Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

  In fact, he had come closer to bringing Salisbury down than most commentators realized. It took the prime minister twelve days to find another Conservative willing to serve as chancellor. But with that, the crisis was over. Randolph was finished. In a moment of arrogance and folly he had gambled everything and lost. He was thirty-seven years old. He would never hold office again.* Jennie was bitter: “It was gall and wormwood,” she said, “to hear Randolph abused in every quarter,” often by men who owed “their political existence to him.” Randolph himself wrote vainly, “What a fool Lord S. was to let me go so easily.” For a time he affected gaiety. His appearances on the back benches became infrequent. He was seen more often at racecourses, where he entered horses from his own stable and bet heavily. He won often. “People smiled,” wrote Harris, “as at the aberrations of a boy.”60

  Did you go to Harrow or Eton?” Winston wrote Randolph the following October. “I should like to know.” It is extraordinary that he did not know already. Since 1722, Churchill boys—six generations of them—had been Etonians. But Dr. Roose urged a break in the tradition. Eton, hard by Windsor Castle, often cloaked and soaked in the fogs rolling off the Thames, was highly unsuitable for a boy with a weak chest. Randolph’s brother had sent his son Charles (“Sunny”) to Winchester. The cousins had been playmates; Sunny liked the school; it seemed the logical choice for Winston. On May 30, 1885, when he was ten, Winston wrote that he was “rather backward with Greek, but I suppose I must know it to get into Winchester so I will try and work it up,” and as late as the summer of 1887 he was still bearing down on Greek because it was “my weak point & I cannot get into Winchester without it.” But then Randolph and his brother quarreled. Their father had died. George was duke. Like his predecessors, he was improvident; to pay his debts he sold the family library, paintings, and jewels. Randolph denounced George with his customary venom and the two stopped speaking. Dr. Roose then recommended Harrow—“Harrow-on-the-Hill”—as best for Winston’s health, and the boy was piloted in that direction. On October 8 Winston wrote his father: “I am very glad to hear that I am going to Harrow & not Winchester. I think I shall pass the Entrance Examination, which is not so hard as Winchester.”61

  It was characteristic of him in his teens that he always approached tests of his learning with breezy confidence and, in the breach, always performed wretchedly. In this instance Brighton may have been partly responsible for his failure. He had just won two more prizes there, in English and Scripture, but the level of instruction was perhaps not all it might have been: “A master here is going to give a lecture on Chemistry, is it not wonderful to think that water is made up of two gases namely hydrogdgen and nitrodgen, I like it, only it seems funny that two gases should make water.” But to scapegoat the Thomson sisters would be unfair. The pattern continued until the end of his school days. He was not, as many have assumed, a victim of dyslexia. Nor could he have been as stupid as he seemed. Confronted with the testing ritual, he seemed stricken by the kind of paralysis that can afflict men in moments of unbearable stress, when the mind seems fathoms down, like some poor land creature entangled in the weeds of the sea. Later he would write poignantly of his entrance into “the inhospitable regions of examinations, through which, for the next seven years, I was destined to journey. These examinations were a great trial to me. The subjects which were dearest to the examiners were almost invariably those I fancied least…. I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.”62

  The explanation, of course, was hostility, and it angered his parents, who never dreamed that they themselves, by their rejection of him, might have been responsible for it. They assumed that he was lazy. But he really wanted to get into Harrow. He boned up weeks in advance; on February 28, 1888, he wrote Jennie, “I am working hard for Harrow,” and a week later he wrote his father, “I am working hard for my examination which is a very Elementary one, so there is all the more reason to be careful & not to miss in the easy things.” On Friday, March 16, a day of shocking weather—the roads, in his words, “were in a horrible condition mud & water & in some places the road was covered with water which reached up to the carriage step and extended for over 200 yrd”—Charlotte Thomson accompanied him to Harrow, where they were received by the headmaster, J. E. C. Welldon. Winston thought Welldon “very nice,” but then he was led into a classroom and the ordeal was upon him. There were no questions about the subjects he felt he had mastered: grammar, history, French, geography. Instead, he was asked to translate passages in Greek and Latin. His mind went blank. He couldn’t even remember the Greek alphabet. Then, as he recalled afterward, he found himself “unable to answer a single question in the Latin paper. I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question, ‘I.’ After much reflection I put a bracket round it, thus, ‘(I).’ But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true. Incidentally there arrived from nowhere in particular a blot and several smudges. I gazed for two whole hours at this sad spectacle; and then merciful ushers collected up my piece of foolscap and carried it up to the Headmaster’s table.”63

