Freed to move north, Churchill began roving around the front “wherever there was a chance of fighting” and had his horse shot from under him during an action involving mounted scouts. Churchill advanced as Roberts’s force marched on Johannesburg and Pretoria in the summer of 1900, even managing to cycle in civilian clothes through Johannesburg before it had surrendered, thereby getting an important message through to Lord Roberts. He had the pleasure of running up the flag on the State Model School, where he had so recently been incarcerated, and took part in the Battle of Diamond Hill, where he displayed “conspicuous gallantry.” Churchill continued to write for the Morning Post and rushed out more books: Ian Hamilton’s March was published in October 1900, selling eight thousand copies. Its predecessor, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, was published five days before the relief of Mafeking and sold fourteen thousand copies. This military activity and copious literary output in this period was remarkable, and quite unique.
It was when the Union Flag was raised in the enemy capital of Pretoria on June 5, 1900, that Churchill decided to return home. The conventional war had been won and the enemy’s capital cities conquered. There remained a lengthy guerrilla phase that “promised to be shapeless and indefinite,” and this was not for Churchill. He had formed the lasting—and through two world wars, important—impression that war was far too serious a business to be left to generals and that the Victorian army was poorly placed to fight a modern war. Also in his mind was the prospect of a general election, as well as a store of cash and public capital at home that needed to be exploited. The nineteenth century, and a half decade of intense Churchillian activity and development, were over. The twentieth century, which was to witness Churchill’s colossal contribution to world history, had dawned.
3
Pundit and Politician: A Rising Star
In the decade following his election to Parliament, Winston Churchill moved swiftly through the political gears, gathering speed at an unheard-of rate as he advanced from parliamentary debutant to senior Cabinet minister. It was a rise made all the more remarkable by the fact that he left one political party for another, crossing the floor of the House of Commons in a daring move that could make or break his fledgling political career. Those who encountered Churchill rarely forgot him, most recognizing his extraordinary nature, whether they approved of him or not. At the turn of the century, Captain Percy Scott of HMS Terrible predicted that one day he would be prime minister, for he possessed the two necessary qualifications, “genius and plod.”1
Having left the Boer War behind, Churchill had returned to Britain determined upon politics. He had had a “good” war and was accorded a hero’s welcome in Oldham, entering the town through crowded streets in a procession of ten landaus, to regale a packed Theatre Royal with the tale of his escape from captivity. Jubilant cheers rang out when he mentioned the name of one of his Oldham-born saviors and it was discovered that his wife was in the gallery. The Conservative government was determined to cash in on the general optimism following the fall of Pretoria and Johannesburg, the debilitating guerrilla war not yet having set in. Churchill campaigned as a pro-war candidate and criticized the Liberals for opposing it. He took one of the town’s two seats by a narrow margin in the “khaki” election of 1900. Congratulations and demands to speak in support of other candidates flowed in, from Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour (Salisbury’s successor in July 1902) down. Churchill’s success in Oldham, and his celebrity, meant that he was much in demand. “For three weeks I had what seemed to me a triumphal progress through the country”: twenty-six years old and fêted throughout the land.2
How did this young dynamo appear to his fellow men as he swapped khaki and press dispatches for the frock coat and parliamentary flourish? He was “five foot six and a half inches, slender built, with a 31-inch chest, rounded shoulders, delicate skin, ginger hair and a pugnacious baby face with twinkling blue eyes . . . striking but not handsome.” His personality struck people forcibly, even if his looks did not. Some he repelled; others he fascinated. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt described him as “a little, square-headed fellow of no very striking appearance, but of wit, intelligence, and originality. In mind and manner he is a strange replica of his father, with all his father’s suddenness and assurance, and I should say more than his father’s ability. There is just the same gaminerie and contempt of the conventional.”3
He had swapped paid employment for unpaid, and so his search for money continued. Back salary from the Morning Post, plus the sale of his books on the Sudan and South Africa campaigns, netted him over £4,000, but he spotted an opportunity to add significantly to this sum: sensing that his earning potential as a celebrity lecturer was at its zenith, he began planning a lecture tour of America, Britain, and Canada, recounting his Boer War escapades and explaining his political opinions. Churchill stayed with the governor general in Canada, where, aided by magic lantern displays, he addressed packed gatherings about the war and his part in it, rarely earning less than £100 a night. In one month—November 1900—he banked over £4,500. Despite these earnings, he remained relatively hard up. But he was at least able to relieve his mother of the annual £500 allowance and from this moment began his financial independence.
