A Synopsis of
THE LAST LION: WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL;
Visions of Glory: 1874–1932
THE GRANDSON of a duke, Winston Churchill was born in splendrous Blenheim Palace during the autumn of 1874, when the British Empire was the world’s mightiest power. Almost immediately the infant was entrusted to his plump nanny, “Woom,” who became his only source of childhood happiness. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a brilliant if erratic member of Parliament—he was, briefly, chancellor of the Exchequer—actually loathed Winston. The boy’s breathtakingly beautiful American mother, Jennie, devoted most of her time to sexual intrigue, slipping between the sheets with handsome, powerful men in Britain, in the United States, and on the Continent. Her husband was in no position to object. He was an incurable syphilitic.
Winston rebelled against school authority, first becoming a disciplinary problem and then, at Harrow, the lowest-ranked scholar in the lower form. His dismal academic record ruled out Oxford or Cambridge, so he went to Sandhurst, England’s West Point. On February 20, 1895, less than a month after his father’s death from paresis, young Churchill was commissioned a second lieutenant and gazetted to the Fourth Hussars, preparing to embark for India. In Bangalore Churchill succeeded where his schoolmasters failed. During the long, sweltering siestas, he educated himself, reading Plato, Aristotle, Gibbon, Macaulay, Schopenhauer, and poring over thousands of pages of parliamentary debates. Developing a flair for the language, he found he could earn money writing newspaper and magazine articles and books. At the same time he felt strong stirrings of ambition. He would, he decided, seek a seat in Parliament. But first he must become famous. Ruthlessly manipulating his mother’s lovers (who included the Prince of Wales), he managed to appear wherever the fighting was fiercest. By 1899 he was in South Africa. Taken prisoner in the Boer War by the Boers, he managed a sensational escape from a POW stockade, making his way across three hundred miles of enemy territory to freedom. His breakout made him a national figure. Returning home, he was elected to Parliament while Victoria still reigned.
In the House of Commons his rise was meteoric. At thirty-three he was a cabinet minister. Appointed president of the Board of Trade, he joined with David Lloyd George, the new chancellor of the Exchequer, in the move to abolish sweated labor despite die-hard peers in the House of Lords. In 1908, working in tandem, they conceived and then guided through the Commons an unprecedented program of liberal legislation: unemployment compensation, health insurance, and pensions for the aged, all of them to be financed by taxes on the rich and the landed gentry. Winston denounced the aristocracy in savage speeches, and titled relatives stopped speaking to him. But he had a new, exciting supporter: Clementine Hozier, who became Mrs. Winston Churchill in 1908. Long afterward the groom said that they had “lived happily ever afterwards.” In fact, they remained deeply in love until his death nearly sixty years later.
When the Central Powers, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, plunged all Europe into the Great War of 1914–1918, Churchill had anticipated it. Since 1911 he had been first lord of the Admiralty. The fleet was ready. But on the western front the great armies were locked in a bloody, hopeless stalemate. It would be years before either side could hope for victory in the west. Churchill saw a way to break the deadlock. He proposed that the Allied navies open a new front in the eastern Mediterranean, exploiting the weakness of the Central Powers’ unstable ally, Turkey. If the Dardanelles strait were forced by battleships, Constantinople would fall within hours. The French and British could then join hands with their Russian ally and sweep up the Danube into Hungary, Austria, Bavaria, and Württemberg, ripping open the Second Reich’s undefended southern flank.
Today military historians agree that the Dardanelles strategy could have ended the war in 1916 with a German defeat. But a timid British admiral, who had been sweeping all before him, turned tail at the first sign of resistance—even as the Turks, believing themselves beaten, abandoned their forts on the strait and began the evacuation of their capital. Then equally incompetent British generals botched the landings on Gallipoli Peninsula, which flanked the Dardanelles. The British public demanded a scapegoat, and Churchill, as the stratagem’s most flamboyant advocate, was dismissed from the Admiralty. He joined the army, crossed to Flanders, and, as a lieutenant colonel, commanded a battalion in the trenches.
After the Versailles peace conference, in which he played no part, he became secretary for war and air, and established the Royal Air Force. Then, as colonial secretary, he was responsible for Britain’s postwar diplomacy in the Middle East. He planned the Jewish state, created the nations of Iraq and Jordan, and picked their rulers. It was typical of Churchill, whatever the question, that he would open with a ferocious stance. Negotiations would lead to compromise and solution. Thus he responded to postwar IRA terrorism by creating a force of Black and Tans—former British soldiers who became terrorists themselves. Yet in the end it was he who befriended Michael Collins, the IRA guerrilla leader, and who piloted the Irish Free State treaty through Parliament.
In 1922 Lloyd George’s coalition government fell and was succeeded by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives. As a Liberal, and then as a Liberal Free Trader, Churchill ran for Parliament in three elections and was defeated each time. Changing parties, he won as a Tory in 1924 and was appointed chancellor of the Exchequer—traditionally, a step away from the prime ministry—by Baldwin. His appointment was in fact unwise. Rejecting the counsel of John Maynard Keynes and accepting instead the advice of the Bank of England, he returned Britain to the gold standard. Markets abroad couldn’t afford British exports. A coal miners’ strike led to a crippling general strike. Winston founded a strike-breaking newspaper; then, after the strike had failed, he took up the coal miners’ cause and fought the mine owners, including a close Churchill relative, for higher pay and safer pits.
After Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour party won the election of 1929, Winston held the Exchequer post in the Tory shadow cabinet, which would return to power when Labour’s slim majority disappeared. But before that could happen, he fell again. The issue was a grant of dominion status for India, putting her on a level with Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. He, like Disraeli, regarded the British Raj as the brightest jewel in England’s imperial crown. He told Parliament that India was “a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.” Facing a stone wall of hostile Tories, Churchill resigned from the shadow government on January 27, 1931. Less than seven months later a new government was formed, and in November what might have been Churchill’s place at the Exchequer was filled by Neville Chamberlain. Thrice fallen from grace—the Dardanelles, the lost elections, and now India—Churchill had become a political pariah, out of joint with the times.
In the early 1920s, a small legacy and £20,000 in royalties from sales of his six-volume history of the Great War had permitted him to buy Chartwell Manor, a country home near the small Kent town of Westerham, where he did most of his writing. John Kenneth Galbraith has pointed out that administrations suspicious of intellectuals unwittingly make substantial contributions to scholarship and writing. “It comes about,” he wrote, “from not employing the scholars or scribes.” During Churchill’s long spell as a backbencher he wrote and published a million words.
His chief concern was that Britain might be vanquished by a tacit conspiracy between Prussian aggression and English pacifism. Typically in the House of Commons, he would contemplate his colleagues, then lower his head like a bull confronting a matador and slowly shake it. After a pitifully weak MP revolt against government policy, Aneurin Bevan encountered him in the smoking room and asked: “What have you been up to? We haven’t seen much of you in the fight lately.” “Fight?” growled Winston, sweeping the room with a challenging glance. “I can’t see any fight. All I can see in this Parliament is a lot of people leaning against each other.”