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“And with a withering volley he shattered the enemy’s line ...”

Baby was now four years old. Baby had slightly bat ears; he was a funny rather than a beautiful baby. No matter, slightly bat ears might make it easier to drink in the music of these grandiose words. Sixty years later Winston Churchill can still hear the tones in which the old gentleman in his red uniform, glittering gold, uttered the magic-sounding sentence, “And with a withering volley ...” His Grace, Grandfather, was unveiling the Lord Gough statue. It was the first impression that has survived in Winston Churchill’s life. Even as a four-year-old, Baby was receptive to magic words. No wonder he has become the greatest living word-wizard in the English language.

The first winter of his eventful life “Winnie,” as he was to be called for the next few decades, spent at Blenheim Palace. Then his parents moved to the town house at 50, Grosvenor Square, in London. The Duke of Marlborough became Viceroy of Ireland, and took along his son as secretary. The Churchill family moved into a house called The Little Lodge, directly across from the Viceregal Palace. Jennie, still feeling a little strange amid all the splendor, kept rather to herself at the official receptions. But now she was a Churchill. The men and women of that house can never help being the center of things. Lord D’Abernon, later British ambassador at Berlin, describes one of these receptions of the Duke’s in his memoirs: “No eyes were turned on the Viceroy and on his consort, but all on a dark, lithe figure, standing somewhat apart and appearing to be of another texture to those around her, ardent, translucent, intent, more of the panther than of the woman in her look, but with a cultivated intelligence unknown to the jungle.”

Jennie preferred to spend her free time with her husband, hunting, and the child remained largely under the care of Mrs. Everest, the nurse. She was the first friend Winston Churchill ever had, and for long years the only one. Today her picture hangs on the wall of his studio in Chartwell, as it did in the bachelor flat he used to occupy in Mayfair.

Mrs. Everest lived in constant fear of the Irish Fenians, who were quite capable of kidnapping the children of the “English oppressors.” One day Winnie rode out on his donkey, accompanied by his nurse. In the distance a somber procession of dark-uniformed men appeared. Probably it was a marching troop of soldiers. Mrs. Everest, however, convinced they were Fenians, was terribly agitated. Her agitation communicated itself to the donkey, which bucked and threw its light burden. Winnie suffered a brain concussion. No more characteristic introduction to Irish politics could possibly have been contrived.

Mrs. Everest had a sister living in Ventnor whose husband was a prison warden. He told the lad about prison revolts, and how he himself had often been attacked and injured by the convicts. The sympathy that these tales aroused in the budding revolutionary was naturally directed toward the convicts. In later years Churchill recalled that these stories had remained vividly in memory when he became Home Secretary, and thus responsible for the English penal system. They led him to an inclusive prison reform. To them too he owed one of the greatest, if unintentional, humorous successes of his life. This was the famous affair of the Dartmoor Shepherd. (Dartmoor, of course, is the English Sing Sing.) The new Home Secretary was so full of the convicts’ misery, which had haunted him since childhood, that he released an old shepherd who had been sentenced to a long term for a series of thefts from the offertory boxes. The particular character of the thefts seemed almost sacrilegious, and the man’s pardon was interpreted as an anti-religious measure on the part of the Home Secretary, who was just going through his most violently radical stage. Naturally Churchill would return the blow with interest. All over the country he proclaimed the old shepherd a victim of the social order, who had to steal because he had never got a square chance in his life. Churchill himself found the man a job at Wrexham. But the old fellow did not last long. A few days after his “reformation” he was caught stealing again, and it proved that Mr. Churchill’s martyr had been an incorrigible thief for years.

With the warden of Ventnor little Winston often went walking along the cliffs. One day they saw a splendid ship passing by with all sails set, only two or three miles from shore. “The Eurydice,” said his companion proudly, “the training ship.” Suddenly the heavens darkened. Such a hurricane broke loose as occurs but once a century in those temperate climes. The boy got home wet to the skin. Next day he heard that the Eurydice had capsized and gone to the bottom with three hundred soldiers and sailors on board. The divers went down to bring up the corpses; some of them fainted at seeing the fish eating the drowned. Winston had nightmares; he saw ghosts at night. He was a high-strung child.

