Churchill

by Ashley Jackson

  Churchill spent three years in the army form at Harrow, as it had been decided that he was to be a soldier, though he had to make three attempts to get into the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. After his second failure to pass the exam, he was sent to a crammer run by Captain W. H. James. His poor math had prevented him from getting into Woolwich, the academy for the artillery and the engineers. Captain James believed that Winston thought too highly of his own abilities, and in March 1893 reported that “all of the tutors complain that while he has good abilities he does not apply himself with sufficient earnestness.”

  Churchill finally succeeded in passing the dreaded exam in the summer of 1893 (largely because by chance he had mugged up on New Zealand, on which a question appeared), but he did not do enough to qualify for the infantry, a further source of irritation for Lord Randolph, who roundly chastised his son in a withering letter. But he had passed in all subjects (he was placed 95th out of 389), and only 12 out of 29 Harrovian army candidates succeeded. Nevertheless, his father blasted him for his “folly & failure” and the risk he ran of degenerating “into a shabby unhappy and futile existence” as a “social wastrel.”21

  Churchill’s transition from schoolboy to soldier cadet was delayed when in January 1893 he fell off a bridge and lay unconscious for three days. His aunt, Lady Wimborne, had lent the Churchills her comfortable estate at Bournemouth for the winter, and in the grounds there were forty or fifty acres of pine forest descending to a beach. Here, while trying to evade being caught in a game of chase, he plunged off a bridge and plummeted over thirty feet, breaking his fall in the branches of a tree. As a result, he was confined to bed for over three months with, among other injuries, a ruptured kidney. In order to recover fully from his fall, Winston was transferred to his father’s house in London. Here, while convalescing, he watched from the gallery as “many of the leading figures of the Parliamentary conflicts” visited, including luminaries such as Balfour, Chamberlain, Rosebery, Asquith, Morley, and Carson. “It seemed a very great world in which these men lived.”22 Though Sandhurst and the army beckoned, it was little surprise that Winston Churchill’s head had already been turned by the lure of politics and power.

  Sandhurst and the Army

  In the period between Harrow, which he left in December 1892, and Sandhurst, which he entered in September 1893, Churchill spent time in Versailles in an attempt to improve his French and was sent by his father, in the company of an Eton master and his brother, Jack,, on a walking tour in Switzerland. Churchill qualified for a cavalry cadetship at Sandhurst and ranked horses as his greatest pleasure while there. He had been lucky to get in, on health as well as intellectual grounds. His recurring chest ailments meant that he almost failed the medical. The competition to enter Sandhurst as part of the infantry class was keener, as the cavalry was so much more expensive. This was a prime consideration for the Churchill family, which had just started house sharing with Duchess Fanny at 50 Grosvenor Square in order to economize. They had also given up their country home, Banstead, as a result of their financial difficulties. While this didn’t deter Churchill, it governed his father’s attitude to the matter. “What fun it would be having a horse! Also the uniforms of the cavalry were far more magnificent than those of the Foot. It was therefore in an expansive mood that I wrote to my father. I found to my surprise that he took a contrary view. He thought it very discreditable that I had not qualified for the infantry.”23 Lord Randolph was particularly put out by the expense he would have to meet, including two official chargers, one or two hunters, and the indispensable string of polo ponies. His father was exercised enough by the triumphant manner in which Churchill announced his results to roundly chastise him in a letter that cut Churchill to the quick.

  Despite his father’s warnings, Churchill was a great success at Sandhurst, graduating near the top of his class, though his father died before this incontestable triumph was announced. Joining the army altered Churchill’s relationship with his father in some ways, but not in others. “When I became a gentleman cadet I acquired a new status in my father’s eyes. . . . But if ever I began to show the slightest idea of comradeship, he was immediately offended.” On Churchill’s own count he had only “three or four intimate conversations” with his father.24 When Winston joined the army, Lord Randolph “proceeded to talk to me in the most wonderful manner about school and going into the army and the grown-up life which lay beyond. I listened spellbound to this sudden complete departure from his usual reserve, amazed at his intimate comprehension of my affairs.”

  Churchill’s arrival at Sandhurst brought to a close twelve years of school, and he thrived at this elite military academy. He stood five feet six and a half inches in height and, with an unexpanded chest measuring thirty-one inches, was considered undersized and in need of development if he were to survive the physical demands of army life. He flowered as a self-confident though still self-centered youth and was soon able to indulge his love of danger. Here, he wrote, “I had a new start. I was no longer handicapped by past neglect of Latin, French or Mathematics.” The task was now to learn the ropes as a young cavalryman, including all the requisite horsemanship, cavalry maneuvering in column, and fighting in line. Tactics and fortifications, to Churchill’s delight, replaced math and Latin as subjects of study. He was impressed by cavalry units as they were handled in the field and later recalled an occasion when General Luck, the inspector general, maneuvered a cavalry division of thirty or forty squadrons as if it were a single unit.

