Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  He played up the story of nineteen-year-old Winston creating a disorder at the Empire Theatre in London while valiantly defending the music hall girls against anti-vice campaigners. Davis’s version of the event appears to be based on what Churchill must have told him in an indiscreet moment, or more likely on stories repeated by Ethel Barrymore, who probably thought the whole episode was a charming example of Winston’s free spirits. But Davis made it seem too much like a night of debauchery, and Winston was mortified when he read it. In Davis’s account, Winston does everything but swing from the chandeliers and sip champagne from a slipper.13

  Now, as a government official and young leader of the Liberal Party, the last thing Churchill needed was a lurid scene in a new book portraying him as the ringleader of a riotous celebration on behalf of music hall beauties. At first, he hoped that no one in Britain would pay any attention to the book, but the press soon discovered the sensational passage and appeared at his door to question him. He refused to make any comment and then waited to see what would happen next. Meanwhile, he contemplated suing Richard Harding Davis, and wrote him a stern note saying that he considered the passage “defamatory & injurious.”

  But because the incident had taken place more than ten years ago, there wasn’t much to report beyond what was in Real Soldiers of Fortune. As a result, the story received little attention except as the subject of a few throwaway jokes about the undersecretary and the empire. “Mr. Davis is very frank in some of the things he says about Mr. Churchill,” remarked a reviewer in Black & White. “It scarcely seems tactful at this time of day to repeat that story about the Empire—the music-hall, not the other thing.”14

  Winston was perhaps overly sensitive on the subject of music hall girls. They had a reputation as friendly hostesses of easy virtue, and many decades later Lord Rosebery’s son Harry recalled that Churchill didn’t lose interest in them after that one night in his late teens. Harry liked to tell the story of a time when Winston was several years older and the two of them had taken out a pair of “Gaiety girls.” At the end of the night, he claimed, they each went home with one of the women. Meeting Winston’s date a short time afterward, he asked how the rest of the night had gone. Her reply didn’t surprise him. She said that he had done nothing but talk “into the small hours on the subject of himself.”15

  * * *

  If Winston was worrying too much about his reputation at the beginning of 1907, it may have been because the first vacancy in the Cabinet had opened up and he had failed to win the spot. He pretended not to mind, but some in the press had been speculating that he would be the next to enter the Cabinet, and when he wasn’t, it looked like a setback. He was receiving so much attention in print that one writer complained, “It is all part of the most skillful game of puffery ever played, the sole object being to set going a Winston Churchill craze.”

  The prime minister had seen the newspaper stories and hastened to assure Winston that he wasn’t losing favor with him. “We want your help at the [Colonial Office],” Campbell-Bannerman wrote on January 22. “I am sure therefore that you gain by your continuance at the CO whatever might be the charms of change.” That wasn’t the whole story, however. The prime minister had given serious consideration to promoting him but then had decided against it partly on the recommendation of John Morley. The opening was for president of the Board of Education—not a job that Winston would have enjoyed, and not one that would have done much to enhance his reputation. But it came with a seat in the Cabinet, and that was where he wanted to be.16

  Morley was doing what he thought was best for Winston and the country when he wrote the prime minister that his young friend was “unfit and even unthinkable” for the Board of Education. The older Liberals were developing more confidence and respect for Winston’s abilities but were still wary of giving him too much responsibility, and so were happy to see him flapping his wings under Elgin’s watchful eye at the Colonial Office. But, to Winston, their caution was a sign that he might have to wait a long time for a better position. It couldn’t have pleased him when he heard that the Education job was going to a safe, conventional choice—Reginald McKenna, who was more than ten years his senior and a sober, respectable figure. Reggie, as he was known, was an earnest Liberal with plain features who lived with his sister and kept a low profile. If McKenna was the kind of man the Cabinet wanted, Winston’s future as a Liberal might not be as bright as he had hoped.17

  It’s a good thing that he didn’t know the prime minister’s reason for promoting McKenna. It would have made him worry even more about his reputation. Writing to Asquith, C.B. explained that McKenna “had nearly all the qualities” for the job, “all save notoriety, and that is better absent.” Of course, by contrast, Winston had more “notoriety” than the rest of the Cabinet put together.

  To another colleague, C.B. explained that a promotion for Winston “would be what the public might expect, and what the Press is already booming; he has done his job brilliantly where he is, and is full of go and ebullient ambition. But he is only a Liberal of yesterday, his tomorrow being a little doubtful.” No matter how well Churchill performed today, there was always the fear that he might crash and burn tomorrow. “The P.M. won’t hear of Winston being in the Cabinet at present,” the well-informed courtier Lord Esher noted in January. “He is, like [Gladstone], old fashioned and disapproves of young men in a hurry.”18

  Yet there was one Cabinet member who thought C.B. had made a mistake and that Churchill should have been offered the job. It was Asquith, who was not yet on close terms with Winston but whose admiration for his work in the House of Commons was growing. He considered McKenna’s claim to the job “inferior” to Churchill’s and questioned whether it was wise to make this safe choice rather than the more unconventional one. McKenna had worked for him at the Treasury, so Asquith was in a good position to judge the relative merits of the two men.19

  Winston didn’t know that he had a new admirer in Asquith, but he would soon discover it, though not from the man himself. Instead he would learn it from his daughter, who shared her father’s admiration for Winston, and who wanted to know him much better.

