Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

  India now loomed. The Fourth Hussars marched from Aldershot to Hounslow, paraded past the retiring Brabazon for the last time, and began packing leisurely for the long voyage eastward in the autumn. Churchill later recalled: “I now passed a most agreeable six months; in fact they formed almost the only idle spell I have ever had.” It was the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; fashionable London celebrated with balls, receptions, recitals, and dinner parties. Jennie was back after nine months of dalliance on the Continent, including a marathon romp with Bourke Cockran in a Champs-Elysées apartment, and vexed only by pursuing, jealous little notes from the Prince of Wales, who typically speculated on “where your next loved victim is…?” Winston had also missed her. “My darling Mamma,” he had written her from Aldershot, “I am longing for the day when you will be able to have a little house of your own and when I can really feel that there is such a place as home.” Now she had taken, not a little house, but a seven-story Georgian mansion at 35A Great Cumberland Place, near Hyde Park and within sight of Marble Arch, and using London’s six-year-old “electric deep-level” subway, the precursor of the modern tube, he commuted between there and Waterloo, taking the train on to his barracks. Once Duchess Lily invited him to join a weekend party at Deepdene given for the prince. Colonel Brabazon would also be present. Churchill realized, he wrote, that “I must be upon my best behaviour: punctual, subdued, reserved, in short display all the qualities with which I am least endowed.” Unforgivably, he missed the six o’clock train to Dorking. That delayed him by an hour and a quarter. In his railway compartment, he frantically changed to full dress—to the dismay of the man who shared it—and a servant, meeting him at the station with a brougham, lashed the horses into a gallop. Nevertheless, he was late. He hoped to slip into the dining room unnoticed and apologize afterward. Instead, he found the entire company assembled in the drawing room. Without him there were only thirteen in the party, and the royal family was superstitious about that. As Winston bowed, HRH said shirtily with his German accent: “Don’t they teach you to be punctual in your regiment, Winston?” He glared at Brabazon, who glared at Winston, who was, for once, mute.22

  It didn’t last. Before the meal ended he was chatting amiably with the prince. Duchess Lily reproachfully called him incorrigible; he cheerfully acknowledged it. Among the other guests he had met Sir Bindon Blood, an influential veteran of colonial wars, so he counted the weekend a triumph. In his letters of those months one has the feeling that skies were always blue. He danced, he hunted, he devised clever masquerades for fancy-dress balls, and he evaded creditors. His means during this period are in fact mysterious. Messrs E. Tautz, breeches and trousers makers, were dunning him for nearly forty guineas. He now had “five quite good ponies” and owed payment for them. Wine bills, book bills, saddler’s bills—they accumulated, were stuffed away and ignored. His attitude toward them was insouciant. He left a note for his mother: “Our finance is indeed involved! If I had not been so foolish as to pay a lot of bills I should have the money now.”23

  She wrote him tautly: “I assure you unless something extraordinary turns up I see ruin staring me in the face.” Jennie was as improvident as Winston—she would spend £200 on a ball dress—but after he left she would be in London to face the consequences of his extravagance, and her alarm mounted. She borrowed from friends. She borrowed £17,000 from a bank, using her life insurance as collateral. She raised money on her jewels and juggled balances. Still the drain continued. She wrote: “My darling boy, you can’t think how all this worries me. I have so many money problems of my own I feel I cannot take on any others”; and, “What an extraordinary boy you are as regards yr business affairs.” Her annual income had fallen to £900, out of which she had to provide allowances for both her sons. She explained this to Winston, and he replied: “The situation as described by your letter is appalling. As you say it is of course impossible for you to live in London on such a pittance.” Then he hinted unscrupulously: “I hate the idea of your marrying—but that of course would be a solution.” It was indeed the eventual solution. Meanwhile, she made ends meet by taking over houses, redecorating them, and selling them for a profit. Winston remained indifferent to her struggle. Once one of his checks actually bounced. She told him: “I marvel at their allowing you to overdraw as you do. Neither the Westminster or the National Bank will let me overdraw £5 without telling me at once.” She sounded envious.24