Next came learning to read and write. There would be a governess—the boy awaited her as some figure of dread. Mrs. Everest, the nurse, tried to soften the shock. She brought in a book, Reading Without Tears, which the lad was to study in preparation for the lessons with the governess. But there was no reading without tears. The child fought desperately against the crooked, senseless shapes that were pounded into him, the letters and numbers. The letters were tolerable at a pinch; after a while they would take on shape, and assume some silly meaning or other. But figures? Never! Even in the nursery he showed that all through his school career he was going to fail in mathematics.

When the dreaded governess finally arrived, the boy ran out of the house, and hid away in the woods. It took hours to catch him. Then he was put to the treadmill. In vain he appealed to his beautiful mother. Mamma had no time. She quite agreed with the governess’ strict methods. Besides, the horse was already neighing impatiently at the door. On big, aristocratic thoroughbreds of the finest strain Jennie and her Lord hunted through the Irish woods. Children belonged at home, under supervision. “She made a brilliant impression on my childhood’s eye,” Churchill remembered of his mother. “She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly—but at a distance.”

Thus lonely children grow up, timid and scared amid viceregal pomp. For that matter, the pomp even then was rather superficial. The Duke had to spend all his money on entertaining the Irish in Dublin. His wife contributed to and collected for the Famine Fund.

The Irish came to the receptions; they made use of the Fund. Nobody said thank you. Clouds gathered darkly on the horizon.

The clouds, dark and menacing, descended even on Winnie’s nursery. He was seven years old, and now it came time to take leave of the magic lantern, the real steam engine, and the thousand lead soldiers, wearing the uniforms of all the British services and regiments, that were more his playmates than his playthings. Off to school!

He would simply love school. There would be a great many other little boys, and wonderful adventures besides. Some boys grew so fond of school that they hated to come home for the holidays. Just ask your older cousins!

The cousins said nothing, but grinned.

He started on the journey of life with fourteen pairs of socks and three half-crowns. With these possessions his beautiful Mamma delivered him to St. James’ School, Ascot. She had scarcely taken leave of the headmaster, frozen in respect, before the latter’s manner changed. He drew himself up as well as his stoop would allow. His wrinkled face darkened into an utterly authoritarian glare: “Have you any money with you?” The three half-crowns vanished into a drawer. True, Winnie was carefully given a receipt. Then they handed him his first Latin book. He must learn to decline mensa.

So far as education went, St. James’ School was the last gasp of an antediluvian era. It had electric light, a revolutionary innovation at that time. It had a carefully chosen student body, with only ten boys in each form, all aspirants for Eton; it had the manner of Eton; its masters wore cap and gown. The school was fashionable and expensive. Each week in the library a number of boys were flogged until they were raw. Discipline demanded it.

The very first day, Winnie came dangerously close to the library. Mensa, vocative, his form master explained, meant “O table!” “You would use that in addressing a table,” he said.

“But I never do,” replied the boy.

“Next time you will be punished very, very severely!” With these words ended his introduction to the humanities.

Little Winston was not to be cowed. Never would he learn Latin, he vowed.

Of course they tried to introduce him by means of the cane to the beauties of the classical world. Once when he was thrashed too roughly he kicked the headmaster’s hat to pieces. They beat him again. He was impertinent, stubborn, sulky. Why, the child even stole. Flogging again. His naughtiness became legendary.

Here the anti-disciplinarian was born. Traces still remain. H. G. Wells said of him many years later, “There are times when the evil spirit comes upon him, and then I can only think of him as an intractable little boy, a mischievous, dangerous little boy, a knee-worthy little boy. Only by thinking of him in that way can I go on liking him.”

Untamable fury was stored up in the lad when discipline grew yet stricter. He would have revenge. When he was bigger he would come back to Ascot and publicly chastise the headmaster. He was still far too small for his great rage. After two years—the only two unhappy years of his life, as he later described them—he had a complete physical breakdown.

Photo from European

WINSTON CHURCHILL AT THE AGE OF SEVEN

One question kept gnawing at his soul: why did not his father come to deliver him? After all, his father was the greatest and handsomest man in the world; he could come striding like a god. But his father was long since in the grip of politics. Politics will devour even the greatest and handsomest man in the world. Not until a serious illness attacked the child did his parents take him from the terrible boarding-school.