  XIII

  THE POLITICAL MAIDEN

  It was in the spring that Winston Churchill and Violet Asquith became close friends. She had just turned twenty and was enjoying life in the spotlight as the only grown daughter of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Several handsome young men seemed interested in her, but she wasn’t ready for marriage and found most men her age a little dull and predictable. Devoted to her father, she loved nothing better than talking politics with him and following the latest events in the news. Her stepmother, Margot, worried that Violet was so intelligent and serious that she would never find a suitable mate.

  Violet needed to be less demanding, insisted Margot, telling a friend, “You must give gold for gold to find [the right man] and Violet has always given copper. She is brilliant, alas too brilliant!”1

  She was also pretty in a way that set her apart from the average Edwardian beauty. Her figure wasn’t statuesque or busty; her nose was a little too long, her fine wavy hair a little unruly. But her features were attractive in an unaffected way, fresh and natural. She had a bright, curious gaze, a full mouth, strong chin, and a slender waist. Ettie Grenfell thought Violet was heartbreakingly pretty and encouraged her to fall in love as often and as madly as she desired. “There are tracts before you to ravage darling,” Ettie would tell her, “crowds I wish to see in the dust at your feet.”

  Perhaps it was no coincidence that Violet and Winston began their friendship in earnest one April weekend in 1907 at Taplow Court as Ettie’s guests. (Willie Grenfell was now in the House of Lords, so Ettie had become Lady Desborough.) As Violet mentioned afterward in a letter to a friend, the house party was memorable chiefly because it was her first chance to have long talks with Winston. They had met socially in the past year, but had merely exchanged pleasantries. Now, after a weekend of the usual fun and games
at Taplow—charades, bridge, tennis, walks along the Thames, water fights—she concluded that there were few things more stimulating than conversations with Winston. His humor and political shop talk were unlike anything she had heard from other men—except, of course, from her father. Getting to know him, she said, filled her with a sense of “new excitement.”

  To Ettie, she sent a note of thanks full of ebullience. “Being with you always means happiness for me,” she told Ettie, “with or without water-fights.”2

  Over the next few months her delight in Winston’s presence grew. They met at balls and dinner parties, or at her home when Winston came to see her father, or at the House of Commons before a big debate. At the balls, as soon as he arrived, she would throw “all engagements to the winds” and steer him to a corner where they would talk for hours while others danced.

  “Was he, as people said, inebriated by his own words?” she asked herself. “I did not care, I only knew that I was.”

  Finally, at thirty-two, Winston had found a young woman who took him at his own estimation. She didn’t doubt his talents or resent his air of confidence or laugh at his moments of complete self-absorption. She saw from the start that he lived so deeply in his thoughts that he often seemed cut off from everything else, submerged in his own world “like a diver in his bell,” as Violet put it. Over the summer a special bond began to form between them—an unbreakable one, she thought. It was as if she had found the key to his heart. “By a blessed fluke,” she would later write, “I found my way into the bell and never lost it.”3

  Those last words were written when she was in her seventies. She loved language, and knew how to turn a phrase, but never published anything substantial until 1965, when the memoir of her friendship with Churchill appeared shortly after his death. (It was published in Britain as Winston Churchill as I Knew Him, and in America as Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait.) For the most part, it was respectfully received as a revealing look at Winston the private man. (The New York Times described Violet as “an affectionate admirer.”) But because the image of the public man was then so omnipresent, and because most people thought of him only as the famous old man with his cigars and impish smiles, Violet’s portrait of Churchill in the Edwardian period—when she was closest to him—didn’t make much of an impression and was soon pushed aside by bigger books on the great statesman of later years.4

  It would have helped if she had not pretended—partly for decorum’s sake—that Winston had been merely a friend. Her memoir is clearly a story of unrequited love, and it shows in countless passages. She writes glowingly about being “transfixed” and “spellbound” in Winston’s company, and of “seeing stars” as she sat next to him, and of feeling “a great void” whenever he was absent for any length of time. There is certainly something deeper than friendship in her declaration near the end of the book that he was “the searchlight” that “illumined” her course in life. “For ten years,” she wrote, “my first impulse in any crisis had been to find out [Winston’s] attitude to what was happening. Next to my father’s his was the mind whose reaction to events I awaited most eagerly.”

  She began the book with a scene from a dinner conversation between them that took place almost a year before their important weekend at Ettie’s. The surviving evidence of her letters and diaries suggests that she confused this dinner with the ones at Taplow, but her scene captured the essence of their first talks, which involved poetry and politics, history and gossip. Many of her pretty contemporaries might have fled in tears of boredom or alarm as Winston discoursed on the brevity of human life and his determination to accomplish great things in the short time available. Without the slightest trace of modesty, he told her, “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glowworm.”5

  Winston liked to talk, and Violet liked to listen. More important, she perfectly understood the nature of his talk—that it was essentially Winston thinking aloud, but in a form that seemed perfectly shaped, with polished sentences and witty epigrams. It was a performance, but full of unexpected twists and turns, and making no concessions to the ordinary conventions of polite conversation. The trick for his sympathetic listener who wanted to be part of the conversation was to leap nimbly in and out of the flow of his talk without impeding it. Violet seems to have mastered that trick early on.

