Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

  In the summer of 1892, when Winston was beginning his struggle to enter Sandhurst, the voters narrowly rejected Salisbury’s Conservatives, giving Gladstone the chance to form his last government. His position in the House of Commons was fragile. Even with the support of eighty Irish Nationalists, the Liberal majority was only forty. In 1886 Joe Chamberlain had deserted the Grand Old Man on the question of Home Rule and joined the Ulster Unionists, whom he would eventually leave to become a full-fledged Tory. The cabinet differed sharply among themselves on key issues. Obviously the Tories would soon return. But Randolph didn’t see it that way. He thought they needed his help. When Parliament met the following summer—the summer Winston scraped through his third examination—the political configuration looked like 1885 all over again. The GOM sat on the government bench, and Churchill, the master of invective, was preparing to display his brilliant talent once more. In Winston’s words, “It was thought that he would in Opposition swiftly regain the ascendancy in Parliament and in his party which had been destroyed by his resignation six years before. No one cherished these hopes more ardently than I…. We all looked forward to his reconquest of power…. Although he was only a private member and quite isolated, everything he said even at the tiniest bazaar was reported verbatim in all the newspapers, and every phrase was scrutinized and weighed. Now it seemed that his chance had come again.”121

  Only rarely could Winston observe the parliamentary maneuvering from the Strangers’ Gallery, and even then he deferred to his father’s wishes, asking his permission to attend: “I have had a letter from Mr Carson inviting me to dine with him at the House on Friday evening. I have accepted as I have very little work on Saturday. If you would rather I would not go Please send me a line.” He was fascinated by the civility between adversaries; at table “not only colleagues, but opponents, amicably interchanged opinions on the burning topics of the hour.” Apart from newspapers, his sources of information on what was happening behind the scenes in the House were his mother and his father’s brother-in-law Edward Marjoribanks, who, as Gladstone’s chief whip, was on the other side. Political civility also prevailed within the family, though Winston enjoyed trying to pin Marjoribanks down. He wrote his father: “Uncle Edward has been here to dinner. He spent nearly half an hour after dinner explaining to me the methods by which the Opposition of the House of Lords was going to be overcome. I wish you had been there to answer him, as I am sure there was an answer though I could not think of it.”122

  Jennie and Uncle Edward gave him accounts of Randolph’s progress. They said he was doing well, and in the beginning they were right. Even the Spectator, the Conservative organ, which had abused him so cruelly, reported: “The chief feature of this Session… has been the return of Lord Randolph Churchill to active political life, and his successful reassertion of himself as a force to be reckoned with in party warfare. Lord Randolph has seen his opportunity in the crusade against the Home-rule Bill… we rejoice that the party has recovered the services of a man with such excellent fighting qualities…. More than any of the Unionist leaders, Lord Randolph possesses the faculty of speaking to uneducated men in the style which they understand and admire…. We wish Lord Randolph every success.”123

  Suddenly it was all over. Although Home Rule passed the Commons, it was rejected by the Lords. The Grand Old Man, half blind and half deaf at eighty-five, rode up Birdcage Walk to the Queen who had never liked him and resigned. Randolph had been deprived of his prey. But even before then it had become evident that he, like Gladstone, was not the man he had been. Winston noted: “I could not help feeling that my father’s speeches were not as good as they used to be. There were some brilliant successes; yet on the whole he seemed to be hardly holding his own. I hoped of course that I should grow up in time to come to his aid…. I thought of Austen Chamberlain who was allowed to fight at his father’s side, and Herbert Gladstone who had helped the Grand Old Man to cut down the oak trees and went everywhere with him, and I dreamed of days to come when Tory democracy would dismiss the ‘Old Gang’ with one hand and defeat the Radicals with the other.” Randolph, however, found the very thought of a mature relationship between himself and Winston repellent. “If ever I began to show the slightest idea of comradeship,” Winston wrote, “he was immediately offended.” Once, when “I suggested that I might help his private secretary to write some of his letters, he froze me into stone.”124

  Now that we have the son’s life spread before us, the father’s behavior seems monstrous. But Randolph could not hold a mirror up to the future. He only saw what was there to be seen, and it was anything but encouraging. His letter from Bad Kissingen had been unforgivably brutal, but it had not been an exercise in fantasy. Winston’s school records were a catalogue of misconduct and scholastic failure. Even when seen through the kindest eyes—those, say, of Mrs. Everest—he was a redheaded, puny little swaggerer who was always in trouble, always disobedient, always making and breaking promises. Unquestionably parental negligence had contributed to his many fiascos. Undoubtedly his father bore a thinly veiled animosity toward him. But Randolph had his own troubles. Although stricken with a vile disease through no fault of his own, he had achieved a certain position in public life. He was, in fact, the most successful Churchill since the first duke. A proud man, he yearned for parental pride and was thwarted. If he had little faith in his son’s potential, there was precious little there to inspire faith. He wrote Duchess Fanny in August 1893: “I have told you often & you would never believe me that he has little [claim] to cleverness, to knowledge or any capacity for settled work. He has great talent for show off exaggeration & make believe.”125 Sending his son to a military academy was the wisest decision he ever made, but he had no way of knowing that then. At one point he even asked a friend about career opportunities in South America. Winston, he was convinced, would never make good in England.