  He remitted thirty pounds of the forty-five she had paid on his account and vaguely assured her he would send the rest “when my ship comes home.” He did not mean the ship to India. He had decided that he wanted to miss that one. The Fourth Hussars would be there nine years, and the more he thought about that, the less he liked it. The fact was that he wasn’t really cut out to be a professional officer. His father’s impression that he was, fragilely based on a boyhood infatuation with toy soldiers, had been whimsical. Winston was brave, and would distinguish himself in battle, but the long droughts of peacetime service could only frustrate him. He wanted to get on. Barracks life in the East would be dull, confining, dispiriting—Harrow all over again. England was the place to be; here he could find a constituency and run for office. Money would be necessary, of course, but he was an experienced journalist now; surely some newspaper would pay for his by-line. Crete was going through one of its periodic upheavals. He approached the Daily Chronicle with the suggestion that the paper send him there as its correspondent. The editor replied that they would pay him “at the rate of ten guineas a letter” if he got there on his own. He couldn’t afford it. In Fleet Street he floated other proposals. He offered to cover the Nile expedition Kitchener was organizing, or Sir Frederick Carrington’s expedition in Matabeleland, or the Ninth Lancers’ adventures in Rhodesia. There were no takers. He urged relatives and powerful friends to intercede on his behalf. They failed, and Lord Lansdowne, the secretary of state for war, wrote Jennie that Winston’s importuning was causing talk. His duty, Lansdowne said, lay with his regiment. There were rumors that he was trying to dodge it. “There are plenty of ill natured people about,” Lansdowne wrote, “and it is just conceivable that an attempt might be made to misrepresent his action.”25

  Churchill was unchastened. By now it was August, and they would be sailing for Bombay in a month. He leaned on his mother. He leaned hard. Perhaps he sensed that she, ashamed of her early neglect of him, was vulnerable to pressure. Surely, he felt, one of her many contacts could solve his problem. Writing from Hounslow he begged her to find “places where I could gain experience and derive advantage—rather than to [sic] the tedious land of India.” If he went he would be losing a “golden opportunity” and “guilty of an indolent folly that I shall regret all my life. A few months in South Africa would earn me the S.A. medal and in all probability the company’s star. Thence hot foot to Egypt—to return with two more decorations in a year or two—and beat my sword into an iron despatch box.” He turned the screw: “I cannot believe that with all the influential friends you possess and all those who would do something for me for my father’s sake” something could not be done. It was “useless to preach the gospel of patience to me. Others as young are making the running now and what chance have I of ever catching up. I put it down here—definitely on paper—that you really ought to leave no stone unturned to help me at such a period.” He begged her: “Three months leave is what I want & you could get it for me.”26

  She couldn’t, or at any rate didn’t; no reply from her survives. The army had been lenient with him, and what he was asking of her was probably impossible. Later she would move mountains for him, but he could not avoid India now. On September 11, 1896, he and a hundred other officers sailed from Southampton aboard the S.S. Britannia. Twelve days later, at Balmoral, Queen Victoria celebrated the sixtieth year of her reign. Churchill, who would do more to preserve and protect the Victorian legacy than any of her other subjects, was on the Red Sea, at midpoint in the twenty-three-day voyage. He played chess with a fellow off
icer that afternoon and listened to a string band that evening. His spirits were low. He wrote home: “The weather is beginning to get hot and the troop decks are awful.” His only good news was that he had reached the semifinal of a shipboard chess tournament: “I have improved greatly since the voyage began, and I think I shall try to get really good while I am in India.” But that was the limit of his expectations there. He had no inkling that India, far from dooming his future, would be the first crucial experience of his youth.27

