(10) Charm offensive: Churchill and Kaiser Wilhelm try to impress each other during German military exercises in 1906.
(11) The Prime Minister’s Daughter: Violet Asquith’s love for Winston was unrequited, but she was a passionate friend and encouraged her father to advance young Churchill’s career.
(12) Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, who welcomed Churchill’s switch to the Liberal Party and brought him into the Cabinet.
(13) Serious business: with his new private secretary—Eddie Marsh—at his side, Churchill begins his climb to the top by serving as a junior minister in the Colonial Office.
(14)
(15) Looking for votes: Churchill leaving his house in London (previous) to campaign in Manchester in 1908.
(16) Slains Castle, Scotland (above): The scene of dramatic events involving Churchill and Violet Asquith near the time of his wedding to Clementine Hozier (next) in 1908.
(17)
(18) Domestic battles: As Home Secretary, Churchill causes a stir when he visits the scene of a gun battle with anarchists in the East End of London, 1911 (above); and a bellringing suffragette disrupts Churchill’s speech to working men in Dundee, 1908 (next).
(19)
(20) “The Two Romeos”: Churchill and David Lloyd George.
(21) Smooth sailing in 1913: Punch portrays Churchill and Prime Minister Asquith on the Admiralty yacht, HMS Enchantress.
(22) Clementine and Churchill leave the Enchantress after a voyage.
(23) Naval Affairs: Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1914 (above); and Admiral Jacky Fisher (next), whose stormy relationship with Winston would prove disastrous.
(24)
(25) Before the Fall: Winston in training as a pilot, 1913 (above); and strolling confidently in London just before the beginning of the First World War (next).
(26)
(27) Among the ruins of his past: Prime Minister Churchill inspecting bomb damage at the House of Commons, 1941.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I doubt whether this book would have been written if I had not had the good fortune to join forces with two literary dynamos—my agent, Molly Friedrich, and my editor, Priscilla Painton. Both gave me the enthusiastic support and encouragement that were crucial to transforming an idea into a finished work. Molly is a passionate champion of her authors, and Priscilla is the kind of editor every writer hopes to find—knowledgeable, insightful, and scrupulous.
For their expert assistance and kind attention, I also want to thank Lucy Carson and Molly Schulman of the Friedrich Agency. At Simon & Schuster I am grateful for the hard work and thoughtful advice of Michael Szczerban, Tom Pitoniak, and Mike Jones.
In Britain, my good friend Adrian Clark helped enormously to ease my research burdens, generously tracking down information in various archives. I am immensely grateful for his tireless efforts.
At the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Colin Harris was especially helpful in introducing me to the remarkable archives housed in the Department of Special Collections, where he serves as Supervisor of the Reading Rooms. I very much appreciate his useful suggestions, and I was encouraged by his eagerness to answer my questions.
Among those at my university who helped, I am happy to thank the President of Indiana State, Dan Bradley; the dean of the library, Alberta Davis Comer; the chair of my department, Robert Perrin; and the following colleagues: Cheryl L. Blevens, Keith Byerman, Tom Derrick, Mary Ann Duncan, Kathy Edwards, Kit Kincade, and Holli Moseman.
For support of various kinds, I am grateful to Joe and Nancy Fisher, Lee and Maria McKinley, Wes and Mary Burch Ratliff, John Seavey, and June Shelden.
I treasure the love of my daughters, Sarah and Vanessa, and would never have made any progress worth mentioning without the love of my wife, Sue.
MICHAEL SHELDEN is the author of four previous biographies. His Orwell: The Authorized Biography was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. For twelve years he was a features writer for The Daily Telegraph (London) and a fiction critic for The Baltimore Sun. He is currently a professor at Indiana State University.
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ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Author photograph: 16
Author’s collection: 20
Bain News service, personal collection: 18
Harold Begbie, Master Workers (1905): 24
Bibliothéque nationale de France: 25
The Bystander (1906): 9
The Bystander (1908): 14, 15
Violet Bonham Carter, Lantern Slides (1996): 11
Corbis: 27
Country Life (1904), 4
Library of Congress: 1, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 17
The Illustrated London News (1908): 19
Ernest William Loxley Mainprice, Fleet Paymaster, Royal Navy, died May 31, 1916: 22
Menpes, War Impressions (1901): 3
Painting by Sydney Prior Hall, 1895: 7
Photographer unknown: 13
Punch: 21
A. McCullum Scott, Winston Spencer Churchill (1905): 2
The Times Book of the Navy (1914): 23
NOTES
Abbreviations
CHAR
Chartwell Papers, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. Microfilm edition, Gale/Cengage Learning, 2001–2005.