When Churchill took up his parliamentary career in earnest after returning from this tour, he soon marked himself out as a man of potential and controversy. He took up his seat on February 14, 1901, in “the historic arena where he was to live his life and fulfill his destiny” and which he had envisioned in countless daydreams since childhood.4 His maiden speech was delivered to a packed house four days later and was widely reported in the press; through the advance release of the text, Churchill had ensured that it would be. The Daily Express considered it “spellbinding.” In the speech, he graphically portrayed himself as his father’s son and courted the displeasure of his party by making a reference to the justness of the Boer cause when viewed through Boer eyes, remarking that if he were a Boer, he would be fighting against the British. He struck a fair-minded, as opposed to jingoistic, tone, saying that the government’s policy “ought to be to make it easy and honourable for the Boers to surrender, and painful and perilous for them to continue in the field.”5
As was to be the case throughout his life, Churchill’s preparation for the speech had been meticulous, for he was not a gifted off-the-cuff speaker. “Just preparing my impromptu remarks” was to become a feature of his approach to public speaking. There was very good reason for this use of the “concocted impromptu,” for shortly after entering Parliament, he had the horrifying experience of forgetting what he was saying. He rose to speak in the House on the Trades Unions and Trade Disputes Bill, in which he intended to attack his own government for not being radical enough in protecting workers. He began “with all the vigour, brightness and freshness of expression and courage” for which he was known, a reporter wrote. But after forty-five minutes, he dried up. He tried several times to remember what he had to say. He cast around for pieces of paper, searching his pockets and the floor. Finally he sat down after thanking the House for its kindness in having listened to him. “He searched the roof with upturned eyes.” Next day the headlines declared “Mr. Churchill Breaks Down” and “Moving Incident in the House.” Many people thought he had suffered a stroke, though “these anticipations were happily premature,” as he wrote later. “But the experience was disconcerting to the last degree, and it leads me to utter this solemn warning to public speakers: ‘Never trust your memory without your manuscript.’”6
The usual custom for new members of the House was to maintain a decorous parliamentary silence for some time following their maiden speech. But there was little chance of Winston Churchill observing this custom. In the following week, he intervened twice on South Africa, and on March 12, he defended the government in a significant speech, eliciting the gratitude of the secretary of state for war, St. John Brodrick. In his first eleven months in Parliament, he made nine speeches in the Hous
e, thirty speeches in the country, and twenty in towns.7 He spent twelve afternoons playing polo during this period, fourteen days hunting, two days shooting, and eighteen days holidaying abroad.
His maiden speech marked the start of what would become a seminal relationship in Churchill’s political life—his association and friendship with David Lloyd George, leader of the radical wing of the Liberal Party. After the rising Liberal star had met “the new Tory bully” (as he described Churchill) on the floor of the chamber, he sought him out to congratulate him. Churchill soon came to look up to this remarkable Welsh politician and was to seek his counsel and advice through many political vicissitudes.
Churchill’s debut as a parliamentary speaker bore within it the seeds of discord. He was a Conservative MP—but as he had written to his mother in 1897, “I am a Liberal in all but name.” Only on the issue of Irish Home Rule did Churchill’s views vary from those of the Liberal Party. Almost as soon as he had set out on his parliamentary career, Churchill began to challenge his own government’s policies, ferociously criticizing proposals for an increase in the size of the British Army tabled by the secretary of state for war (while upholding the Royal Navy as the guardian of British and imperial security, a view that was shared by many within his own party, as well as on the Opposition benches). For a three-year period from April 1901, Churchill attacked Brodrick’s proposed army reforms. As he said in the Commons on May 13, 1901, “I wish to complain very respectfully, but most urgently, that the Army Estimates . . . are much too high. . . . I think it about time that a voice was heard from this side of the House pleading that unpopular cause.”8 His position was that the army was bad value for money. It was not big enough to rival the armies of the continental powers and should confine itself to the job of garrisoning the empire—the wider security of Britain was the job of the navy: “The Empire which has grown up around these islands is essentially commercial and marine.”9 He claimed that “the first and main principle which should animate British statecraft in the realm of imperial defense was the promotion of a steady transfer of expenditure from military to marine.”10 He chided the government and Brodrick in particular for imitating the Germans and advocating a big army. As he told laughing constituents in Oldham in January 1903, “Sometimes I think the whole Cabinet has got a touch of German measles, but Mr. Brodrick’s case is much the worst. He is spotted from head to foot, and he has communicated the contagion to the Army.”11 That same year, he was to begin making fun of Joseph Chamberlain in his speeches as the issue of tariff reform came to dominate party politics. For a twenty-something parliamentary debutant, and one with vaulting political ambitions, to start his career by laying into his party’s senior ministers was brave to the point of recklessness. But as Churchill’s extraordinary political rise bore witness, he seemed to know what he was doing.
