It was thus that Churchill headed for Cuba via New York in November 1895. “Often I had imagined in dreams and day-dreams the sensations attendant upon being for the first time under fire,” and his dreams were about to be fulfilled.34 The trip to Cuba, in the company of a fellow junior officer, Reginald Barnes, was intended to accomplish this essential first step: “I thought it might be as well to have a private rehearsal given my choice of profession.” And so, for the first time, Churchill left Europe behind. The ship called at New York before onward passage to Cuba, where a meeting took place that presented another example of his mother’s influence. Churchill and Barnes were met on the quayside by Bourke Cochran, an influential American politician and friend of Lady Randolph’s who was to have an important impact upon Churchill as a politician and orator. Cochran put them up in his Fifth Avenue apartment and impressed Churchill markedly, particularly with his exhilarating conversation. Later in life, Churchill claimed that he had never met Cochran’s equal in conversation and comprehension. A correspondence between the two men developed, Bourke sending Churchill copies of his speeches. In New York, Churchill developed impressions of America, remarking upon paper money, the transport system, the strictness of the regime at West Point Military Academy, and the smartness of the cruiser USS New York.
Following this New York sojourn, Churchill and Barnes sailed for Cuba. “When first in the dim light of early morning I first saw the shores of Cuba rise and define themselves from the dark-blue horizon, I felt as if I sailed with Long John Silver and first gazed on Treasure Island.”35 Churchill had devoured “with delight” Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel about pirates, shipwrecks, and treasure at the age of nine. Upon their being received and welcomed by the Spanish authorities, it was suggested that the two junior officers join a mobile force if they wanted to see some fighting. A three-thousand-strong column had started from Santa Clara heading for Sancti Spíritus, a town beset by rebels. They caught up with the column and were cordially received by General Valdez, who saw in their visit a token of moral support from Britain.
As well as acquiring a taste for Havana cigars and siestas, Churchill made useful observations during his visit to the troubled island. He discovered that foreigners had “the same feelings about colonies as we do,” and that the Spaniards talked of Cuba “as we talk of Ireland.” Despite this, he couldn’t see how the Spanish could win, given the immense cost of maintaining large forces so far from home, fighting a war in which the enemy only needed to avoid defeat in order to win. Cuba for Spain was “like a dumb-bell held at arm’s length.” Across the island the Spanish forces “moved like Napoleon’s convoys in the Peninsula,” Churchill wrote, “league after league, day after day, through a world of impalpable hostility, slashed here and there by fierce onslaught.”36
Churchill was straining at the bit for something to happen, and on November 30, 1895, his twenty-first birthday, it did. “For the first time I heard shots fired in anger, heard bullets strike flesh or whistle through the air,” a bullet even passing through the hut in which he was sheltering. Immediately he began to take a more circumspect view of being “under fire.”37 “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” He witnessed several contacts between the Spanish column and the Cuban insurgents. He was even awarded a Spanish medal for gallantry, causing a rumpus at home, where the Spanish action was unpopular, and inviting questions as to what on earth young Churchill was doing in Cuba at all. Nevertheless, the receipt of silverware ticked another item off the list of things required if he were to get on. The trip also introduced him to what was to become one of the major vehicles for establishing his name, and a crucial strand of personal income for the rest of his life—writing for the newspapers. Taking a leaf out of his father’s book, he had contracted with the Daily Graphic to provide letters at £5 a piece from this distant war zone. From this point on, writing was central to Churchill’s life, inseparable from his political and public life. He found in it not only power and profit, but solace. As he described it in 1908, “I often fortify myself amid the uncertainties and vexations of political life by believing that I possess a line of retreat into a peaceful and fertile country where no rascal can pursue me and where one need never be dull or idle or even wholly without power. It is then, indeed, that I feel devoutly thankful to have been born fond of writing.”38
Soldier and War Correspondent: India and Africa
Returning to England, Churchill sought every opportunity to meet the “right sort” of people and discuss the affairs of the day. In January 1896, he stayed at Tring with the Rothschilds, where the talk was of Cecil Rhodes and the Jameson Raid into the Transvaal. In spring 1896, his regiment marched to Hounslow and Hampton Court, preparatory to departure for India. While waiting to sail, Churchill passed an agreeable six months that he described as the “only idle spell I’ve ever had.” He was able to live at home with his mother, play polo at Hurlingham and Ranelagh (he had five polo ponies), and enjoy the trappings of the London Season. In describing this world of the 1890s from the vantage point of the 1920s, Churchill wrote of how “in a very large degree, everyone knew everyone else. The few hundred great families who had governed England for so many generations and had seen her rise to the pinnacle of her glory, were interrelated to an enormous extent by marriage.”39 In the intervening thirty years, this was all to change immensely, the great London houses turned into hotels or flats and the aristocracy immeasurably weakened. Naturally, Churchill deplored such changes, just as he deplored what he termed the “democratization of the battlefield” brought about by the industrialization of conflict, a far cry from the warfare depicted on the grand tapestries at Blenheim Palace that had so influenced his childhood thoughts. Yet regretting what he perceived to be changes for the worse never prevented him from keeping abreast of modern developments and dealing effectively with them, whether in his private or professional life.
