With no wars to fight, with his books describing his deeds in India and, later, his derring-do in the Boer War1 widely popular both in Britain and in America,2 and a seat in Parliament won, Churchill decided that his goal of developing wider and deeper contacts at home and in America would best be achieved by lecture tours, one in Britain, followed by another in his mother’s home country. They would, of course, also generate income. “…You must remember how much money means to me and how much I need it for political expense and other purposes…,” he wrote to his mother as he overcame an initial reluctance to launch his career as a paid speaker.3 Presumably, the “other purposes” included some luxuries of the rather extravagant lifestyle he was starting to adopt quite early in his life.
Churchill realized that his ever-present need for money had become more pressing because of two developments. For one thing, after an unsuccessful run for a parliamentary seat in Oldham in Lancashire, Churchill won that constituency on a second try, but only after waging a campaign that cost about £1,500, a large expense4 at a time when members of Parliament were not salaried. He modestly reported that political victory to Bourke Cockran as “something in the nature of an achievement.” With this trip looming, he added, “It will be vy [sic] pleasant to meet you again and to see something of American quiet and seclusion after the [campaign] clatter here.”5
Another reason Churchill felt pressure to increase his earnings was that Jennie’s remarriage required her older son to move out of her house and into his own place. Fortunately, his cousin “Sunny” Marlborough, the ninth duke, handed him the remaining two years of a lease on a flat he owned in Mount Street6—the sort of courtesy from which Churchill was to benefit his entire life—giving him, at least temporarily, a home of his own in London.
His first lecture tour, in Britain, was a typical Churchill work effort, twenty-nine lectures over thirty-two days in late 1900.7 It was an arduous schedule that he would duplicate a few months later on his American tour, for which the British tour might well have been a practice run. He visited most of the great cities in England, Scotland, and Ireland, including Oxford and Cambridge, earning £3,782 15s 5d. That included £278 for a lecture at his old school, Harrow. Despite the tiny fee, the Harrow lecture was well worth the effort, since it was there that he learned to condense his notes into a manageable time frame and to be aware of audience reactions.9 These skills would stand him in good stead on both his British and American tours, and later in life.
As he would do in America, Churchill used his British lecture tour to build a network of important contacts that would provide useful support for his policies, for his career, and for his financial well-being. This included displaying to many of the socially and politically prominent friends to whom his famous name had provided access, that there was talent to go along with that name. As his biographer son, Randolph, puts it, Churchill “set about assiduously collecting eminent men to preside at his lectures in the various cities… a local notable to suit every town…”10
He succeeded, and the large crowds of attendees included government ministers, financial titans, and many of the elite from royal dukes on down—most of whom remembered his father. It is not unreasonable to suppose that all came away with an awareness of the many talents of this extraordinary young man.
Churchill asked Lord Wolseley to preside over what would turn out to be the most successful stop on his first British lecture tour. Wolseley, one of Jennie’s many contacts, replied that he would “be very glad to preside”11 at the first lecture in St. James’s Hall. According to the Times, Wolseley “occupied the chair.”12 Churchill’s effort on this first tour to ensure that famous people lent their presence and prestige to his talks set a precedent for what would become a lifelong feature of his lectures—especially in his lecture and private tours of the United States.
From this first lecture in the crowded St. James’s Hall in London to his final talk in Cheltenham, his speeches were a success; witness a report in the Times of October 31, 1900:
…The parts played by Mr. Winston Churchill are already so many and so various that it is a matter rather of interest than of surprise to see him assume yet another character. Having passed almost at once from the war correspondent to the political candidate, he now as readily leaves the hustings for the lecturer’s platform; and during the winter months he proposes, in a tour which will extend as far as America, to recount to popular audiences his impression of the Transvaal campaign… The large and appreciative audience who filled St James’s Hall last night to hear Mr. Winston Churchill augurs well for the success of his latest enterprise and it says not a little for his qualities as a lecturer….13
He had become, in the words of one biographer, “a household name in Britain and its empire,”14 an asset that enhanced his political career and one that increased his access to fee income from several sources.
