After Churchill returned from Cuba at age twenty-one, he would begin what might reasonably be considered the most concentrated, physically grueling, dangerous, and exciting four years of his life. He came under fire on the Northwest Frontier in India, in the Sudan, and in the Boer War in South Africa.
These battles would earn him a deserved reputation as a hero while he gained confidence in his ability to support himself by writing books and articles about those adventures that would sell. He developed a determination to capitalize on his fame and skills by running for political office and extending his reach as a journalist and author across several continents, especially North America. Having fought in four wars (one of them as an observer of a rebellion in Cuba), written and published four books, he knew he had the basis for becoming a polished public speaker.
The full tale of that period in Churchill’s life, which provided many of the links to his emerging network, borders on the fantastic. His return to Britain in December 1895 from his visit to New York and his Cuban adventure confronted Winston with a problem. He would have several months of winter leave before his army unit would depart for an eight- or nine-year deployment in India. Just as he had converted an earlier period of leave time into an opportunity by finding a war in Cuba and beginning the construction of a network in New York, he would use this time to accomplish many goals.
The imperatives that drove him to New York and Cuba remained. There was, of course, the restless search for adventure. He needed money; his military pay would not finance a decent lifestyle, much less the one to which he aspired. Members of Parliament were not paid in those days, and elections cost money. And his mother was rapidly dissipating her inheritance and, as yet unbeknownst to him, his as well.1 Her second husband, George Cornwallis West, who was slightly younger than Winston, had only one criticism of his new wife, writing to his family, “In money matters she was without any sense of proportion. The value of money meant nothing to her; what counted with her were things she got for money, not the amount she had to pay for them.”2
Along with networking arts, a skill passed on to Winston, who once described to his brother, Jack, the simple if not austere life on a farm he had purchased, “We live vy [sic] simply, but with all the essentials of life well understood & provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas & old brandy.”3 Adding that at Hoe farm, “…the garden gleams with summer jewelry.”4
Churchill had learned from his Cuba experience that his pen could be his fortune, that he could satisfy his desire for adventure, fame, and money by reporting on the daring deeds he planned to perform at the next opportunity. He did, however, worry: “I do not compose an account quickly. Everything is worked out by hard labour and frequent polishing.”5
He was also eager to solidify the friendship he had formed with Bourke Cockran during his very brief stopovers in New York. Which he did by engaging in an amazingly wide-ranging and sophisticated correspondence with the New York congressman that covered the issues of the day and, more philosophically, the role of governments.6
He also needed deep contacts in the British establishment, especially among the elites that interacted with their American counterparts. He used his time in Britain to meet and associate with many “notables” as he called them, including several future prime ministers (Asquith and Balfour). His son, Randolph (subsequently his father’s biographer), describes his father “taking pains to cultivate the important people he met: he was learning from them about the facts of life and how things were done. He was to make the fullest use of the contacts and friendships he acquired… half his interest in meeting all these fascinating and important people was to use them as a personal springboard.”7
In a letter to his mother, Churchill suggests she contact Lord Rothschild on his behalf “as he knows everyone.”8 And contact him she did. Thanks to her influence and his father’s reputation, “Natty” Rothschild often invited Winston to visit him at his country home at Tring. Since Lord Rothschild was a towering figure in British society, visits to Tring gave Churchill the opportunity of rubbing shoulders with “Mr. & Mrs. Asquith, Mr. Balfour… and meeting… clever people and listening to their conversation” wrote the networking son to his networking mother.9 Or, as he later put it in a different context, he thought social contacts “should be used as a springboard, not as a sofa.”10
Unfortunately, Lord Rothschild was much fonder, or at least more accepting, of his house guest Churchill in 1896 than he was of Churchill in 1911, when he was home secretary. His lordship wrote to his cousin, “Unfortunately Mr. Churchill is at the head of the Home Office and he is always much too much swayed by sentiment. Since he has held the present post strikes have been numerous and the men are beginning to think that they have only to strike to get their way.”11 This was far less damaging to a successful combatant, writer, and politician than it would have been at an earlier stage in Churchill’s career.