CS
Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963. 8 vols. Ed. Robert Rhodes James. New York: Chelsea House, 1974.
CV
Churchill, Randolph, and Martin Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume. 5 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966–79.
NYT
New York Times
WSC
Winston S. Churchill
Prelude: The Prime Minister
1. WSC to Randolph Churchill, June 8, 1941 (The Churchill War Papers: The Ever Widening War, 1941, 766). For background on the attacks of May 10–11, see “Air-Raid Deaths and Damage,” House of Lords, May 13, 1941, Hansard; Robert P. Post, “London Is Hard Hit,” NYT, May 12, 1941; “British Commons Will Meet on Time,” NYT, May 13, 1941; Fell, The Houses of Parliament, 34; “Nazis Wreck Great Monuments of English Culture,” Life, June 2, 1941; Colville, The Fringes of Power, 385–86; WSC, The Second World War: The Grand Alliance, 46–47.
2. Moran, Diaries, 131.
3. “War Situation,” House of Commons, May 7, 1941, Hansard; Eden, Portrait of Churchill, 64. “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us,” said WSC when he made his formal request that “the late Chamber” be “restored in all essentials to its old form, convenience and dignity” (“House of Commons Rebuilding,” Oct. 28, 1943, Hansard). The restoration was completed in 1950.
4. WSC to Pamela [Plowden] Lytton, Oct. 20, 1950 (Private Collection).
Introduction: The Young Titan
1. WSC, Philomathic Society, Liverpool, Nov. 21, 1901, CS, 110; “Sketches in Parliament,” Black & White, June 29, 1907; “Winston Churchill in the Commons,” American Monthly Review of Reviews, May 1905; Hassall, A Biography of Edward Marsh, 565.
2. Aneurin Bevan, “War Aims Begin at Home,” Tribune, Oct. 4, 1940; WSC, Marlborough, 1:15 and 493; Churchill
by Himself, 339.
3. For a sampling of WSC’s fondness for Byron’s verse, see Sarah Churchill’s recollections in A Thread in the Tapestry, 78; Sandys, Chasing Churchill, 11; Colville, The Fringes of Power, 282; Moran, Diaries, 324; WSC, The Second World War: The Grand Alliance, 605, and The Story of the Malakand Field Force, 234. Also, see “His Majesty’s Government,” House of Commons, May 13, 1940, Hansard, for “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” For WSC’s membership in the Byron Society, see Trueblood, Lord Byron, 10. Byron’s “a fever at the core” is from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, as is the phrase “united nations.” WSC’s 1906 purchase of Byron’s Works is recorded in “Account from James Roche, Bookseller, London, Mar. 12, 1906” (CHAR 1/63/22). In British history two prime ministers have written Byronic novels—WSC and Disraeli, whose Venetia (1837) features a character closely based on Byron himself.
4. WSC, “Riches of English Literature,” Nov. 2, 1949, CS, 7883; “Mr. Winston Churchill and Democracy,” Westminster Review, Jan. 1906.
5. “Lord Randolph Churchill,” Saturday Review, Jan. 26, 1895. Frank Harris, the editor of the Saturday Review in 1895, discusses his authorship of the article and WSC’s view of it in Harris, Contemporary Portraits, 90. For more on Harris’s article see “Lord Randolph Churchill,” Review of Reviews, March 1895, and chap. 9 of this biography.
6. Gardiner, Prophets, Priests and Kings, 104; and Bonham Carter, Churchill, 6.
7. In Churchill: The Unruly Giant, Rose argues that WSC was “going through the motions” in his “lackadaisical” attitude toward romance, 60. Manchester makes the extraordinary claim that, “outside his home,” WSC didn’t “genuinely” like women and “was never really comfortable in the company of women” (The Last Lion: Visions of Glory, 366–67). Brendon says that WSC revered women “from afar” and was “largely oblivious to the possibilities of intimate friendship” (Winston Churchill, 41–42). In The Churchills, Lovell states flatly, “With women [WSC] was inept” (200). For accounts of WSC’s “maiden speech” at the Empire Theatre, see Davis, Real Soldiers of Fortune, 82–83, and WSC, My Early Life, 50–59. An extended discussion of the anti-vice campaign against the Empire Theatre can be found in Faulk, Music Hall & Modernity, which notes that a staunch defender of the theater confessed, “ ‘Every sane man knew vice had been prominent in the Empire promenade’ ”(79).