Although perhaps not yet quite as famous as his mother in America, his fame there had increased as a result of his earlier visit in 1895, and its attendant publicity. In July 1900, an article in America’s Harper’s New Monthly Magazine provided a useful predicate to his arrival a few months later. Titled “English War Correspondents in South Africa,” it noted that Churchill, the youngest of the correspondents, “can hardly be said to have gained fame in this war, for he was famous before it. But he has certainly added greatly to his laurels… ambitious, hard-working, a born orator with the power to move people as he wills. Winston Spencer Churchill must go far.”15
As a result of his increasing fame, in February, some ten months before he was to leave for his American tour, A. P. Watt, who claimed to be his literary agent,16 had written to him saying that “one of the best of the American magazines” was interested in buying some articles and responded with the offer of a commission of £100 for each of three articles when Watt suggested articles by Churchill about his South African wartime experiences.17
Watt’s skill as a literary agent did not necessarily qualify him to advise on a choice of planner for Churchill’s American tour. Nevertheless, he recommended a friend, James Burton Pond (sometimes referred to as Major Pond). Churchill took the precaution of asking Jennie to check Pond’s reputation. She was told Pond was “eminently respectable, having organized the speaking engagements of such luminaries as Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain.”18
Further comfort, which was to prove not entirely justified, came a few days after Churchill’s arrival in New York when the very popular and presumably knowledgeable Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper described Pond as having the “specialty [of] the production of lions, both foreign and domestic, upon the lecture platform.”19 Pond was so organized he had envelopes printed with the return address “Winston Spencer Churchill: American Tour, 1900-1901, Conducted by Major J.B. Pond, Everett House, N.Y.”
Churchill was soon to learn that even though Watt had proved useful as literary agent in Britain, such arrangements could not be left entirely to others. Planning details of the lecture tour—cities, dates, timing, transport, publicity, and, as it turned out, security protection—could all affect his reputation and financial rewards. Financial planning, too, was essential to account for differing ticket prices in cities and differing levels of seating. These details were too important to be delegated without paying careful attention. Had Churchill been more experienced with the business side of these tours—a skill he was to acquire very soon—he might have seen a warning flag go up when the promoter apparently never did submit a contract for the tour. In the future Churchill would rely on more experienced and trustworthy representatives.
Pond proposed that Churchill deliver thirty-seven lectures in thirty-one cities, on a two-month tour under the banner of The [Boer] War As I Saw It. The choice of title was consistent with a discovery Pond had made many years earlier, when the ticket-buying public begin to prefer “concerts and novelties” such as operas, to lectures. “To be attractions,” wrote Pond, “heroes must make the history they relate.”20
Churchill, a war hero several times over, certainly fit the bill and would, as Pond foresaw, attract large audiences in what was then a highly competitive field. Churchill, having successfully completed his grueling British speaking tour with no ill effects, was undaunted by Pond’s proposal, and agreed. But he did provide Pond with such instructions as he deemed most important about scheduling and accommodations.
At this point in his career Winston Churchill was likely less well-known in America than his mother. Jennie had been born in Brooklyn and had extensive personal contacts in America. She led a social life that provided endless material for gossip, social, and fashion columnists. She was beautiful. One newspaper, the Buffalo Times described her as “…still one of the most superbly beautiful women of England, despite her grownup son…”21
Her work cajoling sponsors and raising money for the hospital ship Maine had attracted wide public notice. Her publication, the elegant Anglo-Saxon Review, had a substantial readership among American elites. Indeed, her name recognition was such that Pond suggested to Jennie that she accompany her son on his forthcoming tour. “And I need not add that it would doubly enhance the value of the lecture,”22 he advised. Jennie, who had remarried recently, demurred. Although she chose not to join Churchill on his tour, Jennie’s ability to raise funds for the Maine from her well-established network was not lost on her son. Pond also enclosed an article by the London correspondent for the New York Herald in which he described the Churchill the Americans would see: “…in temperament, originality, dash, eloquence, and the magic art of swaying men he is his father’s promissory note, payable when he is more mature.”23
Quite a coming attraction but still his father’s son. But not all the omens for the U.S. tour were encouraging. A month before he embarked for America the Philadelphia Record, November 16, 1900, one of the American newspapers covering his forthcoming British tour, complained of “his youthful failings and his egoistic cocksureness,” and argued that he should have been openly critical of the performance of the British military in South Africa, and should have helped “to bring forward a practicable scheme for the reorganization of the [British] army… throwing away an opportunity of which his father would have taken full advantage.”24
