The Last Lion

New Year’s Day found the Randolph Churchills back in Charles Street. Ladies did not feed their babies then, and one of Fanny’s first tasks had been to hire a wet nurse. The nurse was swiftly followed by Elizabeth Anne Everest. Plump, calm, vehemently Low Church, and proud of her origins in Kent, “the garden of England,” as she called it, “Mrs.” Everest—she had no husband; nannies, like cooks, received the honorific as a courtesy—entered Winston’s life when he was a month old. That was the custom. “I had him from the month” was a nanny’s equivalent of “He is my own child.” Violet Asquith wrote: “In his solitary childhood and unhappy school days Mrs. Everest was his comforter, his strength and stay, his one source of unfailing human understanding. She was the fireside at which he dried his tears and warmed his heart. She was the night light by his bed. She was security.” Except at bedtime, when mother appeared for good-night kisses, nurseries, like kitchens, were rarely visited by upper-class parents then. Like popes granting audiences, they received their children at appointed times, when the small ones, scrubbed and suitably dressed, presented themselves for inspection while their nannies reported on their deportment. Randolph and Jennie appear to have omitted even these token meetings. They had no time for them. Every hour appears to have been devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. Randolph all but abandoned politics; in two years he delivered just two speeches in Parliament. Thirty years afterward Jennie wrote in The Century: “We seemed to live in a whirl of gaieties and excitement. Many were the delightful balls I went to, which, unlike those of the present day, lasted till five o’clock in the morning.” The Churchills were also lavish hosts. In Winston’s words, “They continued their gay life on a somewhat more generous scale than their income warranted. Fortified by an excellent French cook, they entertained with discrimination. The Prince of Wales, who from the beginning had shown them much kindness, dined sometimes with them.”²

In London, His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, was the key to social success. Since the Queen had withdrawn from fashionable gatherings after her husband’s death, His Royal Highness and Alexandra, Princess of Wales, had assumed the social duties of royalty. Great prestige therefore accompanied acceptance into HRH’s entourage. The “Marlborough House Set,” to which the Randolph Churchills belonged, was simply a clique of HRH’s friends and their wives or, in several instances, HRH’s mistresses and their husbands. In their dissipation of leisure they seem to have been both vigorous and inane. They studied the finer points of the Venetian quadrille, the Van Dyke quadrille, and—Jennie’s favorite—the cancan. At fancy balls, prolonged discussions examined the merits of holding one’s partner’s hand high, in the polonaise fashion. In Mayfair the Churchills gave grand dinners, hired expensive orchestras, spent fifteen pounds on masked-ball costumes, journeyed to Hurlingham to watch the pigeon shooting, and attended the Derby and races at Goodwood and Ascot. Later Jennie would remember how dinners, balls, and parties succeeded one another without intermission, and “how we all laughed at M. de Soveral, because he looked like a blue monkey and was always called the blue monkey,” and laughed again when “the Grand Duke poured the chocolate sauce over his head,” and applauded HRH’s spectacular attire: “The doublet and cloak were of light maroon satin embroidered in gold, the large black felt hat… had a white feather, and the dress was completed with loose buff boots, steel spurs, and a long sword. On the left shoulder was a diamond star, and the Prince wore the Order of the Garter hanging from a blue riband round his neck. Fair cavalier curls flowing down his shoulder somewhat distinguished H.R.H. [and] were the finishing touch to a very splendid and perfect costume.” In those giddy years, Jennie later recalled, they were confronted by only one serious misfortune: “it was no less than the sudden illness of the greatest hairdresser of his day.”³

But a genuine crisis loomed in 1876. What HRH gave, HRH could take away. It was in his power to consign any member of his set to social oblivion. It happened to the Churchills. In his biography of his father, Winston wrote: “Engaging in his brother’s quarrels with fierce and reckless partisanship, Lord Randolph incurred the displeasure of a great personage… London became odious to him.”⁴ Or vice versa. The fact is that Randolph had acted badly, as a consequence of his brother George’s having acted badly and the Prince of Wales, impetuously. All of them had broken the thin membrane of contrived deceit which permitted adultery and civility to coexist. Since the details became public in subsequent divorce proceedings, it is possible to reconstruct the chain of events which led to the Churchills’ exile and meant that Winston’s first childhood memories would be of Dublin.

On October 11, 1875, when Lord Heneage, Earl of Aylesford, left England with the Prince of Wales to hunt in India, his wife, Edith, Countess of Aylesford, moved to Packingham, the family seat, with their two daughters. George Churchill was living in a nearby inn. As heir to the dukedom, George bore the title Marquess of Blandford and lived more or less independently. Each evening he entered an unused wing of the hall, using a key which, in the words of the divorce court, he “had obtained… with the knowledge and sanction of Lady Aylesford, with whom he passed many nights.” There was nothing indiscreet here. As a marquess, George was a suitable lover for a lonely countess. Unfortunately, the two of them couldn’t leave it at that. In February they decided to leave the children with Edith’s mother-in-law and elope. Edith imprudently wrote her husband, telling him this, and he hurried home from India. Meanwhile, the Duke of Marlborough sent one of his sons-in-law to persuade his son to abandon the impossible affair. The emissary reported: “I think that any steps you may take to influence Blandford to give up Lady Aylesford would be for the present at any rate entirely thrown away.”⁵

Edith’s brother then challenged George to a duel, and that brought Randolph, as George’s brother, into the drama. Randolph told all interested parties that his brother could be called out by Lord Aylesford and no one else. Then he hired private detectives to watch both George and his challenger, “to prevent,” he said, “a breach of the peace.” Had he stopped there, his social position would have remained intact. But Randolph discovered that George’s predecessors in Edith’s bed included none other than the Prince of Wales. The breakdown in decorum was complete; Edith had saved HRH’s love letters, which she turned over to Randolph. Incredibly, Randolph then called upon Alexandra, Princess of Wales, asking her to use her influence with the prince and see to it that Lord Aylesford canceled plans to divorce his erring wife. Whether he showed her the love letters is unknown, but he did tell friends about them, boasting that “I have the Crown of England in my pocket.” Victoria heard of this; indignant, she wrote her son: “What a dreadful disgraceful business!” But her anger was a moonshadow on that of the prince. Enraged, HRH arrived home and wrote the Earl of Beaconsfield—Disraeli—that “Ld B. and Ld R.C.” were spreading lies about him and that “it is a pity that there is no desert island to which these young gentlemen (?) could be banished.” He then settled for the next best thing. Lord Blandford and Lord Randolph Churchill, he announced, were in Coventry. Not only would he refuse to see them; he would not enter the home of anyone who had entertained them. Socially they had ceased to exist. Jennie was grief-stricken. She wrote her husband: “C’est trop fort—my own darling dear Randolph I shd give anything to have you here tonight I feel so wretchedly.” As for Randolph, Winston wrote, “The fashionable world no longer smiled. Powerful enemies were anxious to humiliate him. His own sensitiveness and pride magnified every coldness into an affront…. A nature originally genial and gay contracted a stern and bitter quality, a harsh contempt for what is called ‘Society,’ and an abiding antagonism to rank and authority.”⁶

Even Randolph realized that he had gone too far, however. He turned the letters over to a royal emissary, Lord Hartington, later Duke of Devonshire. Hartington—who himself had been sleeping with another duke’s duchess for thirty years—burned them in Randolph’s presence. But HRH was unappeased. To untangle the mess, he sent another letter to Disraeli, the wisest man in the kingdom, begging his advice. Dizzy told Duchess Fanny, “My dear Lady, there’s but one way: make your husband take the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland and take Lord Randolph with him. It will put an end to it all.” Randolph, he said, could leave Parliament to serve as his father’s unpaid secretary. At first the duke said no. He was loath to move from Blenheim to Dublin, which he regarded as a primitive outpost of Empire, and an expensive one at that, but he had never been able to deny Disraeli anything. As Winston once said, “He always did whatever Lord Beaconsfield told him to do.” On July 22 he wrote Beaconsfield from his town house in St. James’s Square: “The acceptance of such a high office, is as you say a matter of much moment, and the change, I may almost say the sacrifice of one’s ordinary habits and engagements in England is not an insignificant one, but as you have again done me the honour to repeat the offer, you previously made, I should not feel it my duty on the present occasion to stand aloof, and I shall be therefore happy to place myself at the disposal of the Queen’s service.”⁷

