CHAPTER 1

Becoming a Soldier

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on 30 November 1874, in a room just off the Great Hall of Blenheim Palace, his grandfather’s home. The Palace was hung with tapestries of the military victories of their great common ancestor, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), but they probably did not make more than a subliminal impression on the infant. His first recorded military experience, and his oldest memory, was of a parade of riflemen in Dublin where his father Lord Randolph was secretary to the Viceroy. He even claims to have remembered and understood the phrase ‘and with a withering volley he shattered the enemy’s line’ – a considerable feat for a five-year-old.¹ He wrote later, ‘From very early youth I had brooded about soldiers and war …’.² He was back among the Marlborough tapestries at Blenheim in 1882 at the age of seven when his mother sent him a present of soldiers and a castle,³ and they must have seemed appropriate in a huge and magnificent house built as a reward for military victory. By 1882 Winston had ‘such wonderful toys; a real steam engine, a magic lantern, and a collection of soldiers already nearly a thousand strong’.⁴ In 1885 his brother Jack was sent a box of soldiers representing the Nile expedition which led to the death of General Gordon at Khartoum that year, and the two were building their miniature armies. Most model soldiers were made in Germany at that time, particularly by Georg Heyde of Dresden who cast ‘semi-solid’ and ‘solid’ figures in lead in a great variety of periods and nationalities – it was just before William Britain of London entered the field in 1893 with much lighter and cheaper ‘hollow cast’ soldiers, bringing in a golden age for the collector.⁵ But so far military affairs had played only a small part in Winston’s life and he was far more concerned with his difficulties at school, where he failed dismally to understand the key subject of Latin.

Around the time of Winston’s entrance to Harrow School in 1888, his father made a ‘formal visit of inspection’ to his model soldiers. He now had nearly 1,500, all to the same scale and organised with precocious military understanding into an infantry division and a cavalry brigade supported by 18 field guns plus fortress pieces. It was lacking in ‘what every army is always short of – transport’ until a family friend provided funds to make up the deficiency. Winston knew how to rig the battles against his brother Jack, who was only allowed ‘coloured’ troops without artillery. Lord Randolph spent 20 minutes studying the ‘impressive scene’ – a comparatively long time for him to be with his children – and then asked Winston if he would like to go into the army. The boy naively thought that it would be ‘splendid to command an army’ and that his father has discerned some military genius in him, so he gave an enthusiastic ‘yes’ – but Lord Randolph had merely decided that he was not clever enough to go to the bar.⁶ Nevertheless, as Churchill wrote later, ‘the toy soldiers turned the current of my life. Henceforward all my education was directed to passing into Sandhurst and afterwards to the technical details of the profession of arms. Anything else I had to pick up for myself.’⁷

That meant training with Harrow School’s rifle corps in his spare time, and eventually joining the army class there. In June 1888 he wrote to his father: ‘I am getting on very successfully in the corps especially in the shooting. We use the full sized Martini-Henry rifle and cartridges, the same as the Army. The rifles kick a good deal …’.⁸ Late in October, ‘The Rifle Corps had a grand sham fight yesterday which Mamma saw. Harrow versus Haileybury and Cambridge. Harrow won – we defended the town successfully for two hours.’⁹ There was an even grander affair in March 1889 when the corps went to Aldershot to join 1,300 other public schoolboys and 11,000 regulars. The mock battle ‘was great fun. The noise was tremendous. There were four batteries of guns on the field and a Maxim, and several Nordenfelts. We were defeated because we were inferior in numbers and not from any want of courage.’¹⁰

But these were merely pleasant interludes in the daily grind of study. In September 1889 J. E. C. Welldon, the headmaster, told Lord Randolph that Winston’s mathematics were not good enough for the engineers and artillery in the Royal Military College at Woolwich, so he would be trained to pass into the other college at Sandhurst with a view to joining the cavalry or infantry.¹¹ At the end of the month Winston reported: ‘I have joined the “Army class”. It is rather a bore as it spoils your half holiday: however we do French and geometrical drawing which are the two things most necessary for the army’ – or at least for passing the entrance examinations.¹² He did well in English composition, which boded well for his career as a writer and orator. For the dreaded subject of Latin, he formed an alliance with an older boy to do each other’s homework until he was almost caught out in an oral examination.¹³