  In the corridor he was near hysteria. He told Miss Thomson that he had never been asked to render Latin into English before. She knew he had been translating Vergil for a year and Caesar longer, but, wisely, did not contradict him. To their mutual astonishment, Harrow accepted him. She wrote Randolph, “I hear from Mr Welldon today that Winston passed the examination yesterday.” She didn’t try to camouflage the truth: “My worst fears were realised with regard to the effect the nervous excitement would produce on his work: and he had only scraped through…. He had a severe attack of sickness after we left Harrow and we only reached Victoria in time for the 7.5 train. If Mr Welldon would allow him to try again on the 18th April, I believe that Winston would do himself more justice; but I think the permission would be difficult to obtain.” It was, in fact, denied. Winston didn’t think it mattered. He wrote: “I have passed, but it was far harder than I expected…. However I am through, which is the great thing.”64

  It wasn’t that simple. Had he been another boy, he would have been automatically rejected. His sole qualification was that he was the son of a former cabinet minister. Thus, even before he was enrolled, the masters at Harrow regarded him as a special problem. On April 17, after a holiday at Blenheim with Duchess Fanny, he arrived at the school with his baggage and wrote his mother: “I will write tomorrow evening to say what form I’m in. It is going to be read out in the speech room tomorrow.” The news was crushing. He was assigned to the lowest form. Only two boys in all Harrow were below him, and when both withdrew he was left as the school dunce. On visitors’ days, the roll (“Bill”) was called outside the Old School, and boys filed past in the order of their scholastic record. Other parents, curious about the son of the famous Lord Randolph, would await Winston’s appearance and then whisper to one another: “Why, he’s the last of all!”65

  Today Harrow is part of Greater London, but in the 1880s it stood in open country. Peering toward the city from Headmaster’s House you saw nothing but green fields, and the churchyard provided an unbroken view of rolling English landscape as far as Windsor, which could be seen on a clear day. Old Boys muttered indignantly about the Metropolitan Railway, which had begun to inch this way, and the new bicycle craze, which, in the phrase of the day, was “annihilating distance.” Proud of their school, conscious of its role in English history, which to them meant the history of the world, they wanted nothing to change there. Strangers were shown the flat churchyard tombstone where Byron had brooded beneath the elms and the Fourth Form Room, dating from 1609, whose walls were inscribed with the names of Harrow boys who had made their mark. The Bill was followed closely for pupils of promise; already two of Winston’s contemporaries,
John Galsworthy and Stanley Baldwin, had been marked for future greatness. Harrovian traditions, encrusted by generations of observance, were considered sacred. Some seem odd. The food was inedible. Boys needed generous allowances to survive; such delicacies as eggs and sardines were available only in the private “tuck-shops” in High and West streets. If you wanted to read anything but classical literature, you had to buy it in J. F. Moore’s bookshop. And masters were regarded as the natural enemies of boys, though Welldon, then in his third year as head of the school, was personally popular. In appearance he resembled the twentieth-century British actor Jack Hawkins. One of Winston’s classmates later wrote that the headmaster’s “great massive form, as he swung into Fourth Form Room or Speech Room to take prayers or introduce a lecturer or ascended the pulpit to deliver one of his impressive sermons, produced a feeling of confidence.”66 Most important, in tracing Harrovian influences on Winston, were the school’s patriotic songs:

  So today—and oh! if ever

  Duty’s voice is ringing clear

  Bidding men to brave endeavour—

  Be our answer, “We are here.”

  And:

  God give us bases to guard or beleaguer,

  Games to play out whether earnest or fun;

  Fights for the fearless and goals for the eager,

  Twenty and thirty and forty years on.