That settled it. On a bitter morning the following winter the duke, Fanny, Randolph, Jennie, and various other relatives—The Times incorrectly identified the youngest of them as “Lord Winston Spencer Churchill”—left London in a private saloon carriage attached to the Irish Mail. At Holyhead they boarded the mail steamer Connaught and crossed to Kingstown, where a delegation greeted them and led them to a special train. In Dublin the duke was greeted by a salute of twenty-one guns, invested with the Collar and Insignia of the Order of Saint Patrick, and installed in the Vice Regal Lodge. The Randolph Churchills moved into the Little Lodge nearby. Back in London the bad Aylesfords left England forever. Lord Aylesford sailed off to America, bought twenty-seven thousand acres at Big Spring, Texas, and flourished as a dude rancher until his death, at thirty-five, of cirrhosis of the liver. As Miss Edith Williams—her divorce had gone through—Lady Aylesford emigrated to Paris, where she bore George’s child. She had wanted to marry him, but he had grown weary of her, and she died an unwed mother.

Volatile Ireland was enjoying one of its periods of quiescence. The problems were there, and Randolph, for whom these were maturing years, began a serious study of the social unrest. Jennie didn’t. During her three years there it is doubtful that she saw a typical Irishman, except when trampling potato fields beneath the hooves of her favorite stallion. The Dublin she beheld was a creation of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. To her surprise and delight, she found it very like Mayfair: balls, theaters, dinner parties every evening, amusing friends to be made, and splendid steeplechasing, point-to-points, and foxhunting. Winston’s picture of her in Ireland was “in a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spotted with mud. She and my father hunted continually on their large horses; and sometimes there were great scares because one or the other did not come back for many hours after they were expected.”⁸

His mother was only in her early twenties, approaching the height of her beauty. Viscount D’Abernon, seeing her for the first time in the Vice Regal Lodge, wrote that although the duke sat at one end of the room on a dais, “eyes were turned not on him or on his consort, but on a dark, lithe figure, standing somewhat apart and appearing to be of another texture to those around her, radiant, translucent, intense. A diamond star in her hair, her favourite ornament—its lustre dimmed by the flashing glory of her eyes. More of the panther than of the woman in her look, but with a cultivated intelligence unknown to the jungle.” Later Margot Asquith met her at a racecourse and thought: “She had a forehead like a panther’s and great wild eyes that looked through you.” Pantherlike women do not project maternal images, and two notes she wrote Randolph when he was absent from Dublin reinforce the impression that she had grown no closer to her son. In the first she reported: “Winston is flourishing tho’ rather X the last 2 days more teeth I think. Everest has been bothering me about some clothes for him saying that it was quite a disgrace how few things he has & how shabby at that.” In the second she wrote: “Winston has just been with me—such a darling he is—‘I can’t have my Mama go—& if she does I will run after the train & jump in’ he said to me. I have told Everest to take him out for a drive tomorrow if it is fine—as it is better the stables shd have a little work.”⁹

The shabby clothes are insignificant, except in revealing what came first for Jennie; she wore a diamond in her hair but didn’t see to it that her son was dressed properly. But childish fears of being abandoned are easily aroused. Staying away on horseback until the entire household is fearful of an accident, and telling a little boy that you are about to leave on a train—information he does not need—are bound to unsettle him and leave scars afterward. It is in this context that his relationship with his nanny assumed such importance. Her role in his childhood cannot be overemphasized. She was the dearest figure in his life until he was twenty; her picture hung in his bedroom until he died. He wrote: “Mrs. Everest it was who looked after me and tended all my wants. It was to her I poured out my many troubles.” After reading Gibbon’s memoirs he wrote: “When I read his reference to his old nurse: ‘If there be any, as I trust there are some, who rejoice that I live, to that dear and excellent woman their gratitude is due,’ I thought of Mrs. Everest; and it shall be her epitaph.” An even more revealing tribute appeared in his second book, the novel Savrola. He wrote of the hero’s nanny:

She had nursed him from his birth up with a devotion and care which knew no break. It is a strange thing, the love of these women. Perhaps it is the only disinterested affection in the world. The mother loves her child; that is maternal nature. The youth loves his sweetheart; that, too, may be explained. The dog loves his master, he feeds him; a man loves his friend, he has stood by him perhaps at doubtful moments. In all these are reasons; but the love of a foster-mother for her charge appears absolutely irrational.¹⁰

Why irrational? Childless women have maternal feelings, too; surely it is understandable that they should lavish affection on other women’s children entrusted to them. Anthony Storr comments upon this passage: “Churchill is showing surprise at being loved, as if he had never felt he was entitled to it.” This is part of the depressive syndrome. Most infants are loved for themselves; they accept that love as they accept food and warmth. But in Winston’s case, as his son later observed, “The neglect and lack of interest in him shown by his parents were remarkable, even judged by the standards of late Victorian and Edwardian days.” That anyone should love him became a source of wonder. The uncritical devotion of “Woom” (derived from an early attempt to say “woman”) was inadequate. He could hardly have failed to sense that the woman was a servant. Affection from others had to be earned; eventually he would win it by doing great things. At the same time—and this would cripple his schooling—the deprivation of parental attachment bred resentment of authority. One might expect that his mother and father, the guilty parties, would be the targets of his hostility. Not so. The deprived child cherishes the little attention his parents do give him; he cannot risk losing it. Moreover, he blames himself for his plight. Needing outlets for his own welling adoration, he enshrines his parents instead, creating images of them as he wishes they were, and the less he sees of them, the easier that transformation becomes. By this devious process Lord Randolph became Winston’s hero, and his mother, as he wrote, “always seemed to me a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power.” His resentment had to be directed elsewhere. Therefore he became, in his own words, “a troublesome boy.” His mother called him “a most difficult child to manage.” Toward the end of their years in Ireland Jennie engaged a governess for him. He couldn’t stand her. He kicked, he screamed, he hid. There is a story that one day a parlormaid was summoned to the Little Lodge room where he was having his lessons. The maid asked the governess why she had rung. Winston said: “I rang. Take Miss Hutchinson away. She is very cross.”¹¹

That was precocious. He was just approaching the age of assertiveness, with consequences which would not be realized until he was ready for boarding school. Most of his Irish memories were passive. There was the mist and the rain and the red-coated British soldiers and the breath-taking emerald greenery. There was the time in Phoenix Park when he ran away into the woods, or what he thought were woods; actually, he had just crept under some shrubbery. Once Woom organized an expedition to a pantomime show. When they arrived at the Theatre Royal it had burned down; the mournful manager said all he had left was the key to the front door. Already insatiably curious, Winston demanded to see the key and was awarded a black look. Another day the duke unveiled a statue of Lord Gough, and his grandson would remember “a great black crowd, scarlet soldiers on horseback, strings pulling away a brown shiny sheet, the old Duke, the formidable grandpapa, talking loudly to the crowd. I even recall a phrase he used: ‘And with a withering volley he shattered the enemy’s line.’ ”^* Woom dressed him in a sailor suit and took him to a photographer. Freckled, redheaded, and pug-nosed, the likeness gives the impression of violent motion suddenly arrested, and in fact he was already hyperactive; from the time he had learned to talk his lips had been moving almost incessantly. Woom, the nanny-cum-chauvinist, kept him quiet with chilly tales about the “wicked Fenians.” They were not wholly fanciful. The ancestors of the Irish Republican Army were active, and they were a murderous gang; two years after the duke’s successor arrived in Dublin, his under secretary and a companion were hacked to death with long surgical knives within sight and hearing of the Vice Regal Lodge. Mrs. Everest had good reason to be wary, and she was. One afternoon when Winston was riding a donkey beside her she saw some soldiers in the distance and mistook them for Irish rebels; she screamed and frightened the donkey, which reared up, unseating its young mount. Winston recalled: “I was thrown off and had concussion of the brain. This was my first introduction to Irish politics.”¹²