As to the army class,

It consisted of boys of the middle and higher forms of the school and of very different ages, all of whom were being prepared either for the Sandhurst or the Woolwich examination. We were withdrawn from the ordinary movement of the school from form to form. In consequence I got no promotion, or very little, and remained quite low down upon the School List, though working alongside boys nearly all in the Fifth Form. Officially I never got out of the Lower School, so I never had the privilege of having a fag of my own.¹⁴

For the entrance examination to Sandhurst, he chose French and chemistry alongside the compulsory subjects of mathematics, English and Latin. He was strong in English and chemistry but needed at least one other subject to gain entry, and mathematics seemed the most likely. At his first attempt he had gained only 500 marks out of 2,500 for the subject. Special coaching by one of the Harrow masters brought him up to nearly 2,000 at the second try, but nevertheless he failed overall. Like many other potential officers he was then sent to a ‘crammer’ to be prepared specifically for the third attempt. It was run by Captain James in the Cromwell Road in London. ‘It was said that no one who was not a congenital idiot could avoid passing thence into the Army. … They knew with almost Papal Infallibility the sort of questions which that sort of person would be bound on the average to ask on any of the selected subjects.’ It was a ‘renowned system of intensive poultry-farming’.¹⁵ However his natural bravery turned to foolhardiness when he failed to leap across a chine or ravine near Bournemouth, and he spent several months recovering from his injuries. Eventually he qualified for a cavalry cadetship at Sandhurst, though his marks were not high enough for the infantry, much to the disgust of his father.

Gentleman-Cadet Churchill arrived in the mock-Georgian splendour of the Royal Military College Sandhurst at the beginning of September 1893, to spend the first three days ‘being measured for the uniform and finding one’s way about – the latter no easy task in so huge a building’. He found a discipline which was far stricter than at Harrow: ‘No excuse is ever taken – not even the plea of “didn’t know” after the first few hours: and of course no such thing as unpunctuality or untidiness is tolerated’, and his first conduct report stated ‘Good, but unpunctual.’¹⁶ In general he liked the life but had to get away at weekends – in April 1894 he wrote that he could not endure two Sundays running in the place.¹⁷ He had the greatest pleasure in riding, claiming that ‘no-one ever came to grief – except honourable grief – through riding horses. No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle.’¹⁸ With the help of private lessons he became one of the best riders in the college, in December 1894 he took part in a gruelling college competition in which he jumped with and without stirrups and with his hands behind his back. He came second with 199 marks out of 200.¹⁹

On to the more academic side, he ordered several books, including the works of Prince Kraft zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, lauding the Germany army and its performance in the war of 1866 against Austria and in 1870–71 against France. Kraft still assumed troops would fight in line, and only made a brief mention of the ‘mitrailleuse’, the primitive machine-gun used by the French. Though he was a gunner himself, Kraft asserted that ‘Cavalry, like artillery, can only expect to obtain the best results, if it remains always convinced that it is only an auxiliary to the infantry. The infantry is the army, and makes use of cavalry and artillery. The cavalry must work for the infantry, and can learn only by close union with the infantry what services the latter will require from it …’.²⁰ Its main service was reconnaissance ahead of the infantry, for the days of the great cavalry charge were over. But Kraft was only thinking about European armies, not the less sophisticated forces in the overseas empires. Another source was Colonel Edward Hamley’s Operations of War, first published in 1866 and again in 1878 and 1900. As well as the Napoleonic Wars it drew heavily on the more recent experiences of the American Civil War when rifles became standard for the first time. It began by claiming that the ‘very numerous’ readers of military history saw it as a romance, whereas he applied an encyclopaedic knowledge of battles past to study war scientifically. As well as citing the work nearly half a century later,²¹ Churchill perhaps learned something about how to present the subject on paper, and Hamley’s use of maps, ‘containing all that is wanted and no more’, was almost as well-contrived and extensive as Churchill’s own in his later writings.