Also, there was the long-standing suspicion of British imperialism in America, a country that annually celebrated its feat of throwing off the British yoke imposed by what was taught in schools to be evil King George III.25
Churchill’s history of reporting on and participating in battles in Cuba, engaging in and recording fierce battles in India and Sudan, and being captured during the Boer War would have been followed closely in America. But admiration for Churchill’s daring did not extend to the imperial causes for which he had fought. In short, his adventures would not be viewed as favorably in Chicago as in Chiswick. Americans generally favored liberating colonies from tyrannical foreign overlords, never mind US imposition of military rule on the Philippines, acquired from Spain exactly two years before Churchill’s departure for America. Besides, Bourke Cockran had been touring the country, with stops in New York, Chicago, and Boston to address pro-Boer meetings. His speeches blaming England for “one of the most barbarous wars in the dreary annals of aggression,” received wide publicity.26 It is possible that Cockran’s speeches—he was one of the great orators of the day—contributed to the interest in hearing this twenty-six-year-old who was coming to America after participating in four wars, one an insurrection. He had joined the last great cavalry charge, in 1898, at Omdurman in the Sudan. He described that battle in a letter to his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, as “…a wonderful spectacle.”27
He may have called it a spectacle but it was a dangerous hand-to-hand battle in which he came close to being killed or seriously wounded, protected only by his pistol as he rode his horse amidst the fighting armies. In the war against the Boers in South Africa he was captured and escaped to resume the fight. He had published two books on the wars in which he had participated in India and the Sudan28 and another two on the South African campaign29—all to good reviews both at home and in the United States. And a novel, Savrola, published in 1900, which was received reasonably well by literary critics.30 He had waged two campaigns for a seat in Parliament, the second one successful. In India he had participated in high-level polo matches, a sport he called “the finest game in the world,”31 and in which he participated until age fifty-two, his last game—a friendly one—played in Malta.32 He had made the rounds of the salons and country houses of high society and politics in Britain. He had delivered a well-received lecture at Harrow and completed his thirty-two-day lecture tour of Britain, recounting his deeds during the Boer War, drawing large crowds generated in part by the wide coverage those deeds had already received in the press. He had moved out from under his mother’s wing to establish his own residence in London. He had impressed just about everyone who mattered in Britain with his courage, wit, and skill as an orator, and the reading public in America with his courage and adventures. He had earned significant and much-needed money, some £3,782 15s 5d for his labors.33 He had only the previous day celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday.
“I pursue profit not pleasure in the States this time,” he wrote to his friend Bourke Cockran a few days before embarking for America. When advised by Pond not to stay with Cockran, lest “it will be used by the newspapers to show that I have interfered with American politics,” Winston asked for advice from his potential host. “I put myself frankly in your hands… I leave the matter to you knowing you are a good friend & will decide what is best for me.”34
In the event, Churchill decided to accept Cockran’s invitation to stay in his apartment after a short stop in a hotel which must not have been up to Churchillian standards, especially since he knew from his earlier trip what luxury would be available in Cockran’s apartment. It is reasonable to assume from their relationship and extensive correspondence that Churchill’s wish, expressed in his planning letter to Cockran, was granted, “I… have looked forward for a long time to some more pleasant talk & discussion in your house, 753, if I remember rightly, 5th Avenue.”35
Preparations complete, on December 1, 1900, two months after being elected for the first time to a seat in Parliament (Oldham), he set sail for New York aboard the RMS Lucania, one of Cunard’s fastest ships, prepared to lecture to Americans on his experiences in the Boer War. It was a few weeks short of five years since the conclusion of his first visit to his mother’s home country, during which time America’s most populous city had more than doubled in size.
On December 8 at 10:00 A.M., Churchill sailed into New York harbor.36 A Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter at dockside when the Lucania arrived told his readers that Churchill “wore a dark suit, a square top Derby hat, and an Astrakhan trimmed overcoat,” either the same coat he wore at the so-called Siege of Sidney Street a decade later or one very much like it.37
Pond had promised the New York press and prospective audiences in thirty-seven cities that Churchill would speak of his South African adventures. Churchill, of course, was known to the local American press from his interviews after his trip to and from Cuba, the deeds in India he had recorded in The Malakand Field Force and The River War.