In the early 1880s the Churchills’ banishment ended. Randolph had laid low when visiting in London, but he had never really abandoned politics; three years earlier he had slipped across the Irish Sea and spoken to his Woodstock constituency, attacking Disraeli’s lackluster Irish policy. (“The only excuse I can find for Randolph,” his mortified father had written a Tory leader, “is that he must either be mad or have been singularly affected with local champagne or claret.”) Now he ran for Parliament again in the family borough and was elected by 60 votes—something of a triumph, for there were only 1,071 voters in the borough, compared with today’s typical constituency of 50,000. Moreover, he was bucking the tide; Gladstone had overthrown Disraeli and would be prime minister for the next five years. That meant a new viceroy in Dublin. Back in London, Randolph moved his small family into a new house at 29 St. James’s Place, next door to Sir Stafford Northcote, the leader of the Conservative opposition in the House, and opened negotiations for his re-entry into the Prince of Wales’s favor. Victoria approved. She had already told her son that she could not continue to exclude Randolph from court festivities. Sir Stafford approached Disraeli and wrote in his diary: “I asked him whether Randolph Churchill was forgiven yet in high quarters. He said he was all right so far as the Queen was concerned, but that the Prince of Wales had not yet made it up with him.” Four years were to pass before HRH and Randolph sat at the table together, at a dinner given by Sir Henry James, MP (the future Lord James of Hereford), in March 1884. Afterward the prince sent word to Sir Henry that “R. Churchill’s manner was just what it ought to have been.” Yet all bygones were not to be bygones. Vanity Fair reported the “full and formal reconciliation” between the two but added: “It is understood, however, that while Lord Randolph feels much satisfaction at being again on friendly terms with the Heir-Apparent, he does not propose to become intimate with all the Prince’s friends.” Randolph would never forgive those Tories who had turned their backs when HRH had ostracized him. He would remain a member of the Conservative party, but would be a rebel within it. After his death his son would step into the same role. Thus, in a sense, one source of Winston’s rebellious stand against Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s lay in Lady Aylesworth’s bed.¹³

Randolph’s brief but spectacular political career was just beginning when Winston reached the age of full awareness, first at St. James’s Place, then at Beech Lodge in Wimbledon after Randolph and Jennie had toured the United States, and, finally, at 2 Connaught Place, a block from Hyde Park and Marble Arch and the first house in Mayfair to be equipped with electricity. All three homes had large nursery wings; Winston lost himself in fantasy there, playing with his steam engine, his magic lantern, and his toy soldiers. Already he had more than a thousand lead soldiers. Year by year the collection would grow. It is not clear who first gave them to him—Randolph, perhaps, or perhaps Mrs. Everest, who was provided with cash to be used at her discretion—but relatives learned that, when in doubt about presents, a gift of tiny dragoons or lancers would be prized by him. He now had a brother, or half-brother, Jack. Six years separated them, however, and there appears to have been no attempt to find playmates for Winston. Woom took him to pantomimes, Drury Lane, Madame Tussaud’s, and for walks in the park. But mostly he was alone. He loved it. The time flew—“It is the brightest hours,” he wrote of these years, “that flash away the fastest.”¹⁴

In Cradles of Eminence, their study of childhood patterns found in the lives of men who later distinguished themselves, Victor Goertzel and Mildred George Goertzel found that Winston’s family provided “multiple examples of the qualities in parents and other relatives which seem to be related to the production of an eminent man. There was respect for learning, an experimental attitude, failure-proneness, a plentitude of opinionated relatives, and turbulence in the family life as a result of the erratic behavior of his irrepressible uncle and father. During the time that Winston was thought dull, he was, like other boys, evidencing qualities which presaged ability.” But that was hindsight. It was no consolation to Woom. She worried about her charge. When not lost in thought, he was in constant motion, jumping up and down, leaping from chair to chair, rushing about, and falling and hurting himself. He seemed to have no sense of personal safety. His love of martial poetry was obsessive. He had a speech defect, and one miserable cold after another. But his interest in politics was, for a boy his age, decidedly precocious. When Disraeli sickened in March 1881 and died six weeks later, Winston could talk of nothing else. He later recalled: “I followed his illness from day to day because everyone said what a loss he would be to his country.”¹⁵ In one way, his anxiety for Disraeli was a boon to Woom. It gave him an incentive to read. She had given Winston a book, Reading without Tears. Soon he was forming letters. His first letter, undated, was to his mother:

His second, also to her, was written on January 4, 1882, at Blenheim, where he was visiting his grandmother:

He was seven years old and his parents decided it was time he left home. On November 3, 1882, five weeks after the start of the autumn term, he was enrolled as a boarder at St. George’s School near Ascot, a place famous for its women and horses. St. George’s was an expensive school—fifty-two pounds for the first month, payable in advance—which prepared boys for Eton. Winston wept when told he must go. “I had been so happy in my nursery,” he wrote later; “… now it was to be all lessons.” Precisely how he traveled there is unclear. Jennie rode with him to Paddington Station in Randolph’s private hansom, but on the train platform they parted; she gave him three half crowns and sent him on alone. He lost the coins, panicked, found them, and arrived trembling. It was late afternoon, and dark. A master led him to a desk, handed him a thin, brown-green Latin grammar, told him to memorize the declension of mensa, and departed. When the teacher returned, Winston reeled off a perfect recitation. The man seemed satisfied, and Winston, encouraged, asked, “What does it mean, sir?” He was told, “Mensa means a table.” Winston pointed out that according to the book, one of the forms would then be translated as “O table.” He asked why. The master explained that this was the vocative case, that “you would use that in addressing a table.” Astonished, the boy blurted out: “But I never do.” The master snapped: “If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely.”¹⁷

That was the quintessential St. George’s, the school in microcosm. Churchill would remember “how I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I made very little progress at my lessons, and none at all at games. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude and range my soldiers in line of battle on the nursery floor.” However, he did not tell his parents that. At the end of his first month there he wrote his father, “I am very happy at [s]chool. You will be very plesed to hear I spent a very happy birthday,” and the same day he wrote Jennie, “I hope you are quite well. I am very happy at school.” But this is unsurprising. Boarding-school boys who feel wretched and badly treated seldom mention it in letters home. They think the flaw is in them, and they hide it. He doubtless assumed that his father would have snorted had he complained, and he was probably right. Like all Victorian children of his class, he had been taught to keep a stiff upper lip, so he did. Now and then he hinted at his immense yearning to quit St. George’s. In March he wrote: “30 day [sic] more and the Holidays will be Here.” Then: “Only 18 more days.” And then, on the eve of his next vacation: “I am comeinge home In a month.” He dragged out the end of his letters, as though he could not bear to break this frail tie with his family:¹⁸

… W… I… T… H
     love & kisses
           I
     Remain
          your
          loveing
          Son
          W.L.S. Churchill

Mostly he wrote of trivia. “We went to hampton cort palace.” “We went to see the picture gallry.” “Give my love to my ants.” He had caught another cold, but wrote, “My cough is nearly well now.” Still another cold followed six months later; it hung on and on before he could report: “I am all wright and well. I have been allowed to go back into my own room.” It is doubtful that his mother had known he had a room. Certainly she didn’t know what it looked like. She never came. And he mourned her absence. That is the one thread that runs through his pathetic little correspondence: he desperately wanted visitors. “It was so kind of you to let Everest come,” he wrote in the summer of 1883, but Woom, and then Woom and Jack, seem to have been the only ones who came. Ascot was a short hansom ride from Mayfair—trains from Paddington were even quicker—but neither Jennie nor Randolph found the trip convenient. So his pathetic pleas were unanswered. He begged his mother to “come and see me soon,” to “Come & see me soon dear Mamma.” He wrote, “I am wondering when you are coming to see me?” and, “You must send somebody to see me.” The least she could have done was reply. She seldom did. On June 8, 1884, when he was nine, his accumulating resentment flared briefly: “It is very unkind of you not to write to me before this, I have only had one letter from you this term.” The back of one of his notes tells us something about her priorities. On it are scribbled lists of guests for two dinner parties. She had time to entertain “Sir R. Peel,” “Consuelo,” “Duke of Portland,” “Ld Marcus,” and sixteen others, but she couldn’t spare a few minutes to slake her small son’s thirst for a line or two of love. She planned feasts for her friends. Winston asked for bread, and she gave him a stone.¹⁹