In October 1896 Churchill returned to Bombay (present-day Mumbai), India, and thence to Bangalore, where his regiment was stationed. He was soon bored playing polo, and by this time firmly set on a political career—in emulation of his late father. He was, however, keenly aware that his Harrow and Sandhurst educations were inadequate, often leaving him unable to understand references in conversations “with those of his contemporaries who had gone to Oxford and Cambridge,”12 people who would someday be important for him to know and consort with comfortably. So he launched what for anyone of lesser determination and intelligence would be a daunting self-education campaign.
He had Jennie send him Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Lord Macaulay’s six volume History of England,13 twenty-seven volumes of the Annual Register, a record of world events14 beginning with the two volumes covering 1870 (some were skipped because Jennie found the complete set simply too expensive).15 He read them all, “devoured” the eight volumes of Gibbon “and enjoyed it all.”16 He annotated those reports of Parliamentary debates with notes on what he might have said if called upon,17 and sent his mother comments comparing the writing styles of Gibbons and Macaulay.18 The list goes on and on and on—including other works too numerous to list here,19 perhaps the most notable for this young free-trader, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The result was an “enormous intellectual self-confidence.”20 Well earned.
Reading had its limits for this man of action. He wrote to advise his mother that he was getting “very restless…. The time comes when books and roses [and butterflies] prove insufficient interest…. I am very well and so far as I know in favor with God and man—but there are days when I feel I cannot sit still.”21
What he wanted was action, military if possible, and soon so he could get his name before what he hoped would be an adoring public. As usual, he asked Jennie to deploy her network to arrange a transfer to a regiment that might see some action. In a postscript to a letter to his mother in March 1897, he implores her, “Do stir up [Henry] ‘Bimbash’ [Arabic for “soldier”] Stewart22 and others to write to Kitchener and get me some good letters for use in Cairo and Constantinople. Sir Edgar Vincent ought to be able to help me at the latter place.”23
While on a short leave from his regiment in Britain, he read of a revolt by the “Pathans tribesmen on the [North West] Indian frontier”24 and that Sir Bindon Blood was putting together a Field Force. Churchill at once applied to join him but Sir Bindon replied that he could arrange an appointment to join the Malakand Field Force “as a press correspondent” only if Churchill could obtain press credentials.25
Once again Winston turned to Jennie, a very close friend of Edward Levy-Lawson, owner of the Daily Telegraph—the Times already had a correspondent in India. Churchill would also get press accreditation from the Pioneer Mail and Indian Weekly News (Rudyard Kipling’s publisher), promising them 300 words a day, but Sir Bindon required a British publisher in order to allow Churchill to come along.
Nevertheless, Churchill, taking a leave again from his unit, but wearing the uniform of the 4th Hussars, set off from Bangalore for northwest India—a five-day train trip—without knowing whether Jennie could arrange for his press credentials, or for which British outlet he might be writing. He had learned from his Cuba experience that participating in and reporting on a military action was his best route to fame and, given the pressure on him from his bankers, fortune. “The great thing is to get to the front,” he told his mother.26 He urged her “I most sincerely hope you will have done what I asked…”27
Jennie dutifully contacted the owner of the Daily Telegraph, Levy-Lawson (later Baron Burnham) and asked him to name her son as the Telegraph correspondent.28 Lawson agreed and asked Jennie to remind Churchill “to post picturesque forcible letters,”29 probably with the sketches he had done from Cuba in mind. He instructed his mother not to accept less than £10 per letter, and to arrange for signed pieces “as otherwise I get no credit for the letters. It may help me politically to come before the public in this way.”30
She was “to use your own discretion in editing it…,”31 wrote a weary Churchill, referring to the latest batch of letters he was sending for transmission to the Daily Telegraph. In addition to her other accomplishments, Jennie Jerome edited an important magazine, The Anglo-Saxon Review, with some journalistic advice from her son.
On October 6, 1897, the first of his letters was published and appeared on the front page of the Daily Telegraph. Churchill was deeply disappointed, however, to see that his name did not appear on the article, which was headlined as INDIAN FRONTIER—BY A YOUNG OFFICER. He complained that he “had written them with the design… of bringing my personality before the electorate. I had hoped some political advantage might have accrued.”37
His mother’s society-publicity machine went into action to tell her friends of his bravery and that the young officer was Winston Churchill. Thanks to his mother’s action, most of London knew he had written the battle reports, including the Prince of Wales, who likely shared the identity of the young officer with his socially important set.