The interviews with reporters at dockside went well. Answering a question from a reporter from the New York Evening Journal inquiring whether he had come to marry a rich heiress, the reverse of the titled husband-hunting of American heiresses in Britain, Churchill responded, “I’m not here to marry anybody. I am not going to get married….”38
He did announce to the reporters covering his arrival, “I have received an invitation to dine on Monday next with Governor [Theodore] Roosevelt at Albany,”39 an event that proved to be an inauspicious start to developing links for his American network.
A reporter sent from upstate Elmira, New York, to cover Churchill’s arrival reported that the welcoming committee at the dock included Governor Roosevelt [unlikely], governor-elect Benjamin Barker Odell Jr., Mayor Robert Anderson Van Wyck,40 Senator Chauncey Depew, and “other prominent citizens.”41 It is possible that the list of welcomers might have been drawn up by the indefatigable Major Pond, in which case exaggeration is not an impossibility.
On his first night in New York, Churchill dined at the Press Club, where he was introduced by a famous businessman, Colonel A. B. de Frece42 (a well-known businessman and philanthropist) and answered questions from an audience of some one hundred.43 In other cities, as in Britain, Churchill would be introduced by local VIPs, and in Washington he lectured “under the patronage of Lord Pauncefote,” earlier appointed the first British ambassador to the United States.
On December 9, a Sunday, at a press conference in Everett House (later Hotel) in New York, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain, made an appearance and joined the questioners. Twain was born on the same date as Churchill but was fifty-nine years his senior. It was thrust and parry, with Churchill attempting to defuse Twain’s hostility to imperialism by predicting that the “conflicting elements” in the Boer War would eventually become reconciled and become as independent as Canada, adding that “The Boer is a splendid fighter and the coolest man under fire I have ever seen.”44
That evening, a New York cousin of Jennie’s, Kitty Mott née Katherine Jerome Purdy, who had arranged a valet for Churchill on his earlier visit to Cuba in 1895, gave a dinner to introduce Churchill to a host of notables. Among them, according the press, were Mark Twain, Whitelaw Reid,45 and George W. Smalley.46
On December 10, Churchill had dinner with Governor Theodore Roosevelt in Albany, New York, at the governor’s invitation. Roosevelt had recently been elected, but not yet inaugurated, to serve as vice president under President William McKinley (whom he would soon succeed after McKinley’s 1901 assassination). As part of his media publicity planning, Major Pond had invited the governor to attend Churchill’s lecture, scheduled for the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City on December 12, offering him a box for the evening. Roosevelt responded: “I wish I were able to accept that box, but I am already engaged for the evening in question, December 12th…. I am really very sorry as I am a great admirer of Mr. Churchill’s books, and should very much like to have a chance of meeting him socially. Is he now in New York? I should greatly like to have him take lunch or dinner with me if he is in Albany on Monday; or lunch if he is here Tuesday, of next week. Where shall I write him?”47
At that dinner, held in the governor’s mansion: a rare event. Governor Roosevelt took a hearty and enduring dislike for Churchill. Roosevelt’s long-lived ill feelings toward Churchill were possibly awakened when, during the height of his unsuccessful 1912 run for the presidency as a third party candidate, the Saturday Evening Post, an American magazine with a circulation of two million per week,48 compared him rather unfavorably with Churchill:
Both are men of gentle birth, and both are held high in popular esteem, though each is basically of aristocratic tendencies and sympathies… The only American to whom he [Churchill] can be compared is [Theodore] Roosevelt; and that comparison isn’t especially apt, for Churchill writes far better than Roosevelt does, talks far better, and at thirty-eight [sic] has gone farther than Roosevelt had when he reached that age…. he should have a kindly feeling for Americans, for, you see, his mother is an American and that likewise may account for many things—his quickness of mind, for example!49
This sort of publicity, in a mass circulation magazine, coming as it did during the thirty-year hiatus between Churchill’s first and second American lecture tours, contributed to making his continuing task of knitting together his American network a bit easier.