Randolph, surprisingly, did send him a gift that year. It was a copy of Treasure Island. Winston devoured it and promised to be worthy of it: “I will try to be a good boy.” Most boys at St. George’s tried to be good, though, and without incentives from home. The penalties for failure were dire. Since the Churchills were not the only influential family to be gulled into sending their son there, we know a good deal about the school. It was an upper-class version of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby. The regimen was fierce: eight hours a day of lessons, followed by football and cricket. There was fagging, and there were floggings almost every day, the chief whipper being the Reverend H. W. Sneyd-Kynnersley, a sadistic headmaster who would lay as many as twenty strokes of birch on a boy’s bare rump. Given Winston’s extremely sensitive skin, this must have been excruciating. Yet he became, and remained, the school’s chief rebel. He excelled in history, but refused to learn Latin verses he did not understand; in his words, “Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.” Pitted against authority for the first time in his life, he defied it, refused to curry favor, and was, as a consequence, beaten until he shrieked. He later wrote: “My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form. They were offended. They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn.”²⁰

His rebelliousness did not arise from the dignified resolution of a mature man standing on principle. Principles were indeed at stake, but he couldn’t have known that. He was less than ten years old. His behavior was intuitive. To others he simply seemed a disobedient, mischievous little boy. Maurice Baring, who entered St. George’s shortly after Winston left it, wrote: “Dreadful legends were told about Winston Churchill, who had been taken away from the school. His naughtiness appeared to have surpassed anything. He had been flogged for taking sugar from the pantry, and so far from being penitent, he had taken the Headmaster’s sacred straw hat from where it hung over the door and kicked it to pieces. His sojourn at this school had been one long feud with authority.” His masters and even his schoolmates, with the conformity of youth, were appalled. Baring said: “The boys did not seem to sympathise with him. Their point of view was conventional and priggish.”²¹

One afternoon Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, a political ally of Randolph’s and a founder of the Tory Primrose League, called at Connaught Place and asked Jack if he was good. Jack said, “Yes, but brother is teaching me to be naughty.” Actually, Jack would never be naughty. Though he was born of the same mother and shared the same family life, his development was the opposite of Winston’s. He resisted nothing, accepted what he was given, turned inward, and grew up to be an inoffensive man from whom little was expected or given. Boys like Jack create no difficulties for their parents. He was the kind of son Jennie wanted, and the contrast with his sibling pained her. As early as December 26, 1882, she wrote Randolph at Monte Carlo—the familial Christmas rites, so beloved by other Victorians, seem never to have been celebrated at Connaught Place—“As to Winston’s improvement I am sorry to say I see none. Perhaps there has not been time enough. He can read very well, but that is all, and the first two days he came home he was terribly slangy and loud. Altogether I am disappointed.” Sneyd-Kynnersley, she said, had assured her that the masters intended “to be more strict with him.” She meant to try her own hand anyhow; “it appears that he is afraid of me.” That was an odd admission from a mother, but perhaps it was true; a fearsome mother was at any rate preferable to maternal indifference. But she failed. Nothing intimidated him, certainly not St. George’s. One riffles through his report cards there with mounting rage and amazement. It seems to have occurred to no one that a fresh approach might improve the behavior of this very difficult child. In his first accounting to Jennie the headmaster noted that Winston “has been very naughty.” Then: “He is still troublesome.” Next: “He is, I hope, beginning to realize that school means work and discipline.” And then: “He is rather greedy at meals”—a peculiar description of a youthful appetite. After that, according to Sneyd-Kynnersley’s comments, it was all downhill. His conduct was “very bad”; he was “a constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape or other”; he could not “be trusted to behave himself anywhere”; he had “no ambition”; he gave “a great deal of trouble.” There is a sense of impending crisis in all this, and it crystallized when Winston, flayed beyond endurance, fled home to Mrs. Everest. Woom undressed him and recoiled when she saw his back and bottom crisscrossed with welts. She summoned Jennie, and the sight of his wounds told her what he, in the mute, tortuous language of a child, had been trying to tell her for two years. She immediately removed him from St. George’s and entered him in a small school run by two maiden sisters in Brunswick Road, Brighton. It is unclear what, if anything, passed between her and the headmaster. Very likely Randolph knew nothing of the incident; his own letters show that he did not even know how old Winston was. But it is satisfying to report that two years later Mr. Sneyd-Kynnersley, aged thirty-eight, dropped dead of a heart attack.²²

Brighton, with its sea air, chalybeate springs, colorful architecture, and general atmosphere of freedom, was a distinct improvement on St. George’s, but Winston continued to play the imp. Any form of discipline still incensed him. The word permissiveness cannot be found in any dictionary of the time; as a concept it did not exist. Even if it had, Kate and Charlotte Thomson would have condemned it. They expected docility from their wards, and the record shows that they did not get it from their new boy; in his first term, when he passed his tenth birthday, his conduct was ranked twenty-sixth in a class of thirty-two. By the next term he was at the bottom, and there he remained. Charlotte Thomson wrote Jennie in her first report that “frequent absence from the schoolroom made competition with other boys very difficult.” His dancing teacher, Vera Moore, later depicted him as “a small, red-haired pupil, the naughtiest boy in the class; I used to think he was the naughtiest small boy in the world.” Even the indulgent Duchess Fanny, in whose Grosvenor Square home he spent holidays from time to time, wrote to Randolph: “Winston is going back to school today. Entre nous I do not feel very sorry for he certainly is a handful.”²³

Yet the Thomson sisters treated him with kindness and understanding, and he began to respond. At the end of his second term they noted “very satisfactory progress,” and, after the third, “very marked progress.” He was first in his classics class and near the top in English, French, and Scripture knowledge. He began to enjoy school: “We are learning Paradise Lost for Elocution, it is very nice.” He was “getting on capitally in Euclid. I and another boy are top of the school in it we have got up to the XXX Proposition.” In French they were rehearsing “Molière’s ‘Médecin Malgré lui.’ I take the part of ‘Martine.’ ” In Greek, he wrote, “I have at last begun the verbs in ‘μι’ of which the first is ‘ιστημι.’ ” He proudly wrote his mother: “I have got two prizes one for English Subjects & one for Scripture.” He even wrote Jack, aged six: “When I come home I must try and teach you the rudiments of Latin.” In later life he recalled: “At this school I was allowed to learn things which interested me: French, History, lots of Poetry by heart, and above all Riding and Swimming. The impression of those years makes a pleasant picture in my mind, in strong contrast to my earlier schoolday memories.”²⁴

Collecting stamps, autographs, and goldfish, he began to share the interests of the other boys. He even tried sports—“We had a game of Cricket this afternoon, I hit a twoer, as the expression goes, my first runs this year”—though that didn’t last long. He was now reading every newspaper he could find, poring over accounts of the Belgian conquest of the Congo, the Haymarket riot in Chicago, the death of Chinese Gordon, the erecting of the Statue of Liberty, and, in Germany, Gottlieb Daimler’s invention of the first practical automobile. (These years also saw the founding of the Fabian Society and the Indian National Congress, both of which were to play major roles in his life, but London editors had dismissed them as insignificant.) In the spring of 1885 he was aroused by the uproar in Paris over whether or not Victor Hugo should receive a Christian burial and wrote his mother: “Will you send me the paper with Victor Hugo’s funeral in it?” King Solomon’s Mines, published during his first year in Brighton, held him mesmerized. He begged Jennie to send him everything Rider Haggard wrote, and was transported when her elder sister Leonie, who knew the author, took the boy out of school to meet him. Afterward he wrote Haggard: “Thank you so much for sending me Allan Quatermain; it was so good of you. I like A.Q. better than King Solomon’s Mines; it is more amusing. I hope you will write a good many more books.”²⁵

