Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill Read online

  And if the years before 1940 were a prelude, the years after the war were a long decline. In the 1945 election, even before Japan surrendered, Churchill was ejected from office. The public sensed in him the permanent relish for battle, and they wanted no more of it.

  Out of office, however, Churchill continued to fight. He criticized the domestic and imperial policies of Labour, and when public sentiment changed, he returned as Prime Minister in 1951. But this time, instead of issues of war and peace, he faced economic problems. In wartime, the country was united behind a single goal, victory, and behind a single man, Churchill; peace brought disagreements about both ends and means. Churchill observed in 1954 that during the war, “We always knew exactly where we stood, and we had the power to act as we thought best. Now everything is different. There is so much patter, patter, patter, chatter, chatter, chatter it’s a wonder anything ever gets done.”

  Nothing was the same after 1945. Churchill once confided to his doctor, “I feel very lonely without a war. Do you feel like that?” During the war, Churchill had made famous use of his ACTION THIS DAY labels, which he stuck on his most urgent orders to ensure immediate action. The staff loyally preserved the labels in case of Churchill’s return, and when he again became Prime Minister in 1951, a stack was placed on his desk. But times had changed. The labels stayed there for more than three years and were never used.

  Is it a virtue or a fault to thrive on war? “In great or small station, in Cabinet or in the firing line, alive or dead, my policy is, ‘Fight on.’ ” In The World Crisis, Churchill observed, “Nations as well as individuals come to ruin through the over-exercise of those very qualities and faculties on which their dominion has been founded.” All gifts are not suited to all seasons; Churchill was punished for his combativeness at other times, but it was his aptitude for war that fitted him for his greatest days.

  14

  CHURCHILL’S TIME LINE

  Key Events

  As an attempt to mark all the crucial events in Churchill’s life, the conventional time line surely fails. His arrival at Harrow rates the same emphasis as the surrender of Germany, and so many milestones are left out: the appearance of his nanny, Woom—his vow to one day become Prime Minister—the day he received his father’s cruel letter—his first game of polo—the sleepless night in 1938—his first stroke—the day he painted for the last time. These are not the kinds of events that usually appear on time lines.

  WINSTON LEONARD SPENCER CHURCHILL

  (1874–1965)

  1874

  Born November 30, at Blenheim Palace

  1888

  Entered Harrow

  1893

  Entered Royal Military College at Sandhurst as cavalry cadet

  1895

  Death of his father

  Commissioned in the Fourth Hussars

  1895–1898

  Military service in India and the Sudan

  Publication of The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898)

  1899

  Stood for and lost his first election

  Escaped Boer prisoner-of-war camp

  Publication of The River War

  1900

  Elected Conservative Member of Parliament

  Publication of Savrola

  Publication of London to Ladysmith via Pretoria

  Publication of Ian Hamilton’s March

  1904

  Joined Liberal Party

  1905–1908

  Undersecretary of State for the Colonies

  1906

  Publication of Lord Randolph Churchill

  1908

  Married Clementine Hozier

  Publication of My African Journey

  1908–1910

  President of the Board of Trade

  1910–1911

  Home Secretary

  1911–1915

  First Lord of the Admiralty

  1915

  Failure of the Dardanelles campaign

  Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster

  1915–1916

  Lieutenant colonel in France

  1917–1919

  Minister of Munitions

  1919–1921

  Secretary of State for War and Air

  1921–1922

  Colonial Secretary

  Death of his mother

  1922

  Bought Chartwell Manor

  1923

  Publication of The World Crisis (1923–1931)

  1924

  Rejoined Conservative Party

  1924–1929

  Chancellor of the Exchequer

  1930

  Publication of My Early Life

  1932

  Publication of Thoughts and Adventures

  1933

  Publication of Marlborough: His Life and Times (1933–1938)

  1937

  Publication of Great Contemporaries

  1939–1940

  First Lord of the Admiralty

  1940–1945

  Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

  1940

  Battle of Britain

  1941

  First wartime meeting with Roosevelt

  Soviet Union and United States enter the war

  1944

  Allied invasion of Normandy

  1945

  Surrender of Germany

  Defeated in the general election

  Surrender of Japan

  1945–1951

  Leader of the Opposition

  Publication of The Second World War (1948–1954)

  Publication of Painting as a Pastime (1948)

  1951–1955

  Prime Minister

  1953

  Awarded Nobel Prize in literature

  Created Knight of the Garter

  1956

  Publication of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–1958)

  1959

  Won his last election to the House of Commons

  1963

  Made honorary citizen of the United States

  1965

  Died January 24

  15

  CHURCHILL AS SON

  His Most Formative Role

  Cut off from any unrecorded thought or gesture, biographers can’t divine what drives their subjects: they must guess or accept their subjects’ claims.

  Churchill always insisted that his greatest influence was his father. He memorized his father’s words, wrote his biography, imitated his career, and shared his qualities of wit, extravagance, arrogance, ambition, and love for drink and gambling. From his childhood until his death, Churchill longed to be close to his father.