8. The three women were Pamela Plowden, Ethel Barrymore, and Muriel Wilson. His intimate friend Violet Asquith said that he was such a “conspicuous figure” that he was “assailed and pursued by importunate hostesses” (Bonham Carter, Churchill, 113–14). Balsan, The Glitter and the Gold, 55.
9. Bonham Carter, Churchill, 107 and 173.
10. E. J. Moyle, “Witty Retorts of Politicians,” Chambers’s Journal, Nov. 17, 1900. The story of WSC’s wordplay on Christopher Marlowe’s line about “the face that launched a thousand ships” exists in several versions, including Hassall, A Biography of Edward Marsh, 131, and Bibesco, Sir Winston Churchill, 109–10.
11. “Assails Churchill As Public Danger,” NYT, Apr. 27, 1915; “German Gibes at Churchill,” NYT, Nov. 14, 1915.
I: A New World
1. WSC to Pamela Plowden, Nov. 28 [1898], CV 1:2, 989; Cynthia Asquith, Diaries, 154. WSC to Pamela Plowden, July 23 [1898] and March 6, 1899 (Private Collection).
2. WSC to Pamela Plowden, Nov. 18 [1899], CV 1:2, 1074. Pamela Plowden to Jennie Churchill, Dec. 22, 1899, CV 1:2, 1093. WSC to Jennie Churchill, Sept. 3, 1899, CV 1:2, 1045. WSC acknowledges the fiftieth anniversary of his proposal in WSC to Pamela [Plowden] Lytton, Oct. 20, 1950 (Private Collection); see also Colville’s statement: “Churchill told me he proposed to [Pamela] in a punt when they were both staying at Warwick Castle. She said no” (The Fringes of Power, 591). The Countess of Warwick recalls the couple visiting her together in 1900 (Life’s Ebb and Flow, 258).
3. WSC to Jennie Churchill, Jan. 1, 1901, CV 1:2, 1224. For the promotion of WSC’s Winnipeg lecture, see the Manitoba Morning Free Press, Jan. 21, 1901. Davis, Real Soldiers, 88–89; WSC to Pamela Plowden, Jan. 21, 1901 (Private Collection).
4. J. P. Brabazon to Mrs. John Leslie, [? Oct. 1900], CV 1:2, 1209; Marsh, A Number of People, 154; Balsan, The Glitter and the Gold, 57.
5. Moran, Diaries, 348.
6. WSC to Pamela Plowden, March 6, 1899 (Private Collection).
7. WSC to Jennie Churchill, Jan. 22, 1901, CV 1:2, 1231; Strachey, Queen Victoria, 423; Ponsonby, Recollections of Three Reigns, 128.
8. WSC to Pamela Plowden, Jan. 21, 1901 (Private Collection).
9. WSC, My Early Life, 362; “Had Thrills in It: Winston Spencer Churchill’s Lecture at the Lyceum,” Minneapolis Journal, Jan. 19, 1901.
10. E. J. Moyle, “Witty Retorts of Politicians,” Chambers’s Journal, Nov. 17, 1900.
11. Twain to William Dean Howells, Jan. 25, 1900, Selected Letters, 345. (Twain introduced WSC’s lecture at the Waldorf-Astoria on Dec. 12, 1900.) WSC to Jennie Churchill, Jan. 1, 1901, CV 1:2, 1224; Ellsworth, A Golden Age of Authors, 252.
12. “Great Dominion,” Globe and Mail (Canada), May 5, 2005; James B. Pond’s notes, Dec. 27 [1900], Russell Theatre, Ottawa (Special Collections, University of Delaware Library); “War Lecturer Goes on Strike,” Daily Mail and Empire (Toronto), Dec. 29, 1900.
13. WSC to J. B. Pond, Jan. 9, 1901 (Special Collections, University of Delaware Library); WSC to Jennie Churchill, Jan. 1, 1901, CV 1:2, 1224.
14. “On a Very High Horse,” St. Paul Globe, Jan. 22, 1901; “Explains It All Away,” St. Paul Globe, Jan. 25, 1901. For a selection of TR’s comments on young WSC, see Theodore Roosevelt’s History of the United States, 296–97. As the NYT reported on Sunday, Dec. 9, 1900, “On Monday Mr. Churchill will dine with Gov. Roosevelt at Albany.” For “bully pulpit,” see Outlook, Feb. 27, 1909. Jenkins, Churchill, 70.