The London that Churchill launched himself upon in the summer of 1896 was one where all minds were turned to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee the following year: the First World War, and the immense changes it was to effect, were part of a future as yet unknown. Churchill was determined not to waste the final summer before the start of his regiment’s lengthy stint in India. At social functions he met, among others, a former home secretary, two future prime ministers, the Leader of the House of Commons, the First Lord of the Treasury, the colonial secretary, the commander in chief of the British Army, the president of the Local Government Board, and the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. At a house party at Deepdene, home of Lord William Beresford and Lilian, widow of Churchill’s uncle the 8th Duke of Marlborough, he also met General Sir Bindon Blood. “On the sunny lawns of Deepdene I extracted a promise that if ever he commanded another expedition on the Indian frontier, he would let me come with him.”
The rambunctious Churchill realized, sometimes, that he needed to curb his natural tendencies in order to operate successfully in such exalted company. Nevertheless, it must have been very difficult to do so while mixing in the lofty circles to which his family background (and his father’s fame) entitled him and never having been one to defer to others just because they were older or more important. He attended a weekend party given by the Prince of Wales (a family friend and sometime enemy, now firmly returned to friendship and even intimacy with Lady Randolph) to which the colonel commanding his regiment was invited. He had, therefore, to be on his best behavior—“punctual, subdued, reserved, in short display[ing] all the qualities with which I am least endowed.”40
Over the course of this summer, he energetically maneuvered for future advantage. He heard that Kitchener was organizing an expedition to reclaim the Sudan and attempted to join Sir Frederick Carrington’s expedition to Matabeleland. Churchill’s appetite for politics remained undiminished, as did his desire to hone his communicative skills and augment his knowledge. In April 1896, Bourke Cochran commended the study of sociology and political economy, because �
��with your remarkable talent for lucid and attractive expression you would be able to make great use of the information” acquired.41 He hungered for immediate glory and for political renown and was reluctant to pay his dues in order to get there, unprepared to wait his turn. The prospect of eight years of garrison duty in India appalled him. As he wrote to his mother on August 4, 1896, “The future is to me utterly unattractive. I look upon going to India with this unfortunate regiment . . . as useless and unprofitable exile.”42 He was already determined to become a politician and impatient for the opportunity to change career.
But not even Churchill could turn the wheel of fate at a moment’s notice. In September 1896, he was off to India, unfortunate or not, aboard the SS Britannia. Colonel Brabazon’s farewell address referred memorably, Churchill recalled, to “India, that famous appanage of the Bwitish Cwown.” Along with the 1,200 men of his regiment, he sailed from Southampton, landing in Bombay twenty-three days later. The journey was spent playing chess and piquet (a two-handed card game) and conducting debates. Alighting from the ship, he fell and badly injured his shoulder, a wound that crippled him at polo and prevented him from using his sword at the Battle of Omdurman two years later. From Bombay the regiment moved via Poona to Bangalore, the main military cantonment of the Madras Presidency. Settling in, among an officer’s first tasks was to collect about him his “cabinet” of servants, finding (or inheriting from a departing regiment) a dressing boy, an attendant, and a butler. Again favored by his stellar background, Churchill was invited to dine at Government House. Thus after a day spent chiding troops for failing to wear their pith helmets, he was able to enjoy a “banquet of glitter, pomp and iced champagne” and began to develop an imperialist’s sense of the “great work that England was doing in India and of her high mission to rule these primitive but agreeable races for their welfare and our own.”43
In Bangalore, Churchill, along with Reginald Barnes and Hugo Baring, “took a palatial bungalow, all pink and white, with heavily tiled roof and deep verandahs sustained by white plaster columns, wreathed in purple bougainvillea, in two acres of land and surrounded by rose trees.”44 Here Churchill took up a hobby he had toyed with during childhood and built a collection of the exotic butterflies that fluttered in the garden, though it was soon destroyed by a rat. The abundant roses in the garden meant that “every morning I can cut about three great basins full of the most beautiful flowers. Flowers, flowering shrubs and creepers blossom in glorious profusion,” he wrote, “snipe (and snakes) abound in the marshes; brilliant butterflies dance in the sunshine.”45 A large barn was built to cater for thirty horses and ponies, and soon the regiment acquired twenty-five polo ponies from the Poona Light Horse, a stable that was to form the nucleus for the 4th Hussars’ assault on the Inter-Regimental Polo Tournament. As Churchill explained, this devotion to horsemanship and winning polo tournaments sustained the regiment’s intensity of purpose.