Clearly, party loyalty was not of great consequence to Churchill, and it never would be. Many would come to despise him for this reason. But as he told an audience in Liverpool in November 1901, “Nothing would be worse than that independent men should be snuffed out and that there should be only two opinions in England—the Government opinion and the Opposition opinion. The perpetually unanimous Cabinet disquiets me. I believe in personality.”12 Churchill’s convictions differed from those of the majority of his party. He had contacts, such as the radical politician and free-thinker John Morley, and social ideas that were anathema to most Tories (such as progressive taxation and disapproval of the Church of England’s protected position). His contact with Lloyd George nurtured the seeds of liberalism implanted in Churchill’s breast. He did not, however, set out to be a rebel, and it was not unusual for a young man to “be in a hurry.” Churchill was sensible enough to couch his opposition to the government’s policies in terms of loyalty, saying, for example, that if Chamberlain’s tariff reform proposals were adopted, the old Conservative Party would disappear (a view many Conservatives would have endorsed). When he disagreed with his party, he was apt to say that the party had moved away from him, not vice versa, and he reserved much of his fire for “socialism” as espoused by the emerging Labour Party, castigating its “all yours is mine” philosophy.
While Churchill had little time for party political warfare, he was also uninterested in personal rivalries. His lack of party loyalty led many politicians to distrust him, and his brusque, often rude style put backs up from the start of his career. As a young politician, he was very aggressive in his parliamentary speeches and prone to making personal attacks. After leaving the Conservatives to join the Liberals in 1904, he was asked to moderate his abuse of the Conservative leadership by his Liberal Party superiors. Balfour’s elegant censure was that “if there is preparation there should be more finish, and if there is so much violence there should certainly be more obvious veracity of feeling.”13 Despite the rancor he attracted, it was remarkable how little enmity he felt toward those who attacked him. He had the skin of a rhinoceros, which was just as well, for not only had he made himself unpopular in certain military circles, once he entered Parliament, he succeeded in making himself an unloved, even a hated, figure in some quarters, more especially after he had abandoned the Conservative Party. But his guileless disregard for, and indeed ignorance of, what other people on an individual basis thought about his actions was one of his greatest political strengths.
Churchill’s loyalty to the Tories was undermined by the process of writing his father’s biography (commenced in 1902, completed in 1905, published in two volumes in 1906). He came to believe that Lord Randolph had been ill used by the party’s hierarchy, and this affected his political expressions. Earl Winterton was “convinced that this behavior, which caused him to be the most unpopular man in politics and society at the time, was due to what amounted to an idée fixe about his father. . . . He believed that the latter had been abominably treated by the social and political world who had together plotted his downfall.”14 His father had been the natural successor to Disraeli, the man who had revived Tory fortunes after the 1880 election defeat and the great leader’s retirement. And yet he had been abandoned by his party and his so-called friends. Churchill had an ardent desire, therefore, to be seen to be carrying on his father’s disputes. He was an egocentric individual and, unlike most politicians, took no steps to conceal it.
During these early parliamentary years, Churchill surveyed the metropole and contemplated his new career from rooms at 105 Mount Street, seeing out a lease on the property taken by his cousin the Duke of Marlborough (as well as the gift of this two-year lease, his generous cousin gave him £500 toward election expenses). Having joined the set of youthful MPs who had so impressed him a few years before, Churchill soon became a key member of a group known as the Hooligans or “Hughligans,” after Lord Hugh Cecil. It was an informal House of Commons dining club through which a select band of mischievous youngbloods sought to get themselves noticed by the prominent people they invited to attend. They dined more often with members of the Liberal Party’s right wing than with fellow Conservatives, very much to the liking of the transparty Winston Churchill. Though still very early in his parliamentary career, he was already seeking to forge a new political grouping that would concentrate like-minded men from both main parties. As he wrote to the aged Lord Rosebery in October 1902, he longed to “create a wing of the Tory party which could either infuse vigour into the parent body or join a central coalition. . . . The only real difficulty I have to encounter is the suspicion that I am moved by mere restless ambition: & if some issue—such as [tariff reform]—were to arise—that difficulty would disappear.”15 Churchill’s scant regard for the proprieties of party membership stoked the fires of those who disapproved of him and was an important facet of his image in the long years before he became a national hero.
Churchill’s attachment to the Conservative Party was further weakened when one of its leading lights, Joseph Chamberlain, began to espouse the cause of protectionism, or tariff reform, that if adopted would lead to the l
evying of duty on imports from nonempire countries, signaling a move away from the free-trade precepts ushered in by the Corn Laws. It began an internecine struggle for the heart of the Tory party that was to do it great damage. Having drifted so far from the rather loose Tory moorings that had tethered him, it was inevitable Churchill would leave the party. Warned by Joseph Chamberlain, the party’s leading proponent of tariff reform, to look out for it as the “coming” big issue in British politics, Churchill sedulously prepared himself for the fight. He opposed protectionism because although the vast British Empire contained many of the raw materials and markets that Britain’s global trading economy depended upon, it could not act in isolation from the rest of the world; ultimately, a turn to protectionism would spell disaster. Churchill was adamant that he did “not want a self-contained Empire. It is very much better that the great nations of the world should be interdependent.” In the event of a European war, “do you not think it very much better that the United States should be vitally interested in keeping the English market open?”16 As he wrote to Ernest Fletcher:
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