  In 1896 the British Raj had reached flood tide. It lay halfway between the Mutiny forty years earlier, which had seen the transfer of power from the Honourable East India Company to the Crown, and the great days of that improbable, bespectacled nationalist who wore only a homespun dhoti and was known as Mahatma Gandhi. In the interval English dominance over the subcontinent flourished. The Indian Empire was a jigsaw of 602 states, ranging in size from Kashmir and Hyderabad to tiny holdings of a few acres. All were ruled from London under the principle of “paramountcy.” This was paternalism at best, and at worst, dictatorship, but the British argued, not unreasonably, that India had never been democratic, had never even been a country, and had always been governed by rajas, whose rights were respected by the Queen’s viceroy. As Englishmen saw it, they had rescued the people from pagans and savagery and introduced them to a better way of life. This was not entirely hypocritical. At the time of the Mutiny they had founded three Indian universities. Qualified natives, though few in number, had been admitted to the Indian Civil Service since 1864. Irrigation, railroads, newspapers, and the concept of Western justice and its quaint trimmings had been introduced and accepted. Solicitors wore white collar-tabs, like lawyers in Lincoln’s Inn; barristers wore wigs; judges wore imperial ermine. Hospitals, physicians, and public-health officials treated black and white patients alike.

  Nevertheless, the Union Jack flew over all public buildings. Englishmen could, with impunity, strike natives who offended them. The pukka sahib and the burra sahib were masters to be respected and feared. By no means did all of them abuse their privileges. Those who came to love India, and they were many, treated its people with respect and civility. To them the Raj was a gigantic humming chromoscope providing endless, delightful, exotic sights and sounds: the sullen red glow growing in the bazaars and the little compounds crayoned with light at dawn, and equestrian statues of British generals staring blankly at the alien sunshine; the rhinestone eyes of plodding bullocks, and chuprassies fussing busily about in their gold-frogged chamras, and red tikkas on the foreheads of Brahmin women; dholl banyas beating their gongs and chewing blood-red pan supari; the fierce dadu wind blowing down the Himalayas and the contrasting hot puff of a sultry loo breeze; the fabrics of Mysore silk and Travancore coir and khuskhus screening from Bombay; the strumming of sitars, the quiet green maidans, the pye-dogs, the ita’at festivals of holy sadhus, the did-you-do-it did-you-do-it of lapwings perched on the branches of gigantic haldu trees, and the choruses of doves weeping piteously in scented foliage overhead, throbbing like a fever in the night. Britons who had found a home here (“Ah India, my country, my country,” Kipling had scribbled in the middle of an essay) rejoiced in the land’s eccentricities: the sacred elephants with their embroidered howdahs, the big fruit bats which flapped home at daybreak and hung upside down in trees by day; the fields of steaming white where dhobis’ sheets lay drying; the native railway engineers who rode around seated beneath umbrellas on their little inspection trolleys; the paddle-wheelers of the Ganges; the “kala memsahibs,” or black ladies, who could be just as arrogant as the most insensitive English mems; and the obscene carvings on the Nepalese temple of Benares, of which Murray’s Handbook chastely observed, “visitors need not see them if the attendant is discouraged from pointing them out.” Visits to rajas’ palaces could be stunning; one might see strutting peacocks, figures of four-armed goddesses in marble courtyards, gardens of brilliant melon-flowers, displays of star rubies, Kashmir sapphires, and emeralds like eggs—visions of the ancient, merciless India of priceless jewels and slave girls. Performing scorpions were to be found in the streets. So were snake-charmers, and fakirs, and freak shows, and the indescribable scent of communal India, a complex compound of kerosene, burned ghee, rose, dung, and dahlia. Excitement could be found in just sitting on your veranda at teatime, sipping whiskey in the heat, your legs propped up on the long arms of your wicker chair, awaiting the first mango showers and watching the fading of daylight, so unlike the long blue twilights of England, when the sun plunged behind the Arabian Sea with dramatic swiftness, and darkness fell on the vast Hindustan plain before you could grope your way inside.

  This was the India Kipling loved, but it was known to too few of the new arrivals of the 1890s. A majority of them ignored the magic of India, eschewed curry, tried to recreate English suburbs in their cantonments, and watched regimental cricket matches while bands played Gilbert and Sullivan airs. Among themselves they laughed heartily, slapped one another on the back, and called each other “old chap” while completely ignoring the Indians, or, as they called them, the “wogs.”* They traveled like lords. Short distances were covered in horse-drawn tongas, in coolie-drawn rickshas, or in sedan chairs, where you sat on a dholi, a small stool suspended from poles carried on the shoulders of two natives. Long trips were by train, in coaches reserved for the English; at stations there were rest rooms for First Class Gents, even special ones for Officers. On Saturday evenings subalterns got drunk, played rugger for regimental trophies, and sobered up in the morning over mulligatawny soup—all without leaving the post to explore the mysteries beyond the gate. It was assumed that the greatest possible achievement of an Indian youth would be to be accepted by a British public school. Natives believed it, too. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s greatest protégé, became, and remained, a loyal Harrovian.