The visit with Haggard, though unusual, was not unique; teachers and relatives were taking the restless boy off the school grounds on frequent trips. He saw what he described as “a Play called ‘Pinafore’ ” with Leonie’s daughter Olive, and, with Randolph’s sister Cornelia, heard Samuel Brandram recite Twelfth Night. Then came electrifying news. “Buffalow Bill,” he wrote home, was bringing his show to London; Bill was a friend of Clarita Jerome’s husband, Moreton Frewen, who owned a Montana ranch. Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee was to be celebrated the Monday after that weekend, and Winston was determined to see both of them. He wanted to come home to Connaught Place on Saturday and stay until Wednesday. The Thomsons discouraged him, explaining that there would be no place for him in Westminster Abbey and his mother would be far too busy to look after him. Predictably, Jennie agreed with the sisters; she rejected his first appeal. He wouldn’t give up: “I can think of nothing else but Jubilee. Uncertainty is at all times perplexing write to me by return post please!!! I love you so much dear Mummy and I know you love me too much to disappoint me. Do write to tell me what you intend to do. I must come home, I feel I must…. Please, as you love me, do as I have begged you.” Before she could reply, he wrote again: “Miss Thomson says that she will let me go if you write to ask for me. For my sake write before it is too late. Write to Miss Thomson by return post please!!!” In the end, his mother relented. A seat for him in the abbey was in fact out of the question—though Jennie had a good one—but he did see Buffalo Bill and all the rest. Thus it was that Winston Churchill stood among the cheering throngs on June 21, 1887, as the old Queen rode by, crowned by a coronet-shaped bonnet of lace studded with diamonds, her hands folded, her head bowed, her cheeks glistening with tears. Afterward Jennie and the Prince of Wales took him for a ride on the royal yacht, where he met the future King George V. It would be pleasant to report that his conduct was exceptional. It wasn’t. He was loud, he stunted, he showed off. Back in Brighton he apologized to his mortified mother: “I hope you will soon forget my bad behavior… and not… make it alter… my summer Holidays.”²⁶

He feared a summer tutor. One tutor had spoiled a seaside holiday at Cromer, then as now a watering place on the North Sea coast; Winston had complained that she was “very unkind, so strict and stiff, I can’t enjoy myself at all.” But the reports of improvements in Brighton had lifted that threat. He was free to play, and in his choice of games we see the growth of his combative instincts. Once he talked Woom into taking him and his cousins to the Tower of London, where he delivered, with great relish, a lecture on medieval tortures. Pencil sketches of cannon and soldiers adorned the margins of his letters. His cousin Clare Frewen recalled in her memoirs that when the Churchills rented a summer house in Banstead, Winston erected a log fort with the help of the gardener’s children, dug a moat around it, and, with Jack’s help, built a drawbridge that could be raised and lowered. Then, she said, the children were divided into two rival groups and “the fort was stormed. I was hurriedly removed from the scene of the action as mud and stones began to fly with effect. But the incident impressed me and Winston became a very important person in my estimation.” Shane Leslie, Leonie’s son, remembered that “we thought he was wonderful, because he was always leading us into danger.” There were the fort struggles, fights with the village children, and raids on the nests of predatory birds. In Connaught Place he had converted the entire nursery into a battlefield. According to Clare Frewen, “His playroom contained from one end to the other a plank table on trestles, upon which were thousands of lead soldiers arrayed for battle. He organized wars. The lead battalions were maneuvered into action, peas and pebbles committed great casualties, forts were stormed, cavalry charged, bridges were destroyed…. Altogether it was a most impressive show, and played with an interest that was no ordinary child game.” It impressed Lord Randolph. One day he put his head in the door and studied the intricate formations. He asked his son, then in his early teens, if he would like to enter the army. In Winston’s words: “I thought it would be splendid to command an Army, so I said ‘Yes’ at once: and immediately I was taken at my word. For years I thought my father with his experience and flair had discerned in me the qualities of military genius. But I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar.”²⁷

On such slender evidence was so weighty a verdict reached. Winston was clearly ready for intellectual stimulation, and one might expect that he would have found it in the home of a lord who was also a member of Parliament and a charismatic MP at that. Instead, the boy’s mind was fired by, of all people, Mrs. Everest’s brother-in-law, John Balaam, a senior warden at Parkhurst Prison. British workmen in the nineteenth century, undiverted by mass media, often read deeply and thoughtfully. The family of Woom’s sister Mary lived in the coastal town of Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight, and she took him there on holiday. It was the first time Winston had seen a humble English home. The experience was worthwhile for that alone, but the old warden, after holding the boy spellbound with tales of prison mutinies, produced a worn copy of Macaulay’s History of England. He read passages aloud; Winston listened, rapt, to the cadences of the majestic prose. Later in India he remembered those evenings in the cottage on the sea. He acquired his own Macaulay and, in his words, “voyaged with full sail in a strong wind.”²⁸

Woom never let him down, but her health did. During the Christmas holidays at the end of 1887, while Jennie and Randolph were abroad, she contracted diphtheria, then a fearsome disease and often fatal. Dr. Robson Roose found two bad patches of false membrane in her throat and moved the two boys from Connaught Place to his own home. “It is very hard to bear—we feel so destitute,” Winston wrote. “I feel very dull—worse than school.” Duchess Fanny whisked them off to Blenheim, and Leonie telegraphed the news to their parents. Fanny, very much in charge, wrote to Randolph: “I fear you will have been bothered about this misfortune of Everest having diphtheria but she appears to be recovering & the 2 children are here safe & well.” Blandford (George) offered to take them into his London house. Fanny wrote: “They leave here & go to Grovr Sq tomorrow so you might write (or Jennie might in your name) a line to B for having had them here. It has done them good & I keep Winston in good order as I know you like it. He is a clever Boy & not really naughty but he wants a firm hand. Jack requires no keeping in order. They will stay at 46 till you return.”²⁹

By January 12 Winston could write his mother: “Everest is much better—thanks to Dr Roose. My holidays have chopped about a good deal but… I do not wish to complain. It might have been so much worse if Woomany had died.”³⁰ There seems to have been a tacit acceptance by the relatives of both parents that Randolph and Jennie were not really responsible for their children. As a consequence, Winston’s awareness of his grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins deepened; they move in and out of his early life like characters in a Pirandello play. Had his immediate family been more self-sufficient, he might have been less conscious of his Marlborough heritage on one side and his American roots on the other. Jennie, by now, was indistinguishable from the titled Englishwomen of her social circle. She had no interest in Buffalo Bill. But her sisters were vibrant with the U.S. chauvinism of the time. Jennie, a purebred American, had become indifferent to the fact. Her son was half American, was constantly reminded of it by his maternal aunts, and never forgot it.

Winston’s own illnesses, with one important exception, were normal for children of the time. He caught mumps (“My mumps are getting smaller every day the very thought of going home is enough to draw them away”) and, later, measles, which—to his mother’s intense annoyance—he passed along to her current lover, the dashing Austrian sportsman Count Charles Kinsky. The important exception was double pneumonia. All his life he would be plagued by recurrences of bronchial infections; his consequent indispositions would play a role in World War II. He was first stricken in his twelfth year, on Saturday, March 13, 1886. The danger was clear from the outset; Jennie and Randolph arrived separately in Brighton, and Dr. Roose, who kept a house there, remained by the boy’s side, sending them bulletins after they had departed. These survive. At 10:15 P.M. Sunday he scrawled: “Temp. 104.3 right lung generally involved…. This report may appear grave yet it merely indicates the approach of the crisis which, please God, will result in an improved condition should the left lung remain free. I am in the next room and shall watch the patient during the night—for I am anxious.” Infection of the left lung swiftly followed. At 6:00 A.M. Monday he wrote: “The high temp indicating exhaustion I used stimulants, by the mouth and rectum…. I shall give up my London work and stay by the boy today.” Then, at 1:00 P.M.: “We are still fighting the battle for your boy…. As long as I can fight the temp and keep it under 105 I shall not feel anxious.” At 11:00 P.M.: “Your boy, in my opinion, on his perilous path is holding his own well, right well!” Tuesday: “We have had a very anxious night but have managed to hold our own…. On the other hand we have to realise that we may have another 24 hours of this critical condition, to be combatted with all our vigilant energy.” By Wednesday the worst was over. At 7:00 A.M. Roose scribbled: “I have a very good report to make. Winston has had 6 hours quiet sleep. Delirium has now ceased.” Later in the day he wrote from the Brighton train station: “Forgive my troubling you with these lines to impress upon you the absolute necessity of quiet and sleep for Winston and that Mrs Everest should not be allowed in the sick room today—even the excitement of pleasure at seeing her might do harm! and I am so fearful of relapse knowing that we are not quite out of the wood yet.”³¹

