Sandhurst, like West Point, divided cadets into companies. There were six, each commanded by a commissioned officer, regular army NCOs, and cadet corporals; each with its own quarters, mess, and billiard room; each fielding athletic teams against the others. The year after he was commissioned, Winston wrote an article about the academy for the Pall Mall Magazine. He used the pseudonym “Cornet of Horse,”* and he described a typical day at Sandhurst. Reveille sounded at 6:00 A.M. and forty-five minutes later the study halls were filled with cadets in immaculate blue uniforms, “deep in the wiles of tactics or the eccentricities of fortification.”134 Breakfast was served at 8:00 A.M. Morning parade came an hour later, followed by gymnastics, the formation of skirmishers beyond the cricket pavilion, bayonet practice, lectures on outposts and attacking enemy positions, and lunch. Riding school was held in the early afternoon and was mandatory, even for infantry cadets; those who lacked mounts, like Winston, hired “screws” at the local livery stables. Sports began at 4:00 P.M. Tea and study preceded mess, the school’s only formal meal. Evenings were devoted to reading, talking, playing whist and billiards, and, sometimes, watching a boxing match between cadets. The bugler played “lights out” at 11:00 P.M.
Winston became a passionate horseman. He was the liveryman’s steadiest customer. Gradually, he wrote, he developed “a tolerably firm seat,” learning to saddle his mount, to ride without stirrups or reins, to ride bareback, to leap fences, and to mount and dismount while his horse was trotting, a “feat very easily performed.” He became Sandhurst’s second-best rider. “I enjoyed the riding-school thoroughly,” he wrote, “and got on—and off—as well as most…. Horses were the greatest of my pleasures…. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them; unless of course they break their necks, which, if taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die.” In idle hours he organized races and point-to-points. His sole complaint about Sandhurst was that “polo for the last two years has been relegated to the limbo of prohibited pleasures,” despite the fact that “if there is a game which could prepare a youth for a soldier’s life, that game is polo.” The argument against it was that some officers would be unable to afford it. “This levelling-down doctrine,” he concluded, “is pure Socialism.” Thus, in the first piece he sold to a newspaper, he identified his parliamentary enemies of the coming century.135
He was now an eager student of war. Lord Randolph had instructed his bookseller to send Winston any books he needed for his studies, and presently the young cadet was devouring Maine’s Infantry Fire Tactics, Prince Kraft’s Letters on Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery, and Sir Edward Bruce Hamley’s 1866 classic, Operations of War. Days passed pleasantly. He was surrounded by his peers. As Byron Farwell observes in Mr. Kipling’s Army, a youth arriving at Sandhurst or Woolwich “found himself surrounded by others with backgrounds similar to his own…. Officer-instructors and cadets spoke the same language in the same accents, possessed similar vocabularies, had the same set of attitudes and beliefs.” Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, looking back, wrote: “We regular army officers of those days might all have come out of the same mould. We had been to identical public schools…. We… were, I’m afraid, terribly dull.” Winston, though his social position was loftier than most, didn’t think them at all dull. After the long dreadful years of being bullied and taunted, he was accepted here as a comrade, and he rejoiced.136
In his early cadet days his father had written him: “Mind you if you do well at Sandhurst & get good reports good positions in your classes & even the good conduct medal you would go to your regiment so much higher in credit & more thought of. So if you feel at times like giving way or falling off ‘Don’t.’ ” Winston had been getting these goads for twelve years. They hadn’t worked then, and now they were unnecessary. In the examinations at the end of his first term, he scored near the top of his class, his strongest subjects being tactics and military law. Under “Conduct” the official verdict was “Good but unpunctual.” He would always be unpunctual, always missing trains, ships, and, later, planes, until he reached a station so exalted that they all waited for him. But he excelled so in every other Sandhurst course that his tardiness was overlooked. His earlier status of public-school dolt was forgotten now that he was an admirable young soldier with a brilliant career ahead of him. This showed, he wrote, “that I could learn quickly enough the things that mattered.” He was growing stronger physically. Furthermore, he was popular with his fellow cadets. Randolph, astounded by all this, lifted the restrictions on his leave, and Winston began entraining for Waterloo Station in London with his new friends.137