  That did not, however, entitle him to enter a Raj club. It was said that the only difference between the Bengal Club and the Bombay Club was that one excluded Indians and dogs while the other admitted dogs. These were sahib bastions. A member sat at a little table, rang a silver bell with the reproduction of a cobra as a handle, and ordered a chota peg, a small whiskey, secure in the knowledge that no one of inferior blood could approach. Reading matter was all from home: Punch, Country Life, the Book of the Horse, The Times, Blackwood’s Magazine, and, of course, the Queen’s Regulations, Hart’s Army List, and, later, Jane’s Fighting Ships. In the clubs, members of the ascendant race planned war memorials, fountains, and statues honoring great Anglo-Indians. Memsahibs concentrated on converting hill stations—cooler because of their altitude, and therefore summer refuges—into a bit of the Mother Country. Naini Tal, Mussoorie, Ootacamund, and Darjeeling were popular hill stations, but the greatest was Simla, to which the viceroy and his court repaired when thermometers began to soar. Simla’s English parks and its half-timbered cluttered homes, shrines of Victorian materialism, testified to the insularity of the Raj. There one could sit by evening fires, breathe deeply of moist, cool air, ride bridle paths, and pretend that the real India did not exist.

  Architecture reflected the confusion of disparate cultures, no more so than in Bombay, the destination of the Fourth Hussars before they moved south to permanent quarters outside Bangalore in the Madras Presidency. Here, where Kipling was born nine years before Churchill, you could find Moslem and Hindu and Occidental architectural principles warring with one another in the Municipality, erected in 1893, and in the Victoria Terminus, the central train station, which Nicholas Wollaston called “pure imported ingenuity, a fantasy of spikes and pillars full of grime and purple gloom.”28 The Mint was Ionic. The Town Hall was Doric outside and Corinthian inside. The Old Secretariat was Venetian Gothic. The university library and clock tower, fourteenth-century Gothic, were the work of Sir Gilbert Scott, who had built the Albert Memorial. You couldn’t miss the similarity; it was awesome. University Hall, fifteenth-century French Decorative, was named, appropriately, after Sir Cowasjee Jehan
gir Readymoney, an Indian who had met the standards of success recognized in the Victorian Midlands. The telegraph office was Romanesque; the High Court, Early English. Various monuments, in indescribable styles, saluted the military virtues, commerce, and equity. The identity of the designer of Bombay’s Sassoon Dock has not survived, luckily for his reputation. It is a triumph of incompetence, so ill-suited to disembarkation that impatient immigrants often chose to come ashore in skiffs, a risky procedure which could cripple a man before he set foot on Indian soil.

  It happened to Churchill. Let him tell it: “We came alongside of a great stone wall with dripping steps and iron rings for hand-holds. The boat rose and fell four or five feet with the surges. I put out my hand and grasped at a ring; but before I could get my feet on the steps the boat swung away, giving my right shoulder a sharp and peculiar wrench. I scrambled up all right, making a few remarks of a general character, mostly beginning with the earlier letters of the alphabet, hugged my shoulder and soon thought no more about it.” He was reminded of it in Poona, where the regiment spent the night under double-fly tents and then tried out the polo ponies of the Poona Light Horse. On his mount he found he could not swing a polo stick unless his right arm was strapped to his side. He procured a leather harness. That would come and go, but tennis was out forever. Indeed, his injury was to plague him in various maddening ways all his life. His shoulder would go out at unexpected moments, while he was taking a book from a shelf, swimming, sleeping with his arm under a pillow, or slipping on a stairway. Once the capsule that held the joint together nearly tore loose during an expansive gesture in Parliament, and he thought “how astonished the members would have been to see the speaker to whom they were listening, suddenly for no reason throw himself upon the floor in an instinctive effort to take the strain and leverage off the displaced arm bone.”29