  At Sandhurst, Churchill developed a habit of private study that was to be the wellspring of his future success as a writer, orator, and politician. Focused upon achieving something notable in his life, he developed powers of intense concentration. Beyond the basics of military tactics and soldiering, Churchill had occasion to consider the higher levels of the strategic direction of war, the study and practice of which were to be a central feature of his life, and to dabble in the exhilarating world of public oration. On the former count, he was sometimes invited to dine at the nearby Staff College at Camberley, an educational establishment for higher-ranking officers. Here “the talk was of divisions, army corps and even whole armies; of bases, of supplies, of lines of communication and railway strategy. This was thrilling.”25 It was very much Churchill’s line of territory, as even at this early stage, he was convinced that the gifts of military and political leadership were in his blood and that the direction of great campaigns would represent the best use of his talents. While at Sandhurst, he received his first taste of preparing and delivering public speeches in an attempt to woo opinion when he gave a speech for the Entertainments Protection League, formed to oppose moralists seeking to screen off the bar of the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, where “undesirable” ladies occasionally congregated. He had a letter published in the Westminster Gazette and carefully prepared and rehearsed a speech that he committed to memory (“Ladies of the Empire, I stand for Liberty!”).

  Sandhurst brought its usual share of frolics to the young Churchill (he made a convincing Pierrot at the May 1894 Half-Mile Donkey Derby), yet his poor relations with his father continued. Lord Randolph’s persistent low opinion of his son was graphically demonstrated when in March 1894, Churchill lost a pocket watch his father had given him. Though showing great ingenuity in searching for it, hiring twenty-three men and diverting the course of a river in the hunt, his father boiled with a rage that was communicated, as usual, not in person but on paper. It was not until October 1894, three months before his death, that Churchill became aware of the seriousness of his father’s illness (long believed to have been advanced syphilis, more likely to have been the result of a brain tumor, but still unknown).

  Churchill completed his Sandhurst cadetship in 1895, a year in which the Churchill family suffered a spate of deaths. Lord Randolph “died by inches in public,” continuing to make speeches though visibly in decline. He died on January 24, his wife and two sons at his bedside. A memorial service was held in We
stminster Abbey, attended by Lord Rosebery, and a simultaneous funeral took place in Woodstock, followed by a burial in the family plot in the churchyard at Bladon. “The snow lay thick in the long avenue stretching through Blenheim Park from the Woodstock arch to Bladon. . . . Lady Randolph Churchill, supported by her sons, stood at the grave [and] . . . scattered lilies of the valley in the coffin.”26 Three months later, Jennie’s mother passed away. Then, in July, the cherished Mrs. Everest died as well. Upon hearing that she was seriously ill, Churchill had gone to London to see her, reaching Sandhurst for early morning parade by the last train before returning again to her bedside. He organized her funeral and later paid for the erection of a headstone and for the upkeep of the grave.

  Randolph’s death had a profound influence upon his son. The only silver lining was that it meant he was able to have his way and join the cavalry. Despite his father’s clear wish that he join the infantry, Churchill had, irrespective of his exam results, developed a fancy for the 4th Hussars, whose commanding officer, Colonel Brabazon, he admired. Churchill had set about pulling the necessary strings, his head turned, as he put it, by “the stir of the horses, the clank of their equipment, the thrill of motion, the tossing plumes, the sense of incorporation in a living machine, the suave dignity of the uniform.”27 A week after his father’s death he asked his mother to write to no less a personage than the Duke of Cambridge, commander in chief of the British Army. He was all in favor of the young Churchill going into the 4th Hussars, and so it was neatly arranged.

  Even while at Sandhurst, gearing up for a career in the army, Churchill had decided that he wanted to become a politician, possibly spurred on by his father’s death. He wrote prescient commentaries on political events in letters to his mother, as if rehearsing for what would come. On August 3, 1895, he described politics as “a fine game to play,” for which it was “well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.”28 In the same month, he conceived the idea of spending a couple of hours a week with one of Captain James’s “cramming” tutors when in London—“if you know what I mean, I need some one to point out some specific subjects to stimulate & to direct my reading.” He was conscious of the fact that his mind hadn’t received the “polish” that Oxbridge might have given it and wanted to rectify this perceived omission.

  War Tourist

  Churchill entered the British Army burning with ambition and with a lot to prove. Achievement early was the order of the day, now in pursuit of his father’s memory, a more liberating hunt than seeking his approval during his lifetime had ever been. He was the ultimate “young man in a hurry,” prepared brazenly to use his connections in order to get on and never afraid to put himself forward, an unashamed thruster motivated by ambition and burgeoning talent. Of course, Churchill would have defended himself vigorously against all charges along these lines. What else was he supposed to do? Sit idle and treat the world as if it owed him a living? Languish with his contemporaries, playing cards and waiting for the slow, slow progress through the army’s rank structure? Churchill eschewed these tempting options and decided to act upon the world. Though he exploited his family’s connections where possible, they alone were not a decisive factor. Family connections would have been “to no avail without his own primordial thrust. . . . Though he took the fullest opportunity of connections which he had inherited from his father, it was his own daemon which led him on to fame, prosperity and honour.”29 What now followed were four years of phenomenal military and literary activity, which sculpted Churchill’s adult character and prefaced his career as a politician.