The imperial capital was then approaching its prime, and for privileged youths who knew they would inherit it one day, the city was a source of endless wonder and ebullience. The metropolis of the 1870s, when Winston had played in Mayfair and Hyde Park, had been transformed. London was gay; it was, by earlier Victorian standards, permissive. These were the 1890s, the Naughty Nineties, the Mauve Decade, the best time, Churchill would later write, in his entire life: “Twenty to twenty-five—those are the years!”138 It was almost as though the capital was preparing for the momentous events which lay ahead. Popular institutions which would flourish in the next century, and which later generations of Englishmen would come to regard as the very essence of the British way of life, were just then arriving on the national stage. The first white-fronted J. Lyon’s Teashop had just opened at 213 Piccadilly. Harrods had newly installed display windows. Marks and Spencer had opened their Penny Bazar (“Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny”) at Cheetham Hill, Manchester, and were building a branch in London. Londoners of the upper and middle classes had plenty to spend; that year the capital of England’s limited liability companies exceeded £1,000,000,000—one and a third times that of France and Germany combined. At the five-year-old Savoy, Auguste Escoffier had created the Peach Melba, honoring Madame Nellie Melba, who was singing Wagner’s Lohengrin at Covent Garden. Piccadilly Circus was acquiring its fountain. In Langham Place, Queen’s Hall had replaced old St. James’s Hall as the home of the capital’s orchestral music; it would be famous for its Promenade Concerts until Nazi bombers leveled it in 1941. The Tower Bridge had just been completed. Strolling along the Embankment from Westminster Bridge, the cadets from Sandhurst could see New Scotland Yard rising, a creation of the architect Norman Shaw, who contrived to give the police station the appearance of a French Renaissance château transplanted from the Seine to the Thames.
If they were in the mood for a play, the Sandhurst cadets could see Oscar Wilde’s Woman of No Importance at the Haymarket Theatre, George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the Avenue, Charley’s Aunt at the Royalty, and, at the St. James’s, Arthur Wing Pinero’s Second Mrs. Tanqueray, starring that acrobat of the chaise longue, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. The hit songs likeliest to be hummed by passersby in the street were Dvořak’s “Humoresque”; or “Happy Birthday to You,” a curious tune composed by a Kentucky kindergarten teacher; or, if the pedestrian had just returned from Paris, the theme of Debussy’s Après-midi d’un faune. Lounge suits, worn with bowlers in winter and boaters in summer, were frequently seen here in the center of town, but in the West End the cadets’ fathers were loyal to their frock coats and toppers. Women’s fashions were another matter. The bustle had disappeared four years earlier. Leg-of-mutton sleeves had arrived, and so had separate blouses and skirts, a by-product of lawn tennis’s popularity, though the blouses were worn with stiff collars. Hems were higher, always a source of pleasure for the coarser sex, and boys who could divert chaperons and make exceptional progress with a cooperative girl were delighted to find that knickers had replaced thick petticoats. This was a tribute, not to sexual emancipation, but to the bicycle craze, which dated from J. K. Starley’s invention of the Rover “Safety” bike and J. B. Dunlop’s patenting of the pneumatic tire. The most startling switch in women’s appearance, which did nothing for anyone, was in hair and hats. Dur
ing Jennie’s youth, hair had been plaited and coiled in a knob at the back of the neck; bonnets were then arched over the knob and tied under the chin. Now hair was brushed forward from the back of the neck and massed on top. Hatpins became indispensable. Hatpin hats, floating on top of the coiffures, might be toques, miniature straw hats, or wide-brimmed picture hats. Many pins were required to anchor them. Keeping them in place discouraged motion, a handicap to a youth intent upon exploring his date’s knickers, and the pins themselves were long and deadly, which, if push came to shove on a park bench, could be lethal.