Lord Randolph had evidently forgotten his own school-days. He regarded his underdeveloped son with a troubled eye. To a friend he introduced him with the words, “Not much of a boy yet ... But he’s a good’n, a good’n ...”

A summer trip with his parents to Bad Gastein, the Austrian spa, restored the boy’s health to some extent. But his condition still required rest and care. He was therefore sent to Brighton, where the family physician, the then celebrated Dr. Robson Roose, was in practice. The child had to be under constant medical supervision. At the same time he was put into a school conducted by two elderly ladies of Brighton. This was a much more unpretentious boarding-school; there was neither the electric light nor the caning library of St. James’ School. Instead there was an atmosphere of friendliness and sympathy quite new to the boy. For a little while he remained obdurate. Eva Moore, the actress, who was teaching dancing at Brighton just then, recalls Winston with the words, “A small red-headed pupil, the naughtiest boy in the class. I used to think him the naughtiest small boy in the world. He was cheeky in a specially annoying way, but smart. Games did not attract him, but theatricals. He constructed a toy theatre and produced Aladdin.”

Indeed it was at this time that the histrionic element awoke which distinguished Churchill for years. Today it is long since extinct. The sacred flame needs no further Bengal lights. But it cannot be denied that until quite late in his youth he felt most at ease in the glare of the lights. He had his first dramatic success in a school performance of Colman’s Heir at Law, in which he played Dick Dowles. His elocutionary gifts attracted general attention, though he did lisp slightly. This impediment gave him a good deal of trouble later. Like Demosthenes, Churchill, the greatest orator of his land and age, had to struggle painfully for speech.

Other early arts and sciences now came to him like a breeze. In French classes he did not have to say “O table!” Consequently he learned French very easily. Verses stuck in his youthful memory if he but read them once or twice. History began to fascinate him.

An attack of double pneumonia put the lad in bed. At that time double pneumonia was still a fatal disease, especially when the patient was a weakly, delicate child. But Winston pulled through. “He has a charmed life,” said the doctor. The phrase was to follow Churchill wherever he went.

During his convalescence the nine-year-old began to take an interest in politics. He came to it in an odd way, a regular Churchill way. To occupy him on Sundays he was allowed to look through the old volumes of Punch. He not only looked them through, he devoured them. He was most deeply fascinated by the cartoons. Here he met the world, its great figures and events. Probably the portrayal of contemporary history in caricatures made a special appeal to the boy’s rather scurrilous inclinations. The cosmogony he built up from the yellowing pages of Punch was not always a true one. For instance Gladstone, the great Liberal statesman, then the answer to all cartoonists’ prayers, was usually portrayed as Julius Caesar, an august being crowned with myrtle, a sort of glorified headmaster. Later he learned that Julius Caesar was far from an august being, but instead, in Winston Churchill’s own words, “the caucus manager of a political party, a wicked adventurer whose private life was a scandal, and that he had absolutely nothing in him that any respectable Victorian could tolerate.”

The Franco-Prussian War and the American Civil War were also made vivid by Punch. He saw France defeated—a beautiful woman in distress, resisting, sword in hand, a blonde and apparently irresistible Germania. Young Churchill wanted to help the French.

In the American Civil War Mr. Punch was at first against the South. He showed Miss Carolina about to whip a naked slave, a sort of Uncle Tom. On other pages the Yankees, decorated with long red noses, were running in the direction pointed by a signpost marked To Canada. Finally a picture showed North and South, two haggard, worn-out men, grappling as they moved toward an abyss labeled Bankruptcy. In the end, indeed, Britannia very sadly laid a wreath on Lincoln’s grave.

