep it ever in the hands / of those who fought ’gainst other lands / who fought and conquered well.”17 There were other extracurricular activities. In May 1889, he bought a bike (“a beautiful little machine,” as he told his mother when thanking her for the funds that had procured it), though a month later he was consigned to the sickroom for a week after falling off it. He enjoyed drill and shooting as a member of the school’s rifle corps and competed in mock battles against other boarding schools.
His parents maintained their detachment. Lady Randolph was “increasingly caught up in the world of fashion and society and was more and more surrounded by a competiti
ve band of handsome young admirers” while his father was absent abroad or busy.18 Jennie would even put Winston off from visiting for no reason other than her social engagements; in July 1891, for example, “just” managing to put him up for a night, but at some inconvenience. In that same month, her then beau, Colonel Kinsky, took Winston to the Crystal Palace to see a show put on for the visiting German emperor. At the time, Lord Randolph was touring southern Africa (making some useful investments and writing Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa), while also writing columns for the Daily Graphic, a ploy his son was soon to excel at. While Randolph regretted that he probably wouldn’t be able to bring home a “tame antelope” for his son, he did concede in a letter in June 1891 that he could obtain the Bechuanaland stamps that Winston had requested.
Soon his parents were battling to send him to France for his holidays, in support of Reverend Welldon’s wishes, in order to learn the language. Churchill fought a vigorous, though ultimately futile, rearguard action, deploring their conspiracy to send him to “some horrid French Family.” He was, his parents concluded, at the “ugly” stage, “slouchy and tiresome.”19 They resented Winston’s tone, though seeing his parents so rarely meant that it was not possible for him to always write with an angelic voice when he dissented from their opinions. The “tone of your letter is not calculated to make me over lenient,” his mother wrote in December 1891 after threats and ultimatums regarding his visit to France. She told him that she would determine what was best for him: “I tell you frankly that I am going to determine and not you.” One of his letters she sent back to him, to which he replied despairingly, “Darling Mummy I am so unhappy but if you don’t read this letter it will be the last you’ll have the trouble to send back.”20 Clearly there were faults on both sides, as there often are when family trials of strength are played out, and Churchill fought through his teenage years.
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