  Recognizing that an upper-class father had certain obligations to a son who had become a gentleman cadet, responsibilities which could not be slighted without offending society, he invited Winston to join him for weekends with his racing cronies and fellow MPs. Winston enjoyed the company of the friends and parliamentarians, but the man he really wanted to talk to was his father. That was not possible. Randolph could write Duchess Fanny, “He has much smartened up,” but the closest he came to a public compliment was in introducing Winston to Bram Stoker, Sir Henry Irving’s secretary and the future author of Dracula. “He’s not much yet,” he told Stoker, “but he’s a good ’un.” Winston, immensely pleased, hoped that intimacy would follow. It didn’t. He felt that “I would far rather have been apprenticed as a bricklayer’s mate, or run errands as a messenger boy, or helped my father to dress the front windows of a grocer’s shop. It would have been real; it would have been natural; it would have taught me more; and I should have got to know my father, which would have been a joy to me.” Later, when Herbert Asquith was prime minister, his daughter Violet quoted Asquith’s views on issues and public men to Winston. Winston was amazed. He said: “Your father told you that? He talks to you about such things quite freely? I wish I could have had such talks with mine.” In middle age he told his own son, home from Eton, “I have talked to you more in this holiday than my father talked to me in his whole life.” He wrote of Lord Randolph that “only once did he lift his visor in my sight.” Vacationing with his family in the country, Winston fired a double-barreled gun at a rabbit which had appeared beneath his father’s window. Randolph raged at him; then, seeing that he had upset him, backed down and explained that old people, absorbed in their own affairs, sometimes spoke rudely to their children. He said: “Do remember things do not always go right with me. My every action is misjudged and every word distorted…. So make some allowances.”126

  Winston’s later view of Lord Randolph was ambivalent. To Violet Asquith he spoke of him with “glowing pride.” He liked to call on Lord Rosebery, encouraging him to reminisce about Randolph, whom Rosebery had known well and Winst
on hardly at all, and Winston’s two-volume biography Lord Randolph Churchill is a tribute to filial devotion. Yet he was bitter when he told Frank Harris that whenever he tried to open serious conversations with his father, he was snubbed pitilessly. He recalled: “He wouldn’t listen to me or consider anything I said. There was no companionship with him possible and I tried so hard and so often. He was so self-centered no one else existed for him.” Harris asked: “You didn’t like him?” Winston replied: “How could I?… He treated me as if I had been a fool; barked at me whenever I questioned him. I owe everything to my mother; to my father, nothing.” Actually, he owed him a great deal, much of which he could have done without, for when he himself entered politics he felt obliged to pay off Randolph’s old scores. But there was no real love lost between them. In Winston’s books one may trace a steady theme: great men are frequently products of boyhood loneliness. Three years after his father’s death he wrote of the Mahdi, leader of Sudanese tribesmen: “Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong; and a boy deprived of a father’s care often develops, if he escapes the perils of youth, an independence and vigour of thought which may restore in after life the heavy loss of early days.” And in his biography of the first Duke of Marlborough he observed that “famous men are usually the product of an unhappy childhood. The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished.”127

  It is difficult to resist the tide of Churchillian eloquence. Yet every author, as Cicero observed, is wise and forbearing in his own eyes. The fact is that at Sandhurst, as at Harrow, Winston could be a vexing son, though now his growing flair for seizing command of situations—and perhaps a ripening imagination—added a lively touch to his explanations. These were summed up in the remarkable case of the gold watch. When Winston settled in at the military academy, his father presented him with a fine watch, made by Dents’. Later, dropping into the London shop to see about his own timepiece, Randolph was “annoyed and vexed,” in his words, to learn that Winston’s watch had twice been sent back for repairs, first after it had been “dropped… on a stone pavement & broken,” and, second, when it had been immersed in water, with the result that “the whole of the works were horribly rusty & that every bit of the watch had had to be taken to pieces.” Mending it after it had been dropped had cost three pounds, seventeen shillings. At the time of Randolph’s infelicitous visit it was still in the shop from the submersion. He scribbled off a furious note to Sandhurst. He “could not believe that you could be such a young stupid. It is clear you are not to be trusted with a valuable watch & when I get it back from Mr Dent I shall not give it back to you.” Then he wrote the details to Jennie in Paris, adding that Winston “wont forget my letter for some time & it will be a long time before I give him anything worth having. I wanted you to know this as he may tell you a vy different story.”128