In the course of his career Churchill himself became the favorite of the cartoonists. Not hundreds but thousands of drawings and caricatures show him with his two trade-marks, which have made him as familiar as the walrus moustache did his father, the monocle Joe Chamberlain, and the pipe Mr. Baldwin. One of these two trade-marks is the wart-shaped nose—which, however, is nothing but a malicious yet ineradicable invention. The other is a tiny hat on an excessively broad skull. The wart nose that they have attached to him Churchill might endure. But he has grave objections to the Charlie Chaplin hat. He tells how the hat legend originated. There is no denying that he once wore a hat too small for him by mistake while walking with his wife on the beach at Southport. Unfortunately a news photographer was on hand. From that day forward the cartoonists sealed the fate of Churchill’s head and hat. In vain he points out tirelessly that his headgear is furnished by the best hatter in London. He had his trade-mark and his idiosyncrasy. At bottom he does not mind. A statesman no longer assaulted by the cartoonists is done for, he thinks with worldly wisdom. And as he was always a poor Latin scholar, he renders Oderint dum metuant! in his own private, tolerant fashion: “Let them laugh so long as they love.” Which to some degree distinguishes him from the dictators, even as Supreme War Lord.

Even while he was educating himself on Punch he remained an ill-behaved boy, self-willed and refractory. The school paper that he founded before he was nine was of course called The Critic. Only one number appeared, however. He demonstrated his critical talent when he met Rider Haggard at the home of his aunt, Lady Leslie. Rider Haggard, the author of She and King Solomon’s Mines, was then at the height of his fame. Young Winston, however, was by no means awestruck in his presence. “What do you mean by this passage in your new book?” asked the boy, quite without shyness. “I don’t understand it.”

Mr. Haggard examined the passage, and did not understand it either. Of course a masculine friendship at once developed out of that incident. Rider Haggard sent Winnie his newest work, and the latter thanked him with a most gracious holograph: “Thank you so much for sending me Allan Quatermain. It was so good of you. I like it better than King Solomon’s Mines; it is more amusing. I hope you will write a great many more books.”

An untamed, arrogant, presumptuous child, people said. No wonder—he was the son of the most conspicuous man in England.

After the Easter holidays of 1888 he took his entrance examinations for Harrow. He had been intended for Eton; but the climate there, with its everlasting fogs, was too unhealthy for the sickly boy. He was a little hurt by what he considered discrimination in the choice of schools. That the examination was no great success seemed to him less tragic. He had hoped to shine in his favorite subjects—history, poetry and essay-writing. Instead the examiners were painfully curious about his knowledge of Latin and mathematics. In the Latin paper, alas, he could not answer a single question. His mathematics did not seem to be much better. But Winston had the good fortune to find in the head of Harrow a great teacher with a deep knowledge of the boy soul. At this time Dr. Welldon, later Bishop of Calcutta and Dean of Durham, and for many years young Churchill’s friend, was headmaster. Dr. Welldon was not unreasonable about his students’ Latin prose at the expense of everything else. He knew a personality when he saw it, even in embryo form. Of his favorite pupil he was later to write: “Winston Churchill was not perhaps a boy who distinguished himself in the popularly accepted lines of public school life. He was not prominent in Latin and Greek scholarships or in mathematics or in natural science, nor again was he a prominent athlete as a cricketer or football-player. But not long after his entrance he attracted notice by his historical knowledge and his literary power, and he was among the Harrow boys of my time the most expert in the use of the foils. It would be wrong to pretend that he did not give the masters a good deal of trouble, but I think I may claim to have always felt, as I feel now, a great faith in him. I do not mean that I anticipated the full brilliance of his future life, but it is my deliberate judgment that he showed in his school-days at Harrow the unmistakable promise of distinction.”

One did need the kind heart of a Dr. Welldon to feel this promise of distinction immediately. For in the beginning Winston was ranked among the worst pupils. He stood but two from the bottom of the whole school. And as these two disappeared almost immediately, he was soon the last in order.

He managed to make the best of even this setback. It is an especially characteristic Churchill feature that bad always turns out to be good for him. At least he is able to interpret it so. Since he remained so long in the lowest form, his more gifted companions were taught Latin and Greek and similar splendors, while he was constantly taught English and English again. And in the person of a Mr. Sommerville he found an English teacher of uncommon stature. They continually practised English analysis. And when in later years his more gifted companions who had got prizes for Latin verses and Greek prosody could not write a simple English sentence to earn their bread and make their way, Winston Churchill could not quite keep a grin off his broad face.