According to the syllabus approved by Major-General Edward Clive in 1888, the course at Sandhurst consisted of seven subjects. Gymnastics was to be done ‘As laid down in the regulations’ while Drill was not described at all. Churchill wrote later: ‘From nine to ten there is drill, and the broad square in front of the College resounds with the cautions of the manual firing and bayonet exercises, and those more violent forms of exertion which come under the heading of “Physical Drill”.’ He remained very weak in both these subjects, but was happier when they were ‘varied by a combined attack, with long lines of skirmishers, supports and reserves, upon the fir-woods beyond the cricket pavilion, terminating in a wild bayonet charge and frantic cheers’.²² Fortification was a major subject and was one of Churchill’s best, surprising for one who always looked to the offensive. The standard textbook was written by Colonel G. Phillips and first published in 1877. It was by no means confined to the formal and permanent stoneworks such as those that had been built around the Royal Dockyards in the 1860s, and it was far more prescient than Kraft about the role of machine-guns, even the relatively primitive models of the time. ‘The Gatling … is capable of delivering a continuous stream of bullets at the rate of 400 per minute. Its fire is equal to that of about 22 rifles, and nearly equal to that of two 9-pdr guns up to 1,200 yards. The Gatling gun as a weapon for defensive positions is of great value.’²³ It was a warning of things to come.

‘Military topography’ began with map-reading but went on to drawing and sketching, which was essential in the days before photography became common. It may have contributed to Churchill’s later skill as an artist, but for the moment he did not enjoy it: ‘We have been doing a lot of sketching – maps etc. out of doors and it is very hot and uncomfortable work.’²⁴ It was not his best subject, in the final examination he had 471 marks out of 600. ‘Elements of Tactics’ was probably closer to his heart. Lectures were still based on those delivered by Francis Clery in 1872–75, and his textbook Minor Tactics was recommended for the course. Unlike Kraft, Clery used many examples from the Napoleonic Wars as well as from Germany’s more recent conflicts, though he showed little interest in the American Civil War and touched only briefly on campaigns on the North-West Frontier of India. He was ambivalent about the role of cavalry. On the one hand, ‘The power of cavalry lies in the impetus derived from motion. Accordingly, its action should under all circumstances be offensive. It should therefore never await an attack, should if possible forestall one, but in all cases should advance to meet it.’ This must have seemed very attractive to Churchill, but Clery also wrote, ‘Modern Warfare has reduced the role of cavalry on a battle field to very insignificant proportions. It has ceased to be used in great masses, or rather the attempts to use it in this manner have had as yet scarcely satisfactory results.’²⁵ Churchill did well in tactics, gaining 263 marks out of 300 in his final examinations. ‘Military law’ consisted largely of court martial procedure, while ‘Military administration’ dealt mainly with enlistment and payment of the men, with a conclusion on the logistics of supporting an army in the field. Churchill did quite well in these subjects, which perhaps befits a future government minister. In January 1895 he passed out of Sandhurst as 20th out of 130 in his class.

He was now qualified for an infantry regiment. His father had railed constantly against his extravagance and wanted to put him into the 60th Rifles, one of the most prestigious regiments apart from the Guards and under the colonelcy of the Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the army and a cousin of the Queen. In such a unit Lord Randolph would not have to bear the great expense of horses and uniforms – an infantry subaltern could be equipped for about £200, a cavalry officer might need £600–£1,000 for two chargers and elaborate uniforms.²⁶ A pattern book of 1894 describes the Hussar tunic: ‘On each side of the breast six loops of gold chain gimp, forming three eyes at the top, passing under a netted cap at the waist, and ending with an Austrian knot reaching the bottom of the skirt; with a tracing of gold braid all round the gimp.’ In addition an officer needed blue trousers, pantaloons for mounted duties and for evening levees, ‘undress’ or less formal frock and trousers, a blue and a serge patrol jacket, a stable jacket, a mess waistcoat, a cloak and a cape.²⁷

With his love of riding it is not surprising that Winston was determined to join the cavalry, and he cultivated the friendship of Lieutenant-Colonel John Brabazon of the 4th Hussars stationed at Aldershot nearby. He visited them at the end of April 1894:

In those days the mess of a regiment presented an impressive spectacle to a youthful eye. Twenty or thirty officers all magnificently attired in blue and gold, assembled round a table upon which shone the plate and trophies gathered by the regiment in two hundred years of sport and campaigning. It was like a state banquet. In an all-pervading air of glitter, affluence, ceremony, and veiled discipline, an excellent and lengthy dinner was served to the strains of the regimental string band.²⁸