  Winston told a vy different story indeed. “The first accident,” he wrote, “was not my fault at all.” He hadn’t been careless; quite the contrary. Shielding the Dent watch from harm had, it seemed, been a major concern of his, almost a mission. To that end, he had had a special leather case made for it. He was holding it in this protective case when a rude cadet ran into him, dislodging it from his grasp with such force that, to his horror, it crashed on the surface of the parade ground, emitting a discordant tintinnabulation, a knell of ruin. The dunking had been more complicated. Cadets’ tunics, unlike waistcoats, lacked deep pockets. He had been strolling along the bank of Sandhurst’s Wish Stream when he stooped to pick up a stick. Out popped the watch, sinking into six feet of water, “the only deep place for miles.” Instantly he stripped and dove after it, trying again and again until exhaustion raised the possibility that he might drown. “The next day I had the pool dredged—but without result,” he wrote. Therefore, obtaining official permission for a major effort, he borrowed twenty-three infantrymen, “dug a new course for the stream,” rerouted it, acquired a fire engine from the nearest village, “pumped the pool dry and so recovered the watch.” It was irresistible. Jennie wrote: “Oh! Winny what a harum scarum fellow you are!” Even Randolph relented: “You need not trouble any more about the watch. It is quite clear that the rough work of Sandhurst is not suitable for a watch made by Dent.” He sent an inexpensive substitute.129

  Bills, Winston’s allowance, expenses—throughout 1893 Randolph was increasingly preoccupied with the disagreeable subject of money. To trim his budget, he sold the Connaught Place house and moved his family in with his mother in the ducal mansion on Grosvenor Square. With Jack away at Harrow, Elizabeth Everest stepped into a new role, becoming Duchess Fanny’s housekeeper. Randolph continued to write for the Daily Graphic, but he still couldn’t make ends meet. On October 6, when his elder son was entering his sixth week as a cadet, he wrote Jennie that “I am vy sorry but I have no money at the present moment & balance overdrawn at bank.” He had some South African mining shares for which he had paid £10,000 two years earlier, and was putting them on the market, “but it is vy difficult to get 4½ for them now, & I must not sell more than £500. I will try & send you £105 to Hotel Scribe.” He turned to his mother for help. The duchess, however, was having financial difficulties of her own. She, too, had to economize. She decided she needed less domestic help. She fired Mrs. Everest.130

  If ever a servant was a member of a family, Woom was she. She had been with the Churchills for nineteen years, and she had few savings. Randolph knew that, because she had entrusted them to him; he had driven her down to the City in his private hansom and turned them over to Lord Rothschild at New Court for investment. The return was a pittance. By the time Winston learned of her dismissal, she had been gone for three months. Aghast, he wrote his mother, who replied that it was none of his business and she would refuse to read anything further he wrote her about it. He begged her to listen to him out of “common decency.” He felt that if he allowed Woom “to be cut adrift without protest” he would be “extremely ungrateful—besides I should be very sorry not to have her at Grosvenor Square—because she is in my mind associated—more than anything else with home.” She was an old woman; to be “packed off” in this way “would possibly, if not probably break her down altogether…. At her age she is invited to find a new place & practically begin over again…. I think such proceedings cruel & rather mean.” Of course, the duchess had “every right to discharge a servant for whom she had ‘no further use.’ ” But at the very least Woom should be kept on until she found another job or “be given a pension—which would be sufficient to keep her from want—& which should continue during her life.” He told Jennie: “It is in your power to explain to the Duchess that she cannot be sent away until she has got a good place.” He posted this letter on October 29. There was no reply. Randolph sent Woom seventeen pounds. Other “presents” followed from time to time, but apart from that, she had been discarded like a shabby cradle. Her sisters kept her from destitution. In the little time left her, she continued to write Winston and Jack faithfully, and to remember them with little gifts on their birthdays and Christmas.131

  Winston had entered Sandhurst ninety-second in a class of 102. Immediately he had trouble with parade-ground drill—his officers were dumbfounded to find that he wanted to argue about commands—and was put in the awkward squad. But within a fortnight he had grown to love the life. He felt himself “growing up every week.” Gone, he later wrote, were Harrow’s “unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony…. At Sandhurst I had a new start. I was no longer handicapped by past neglect of Latin, French or Mathematics.” Instead, there were just five subjects to master: fortification, tactics, topography, military law, and military administration. In retrospect it seems inadequate preparation for England’s greatest war leader. “We were never
taught anything about bombs or hand-grenades,” he would recall, “because of course these weapons were known to be long obsolete. They had gone out of use in the eighteenth century, and would be quite useless in modern war.” And though Winston would be disdainful of the U.S. Military Academy when he visited there two years later, West Point without math would have been unthinkable even then.132

  But Sandhurst was fun. He particularly liked the exercises in field fortification. They dug trenches, built breastworks, and revetted parapets with sandbags, heather, fascines, and “Jones’ iron-band gabions”—cylinders filled with earth. Chevaux-de-frise were constructed, and fougasses, a kind of primitive land mine in which the charge was overlaid with stones. Using slabs of guncotton, they blew up simulated railroad tracks and masonry bridges; then they erected pontoon or timber substitutes. All the hills around Camberley were mapped. Roads were reconnoitered. Picket lines were established and advance and rear guards posted. It was like being back at Banstead with Jack and their cousins, building the castle with its moat and drawbridge and using the homemade elastic catapult to hurl green apples at the cow. In a revealing comment on his cadet days, Winston later said he thought it “a pity that it all had to be make-believe, and that the age of wars between civilized nations had come to an end for ever. If only it had been 100 years earlier what splendid times we should have had! Fancy being nineteen in 1793 with more than twenty years of war against Napoleon in front of one!”133