Even in childhood he could see his own path marked out ahead, with all its wanderings and diversions. The visionary gift that was later to distinguish him, more than any other quality, from the great mass of mankind must already have been developed at least in rudimentary form by the time he said, at twelve, “Of course I will become a soldier while there is any fighting to be done. After that I shall have a shot at politics.” Quite independently he went to the great throat specialist Sir Felix Semon. He must lose his lisp: “Cure the impediment in my speech, please. Of course I am going into the army first. But as a Minister later, I can’t be haunted every time by the idea that I must avoid every word beginning with an S.”

At thirteen he astonished the swim attendant at Marylebone baths by enquiring whether the good man was Conservative or Liberal. To a swim attendant in those happy days of course parties were a matter of complete indifference. “What?” Winston jumped. “You pay rates and taxes and don’t bother about politics? Why, you ought to stand on a box in Hyde Park and tell people things!” For that was what he himself, at thirteen, wanted to do. Then he threw out his chest: “My father was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I mean to be the same one day!”

His father had just thrown all England into uproar. On December 23, 1886, in two lines the Times reported the great event:

“Lord Randolph Churchill resigned the offices of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons, and retired altogether from the Government.”

Hidden behind these dry lines was at once a personal tragedy and a political event of the first order. Lord Randolph had been the founder of what he himself had christened “Tory Democracy.” The aim of his life was to inspire the ruling classes of England with the progressive spirit. At the same time he himself was a restless, harried soul, the personal darling and political enfant terrible of the Tories, who gave him the highest posts in the kingdom even in youth, but refused again and again to follow his leadership. None was so tireless as he in denouncing Gladstone, the great Liberal statesman, in rousing England, in inflaming Ulster. He stood for religious and economic reconciliation between the two parts of Ireland, but he would never have agreed to a partition of the United Kingdom. “Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right!” was his most celebrated slogan. Paradoxically it was his son, years later, who contributed more than any other man to conciliation with Ireland, and was certainly more hated than anyone by the Ulstermen.

Lord Randolph’s whole life was a struggle with ill health. He smoked cigarettes “till his tongue was sore” to soothe himself. He was capable of feats requiring uncommon strength, but in reaction suffered grave fits of exhaustion and despondency. “He gallops till he falls,” his wife said of him, remembering their early years of riding together.

His mother, the Duchess of Marlborough, wrote after his early death: “He had a wonderful faculty of making firm friends, who remained through his life devoted to him. He was very constant and decided in his attachments, and outspoken—often imprudently—in his likes and dislikes. This enabled him to succeed in life, but also often brought him into trouble ... Alas, had I been a clever woman, I would have had more ability to curb and control his impulses, and I should have taught him patience and moderation. Yet at times he had extraordinary good judgment, and it was only on rare occasions that he took the bit between his teeth, and then there was no stopping him.”

These lines read as if written about young Winston Churchill, not about his father. An almost uncanny likeness unites the two men.

There was no stopping Lord Randolph when he lost patience over a ridiculous trifle, and—perhaps in hysteria, perhaps already in the shadow of death—tossed away his brilliant career.

Among his ideas for modernizing Tory rule was an anti-militarist passion that was to be part of the early political heritage of Winston Churchill, the born soldier. Winston, like Lord Randolph, was one day to be a pacifist in the captain’s saddle. Winston, however, was to have time to overcome this disease of childhood. Lord Randolph had no time. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he waged a furious struggle against the expenses of the Service Departments. He forced upon the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. George Hamilton, a reduction of £700,000. Mr. W. H. Smith, Secretary for War—a peaceful bookseller in civil life, and memorable through his caricature as Admiral Porter in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pinafore”—on the contrary demanded an increase of £300,000. The subject of dispute was ridiculously small—not even one per cent of the total Army and Navy Estimates, which amounted together to £31,000,000. But Lord Randolph was looking for a fight. “I am pledged to large reductions,” he declared. “If these things can be done in the Admiralty, the attitude of the War Office becomes intolerable.”

He used up his strength in constant explosions. In addition, he was being squeezed by poverty at home. As a younger son he had but a small inheritance. As a political idealist he had never earned a penny. Soon only the dowry from New York would be left. But naturally Lord Randolph would never touch his wife’s money.