15. “Great Dominion,” Globe and Mail (Canada), May 5, 2005; WSC to Jennie Churchill, Jan. 22, 1901, CV 1:2, 1231.
16. “Winston Churchill on the War,” Manitoba Morning Free Press, Jan. 22, 1901; WSC, London to Ladysmith, 189; WSC to Jennie Churchill, Jan. 22, 1901, CV 1:2, 1231.
17. WSC to Jennie Churchill, Jan. 22 and Jan. 1, 1901, CV 1:2, 1231 and 1225.
18. “Discipline in Army Brings Disasters: Winston Churchill Thinks Each Fighter Must Act for Himself,” NYT, Dec. 9, 1900.
II: A Family Affair
1. Wells, The New Machiavelli, 10; WSC, My Early Life, 363.
2. Gardiner, Prophets, Priests and Kings, 27.
3. Ibid., 105; Lucy, The Balfourian Parliament, 64.
4. “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric,” CV 1:2, 816–21; James, Churchill, 15; Smalley, Anglo-American Memories, 92.
5. Macdonagh, The Book of Parliament, 225; “Parliamentary Sketch,” Yorkshire Post, Feb. 19, 1901.
6. “Address in Answer to His Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech,” House of Commons, Feb. 18, 1901, Hansard.
7. “Under the Clock,” Daily Telegraph, and “Mr Churchill’s Spellbinding,” Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1901; “Parliament in Perspective,” Echo, Feb. 19, 1901; Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, 135.
8. WSC to Marlborough, Sept. 29, 1898 (Library of Congress). For more on the skin graft for Richard Molyneux, see WSC, My Early Life, 197–98, and Moran, Diaries, 556. WSC to W. Murray Guthrie, Feb. 18, 1901, CV 2:1, 22.
9. Ward, The Coryston Family, 3–4; Cornwallis-West, Reminiscences, 120–21.
10. “The Ladies’ Gallery: Resolution,” House of Commons, March 30, 1885, Hansard.
11. Michael Macdonagh, “The New House of Commons,” Living Age, May 14, 1910; Cornwallis-West, Reminiscences, 123.
12. “The Progress of the World,” American Monthly Review of Reviews, May 1905.
13. WSC, My Early Life, 151–52; WSC to Jennie, Feb. 16, 1898, CV 1:2, 882.
14. Rossmore, Things I Can Tell, 107; Marie, Queen of Romania, The Story of My Life, 74; Asquith, Autobiography, 49–50; Anne Morton Lane, “A Special Interview with Mrs. George Cornwallis-West,” Good Housekeeping, January 1902.
15. In his posthumously published Memoirs of a Tattooist (1958), the legendary George Burchett (1872–1953) recalls Tom Riley telling him that he gave Jennie the tattoo “when he was in America and she was visiting New York” (102). R. J. Stephen credits Riley for Jennie’s tattoo in the Harmsworth Magazine, December 1898. See also “Pen Portrait of a Lady,” NYT, June 28, 1908, and “The Most Influential Anglo-Saxon Society Woman in the World,” Current Literature, December 1908.
16. Cornwallis-West, Reminiscences, 60 and 381–82.
17. Wilde, Complete Letters, 566–67. The quotation is from Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance.
18. WSC, My Early Life, 4; Moran, Diaries, 637.
19. Cornwallis-West, Edwardian Hey-Days, 102 and 119; “Lady Churchill Married,” Manitoba Morning Free Press, July 30, 1900; Smyth, What Happened Next, 285 (quoted in Sebba, American Jennie, 230).
20. “Lady Churchill Now Mrs. West,” Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1900; WSC to Jennie Churchill, Sept. 3, 1899, CV 1:2, 1045.
21. WSC to Jennie Churchill, March 26, 1901, CV 2:1, 49.
III: Born for Opposition
1. WSC, Great Contemporaries, 23; Trollope, Autobiography, 138–39; WSC, The World Crisis: 1911–1914, 20.
2. Paul Smith, “Cecil, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne, Third Marquess of Salisbury,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Malcolm, Vacant Thrones, 8; Lindsay, The Crawford Papers, 65.
3. “An Unreal Conversation,” Punch, Nov. 6, 1901; Cecil, The Cecils of Hatfield House, 236; Gilmour, Curzon, 128; WSC, My Early Life, 370.
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