  In 1940 Churchill revisited Harrow and heard these stanzas again from another generation. Afterward he said: “Listening to those boys singing all those well-remembered songs I could see myself fifty years before, singing with them those tales of great men and wondering with intensity how I could ever do something glorious for my country.” Here his memory was perhaps selective—songfests were not typical of his Harrow experience—but that is true of most Old Boy memories. Moreover, when one of their number becomes famous, many former schoolmates tend to edit their recollections, or even to distort them. It happens to old retainers, too. In the aftermath of Dunkirk, when Churchillian rhetoric seemed Britain’s only shield against Nazi conquest, a reporter interviewed Wright Cooper, whose confectioner’s store had been Harrow’s most popular tuck-shop of the 1880s and 1890s. Cooper said:

  Churchill was an extraordinarily good boy. He was honest and generous in a day when robust appetites were not always accompanied by well-lined pockets. My family lived over the shop, and when Churchill was downstairs we all knew it. Boys crowded round his table…. He was witty and critical and kept the other boys in roars of laughter. He was exceedingly popular and even the seniors sought his company. He was well behaved and had the ear of everyone. When his father or his mother came to see him, he used to book a table in the tuck shop, and that was a great occasion for him. He was extremely happy at Harrow and full of high spirits. I knew him well in the tuck-shop days and it is one of the proudest memories of my life that I should have known the Prime Minister when he was preparing for his great career.67

  So much for the infallibility of eyewitnesses. It would be difficult to find a statement more riddled with falsehood. He wasn’t a good boy; he was a disciplinary problem. He wasn’t generous; he couldn’t afford to be—“I am afraid I shall want more money,” he wrote on his third day at the school, and he never had enough to cover his debts. Other boys disliked him; Sir Gerald Wollaston, a classmate, later recalled that those who “had not met him personally soon heard about him, and what we heard created a somewhat unfavourable opinion.” Most seniors sought his company only when they wanted him to black their boots or make their beds; he had to fag for three years, performing menial tasks until he was nearly seventeen. Each of his parents visited him but once, and were never there together. And he was wretched most of the time. He himself said later that he was, “on the whole, considerably discouraged” during his Harrow years, and in another reminiscence he wrote that he had been “just a pack-horse that had to crop what herbage he could find by the roadside in the halts of long marches, a bit here and there.”68

  “High spirits,” however, rings true. His letters attest to his misery, but he concealed it from his masters and the other boys. They saw him as an energetic, abrasive, insolent miscreant who, in Sir Gerald’s words, “broke almost every rule made by masters or boys, was quite incorrigible, and had an unlimited vocabulary of ‘backchat’ which he produced with dauntless courage on every occasion of remonstrance.” The most frequent target of his back talk was Harrow’s ultimate authority figure, the headmaster. Once Welldon told him sternly, “Churchill, I have grave reason to be displeased with you.” Winston instantly replied, “And I, sir, have grave reason to be displeased with you.” Another time the headmaster, hearing reports that the boy was using bad language, called him on the carpet. He said: “Now, my boy, when was the last time you used bad language.” Winston had developed a stammer—which should have triggered suspicions that his self-confidence was frailer than it seemed—and he replied: “W-ell, sir, as I en-entered this r-room, I tr-tr-tripped over the do-do-or m-mat, and I am afr-fr-aid I s-s-said D-d-damn.” Pets were strictly forbidden, but he kept two dogs in a kennel on West Street. Parts of the town were out-of-bounds for Harrovians. He made it a point to trespass there. Once he tried to blow up an out-of-bounds building, Roxreth House on Bessborough Road, which was said to be haunted. Using gunpowder, a stone ginger-beer bottle, and a homemade fuse, Winston built a bomb, lit it, and lowered it into the gloomy cellar. When nothing happened, he peered down. At that instant it exploded. His face scorched and his eyebrows singed, he was rescued by a neighbor; she bathed him and sent him back to school. As he left he cheerily told her, “I expect this will get me the bag.” He wasn’t expelled, but he was birched. It wasn’t the first time for him. Harrow wasn’t Ascot, and Welldon was no sadist, but all public schools practiced corporal punishment then. Guilty Harrovians were birched before breakfast in the Fourth Form Room. In most cases it didn’t come to that. Usually it was enough for the headmaster to warn a boy that unless he mended his ways, “It might become my painful duty to swish you.” Winston, however, ignored these threats and was a frequent swishee. He didn’t seem to care. Perhaps the Reverend Sneyd-Kynnersley had hardened him to beatings.69