In May 1894 he wrote to his mother: ‘How I wish I was going into the 4th instead of those old Rifles.’²⁹ He had already produced arguments in favour of the cavalry, which might have made his father question his belief that he would never make a good lawyer – promotion was quicker in the cavalry than the infantry, especially the 60th Rifles which was slowest of all; a commission would be obtained much sooner in the cavalry; the Hussars were going to India soon and if he joined quickly he would perhaps have six or seven others junior to him when the regiment was augmented before going overseas; cavalry regiments were generally taken good care of in India, whereas the infantry ‘have to take what they can get’; and horses could be kept cheaper in the cavalry as the government would provide stabling and forage. He added some ‘sentimental advantages’ which perhaps appealed more to his mother than his stern father. These included the uniform, the interest of a life among horses, the ‘advantages of riding over walking and of joining a regiment where he knew some of the officers’.³⁰ Lord Randolph Churchill died in January 1895. It is not clear if he approved of Winston’s transfer to the cavalry before he died, or Winston relied on the acceptance of his more pliable mother. In any case, she wrote to the Duke of Cambridge to arrange his change of regiment.

The army consisted of four main elements, infantry, cavalry, artillery and engineers. Churchill was not eligible to serve in the last two because he had trained at Sandhurst rather than Woolwich. The infantry was dominated by the Cardwell System, set up in the 1870s. Each regiment had a local base and would recruit its men largely from that area, inspiring great loyalty among the troops and pride in the local population. Churchill always approved of this, writing in 1897 that the soldier’s bravery came out of loyalty to ‘something smaller and more intimate’ than the nation, to ‘the regiment, whatever it is called – “The Gordons”, “The Buffs”, “The Queen’s”.’³¹ A regiment had two regular battalions, one serving overseas in the empire and the other at the depot for training and home defence, so they were not expected to serve together. In addition there was a part-time militia battalion and later several battalions of territorials, and these could be augmented in a major war, when up to 60 battalions might be raised. The system was less strong in the cavalry, where a regiment had only one regular battalion and its local associations were wider and vaguer; but the identity was just as strong. The colonel of the regiment was an honorary post, usually given to members of the royal family, local aristocrats or distinguished officers who had served in the regiment – Churchill would hold several such colonelcies in his later life. The battalion was led by a lieutenant-colonel, the commanding officer who set much of its tone.

Churchill’s whole career depended on the development of the rifled gun for use on land, at sea and to a certain extent in the air. The infantryman’s standard weapon now had an accurate range of up to 2,000 yards instead of 100 yards for a smooth-bore musket. Moreover with repeating rifles the volume of fire was greatly increased even before the machine-gun was taken into account. After using the Martini Henry with a .45 inch round which had strained Winston’s shoulder in 1888, the British army reduced the calibre to .303 inches with the Lee-Metford, introduced just as Churchill entered the army class at Harrow. A shortened and improved version, the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield or SMLE, entered service in 1902 as Churchill began his political career, and in various marks it would remain the standard infantry weapon for more than half a century – when the Churchill government decided to replace it with the Belgian FN in 1954, he had to defend the rejection of a British weapon in an acrimonious debate.³² Like nearly all rifles of the age it was ‘repeating’ rather than ‘automatic’ like a machine-gun. This meant that the bolt had to be opened and closed with every round, but the Lee-Enfield had a ten-round magazine, twice the size of its German rival. the Mauser. As to machine-guns, the navy had first used the Gatling and Nordenfelt in 1880 as a means to fight off torpedo boats, but the great breakthrough came when Hiram Maxim’s gun reached the army in 1891 – it used the waste gases from the explosions to reload, eliminating the need to turn a handle. Despite the predictions in ‘Phillips on Fortification’, the full value of the machine-gun was not appreciated until 1914. After adopting the British name of Vickers, it became the standard heavy machine-gun for the army through two world wars and the main forward-firing gun of the air services.

As to artillery, rifled breech-loading guns came in from the 1880s, and in 1904, after failures during the Boer War, the British Army adopted the 18-pounder quick-firing field gun which could fire up to 20 explosive rounds per minute over more than four miles. Land forces could use much larger guns for fortress, siege and coastal artillery, but there were problems with moving and supplying them before motor vehicles became common. This was not a problem at sea where improved shells vied with new types of steel armour plate for several decades late in the century. Ships could already carry 12-inch guns firing 710 lb shells by 1900. But meanwhile Churchill’s own arm, the cavalry, saw no improvements apart from better rifles, and it would soon find itself squeezed out to the fringes of the battle. From being the heroes of the massed battlefield charge of old, they were turning into a reconnaissance force or, worse still, mounted infantry, which most of the officers feared as it would devalue their long training and greatly reduce their status.