  “The greatest and most powerful influence in my early life,” Winston Churchill explained, “was of course my father. Although I had talked with him so seldom and never for a moment on equal terms, I conceived an intense admiration and affection for him; and, after his early death, for his memory.” In fact, Winston Churchill had two fathers. One was the cold, disapproving father who died when Winston was twenty; the other was the father whom Winston invented after the real one died.

  Lord Randolph’s political career was packed into a few years and crowned by his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1886, at the astonishingly young age of thirty-seven. Winston, then eleven, was immensely proud of his father and kept a scrapbook of news stories and cartoons. He imitated his father in every way he could, even, while at Harrow, asking for a bulldog, just like his father had had at Eton.

  Randolph was a brilliant politician; he was also famously arrogant and rude. A family friend recalled that once, when Randolph was cornered by a bore, he summoned a waiter and said, “Waiter—please listen to the end of Colonel B’s story.”

  Randolph’s overconfidence led to his political suicide within months of reaching high office. In December 1886, he submitted a budget; the Prime Minister rejected it; to force the issue, Randolph submitted his resignation; and the Prime Minister calmly allowed him to resign. With that miscalculated ris
k, Randolph’s career crashed to an end. Only nine years later, at age forty-five, he died, after a long, degenerative illness marked by a savage temper, increasingly bizarre behavior, and physical breakdown. Though questioned by recent studies, syphilis has commonly been given as the cause of death. The day of Randolph’s death—January 24, 1895—was seventy years to the day before his son was to die.

  Randolph did little to earn his son’s adulation. He scorned Winston’s hero worship and efforts at intimacy; once, he suggested that Winston substitute “Father” for “Papa” in his letters. Randolph rarely spoke or wrote to Winston, except to criticize and to make dire predictions—many of which his son would later fulfill, strikingly, in precise opposite. Randolph once returned one of Winston’s letters with a note: “This is a letter which I shall not keep but return to you that you may from time to time review its pedantic & overgrown schoolboy style.” In July 1893, eighteen-year-old Winston took the Sandhurst examination for the third time. To his great relief, he managed to qualify for the cavalry, though he missed the necessary score for the infantry. Winston’s reaction was to see the benefits of this result: “What fun it would be having a horse! Also the uniforms of the cavalry were far more magnificent than those of the Foot.” His father’s response was to write a brutal letter:

  [In failing to qualify for the infantry] is demonstrated beyond refutation your slovenly happy-go-lucky harum scarum style of work. . . . I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel . . . and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy & futile existence.

  Even Winston, with his tremendous loyalty, admitted that the severe letter startled him.

  Winston wanted to learn politics from Randolph, but they had only a few serious conversations. “He seemed to own the key to everything or almost everything worth having,” Winston wrote. “But if ever I began to show the slightest idea of comradeship, he was immediately offended; and when once I suggested that I might help his private secretary to write some of his letters, he froze me into stone.” When his father died, Winston recalled, “All my dreams of comradeship with him, of entering Parliament at his side and in his support, were ended. There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.”

  After Randolph died, however, Winston could replace a critical living father with a noble, inspiring dead father. Alive, Randolph would have continued to accuse him of “incessant complaints and total want of application.” In My Early Life, Winston joked about his father’s low opinion of him, but he didn’t deny it. He described the day his father came to see his toy soldiers in battle formation:

  He spent twenty minutes studying the scene. . . . At the end he asked me if I would like to go into the Army. I thought it would be splendid to command an Army, so I said “Yes” at once. . . . For years I thought my father with his experience and flair had discerned in me the qualities of military genius. But I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar.

  This was the opinion of the living father. With that father safely dead, Winston reinvented him. He memorized huge portions of his father’s speeches. He wrote a two-volume biography, Lord Randolph Churchill, that valorized his father’s political career. Winston concluded his maiden speech in the House of Commons with an allusion to his father: “I cannot sit down without saying how very grateful I am for the kindness and patience with which the House has heard me, and which have been extended to me, I well know, not on my own account, but because of a certain splendid memory which many honourable Members still preserve.”

  Winston’s devotion to that “certain splendid memory” was devotion to an idol, not his real father. His version of Randolph was unrecognizable. No one disputed that Randolph had been brilliant and effective; he’d also been haughty, opinionated, and unstable. His mottled reputation hung over Winston, especially early on, when many of Randolph’s contemporaries remained in power. Winston exploited his father’s high connections, but he also suffered from Randolph’s notoriety as an adventurer, opportunist, and gadfly (the same labels were applied to Winston). Some predicted that with his rash, thoughtless nature, Winston would self-destruct as his father had done.