Had Winston but known it, the change with the greatest significance for his future was the appearance on London streets of W. H. Smith’s newsstands. Once Richard Hoe’s steam-powered rotary “lightning” press had replaced flatbed presses, vast supplies of fodder were needed to feed it. The answer, a German discovered, was cheap groundwood pulp. Readers were ready. W. E. Forster’s Compulsory Education Act of 1870, followed by compulsory schooling ten years later, had raised the entire nation’s level of literacy. In 1858 only 5 percent of the army’s recruits had been able to read and write. But by Churchill’s time the figure was 85.4 percent. Civilians had made similar progress. Reading materials began to be available to them. The 1880s had brought free libraries; Parliament had then abolished the newspaper tax and the excise duty on paper. That cleared the way for what can only be called an explosion in journalism. W. T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette, which was founded in 1892 and cost a penny, was one of the first eruptions. Others were the Daily Chronicle, the Daily Mail, George Newnes’s Tid-bits, and, from the Harmsworth Brothers, Answers to Correspondents, Comic Cuts (for children), the Evening News, and, the year after Winston left Sandhurst, the Daily News, which, at a halfpenny, would reach a circulation of a half-million, twice as high as that of any other paper. Five years later Alfred Harmsworth would become Lord Northcliffe, and three years after that he would acquire The Times and begin trumpeting the danger of war with Germany.
Because of this print revolution, Winston would reach millions of the newly literate, like Mrs. Everest’s brother-in-law, and, with checks from editors and book royalties, support his political career. He would also become a lifelong omnivorous reader of newspapers and one of the most well-informed men in the world on the events of his times. At Sandhurst, as at Brighton, he was scanning column after column of newsprint every evening. Among his discoveries, during his three terms at the school, were the passage of woman suffrage in New Zealand, the election of Keir Hardie as the first MP to represent Britain’s workingmen, and the court-martial conviction, in France, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, after which a mob outside chanted, “Death to the Jews!” Winston approved of none of these. He was more pleased by the West African explorations of the English naturalist Mary Kinsley, who traveled through cannibal country protected by Fan tribesmen, and by the expansion of French imperialism in Laos, French Guiana, and Dahomey; by Belgian imperialism in the Congo; by American imperialism in Hawaii; and by British imperialism in South Africa, where Cecil Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson had just suppressed a native revolt. (Already they were plotting the fateful Jameson Raid, to be carried out a few months after young Churchill had passed out of Sandhurst.) Czar Nicholas II had succeeded his father in Russia and seemed to be settling in for a long, stable reign. Winston liked that, too, and because he was fascinated by the trivial as well as the momentous, he was gratified by descriptions of the new Winchester rifle; by the first striptease, at the Bal des Quatre Arts in Paris; by the defeat of John L. Sullivan by James Corbett; and by the invention of the safety razor by an American bottle-stopper salesman named King Gillette.
Hubert Gough, recalling his own early days in uniform, wrote that on weekends he and his friends rode by “coach, with four horses and two men, all taken from the ranks, to almost every race meeting round London.”139 Winston liked horses, but he was developing other interests. On each excursion to the city he browsed through bookstores. The expansion of the publishing industry, he found, had not been confined to penny dailies. New magazines were also flourishing, from the popular Strand Magazine and the Review of Reviews through W. E. Henley’s National Observer and C. H. Pearson’s National Life and Character, both journals of imperialist thought, to the avant-garde Yellow Book, which carried Aubrey Beardsley’s black-and-white “art nouveau” drawings. The book counters offered a feast: Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Marie Corelli’s Sorrows of Satan, Kipling’s Jungle Book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Ebb-Tide, Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda, H. G. Well’s Time Machine, volumes of poems by A. E. Housman, Yeats, and Hardy; Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England, which sold over a million copies; A. Conan Doyle’s Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (in the December 1893 issue of the Strand, Conan Doyle had contrived to kill Holmes in the Reichenbach Falls, but his public successfully demanded a resurrection); and, if you were more fluent in continental languages than Winston was, Emile Zola’s Débâcle, just off the Paris presses, and thirty-nine-year-old Sigmund Freud’s Studien über Hysterie.