But they were, and the suggestion that Woom might constitute a threat is curious. Duchess Fanny agreed. “I hope Everest will be sensible,” she wrote Jennie, “and not gushing so as to excite him. This certainly is not wise.” His nurse was entrusted with his love, but not his health. In an emergency, it was thought, women of her class could not be depended upon to remain stoical. A display of affection could endanger him; only patricians could be counted on to remain poised. Jennie, certainly no gusher, was admitted to the sickroom (Randolph sent her sandwiches and sherry) while the woman who had saved him from emotional starvation was deliberately excluded. A child of the aristocracy was in jeopardy, and the Churchills’ peers were closing ranks. Because Randolph was at the pinnacle of his career that year, powerful men were concerned for Winston’s survival. Sir Henry James prayed for him; so did Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Lord Salisbury, who had succeeded Disraeli as the Tory leader, wrote of his anxiety from Monte Carlo, and Moreton Frewen told Jennie that the Prince of Wales had “stopped the whole line at the levée” to ask after Winston. In a sense, the boy’s recovery was an affair of England’s ruling families, and the humble people whose lives had touched his did not belong.³²

At Brighton, in his later words, “I got gradually stronger in that bracing air and gentle surroundings.” Meanwhile, his relatives sententiously vowed to cherish him the more now that he had been saved and urged Jennie to do the same. Frewen thought of “poor dear Winny, & I hope it will leave no troublesome after effects, but even if it leaves him delicate for a long time to come you will make the more of him after being given back to you from the very threshold of the unknown.” Duchess Fanny was “so thankful for God’s Goodness for preserving your dear Child,” and Jennie’s own mother, in London but sick herself, wrote her, “I can’t tell you how anxious we have all been about poor little Winston. And how delighted & thankful now that he is better. And what a relief for you my dear child. Yr whole life has been one of good fortune & this the crowning blessing that little Winston has been spared to you. You can’t be too grateful dear Jennie.”³³

Jennie had been scared, and was doubtless relieved, but if gratitude meant changing her life-style, she wouldn’t have it. These were the busiest years of her life, and she was enjoying them immensely. In those days an ambitious woman—and she was very ambitious—could express her drive only by advancing her husband’s career. In the year of Winston’s pneumonia, Anita Leslie writes, “Jennie took it for granted that her husband would reach the post of Prime Minister,” but she was leaving nothing to chance.³⁴ She was active in the Primrose League; she campaigned for Randolph in a smart tandem with the horses beribboned in pink and chocolate, his racing colors; she gave endless dinner parties. No one declined her invitations, for she had become a celebrity in her own right. In the England of the 1880s and 1890s beautiful young genteel ladies diverted the public as film stars do now; their photographs were displayed in shop windows and sold as pinups. Jennie’s was among the most popular. She was also recognized as a gifted amateur pianist, always in demand for charity concerts. In addition there were her social schedules. It was a grand thing to leave each autumn on her annual tour of Scotland’s country houses, grand to receive the Order of the Crown of India from the Queen’s own hands, grand to be courted by Europe’s elegant gallants. There were hazards, to be sure, but they merely added to the excitement. Ironically, the only public embarrassment to arise from Jennie’s catholicity of friendships among the eminent had nothing to do with her role as a romantic adventuress. She cultivated both Oscar Wilde and Sir Edward Carson. Later this proved awkward when Wilde and Carson faced each other in the Old Bailey with the ugly charge of sodomy between them.

In short, Jennie had her priorities to consider, and while the frail child in Brighton was not at the bottom of the list, he scarcely led it. She wrote him, but except when he lay at death’s door and propriety gave her no choice, she avoided the school. Pleas continued to pepper his letters: “Will you come and see me?” “When are you coming to see me?” “It was a great pity you could not come down Sunday,” “I want you to come down on some fine day and see me,” he would give her billions of kisses if she came. She never found time. He had the chief role in a class entertainment, and he wanted her in the audience—“Whatever you do come Monday please. I shall be miserable if you don’t.” He was miserable. Another entertainment was planned—“I shall expect to see you and shall be very disappointed indeed if I do not see you, so do come.” He was very disappointed. They were going to perform The Mikado—“It would give me tremendous pleasure, do come please.” He forwent tremendous pleasure. He ached for the sight of her—“Please do do do do do do come down to see me…. Please do come I have been disappointed so many times.” He was disappointed once more. Learning that a dinner party at Connaught Place conflicted with a school play, he begged her to cancel the dinner—“Now you know I was always your darling and you can’t find it in your heart to give me a denial.” Nevertheless, she found it in her heart to do just that.³⁵

At times the breakdown in communications was total. He made elaborate plans for Christmas in 1887, only to discover at the last minute that both his parents were away on a seven-week tour of Russia. Jennie’s sister Clarita—now called “Clara,” like her mother—invited him to her home but then fell ill, so he spent the holiday with his brother, Woom, Leonie, and his uncle Jack Leslie. Once he wanted to write his mother but didn’t have her address, didn’t even know which country she was visiting. He was too young to travel in London alone, yet he couldn’t even be sure there would be anyone to greet his train when he arrived: “We have 19 days holiday at Easter. I hope you will send some one to meet me at the station.” Astonishingly, Randolph met an appointment in Brighton a short walk from the school but didn’t bother to cross the street and call on his son. Winston found out about it. “My dear Papa,” he wrote, “You never came to see me on Sunday when you were in Brighton.” It happened again: “I cannot think why you did not come to see me, while you were in Brighton, I was very disappointed but I suppose you were too busy to come.”³⁶ There was a note of resignation here. He was disappointed, but he was not surprised. His father was too busy. His father would always be too busy. Indeed, unlike his wife, he rarely wrote Winston. Jennie was a lax mother, but later, when her situation altered, she became a loving one. In Randolph’s case that was impossible. Randolph actually disliked his son.

It is impossible to say exactly when a diagnostician told Lord Randolph Churchill that he was hopelessly afflicted with venereal infection and could not possess his wife without risking her health, too. Before meeting her he had passed through the first two stages of syphilis—the penile chancre and the body rash. After his wedding, according to Frank Harris, he told Louis Jennings that he had followed the physicians’ medical advice for a while, “but I was young and heedless and did not stop drinking in moderation and soon got reckless. Damn it, one can’t grieve forever. Yet I have had few symptoms since.” He added, “The Oxford doctor and the London man said I was quite clear of all weakness and perfectly cured.” Frank Harris asked Jennings if he thought Randolph’s optimism unfounded. Jennings said, “I’m sure of it. He has fits of excessive irritability and depression which I don’t like. In spite of what he told me, I don’t think he took much care. He laughed at the secondary symptoms.”³⁷

Randolph’s assumption that he had emerged from the sinister shadow of the disease was shattered in 1881, when, at the age of thirty-two, he suffered his first paralytic attack. His speech and gait were affected, though at first almost imperceptibly. The following year, however, he was mysteriously absent from London for seven months, and when he returned in October, gaunt and grim, he evaded all questions about where or why he had gone. The fact was that he had entered the third phase of syphilis; the deadly spirochetes had begun their invasion of his blood vessels and internal organs. Less than two months later, on December 12, the London newspapers announced that on the advice of his doctors he was sailing off again, to stay in Algeria and Monte Carlo until February. A remission brought him back, outwardly healthy, apparently his old self.