  Was the driving force of Winston’s ambition his compulsion to prove himself to his ever-absent father? In 1924, when Prime Minister Baldwin named Winston as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he said, “This fulfils my ambition. I still have my father’s robes as Chancellor.” Winston followed—and surpassed—his father’s accomplishments. But of course, the dead Randolph could never be confronted with these triumphs. In 1947, during a family dinner, Winston’s daughter Sarah asked, “If you had the power to put someone in that chair to join us now, whom would you choose?” His children expected him to pick Julius Caesar or Napoleon. He replied, “Oh, my father, of course.” At the end of his life, he decided to be buried not at his beloved country house, Chartwell, but in the churchyard near Blenheim Palace, to be with his father.

  Beneath Winston’s tremendous stature as a world leader, his belligerence, his confidence, there ran this dark, poignant thread, of a son working vainly to win his father’s approval.

  Lord Randolph Churchill, a few years before his death

  Lord Randolph Churchill, a few years before his death.

  Photo © Bettman/CORBIS

  16

  CHURCHILL AS FATHER

  A Good Parent?

  Winston Churchill Was a Good Parent

  Churchill was a loving father and as attentive as his crowded life permitted. Throughout his life, his letters show a close involvement in his family’s activities and health.

  When his children were young, he loved to play charades, build sand castles, and chase them in games of “gorilla.” He often read to his children before bedtime, from books like Treasure Island or Kipling’s stories. When they were older, father and children spent happy hours working on Chartwell construction projects, and his children were allowed to join in adult meals and to mingle with the important guests who visited. Later, the war strengthened their bonds, because Churchill took a lively interest in his children’s war work.

  With his affectionate heart, Churchill felt deeply the death of his daughter Marigold, who died of meningitis before her third birthday. Months later, he wrote Clementine, “I pass through again those sad scenes of last year when we lost our dear duckadilly. Poor lamb—it is a gaping wound, whenever one touches it & removes the bandages & plasters of daily life.”

  In childhood and as adults, Churchill’s children followed his political career with pride, and each encouraged and supported him. When a friend criticized Churchill’s war memoirs, Sarah reassured her father, “You are the best historian, the best journalist, the best poet. . . . [W]rite this book from the heart of yourself, from the knowledge you have, and let it stand or fall by that. It will stand.” Randolph, Sarah, and Mary wrote admiring books about their father.

  Winston Churchill Was Not a Good Parent

  Churchill’s children suffered from his frequent absences, his disruptive presence, and the tremendous pressure of having a world figure as a father. He was often away from home, not only for official business but also for vacations, where he made his own plans away from the uproar of his large family. For example, barely two weeks after the death of his two-year-old daughter Marigold, Churchill left to visit the Duke of Sutherland. Only months later, Churchill traveled to France while Clementine stayed home with a house full of children and servants suffering from influenza. Clementine collapsed from nervous exhaustion; Churchill stayed in France.

  Churchill enjoyed his children in the brief moments he spared for them, but he left the burden of raising and disciplining them to Clementine. Her task was made much harder by Churchill’s indulgence—particularly of Randolph, whom Churchill spoiled terribly. Also, Churchill’s personal and public demands on Clementine were so great tha
t she didn’t spend much time with the children, either. “We soon became aware,” their daughter Mary recalled, “that our parents’ main interest and time were consumed by immensely important tasks, besides which our own demands and concerns were trivial.”

  As adults, most of Churchill’s children were unhappy and unsuccessful. Arguments and scandal caused constant friction within the family, and alcoholism, depression, bad marriages, and the craving for fame without the talent to win it clouded their lives, except the youngest, Mary.

  Randolph, in particular, had a stunted and angry existence. Winston tried to cure the disdain he’d felt from his own father by lavishing attention on his son. Accustomed to indulgence and deference from Winston, as an adult Randolph became overbearing when success didn’t come easily. Churchill himself lamented that his son had “great guns but no ammunition.” Randolph had some of his father’s abilities, loaded with all his father’s faults and bad habits, much aggravated. Winston made cutting remarks in the House of Commons; Randolph bellowed at his wife in a restaurant. Winston smoked and drank but was far outpaced by Randolph, who each day smoked eighty to a hundred cigarettes and drank two bottles of whiskey.

  Randolph’s bad qualities made him very unpopular; despite many tries, and his obvious advantages, he never won a contested election as MP. As he grew older, and his belligerence strained his relationship with his father, he saw himself cruelly shoved aside in Churchill’s affections by surrogate sons: Brendan Bracken, who did nothing to discourage rumors that he was Winston’s illegitimate son, and Randolph’s brothers-in-law Duncan Sandys and particularly Christopher Soames, who were influential politicians and intimate advisers to his father, as Randolph wanted to be.

  17

  CHURCHILL THE PAINTER

  His Favorite Pastime

  A natural subject of curiosity about a great figure like Churchill is his use of leisure. Churchill had many hobbies, but his favorite pastime was oil painting. His love for painting poses a contradiction: on the one hand, it shows he wasn’t content to excel in politics and writing but pushed to extend himself in a secondary talent; on the other hand, it shows that, ambitious as he was, Churchill found time to paint, to occupy himself with color and form, though irrelevant to his worldly position.