Churchill’s disappointment at the Daily Telegraph’s failure publicly to recognize his authorship of the letters from the field was compounded by Jennie’s agreement to a fee of £5 per letter instead of the £10 he had instructed her to request.38 In fairness to Jennie, because of her close relationship with Lawson, it is likely that she knew more about the editor and his willingness to make the appointment that Winston so desperately needed, and his willingness to pay a not-yet famous reporter, than did the correspondent himself. In any event, the newspaper fraternity was aware of the author of these letters, and the fame generated by the deal Jennie obtained from the Daily Telegraph enabled him to improve on that newspaper’s offer to an unknown journalist: Churchill was paid £15 per column, three times his Malakand rate, from the Morning Post, owned by the father of a friend of his, to cover the war in Sudan.39
Churchill did hit upon a way to make further use of his Telegraph pieces: he would convert them into a book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, rehearsing his adventures on the Northern Frontier, where he came under fire from the Pashtuns. “I know the ground, the men, and the facts. It is a fine idea,” he wrote to Jennie.40 He had been up north for only seven weeks, he added, but “what a lot of things have happened to me and how many more might have happened!… It was extremely dangerous.”41
The idea for the book was among one of Churchill’s better career decisions. Although he felt it important for his book to be the first of what inevitably would be several about the war.
Looking for further action, he decided to travel to Cairo to join the expedition south to the Sudan to topple the Mahdists, led now by the Khalifa (“successor” in Arabic). Jennie once again tapped her network, Winston called upon the relationship created by his book with Lord Salisbury and other contacts, plus that ever-useful possession, luck—the death of an officer, leaving a slot open—to wrangle an appointment from a reluctant Lord Kitchener, leader of the Anglo-Egyptian forces,42 as a supernumerary lieutenant in the only cavalry regiment. At Omdurman he took part in the last large cavalry charge that the British Army ever fought, a massive battle in which around 80,000 soldiers fought, taking over 20,000 casualties (dead, wounded, captured)—over 400 of them British. At one point in the battle, “Because of his weak shoulder, Churchill slipped his sword into its sheath and decided to use his Mauser automatic pistol. He galloped into battle… A man riding behind Churchill was killed instantly… Within three minutes Churchill had killed two Dervishes and perhaps wounded two others…”43
After Omdurman, he returned to his regiment in India, using the long and hot shipboard journey to write and edit The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Back in Bangalore, he worked as much as six to eight hours a day to edit, arrange, and rewrite his reports to convert them into book form. “I astonish myself by my industry and application,”44 he wrote his mother, who had often accused him of being too disorganized and averse to hard work to support her financially.45 Others with whom he worked on projects would later refer to his “intimidating energy.”46
He insisted his must be the first book to be published on the frontier wars. He sent his mother the manuscript with very detailed instructions on formatting, maps, and pictures, and “verifying quotations.”47 At a Christmas house party attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales, Joseph Chamberlain (secretary of state for the colonies), and Arthur Balfour (Conservative leader in the House of Commons), Jennie asked Balfour for a recommendation for a publisher for Churchill’s manuscript and reported to Winston, “The letters [Telegraph] have been read & appreciated by the people who later on can be useful to you.”48
In the same letter, she also reported that “Arthur Balfour… has been very nice about you. I told him all about yr book (the Campaign) & he is going to put me in the way of a good publisher & everything. You need only send me the MS & I will have it all done for you…. When you finish yr writing you must go through another course of reading.”49
Much advice from a mother as attentive to a son on the cusp of fame and fortune as she had been to her social life when he had been a needy little boy at a boarding school. The book would be dedicated to Major General Sir Bindon Blood.
In March 1898, Longmans published The Story of the Malakand Field Force, Churchill’s first book. Two thousand copies were printed, “200 of which were sent to New York for American distribution”50 as his name by this time was well-known to Americans and to the American press. Lord Salisbury, then prime minister as well as foreign secretary, was so impressed with the book that he asked to meet the twenty-four-year-old author. Churchill would later dedicate The River War, his account of the bloody battle against the Mahdi, to Lord Salisbury, whom historian Andrew Roberts has described as this “great English tribal leader of the nineteenth century.”51
Reviews of The Story of the Malakand Field Force were almost unanimously favorable, enabling Churchill to achieve his longer-term goal of having his name put before a wider public as a skilled writer and heroic figure. And not only in Britain. The reviews in the United States were also enthusiastic and added to the fame he had gained from press reports of his Cuba and Northwest India adventures.52
His first book published, the promise of more adventure, more fame, more reporting assignments, and perhaps another book, loomed when the Boers decided to struggle to retain their independence in Southern Africa. The resulting Second Boer War, pitting Britain’s 500,000-strong force against 88,000 Boers55 gave Winston still another opportunity to display his courage, and Jennie an opportunity to display the political and financial power conferred by her powerful Anglo-American network, a display that carried a message for an observant Winston. He was off to South Africa.