  Once he had a bad accident when playing and had to be confined to bed. Lord Salisbury heard about it from the father of another Harrow boy and asked how it had happened. “It was during a game of ‘Follow the Leader,’ ” he was told. Salisbury muttered, “He doesn’t take after his father.” But that is precisely what he was trying to do. During his first day at the school he tried to engage a master in political debate. The master may have been embarrassed; by then Randolph had tumbled into public disgrace. But Randolph was still his son’s idol. During his infrequent visits home, Winston begged his mother to introduce him to men prominent in Parliament. This, at least, was something Jennie could enjoy doing for her son. Invitations went out, and among the guests Winston met were three future prime ministers: Rosebery, Balfour, and Asquith. He later wrote: “It seemed a very great world where these men lived; a world in which high rules reigned and every trifle in public conduct counted; a duelling ground where although business might be ruthless, and the weapons loaded with ball, there was ceremonious personal courtesy and mutual respect.” During the convalescence after his fall, Sir Edward Carson, one of Jennie’s beaux, took Winston to dinner and then to the Strangers’ Gallery overlooking the House of Commons. There the boy peered down and listened, in his later words, to “the great parties ranged on each side fighting the Home Rule controversy.” Gladstone, he thought, resembled “a great white eagle, at once fierce and splendid.” He also witnessed the Grand Old Man’s tribute to Joe Chamberlain after the maiden speech of Joe’s son Austen. “It was,” the Grand Old Man said, “a speech which must have been dear and refreshing to a father’s heart.” The boy saw how moved Joe was: “He was hit as if a bullet had struck him.” Winston was touched, too. He thought how proud his own father would be if he were elected to Parliament and spoke well. Back at Harrow, he stood before
a mirror, trying to imitate Randolph’s style and delivery. Except for his stammer, a speech impediment which was just becoming evident, and a certain guttural quality which was developing in his reedy adolescent voice, it went well.70

  It went too well. He was modeling his tone and phrases after those of an embittered man who denounced “a government which has boycotted and slandered me” and used the language to inflict painful wounds on the men who, he thought, had betrayed him. In the mouth of an adolescent who was already thought odd by his peers, Randolph’s studied invective and biting sarcasm were bound to alienate other boys. During his entire time at Harrow he made but one friend, an older boy, John—later Sir John—Milbanke. Even those who admired his nerve were put off by his truculence; one of them would recall in his memoirs how “this small red-haired snub-nosed jolly-faced youngster” darted up “during a house debate, against all rules, before he had been a year in the house, to refute one of his seniors.” He was also becoming cheeky at home. In the kitchen he taunted Rosa Ovenden, the Churchills’ cook, until she took a broom to him, shouting, “What the devil are you messing about here for? Hop it, copper-nob.” Clara Jerome came to see her grandson and left describing him as “a naughty, sandy-haired little bulldog.”71

  In his first letter to Jennie from Harrow, he had told her: “I want to learn Gymnastics and carpentering.” Later he also became interested in fencing, but most of the time he was alone, sawing and hammering with the intensity of purpose he would later show in laying bricks; collecting mulberry leaves for a colony of silkworms he kept; poring over his stamp album; or going on long walks with his dogs, sometimes accompanied by a town detective he had befriended. He hated cricket, hated football, hated field days. He liked boxing in the gym and swimming in Ducker, the school swimming pool, and might have developed warm relationships with other boys there, but he would only box with a master, and his manner elsewhere discouraged intimacy. After Churchill had become prime minister, J. E. B. Seely, by then Lord Mottistone, recalled setting eyes on him for the first time at Ducker. Winston was trying unsuccessfully to push a floating log toward the bank. A Sixth Former said, “You see that little red-headed fellow having a row with the log? That’s young Churchill.” His companion called, “Hi, Churchill, I bet you two buns to one you don’t get it out.” Winston, said Seely, “bent his head down and appeared to be thinking deeply,” as he later did “in the House of Commons.” Then he turned his back on Seely, thereby snubbing a popular boy who could have helped him. On another occasion at Ducker, he sneaked up behind a slight figure and pushed him into the water. As the indignant boy climbed out, another swimmer said, “Now you’re for it. That’s Leo Amery, a Sixth Former.” Realizing that he had gone too far this time, Winston apologized ineptly: “I thought you were a Fourth Former because you are so small.” Sensing his blunder, he bit his tongue and added what, for him, was the supreme compliment: “My father is small, too, and he is a great man.”72