Churchill joined the 4th Hussars at Hounslow on 18 February 1895, and by April he was fitting all too well into the enclosed world of the officers’ mess. He was implicated in the characteristic bullying of the day – in this case it was serious enough to attract attention in press and parliament. Already a young officer named Hodge had been dumped in a horse trough and forced out of the regiment. His successor, Allan Bruce, had been a colleague and rival of Churchill at Sandhurst. He was invited to a dinner at the Nimrod Club in London by a group of subalterns. Churchill, acting as their spokesman, ‘informed Mr Bruce … that he was not wanted in the regiment’. He was told that his allowance of £500 per year was not enough to support him, which was disingenuous as Churchill’s was only £300 – but he had aristocratic connections. Bruce refused at first but was eventually forced out. His father campaigned on his behalf, but went too far in accusing Churchill of ‘acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type’ and had to pay £400 damages. There was another scandal when Churchill took part in a horse race, the 4th Hussars Challenge Cup, under the name of Mr Spencer. It was eventually found that one of the horses was a ‘ringer’; the race was declared null and void by the National Hunt Committee, and all the horses which took part were perpetually disqualified. No action was taken against the participants, but the anti-military elements in the press made full use of the scandal, and Churchill’s role was dubious to say the least.³³

Reading Kraft had perhaps warned Churchill about the rigorous training needed in modern cavalry.

Formerly it was sufficient to have a strong arm, a good sword, and the courage of a good rider on a good horse in order to be an excellent cavalry soldier. These are now only elementary matters of course; the improvement in firearms has so much increased the difficulties with which the cavalry have to struggle, with reference to their training and leading, that they daily require more energy and spirit, if these are to be overcome and the duties of the cavalry of the future are to be discharged.³⁴

Churchill was never lacking in energy and spirit, but nevertheless the regimental training programme was formidable. He wrote:

75 per cent of the cavalry soldier’s time was taken up with drill in preparation for shock tactics. … It is quite true that he had a carbine, but that was only intended for bye-days. In every drill season, and at every inspection, regular, machine-like drill was what was required. … And there is no doubt that they did it very excellently. Anyone who has led the directing troop of, let us say, the third squadron from the squadron of direction, in a long brigade advance, knows what an art troop-leading is, and what ceaseless practice and unremitting effort is required to obtain that accuracy of distance and alignment which is the proof of well-drilled, well-disciplined men. How beautiful it is too!³⁵

Regimental training tended to assume that the new officer knew little or nothing:

… the principle was that the newly-joined officer was given a recruit’s training for the first six months. He rode and drilled afoot with the troopers and received exactly the same instruction and training. … At the head of the file in the riding-school, or on the right of the squad on the Square, he had to try to set an example to the men. This was not a task always possible to discharge with conspicuous success. … Many a time did I pick myself up shaken and sore from the riding-school tan and don again my little gold braided pork-pie cap … with what appearance of dignity I could command, while twenty recruits grinned furtively but delightedly to see their officer suffering the same misfortunes which it was their lot so frequently to undergo.³⁶

Despite this apparent equality on the training ground, the social gap between officers and men was immense. The pretext for the dismissal of the unfortunate Lieutenant Hodge was that he had visited the sergeants’ mess to meet a veteran of the Crimean War. Churchill hardly mentions the rank and file in his autobiography – only that in the early days in India he often had ‘a long day occupied mainly in scolding the troopers for forgetting to wear their pith helmets and thus risking their lives’ and that there was a long-standing feud between the men of the 4th and 19th Hussars which did not extend to the officers.³⁷ As to the ‘rankers’ themselves, Sergeant S. Hallaway recalled his arrival: ‘… as Captain Kincaid and Mr Churchill walked over the squadron parade ground towards my stable I thought how odd he looked, his hair and gold lace forage cap the same colour’. He did not find the young officer easy to deal with.

After a field day Mr Churchill would arrive at stables with rolls of foolscap and lots of lead pencils of all colours, and tackle me on the movements we had done at the exercise. We were nearly always short of stable men, and there were lots of spare horses to be attended to, so it was quite a hindrance to me. … I was a busy man, and I had no time for tactics.³⁸

But Churchill had plenty of time for tactics and other aspects of military science. At Sandhurst he had attended a course in the subject which was ‘very interesting’, and now he delivered an excellent lecture on musketry.³⁹