He prepared well, arranging for the repair of his telescope, his field glasses, and his compass. Perhaps more important, he ordered seventy bottles of a wide variety of wines and spirits delivered to his ship. His principal recent biographer tells us that this “was not all for personal consumption: alcohol was a useful currency in war zones.”56
Churchill arrived in South Africa on October 31, 1899, as a correspondent for the Morning Post, hoping to obtain a commission as an officer once he had arrived. Two weeks after he arrived, he was captured during a Boer attack on a British transport train. The flatbed on the train had been derailed and Churchill led a group attempting to clear the line.
“Amid a hail of bullets and bursting 3-pounders… Churchill and the others encouraged the men, rallying them again and again… After the stricken train engine was loaded with wounded, engine and tender steamed back into Estcourt. Mr. Churchill, however, after handing in his revolver and field glasses, said he was going back to the scene to assist the wounded and stand by the men. The last seen of him was as he trudged alone away down into the arena of battle, where the shot and shell were still screaming, splintering rock and ploughing the ground.”57 He was captured.
The Boers rejected Churchill’s argument that as he was a journalist he should be released, and imprisoned him in Pretoria—with enough freedom to write long letters to the Prince of Wales and to Bourke Cockran from jail. The letter to Cockran was in response to a telegraph from his American friend, relayed to Churchill’s prison by the American consul, wishing him many returns on his twenty-fifth birthday. Churchill wrote to his New York friend: “I am alive and have added another to the several vivid experiences which have crowded my last four years. I am also a prisoner, of which fact—as I am a correspondent and a noncombatant—I complain. But, that I am kept in it, is the only serious objection I have to make of this place.”58
Despite the fact that he was well treated, “…he hated every minute of his confinement. He thought of nothing but escape from the moment he entered the prison.”59
Every newspaper in Britain carried the tale of Churchill’s heroism in evacuating the wounded from the train, which was related by those who had survived the battle thanks to Churchill’s actions. The Yorkshire Post headline read MR. CHURCHILL’S HEROISM, and he became not only the talk of the country but the subject of widespread praise and admiration.60 Years later, his daughter Sarah recalled a ditty “written of him during the Boer War”:
You’ve heard of Winston Churchill;
This is all I need to say
He’s the latest and the greatest
Correspondent of the day.61
Publicity like this allowed some reporters to speculate that his future lay in politics, and that his future would be assured in whatever he did. Meanwhile, as yet unaware that Winston had been captured, Jennie and some of her American friends had the idea of outfitting a hospital ship and sailing to South Africa to care for the wounded there. She was following in her parents’ footsteps. Her father, Leonard Jerome, had “subsidized a Union warship during the Civil War” and Jennie’s mother, Clara, worked at military hospitals.62 Jennie’s ship, the Maine, was named after an American ship that had sunk in Havana harbor after an explosion of uncertain origin, killing 268 sailors.
Jennie’s Maine was fitted out with five wards and 175 beds, each decorated with the name of a donor. She had raised all the money for the ship and gathered other donations to pay the doctors and nurses, medicines, and all the equipment from her American contacts—some twenty of them, mainly American women living in London,63 others in the United States. She was an expert fundraiser, a trait her young son watched with admiration.64 The New York Times reported that “Lady Randolph Churchill presided at a meeting of American women in London, organized to raise funds to equip a hospital ship for South African waters.”65 A week later, she told the New York Times that the interest generated “has already taken such tangible form, from New York to San Francisco…”66
She made it clear that although the Maine was an American ship, it would pick up and care for all those wounded in the ongoing South African (actually the Second Boer) War.67 Her own stationery featured the intertwined flags of the United States and Great Britain as well as the flag of the Red Cross,68 and the matching nurses’ and doctors’ uniforms, including Jennie’s own, were specially designed, with a brassard with Maine and a red cross embossed on it.69 There were to be two commanding officers, an Englishman familiar with British naval protocols and a retired American army surgeon.