By now, however, Jennie, too, knew everything. Her source may have been Randolph; it could have been their family physician, Dr. Roose, who had made his own examination of her husband. Henry Pelling of St. John’s College, Cambridge, observes: “The nature of Randolph’s illness, once it had been diagnosed, was such that he could no longer claim his conjugal rights, and it is not surprising that Jennie began to seek the company of other men.”³⁸ She may have begun to seek it earlier in their marriage. Indeed, one of her first admirers, Lieutenant Colonel John Strange Jocelyn, had found her receptive when the Churchills were still in Ireland. Jennie was Jocelyn’s guest on his 8,900-acre Irish estate. She became pregnant in the summer of 1879, and when Winston’s brother was born in Dublin the following February 4, he was christened John Strange Spencer Churchill.

That would not do; it was not done. Back in England, older and more experienced women counseled her in discretion. One disguise for affairs was to effect a lively interest in the arts and so encounter others similarly inclined. So she joined an artistic set called “the Souls.” Reporting one of their parties at the Bachelor’s Club, the London World told its readers: “This highest and most aristocratic cult comprises only the youngest, most beautiful and most exclusive of married women in London.” Lady Warwick thought they were “more pagan than soulful.” Sir William Harcourt said, “All I know about The Souls is that some of them have very beautiful bodies,” and George Curzon wrote an ode to them called “The Belles”—a parody of “The Bells” by Poe—which ended: “How delicious and delirious are the curves / With which their figure swells / Voluptuously and voluminously swells / To what deed the thought impels.” Marriage vows were certainly broken, but the fact was not advertised. After Ireland, Jennie never flaunted her lovers. Neither, however, was she furtive. She had superb legs, and she found a way to display them; Town Topics quoted a footman who had seen her dance the cancan at a ball: “She suddenly touched the mantelpiece with her foot, making a dreadful exposé.” Town Topics also wrote that “Society has invented a new name for Lady R. Her fondness for the exciting sport of husband-hunting and fiancé-fishing has earned her the title ‘Lady Jane Snatcher.’ ” Later she herself published an article slyly observing that some aristocratic wives could “live down scandals, whereas the less-favored go under, emphasizing the old saying, ‘One may steal a horse while another may not look over the wall.’ ”³⁹

She was a cunning thief, and at times piratical, but she learned to observe the rules. If a prospect was happy in marital harness, she did not tempt him to leave it. She was careful to point out that at the time she was meeting Paul Bourget he was “then unmarried.” When another Frenchman married an American girl, she left his bed, though only temporarily; he implored her not to be puritanical, and perhaps because he was charming and a magnificent horseman, she returned. He was a diplomat, with a reputation to guard. That was important. She had an instinct for men who were dangerous. Sir Charles Dilke was attractive, engaging, and apparently on his way to high office. He seemed to have his pick of Souls. When Mrs. J. Comyns-Carr told Lady Lindsay that she was interested in Dilke, she was told: “There’s a waiting list, you know.” But Jennie wasn’t on it. He sank to his knees and beseeched her to become his mistress. She refused, and described the preposterous scene to Lord Rosebery, who put it in his papers. Afterward, when Dilke was trapped in a public scandal woven of testimony about brothels, exotic sex, and some of Jennie’s friends, her foresight was remembered. She always knew just when to stop. It was one of her many rare traits. Shane Leslie recalled: “She didn’t seem to be like other women at all.”⁴⁰

Toward the end of her life, the novelist George Moore said that she had slept with two hundred men. That is absurd. She was far too fastidious for that, and only she would have known the figure anyhow. But though far from promiscuous, she had certainly led an active romantic life. Her lovers are known to include Kinsky, Henri Breteuil, Thomas Trafford, Baron Hirsch, Sir Edgar Vincent (later Viscount D’Abernon), Lord Dunraven, Herbert von Bismarck, Henri le Tonnelie, Norman Forbes Robertson, Hugh Warrender of the Grenadier Guards, a cavalry officer named Kinkaid Smith, the American Bourke Cockran, Bourget, William Waldorf Astor, Harry Cust, a soldier named Taylor, a man called Simon, an Italian named Casati, and Albert Edward of the house of Saxe-Coburg, eldest son of Queen Victoria, Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII.

Jennie was one of those favored ladies who, invited to dinner by His Royal Highness, found that she was the only guest. HRH usually made his royal conquests in a private dining room over a fashionable restaurant; one paneled wall swung down at the touch of a button, exposing a double bed. There was also a settee on one side which was adequate for most lovers, but HRH needed more room; Rudyard Kipling described him as “a corpulent voluptuary.” Jennie was more than paramour to him. He granted her the rare privilege of using Buckingham Palace’s private garden entrance. According to Ralph G. Martin, “she had a significant and lasting influence on him because he respected her judgment. He also knew he could rely on her. If he wanted a small private party arranged, he often asked her to oversee the compiling of the guest list and decide on the menu. Jennie knew his particular friends as well as his favorite foods. She knew what kind of music he liked. She knew the level of his impatience and boredom, the danger point of his anger, and what to do about them. In return, he was lavish in his gifts and in his open affection for her.”⁴¹ On his coronation in Westminster Abbey, she sat in the King’s Box with the other women he loved, including Mrs. George Keppel, his current mistress, all wearing diamond tiaras. Edward saw to it that pleasure was not sin’s only reward. So did his wife; like Jennie’s mother, Princess Alexandra understood and forgave her husband. She was on the best of terms with Mrs. Keppel, and always kind to Jennie.

Randolph had been less forgiving. He had put up with a lot from the prince; first Ireland, and now this. In 1889, when he had nothing left to lose, he ordered HRH out of his Mayfair house. On another occasion, after hearing from Rosebery that Dilke had propositioned Jennie, Randolph attacked him with his fists. This was rather hard on Dilke, who hadn’t even made it into Jennie’s arms, but he seems to have been a chronic loser. So was the man who hit him. And apart from these two episodes, Randolph, at least in his marriage, appears to have accepted his lot. He dined with men who had lain between his wife’s thighs; he played cards with them; he rode to hounds with them and entertained them in his club. There were those who wondered why. Some speculated that he had become homosexual. That might explain his antagonism toward Winston, but there is no evidence of it. All we can say with certainty is that Winston knew about Jennie’s affairs. The question is when. There is a story, probably apocryphal, that he first learned of her waywardness as a small boy because of a flaw in one of her stockings. In the late 1870s fashionable women in London wore red hose. Red was his favorite color. As she left home one noon, according to this account, he noticed a blemish in her left stocking, just above her shoe, and when she returned several hours later he saw the imperfection had moved from her left ankle to her right. But he would have become aware of her lovers anyhow. He could not have avoided it. In one of his schoolboy letters to his brother he wrote that upon arriving in London for a weekend, “I went, as Mamma had told me to Aldford Street, where I found Mamma & Count Kinsky Breakfasting.” Visiting France, he was entertained by three of his mother’s gallants: Trafford, Hirsch, and Breteuil. In Savrola the character based on Jennie is presented as an adulteress whose husband saw her less and less frequently. Not all this should be entered in the debit column: Jennie’s men, including Edward VII, were to help Winston enormously during his struggle to establish himself. But his knowledge of her guilt undoubtedly contributed to his adolescent turmoil. Even in his early thirties he would have difficulty establishing relationships with young women. “Ambitions I still have: I have always had them,” says Savrola’s hero, “but love I am not to know, or to know it only to my vexation and despair.”⁴²

His knowledge of romantic love came later, and it was glorious. Because Jennie lived until his late forties, he resolved his relationship with her. It was otherwise with his father. Here the grave denied him any opportunity for reconciliation; his image of Randolph was arrested in time. The crucial years were 1884 to 1886, roughly from Winston’s tenth to twelfth birthdays, when he was in Brighton and beginning to take a serious interest in current events. Randolph was in the news constantly. Paresis, which progresses very slowly, had only just begun to cripple him. Outwardly he was vigorous, witty, powerful; the most spectacular man of the day. Newspapers called him “Gladstone’s great adversary,” and described workmen smiling at his mustache and doffing their caps as his carriage passed by. Winston clipped these stories and cartoons of his father and pasted them in scrapbooks. He next memorized his speeches verbatim. To his father he wrote: “I have been out riding with a gentleman who thinks that Gladstone is a brute and thinks that ‘the one with the curly moustache ought to be Premier.’ The driver of the Electric Railway said ‘that Lord R. Churchill would be Prime Minister.’… Every body wants your Autograph but I can only say I will try, and I should like you to sign your name in full at the end of your letter. I only want a scribble as I know that you are very busy indeed.”⁴³