But horses and pith helmets alone were unlikely to be enough for the questing mind of Winston Churchill and the ticking clock of his ambition. He found Anglo-Indian society “vulgar,” reporting to his mother that they had commented on “my not ‘calling’ as is the absurd custom of the country.”46 In this social desert, he again enlisted his mother and her contacts, desperate to meet the “right type” of people. In fact, he found the routine of army life dull and boring. He kept revolving the proposed Egyptian campaign in his mind—“action this day” being a personal leitmotif that he was later to inflict upon other people—and frequently thought about parliamentary elections back at home. He sharpened his political talons in letters, writing, for example, a voluminous response to Lord Lansdowne’s proposal to increase the size of the army. In a lengthy disquisition to his mother he referred to his “stupid speech” and the fact that the strength of the Royal Navy negated a large army (material later to be used when, as a young MP, Churchill took a leading role in opposing Brodrick’s army reforms). Letters to his mother begged her to obtain him a transfer. Jennie, to her credit, sought to soothe his tormented ambition, recognizing (and therefore tolerating) a greedy appetite for life that resembled her own. Her efforts met with some success; in December 1896, Lord Kitchener agreed to put Churchill’s name down for special service with the Egyptian Army in the event of a campaign.
Thinking constantly about his future and his destiny, Churchill decided that he needed to study more widely and intensely than he had ever done before. This was to overcome his lack of a university education, about which he was self-conscious, and to acquire the breadth of knowledge he considered essential for a man of his boundless ambition. Of his university-educated peers he wrote that he “sometimes resented the apt and copious information which some of them seemed to possess. . . . So I resolved to read history, philosophy, economics and things like that.” He asked his mother to send books, including Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Macaulay’s collection of ballad poems Lays of Ancient Rome, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and also the parliamentary debates of the previous six years. “From November to May I read for four or five hours every day. . . . I approached it with an empty, hungry mind, and with fairly strong jaws.”47 This store of knowledge was to stand Churchill in good stead for the rest of his life, though he continued to regret the fact that he learned without the benefit of tutorial enquiry and critical dialogue. Churchill was a self-educated man, and as A. J. P. Taylor noted, “The theme of his education was statesmanship.”48
In these formative years, Churchill conceived a view of the world influenced by Darwinism and history more than God. Civilized races progressed; backward races were there to be aided, though they were not to be allowed to stand in the way of progress. Non-Europeans might currently be inferior to Europeans, but they could be “uplifted,” and this was clearly Britain’s imperial mission. Churchill, writing to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, said that the empire was a lot of bother to Britain; “The only thing one can say for it is that it is justified if it is undertaken in an altruistic spirit for the good of the subject races.”49 England—soon extended in Churchill’s conception of the world to become the “English-speaking peoples”—was a force for good in the world, and this was the key to his belief in the British Empire. It was a driver of progress and enlightenment, and for this reason Churchill was quick to condemn actions that besmirched Britain’s reputation as a fair, wise, and judicious imperial power. He eschewed jingoism and crass yellow-press nationalism, though he was in no way anti-imperialist. Having seen men die horrible, prosaic deaths and having witnessed the slaughter of wounded foes on the battlefield, jingoism was not for him. But he did reflect the “Jolly Old Empire” attitude common among his class and didn’t question Britain’s right to hold dominion over palm and pine. A. J. P. Taylor wrote:
His deepest devotion was to England, as she had matured through the ages, and, though it would be unfair to call him a Little Englander, he was never an Imperialist in the ordinary sense. Perhaps Great Englander would be the right term. In his view the British Empire was another form of the benevolence which he sought to practice at home in social affairs. Far from being a source of profit to be exploited, Churchill’s Empire was simply the white man’s burden—a responsibility imposed by conscience on a great power. Similarly, he did not regard the Dominions as equals and he saw the Commonwealth (a word he detested) as a family of children, loyally sustaining the venerable mother to whom they owed so much.50
Churchill continued to yearn for the British political scene, his appetite whetted by the three thousand miles separating Westminster from the suffocating plains of southern India. As he wrote to his mother, “the more I see of soldiering—the more I like it—but the more I feel convinced that it is not my métier.” He seems to have been more content when given more responsibility, as when, in February 1897, he was acting as brigade major and getting stuck into the interminable administration that accompanies military affairs, becoming “a very ‘correct’ soldier” full of zeal. Even at this early stage in hi
s army career, Churchill (like many junior officers before and since) was putting a mental time limit on the length of his service—perhaps two years—and writing candidly to his mother about how he should best use his time as a springboard for a public career thereafter, constantly seeking to put himself “before the public.” “A few months in South Africa would win me the S. A. medal and in all probability the [British South Africa] Company’s Star. Then hotfoot to Egypt—to return with two more decorations in a year or two—and beat my sword into an iron dispatch box.”51 Churchill considered military service an essential prerequisite for political life and was increasingly convinced that fate, destiny—call it what you will—had something more in store for him than was the lot of ordinary man, even the “ordinary” man of high birth and exceptional talent. His early exposure to the life and works of his great ancestor John Spencer Churchill, so powerfully enshrined in stone and tapestry at Blenheim, his belief in the importance of hereditary blood, his adoration of his father’s achievements and foiled ambitions—all of these things left him yearning for dramatic distinction on the grandest stage. As Clement Attlee was to write, “If there was one thing that marked him off from the comparable figures of history, it was his characteristic way of standing back and looking at himself—and his country—as he believed history would.”52
Churchill Page 6