  Of course, the British Army of this period was a much smaller force than that which was to languish in the trenches and endure lengthy campaigns in Flanders, Turkey, Mesopotamia, and East Africa in the First World War. Churchill remembered that a young cavalry captain with whom he had exercised while at Sandhurst, Douglas Haig, was later to bemoan the fact that he “only” had forty British divisions and four hundred brigades of artillery, a scale of military resource that would have been unthinkable even to the military visionary a few years before. “I wonder,” Churchill mused, “whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything that I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.”30 But in the mid-1890s, the world was still unchanged; God, it appeared, was in his heaven, and despite some discernible challenges, the British Empire was secure, and Britannia ruled the waves. This state of affairs, however, was not entirely to the liking of a young man looking forward, especially a young soldier—for it meant precious few opportunities to win the glory he craved.

  Soon a problem that would remain a factor throughout most of Churchill’s adult life began to plague him: money. His salary as a second lieutenant in the hussars was £120, yet it was reckoned that in such a smart unit an additional £500 was needed just in order to get by. Not having enough money was not just a personal worry and constraint but could lead to public embarrassment, and Churchill was implicated in an unsavory episode of bullying in which a fellow junior officer, Allan Bruce, was driven out of the regiment for (among other things) having an allowance of “only” £500 a year.**** Such an amount could not easily be borne by the Churchills, though Winston did manage to lever more money out of his mother.

  Having joined the right kind of regiment, Churchill now needed to find the right kind of campaigns. Like most army officers, Churchill hankered after action, because that was the way to win medals and get noticed, invaluable springboards to personal advancement in both the army and wider society. For Churchill, this was doubly important, because he had vaulting ambitions far beyond the slow rise toward his majority, battalion command, and the vague hope of possible promotion into the red-tabbed world of senior officers. Churchill was possessed of the conviction that life had much more in store for him than this. As he put it rather endearingly to Asquith’s daughter, Violet, “we are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm.”31 He was irresistibly drawn toward the idea of emulating his father in politics. This sense of promise to be fulfilled, and of glories to live up to, was intensified by the reaction of other people to him as the son of an exceptional man born of a famous line. Because of his father’s meteoric rise and subsequent fame—seen by some as Disraeli’s true successor, widely mentioned as the next Conservative prime minister after Salisbury—everyone had an interest in seeing what the young offshoot was like, including the army’s senior officers. The Duke of Cambridge set the tone when on an official visit to Aldershot, he asked for Churchill as an escort, and everywhere Churchill went,, he gained access to the upper echelons at least in part because his elders and betters couldn’t resist having a peek at him. An air of celebrity surrounded Churchill from birth, and this was a factor in shaping his character and how he viewed the world and his place in it.

  As a young blade searching for distinction, Churchill was entirely representative of his caste in regretting that the world, when viewed from the vantage point of the early 1890s, was growing so “sensible and pacific,” as he put it; there was no chance of the twenty years of war that one “would have got if it was 1793 as opposed to 1893.” British troops hadn’t fired at white troops since the Crimea. “Luckily, however, there were still savages and barbarous peoples,” he wrote. “There were Zulus and Afghans, also the Dervishes in the Soudan. Some of these might, if they were well-disposed, ‘put up a show’ some day.”32

  It was completely in character for Churchill to seek to circumvent the difficulty that this irritating dearth of conflict presented. In doing so, he illustrated the determination, initiative, and self-confidence in his own ability and destiny that marked him apart from most men. Churchill knew full well that the swift road to advancement lay in active service, “the glittering gateway to distinction,” as he put it. Sporting prowess was all very well, but having been “und
er fire” had a special aura. Besides, all his money had been spent on polo ponies, so he couldn’t afford to hunt during the leave period of 1895, as was the norm. Yet, though a man of colossal determination, even Winston Churchill could not cause a war to erupt in order to expedite his search for personal glory and renown. He could, however, do the next best thing: get involved in someone else’s.

  In getting himself into a war zone, Churchill displayed the hallmarks of his pell-mell, thrusting early career—audacity, innovation, and the pulling of strings, most of them in the hands of his mother and other relatives. He scoured the world for war and found the peace of the 1890s broken only in one quarter of the globe: in Cuba, where the beleaguered Spanish Empire was fighting a tricky counterinsurgency campaign. His proposed venture met with the approval of the 4th Hussars’ commanding officer, indeed was considered to be almost as good an idea as a season’s hunting, “without which,” Churchill wrote, “no subaltern [junior officer] or captain was considered to be living a respectable life.”33 This hurdle cleared, a letter was dispatched to the British ambassador in Madrid, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, who happened to be an old friend of Winston’s father. The Spanish minister of war duly wrote to Marshal Campos, commanding operations in Cuba. These contacts ensured excellent introductions, and Churchill was told that he had only to reach Havana to be warmly welcomed by no less a person than the captain general himself. Not content with this, Churchill reached even higher, obtaining a personal interview with the new commander in chief of the British Army, Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, in order to seek formal permission for his trip. Wolseley, who had also been a friend of his father, was happy to oblige. As an added bonus and official imprimatur, the director of military intelligence asked if Churchill could collect military information. One can only admire how Churchill played his hand.