Nevertheless rumors pursued him. High society did not understand his morbid intensity. A gossip campaign discovered the meanest motives for his strange behavior. Clubs abused him. The press censured him. The great Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, tried in vain to come to an understanding with his young right-hand man. When the House passed the Army Estimates according to the War Office demands, Lord Randolph recklessly chucked the whole business. Queen Victoria was grievously offended when she learned of her Chancellor’s retirement.

A schoolboy at Harrow shared with burning heart and feverish cheeks in these struggles, which took place at what was for him an infinitely remote distance. Later he was to say of his father, with great understanding: “Lord Randolph Churchill was a Chancellor of the Exchequer without a budget, a Leader of the House of Commons but for a single session, a victor without the spoils. No tangible or enduring records—unless it be the Burma Province—exist of his labours, and the great and decisive force which he exerted upon the history of the Conservative and Unionist party might be imperfectly realized by a later generation. No smooth path of patronage was opened to him. No glittering wheels of royal favour aided and accelerated his journey. Like Disraeli he had to fight every mile in all his marches.”

Words cannot tell how the boy Winston wanted to help his father in every fight on every march. But naturally Lord Randolph gave him no opportunity; he was still far too young. The battles for which the lad already felt the call had to be fought on the football field, where he raged with the war-cry, “St. George, St. Dunstan and the Devil!” Once at the swimming-pool he saw an unfamiliar schoolmate, temptingly small of stature. Naturally he flung him into the water from behind. To his horror it turned out that he had laid hands on the person of a Senior.

The Senior, Leopold Amery by name, generously forgave him. The two were fellow-correspondents in the Boer War. For more than a generation they sat together as faithful friends in Parliament. Today Mr. Amery and Churchill are fellow Cabinet members.

Young Winston let out all his pent-up energy in riding, swimming and fencing. It was all simply a release, not boyish delight in play; so much he himself knew. Still, he had no objection to a good game of Indians. Once the redskins, two elder cousins, chased him across a bridge. The paleface could escape only by jumping off the bridge, which was held at both ends by the foe. In falling he would grab the branches of a tree, he hoped. He hoped in vain. He fell thirty feet, and landed on stones.

Once again he proved to have a charmed life. By rights he should have shattered his skull. Instead he merely broke his right shoulder. True, he did have to wear plaster casts for six months, and his shoulder has never been right since. But when a man is lucky, even an accident is good fortune. A few years later, at the celebrated Omdurman cavalry assault, he was unable to use his sword. And so, while cavalry sabers flashed around him, he shot his way out with a brand-new Mauser pistol. No howling dervish with the curved scimitar of the Prophet ventured too near him.

Winston Churchill spent three of his four and a half years at Harrow in the Army Class. That he was to enter the service was soon decided. Lord Randolph was pained to think that his boy was too dull for the bar, which would really have been his paternal desire. The father was faced with a puzzle: Why was Winston, a noisy, alert lad, so feeble in his scholastic performances? He wrote excellent compositions. Sometimes he wrote too pointedly. The Harrovian, the school paper, had to censor one of his contributions radically because his language was not suited for publication. But his Latin translation he had to get done by a classmate. In return he dictated the latter’s English essays to him.

The headmaster, Dr. Welldon, took a personal interest in the promising lad who unfortunately was such a backward scholar. Three times a week he gave him private tuition before evening prayers.

But when the time arrived for the entrance examinations for Sandhurst, the English West Point, Winston Churchill failed. He failed a second time. At the third attempt he felt safe in English and chemistry. French seemed tricky to him, although he had a natural talent for the language. He spent six months in a grim effort to master mathematics, his weakest subject. Up and at the enemy where he is most dangerous, was his watchword even then. All at once sines, cosines and tangents became his daily pabulum. According to his own confession he has heard not a word of these specters since Sandhurst. They vanished from his memory as suddenly as he had conjured them up.

Once again a stroke of luck decided the outcome. He knew that in the third examination, just ahead of him, he would have to draw from memory the map of some part of the Empire. Unfortunately Great Britain is truly great, and consists of many parts. He put bits of paper into his hat, each bearing the name of a dominion or a crown colony. With eyes closed he drew the slip marked New Zealand. New Zealand he studied.

In the examination the examiner said, “Draw us a map of New Zealand on the board.”