  In many ways they were a lot alike—both were highly opinionated, strong-willed, idealistic, romantic, intense. She could be overwhelming and demanding, just as he could be. And she could be just as pugnacious. But they weren’t often at odds with each other, simply because their views were so similar. At times Violet seems to have found in Winston’s mind a mirror image of her own. Margot—who thought Winston and Violet were two of the brightest young people she knew—once said that her stepdaughter, “though intensely feminine, could have made a remarkable man.”6

  But, as much as he enjoyed her companionship and admired her intelligence, Winston never seems to have felt that spark of passion that so animated her attachment to him. He wasn’t looking for a female Winston. He was searching for the same thing that he thought his father had found in Jennie—a great beauty with an air of mystery about her, a glittering star to guide and inspire him, a muse who was also a companion. Violet understood the romantic in him, but she wasn’t romantic enough for him. She was a little too young, too awkward, and too much in awe of him to be his guiding star.

  In 1907, however, there was no one else on the horizon. Violet was it—the one young woman in whom he could confide, the one who didn’t laugh when he called himself a “glowworm.”

  * * *

  If Churchill had wanted a serious relationship with Violet, he would have needed to consider carefully the attitudes and expectations of her father and stepmother—especially the latter. Capricious and passionate in her likes and dislikes, Margot was a walking stick of dynamite, and no one could predict when and where she might explode. She was perfectly capable of thinking one day that Winston belonged to the devil (“a little treacherous gutter genius,” she called him), and then deciding the next day that he was harmless and could stay in limbo (“Winston is a child. . . . It is the side of him I am really fond of”).

  For the most part, she disapproved of his relationship with her stepdaughter because she thought he planted unrealistic notions in her head. She was also convinced that Violet behaved differently after spending too much time in his company. She thought her stepdaughter was always insufferably full of herself after talking to Winston. “His attention,” Margot scoffed, “is vain-making.”7

  Winston did his best to please Asquith’s high-strung wife, but she was hard to satisfy. Consuelo Marlborough, who remembered her as “small and phenomenally thin” with “hawk-like nose and shrewd eyes,” found her overbearing and waspish. Margot had a habit of talking over other people or abruptly insulting them. “[She] found it difficult to listen,” said Consuelo. “She would shoot forth exclamations that soared like rockets, and loved to throw in pointed criticisms or to scold satirically.”

  In later years Winston would offer a much more generous assessment of her, saying she was “a great woman, impudent, audacious, a flaming creature.” From his mother, he knew of Margot’s early life as a proud young figure in society who spoke her mind freely, captivated older men with her frank manner, and rode a horse with the wild abandon of a “featherweight daredevil,” to use Churchill’s phrase.8

  As she grew older, she grew more difficult. Her marriage to Asquith was both exhilarating and exhausting. His first wife had died in 1891, leaving behind five young children—four boys and Violet. Three years later Asquith married thirty-year-old Margot, who struggled to be a good mother to another woman’s children, and often failed. She had five children of her own with Asquith, but she lost three in childbirth, and these deaths did much to cloud her view of life, and to weaken her health.

  Asquith—whom she always called Henry—made things worse by his philandering. He had a weakness for younger women like Wins
ton’s Pamela, but he always came home to Margot, and she usually chose to turn a blind eye to his short spells of infatuation.

  Margot liked to believe that she had the greatest influence on Asquith’s thinking. Henry was careful to humor her in this regard, nodding in apparent agreement with her views, but he paid as much attention to Violet’s opinions as he did to Margot’s, and this was often a source of conflict in the family. The two women were frequently at odds. Margot’s shifting moods and sharp tongue were hard for Violet to bear. There were moments when the two would almost come to blows. After one of their tense standoffs, Margot was so incensed by Violet’s “strong will” that she scrawled in her diary, “I could hit her with my fists.”9

  Society tended to put up with Margot because she was Henry’s wife. In later years, she would find much less deference. When Margot’s autobiography appeared in the 1920s, Dorothy Parker quipped, “The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.” Privately, an American diplomat complained that she was “perhaps the most irritating personality in the world.”

  But some of her best insults were gems and will live on. What can’t be recaptured is the way they were delivered in her deep, thick voice, which her grandson said was as “low as a man’s.” The most infamous of her insults was unleashed on a visit to America in the early 1930s. There she met Jean Harlow, who mispronounced her name as “Mar-gott,” prompting her to explain, “My dear, the t is silent, as in Harlow.”10

  * * *

  Herbert Henry Asquith was distinguished looking in his late middle age, with silver hair and a large, well-shaped head. It was easy to imagine him as a senator in ancient Rome, and many cartoonists were fond of depicting him in a toga. He was a little stout, though solidly built. Except for golf, he rarely exercised. Once, when a frantic Margot told him they would miss their train unless they ran, he replied calmly, “I don’t run much.”