The reach of Jennie’s network was truly impressive. Both of Jennie’s sisters, Clara and Leonie, were members of the American Ladies Hospital Ship Fund Committee, of which Jennie was chairman (the term then acceptable). They had married Englishmen, lived in London, and had many contacts in the Anglo-American community. Mary, wife of Joseph Chamberlain, then the colonial secretary and later prime minister, was an American, and very active on the committee. One Boston newspaper read, “Lady Churchill was the U.S.’s ‘Best’ Ambassador.”70
Jennie also solicited help from her contacts in her home country. Since many Americans supported the Boer fight for independence, as Churchill would learn on his first American lecture tour, she was not entirely successful. Teddy Roosevelt, governor of New York and a distant cousin, turned her down, as did Senator Chauncey Depew, whom Winston was to meet later in life. But many Americans in Jennie’s network did help out. An old friend, Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, provided all the nurses from her Mills Training School for Nurses, which Jennie’s father, Leonard, had founded.71 An American millionaire, Bernard Nadel Baker, provided a ship from his Baltimore company, the Atlantic Transport Line, and agreed to maintain the crew at his company’s expense.72
The members of the American Ladies Hospital Ship Fund Committee of course wanted to save the lives of the wounded, but as expatriates living in Britain, they also wanted “to further the friendship between their country and the country they now called home.”73 And be seen to do so.
Turning to her contacts in Britain, which included the secretary of war and the first lord of the Admiralty, both of whom she had long known on a first-name basis, Jennie had the Maine designated an official military hospital ship, thereby, reported the New York Times, “obtaining privileges from the War Office that otherwise would have been impossible…”74 They also made available a surgeon from the 2nd Life Guards and some men from the St. John Ambulance Brigade.
Jennie also drew on her British contacts to lend glitz and credibility to her fundraising efforts. She launched a series of “fundraising concerts, matinees, and entertainments of all sorts” to raise $150,000.75 That effort built on the widely known support of the Prince of Wales and Queen Victoria, who met the Americans who would be staffing the Maine—a sure sign of approval at the highest level.
The final fundraising gala on November 18, was a sumptuous “entertainment” at Claridge’s, with royalty in attendance. “Jennie and her friends converted [the ground floor] into a garden of chrysanthemums, roses and multicolored lights.” Sir Arthur Sullivan made other arrangements at the hotel and several orchestras performed, including a favorite singer of the Prince of Wales.76 Sir Arthur aided the committee’s work probably because of his relationship with another American beauty living in London at the time, and a friend of Jennie’s. Mrs. “Fanny” Ronalds was the honorary treasurer of the committee and a “friend” of Leonard Jerome and the Prince of Wales, as well as Sir Arthur. The New York Times advertised the gala on November 5, knowing its readers would be interested in news of Ronalds, Jennie, and her father, Leonard Jerome.77 Unfortunately, Jennie was too distressed to attend, although her portrait by John Singer Sargent was on the cover of the program,78 and she would have been the undoubted star of the evening. Two days before the gala she learned that Winston had been captured in South Africa and was in prison.
A month passed before she finally learned that he had escaped and was safe. Ten days later, on December 23, 1899, Lady Churchill set sail for South Africa on the Maine.
Lady Randolph had several reasons for drawing on her network for the creation and support for the Maine. Both her sons were involved in the war, Winston as a journalist the Boers considered a combatant, and Jack as a lieutenant in the South African Light Horse regiment, which Churchill joined after his capture and escape. Jack had been wounded and, by pure coincidence as the tale was told, was the first patient to benefit from the presence of the Maine’s hospital facilities.
Finally, as some in the popular press snidely reminded their readers, Lady Churchill also hoped to see George Cornwallis-West, her current favorite, who was serving in the Scots Guards in South Africa. They were married in July 1900 and divorced in April 1914.
Churchill returned to Britain to convert his popularity into a seat in Parliament, a lecture tour of some twenty-nine speeches in various British cities, and a return to North America for a long and grueling lecture tour of the United States and Canada. He had seen what his mother’s network could do and had begun to construct his own. Not bad progress for a twenty-seven-year-old.