In knowledgeable circles Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde, and fin de siècle were code words. They signaled flagrant vice in the West End and, among most educated Englishmen, a collapse of morals. In the upper classes extramarital coitus was acceptable, but sodomy and fellatio were literally unmentionable. Everyone knew that certain public-school boys became confused about sexual roles. You didn’t talk about that. You didn’t let the side down. But these new people were advertising it. “Art for Art’s Sake” meant more than it said. Polite critics called it decadence, which was accurate, though hedonism, a broader term, was more applicable. What few grasped was that this was one of but three new forces which, by the 1890s, had evolved from the religious evangelism of Victoria’s prime years. The other two were Anglo-Catholicism—“High Church,” or “Ritualistic,” Christianity—and rationalism. Rationalism was the wave of the future. Charles Booth had begun his nine-volume inquiry into London poverty when eleven-year-old Winston caught double pneumonia in Brighton. Booth was still at it, and now, while Cadet Churchill was galloping across the meadows around Camberley, Sidney and Beatrice Webb brought out their History of Trade Unionism. Conscience, until now the province of men of the cloth, had found secular forms of expression. When Randolph had gone up to Oxford, the brightest students had been preparing for the ministry. Hardly any were now. Church attendance had dropped sharply all over England. Family prayers in upper-class households, though still prevalent, began to decline. One casualty of this shift was the Victorian Sabbath. Sunday papers were frowned upon, and public restaurants were closed on that day, but it was difficult to defend the old values when all London knew of the Prince of Wales’s showy Sunday dinner parties. Throughout the decade society receded from the old Sabbath observance. Museums and art galleries were thrown open on Sunday afternoon. The National Sunday League urged healthy Sunday recreation and organized Sunday railway excursions at cheap rates. The railroads, unwilling to haggle over old values when profits loomed, accommodated them.
The lower classes couldn’t afford the excursions, even at half price. Instead, they crowded into the music halls, which, responding to the new moral climate, permitted their comedians’ humor to grow broader and broader. This was the halls’ Augustan age. The stars, like their audiences, were mostly cockneys: Marie Lloyd, George Robey, Albert Chevalier, Little Titch, Dan Leno, Harry Champion. They sang “My Old Dutch,” “Don’t Dilly Dally,” “Two Lovely Black Eyes,” “Oh, Mr Porter,” “One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit,” and England’s greatest hit of 1892:
After the Ball is over, after the break of morn;
After the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone;
Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all;
Many the hopes that have vanished, After the Ball.
Sometimes celebrities paraded across the stage: Eugene Sandow, the German strong man; Blondin, the tightrope walker; Captain Webb, the Channel swimme
r. Audiences were intensely patriotic, cheering every glimpse of the Union Jack and, when the chairman thumped his gavel and gave them their cue, belting out “Tommy, Tommy Atkins,” and “The Union Jack of Dear Old England.” The best of the halls were in the heart of London. The Eagle, the Alhambra, and the Empire in Leicester Square were the most popular. It was in the Empire, of all places, that Winston Churchill delivered his first speech. The date was Saturday, November 3, 1894. He was defending prostitution.
Mrs. Ormiston Chant, a crusader against vice, had been eyeing the theater with disapproval for some time. The management, like those of most of the halls, had built a promenade beside the men’s bar, and it was along this walk, as patrons emptied their glasses, that elegant doxies strolled back and forth, describing their specialties and citing their prices in stage whispers. Winston, now a Sandhurst senior, was not among their customers. He, like many of his peers, sublimated his sex drive and idealized women. He had a crush on Mabel Love, a performer at the Lyric, and at his written request she had sent him an autographed photograph; but his feelings for her were nothing if not chaste. His band of cadets regularly toured all London’s great music halls, however, and he was stung when he read that, at Mrs. Chant’s insistence, a “barricade” had been erected between the Empire and its promenade. Instinctively hostile toward authority, he wanted to lash out. He wrote, and then thrice rewrote, a speech which, Churchill the man would recall, was “a serious constitutional argument upon the inherent rights of British subjects; upon the dangers of State interference with the social habits of law-abiding persons; and upon the many evil consequences which inevitably follow upon repression not supported by healthy public opinion.” Reading in the Daily Telegraph that champions of the harlots were forming an “Entertainments Protective League” to defend their dishonor, he resolved to join up. The meeting was held in a seedy London hotel. When he arrived by hansom, he found there was only one other member. The man said sadly, “It’s very difficult to get people to do anything in England now. They take everything lying down. I do not know what’s happened to the country; they seem to have no spirit left.”140