Long afterward he recalled that his father seemed to him “to own the key to everything or almost everything worth having.” He could imagine nothing more exalted than to stand in the House of Commons, guiding the course of England and Empire. Taken to Marylebone swimming baths, he asked the attendant whether he was a Liberal or a Conservative. The unfortunate man replied that he didn’t “bother myself about politics.” Winston was outraged. “What?” he cried. “You pay rates and taxes and you don’t bother yourself about politics?” He broke off his friendship with a playmate. The playmate’s father asked his son why. The boy answered, “Winston says you’re one of those damned Radicals and he’s not coming over here again.” Probably the man believed in nothing more rabid than Gladstonian liberalism, and possibly the bath attendant wasn’t even allowed to vote, but a boy couldn’t be expected to know that. He was his father’s staunchest supporter. He yearned to battle for him. He was obsessed with his image. He had placed him on a high pedestal. He worshiped at the altar of a man he did not, in fact, even know.⁴⁴

He tried to know him; tried, in his childish way, to draw Randolph into the family. “We had a Christmas tree and party here this year,” he wrote, “which went off very well. My Stamp Book is gradually getting filled…. Jack had such a beautiful box of soldiers sent him from Lady de Clifford.” Winston might have been a foreign correspondent sending word of developments from abroad, and indeed at times Randolph was a stranger to Connaught Place. Once he arrived home with a full beard—“a horrid beard so raged [ragged],” Jack wrote his brother at Brighton, and Jennie wrote that “his beard is a ‘terror.’ I think I shall have to bribe him to shave it off.” Most of the time Winston could keep track of him in the newspapers. Apparently he did not find it peculiar that Randolph, who had been too occupied to visit him in Brighton, should have journeyed to speak to another school: “I went to see Grandmamma a fortnight ago, & she read me your speech on the Distribution of Prizes at the school of Art, it was just the sort of speech for school boys.” Then, wistfully: “You had great luck in Salmon fishing. I wish I had been with you I should have liked to have seen you catch them.”⁴⁵

To a ten-year-old English boy in the 1880s, India was enthralling, and Winston was transported by news that his father was actually on his way there. “Will you write and tell me all about your voyage, was it rough at all?” he asked. “I wrote to you once when the ship stopped at Gibraltar. How nice for sailing all over the sea.” Then, six weeks later: “I hear you have been out shooting at Calcutta and shot some animals. When are you coming home again. I hope it will not be long. I am at school now and am getting on pretty well. Will you write and tell me about India what it’s like…. Will you go out on a tiger Hunt while you are there? Are the Indians very funny?… Try and get me a few stamps for my stamp album, Papa. Are there many ants in India if so, you will have a nice time, what with ants mosquitos [sic]…. I am longing to see you so much.”⁴⁶

At the end of this letter he again raised the question of autographs, asking, “Every body wants to get your signature will you send me a few to give away?” How anxious the other boys were is moot. We do know that later, at Harrow, subjects which interested schoolmates and those Winston thought should interest them were not always identical. It seems unlikely that many could have shared his passion for politics. Boys aren’t like that now; they weren’t then. But Winston was rapt in the world he had fashioned for himself, surrounded by scrapbooks, pastepots, scissors, and cuttings. His father thought he would have to go for a soldier, that he was too stupid for anything else. Yet politics already held him in its spell. He wrote his mother: “I am very glad Papa got in for South Paddington by so great a majority”—Randolph had polled 77 percent of the vote—“I think that was a victory. I hope the Conservatives will get in, do you think they will?” And three months later, on October 19, 1886, he wrote his father, “I hope you will [be] as successful in your speech at Bradford as you were at Dartford, and regularly ‘cut the ground from under the feet of the Liberals.’ ” That winter he campaigned tirelessly among the other boys, bullying or cajoling them into making a Conservative commitment, and a handful yielded. The following May 24 he jubilantly informed Jennie that “about a dozen boys have joined the Primrose League since yesterday. I am among the number & intend to join the one down here, and also the one which you have in London. Would you send me a nice badge as well as a paper of Diploma, for I want to belong to yours most tremendously.”⁴⁷

It was an act of faith in his father’s destiny, and it came too late. Not for the last time in his life, Winston had boarded a sinking ship. Randolph’s political career had ended five months earlier.

Disraeli, whose memory the Primrose League was meant to perpetuate—it had been his favorite flower—had in his last days pointed Randolph out to a young colleague and said: “He can have anything he asks for, and will soon make them take anything he will give them.” Gladstone had called him the greatest Conservative since Pitt. Lord Hartington had said that Randolph knew the House of Commons better than it knew itself; it always filled to hear him speak. Harris thought that “from his entrance into the House till 1886, it was Randolph’s courage chiefly that commended him to the House of Commons. It may have been mainly aristocratic morgue, but Englishmen liked it none the less on that account.” After a century which has seen countless changes in oratorical style, it is difficult to account for his appeal, but men of all political persuasions testified to it. He wrote his speeches out and learned them by heart; then he spoke at great speed, with daunting vehemence and compelling intensity. In debate his acid tongue set the House roaring. Once the Liberals thought he was napping. They introduced a specious motion, concealing a trap. He said: “Surely in vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird.” In a typical thrust he attacked George Sclater-Booth, a ponderous Liberal minister: “I don’t object to the Head of the Local Government Board dealing with such grave questions as the salaries of inspectors of nuisances. But I have the strongest possible objection to his coming down here with all the appearance of a great law-giver to repair, according to his small ideas and in his little way, breaches in the British Constitution.” Then, almost as though speaking to himself, he added: “Strange, strange how often we find mediocrity dowered with a double-barreled name.”⁴⁸

He was at his sharpest when he took the offensive. At Blackpool, early in 1884, he turned one of Gladstone’s endearing little traits into a sharp jab at the Grand Old Man. The GOM and his son enjoyed felling trees together. Randolph told his audience how a delegation of workingmen arrived at Gladstone’s home and were led out into the grounds, where “all around them” lay “the rotting trunks of once umbrageous trees; all around them, tossed by the winds, were boughs and bark and withered shoots. They came suddenly on the Prime Minister and Master Herbert, in scanty attire and profuse perspiration, engaged in the destruction of a gigantic oak, just giving its last dying groan.” The workmen were “permitted to gaze and worship and adore”; then each was “presented with a few chips as a memorial of that memorable scene.” Randolph swiftly developed his theme, which was that the GOM had given the delegation exactly what he had given the Empire: “Chips to the faithful allies in Afghanistan, chips to the trusting native races of South Africa, chips to the Egyptian fellah, chips to the manufacturer and the artisan, chips to the agricultural laborer, chips to the House of Commons itself. To all who leaned on Mr. Gladstone, who trusted him, and who hoped for something from him—chips, nothing but chips—hard, dry, unnourishing, indigestible chips.”⁴⁹

The self-righteous GOM was particularly vulnerable to satirical oratory, and it was Randolph’s great good fortune that the Liberals should have been in power when he returned from Dublin to make his way in the House as a Tory MP. Gadflies like him flourish in opposition. It was Winston’s boyhood impression, he later wrote, that “Dizzy had been thoroughly beaten by Mr. Gladstone, so we were all flung out into Opposition and the country began to be ruined very rapidly. Everyone said it was ‘going to the dogs.’ ” Afterward, looking back, he wrote that the position of the Conservatives, as a result of that beating, had “become weak and miserable in the extreme…. Outmatched in debate, outnumbered in division, the party was pervaded by a feeling of gloom.” Dispirited, many stopped attending Parliament altogether. But for Randolph, the moment and his own mood were matched. His resentment of the men who had cut him after his row with HRH had infused him with a Jacobin spirit. The membership of the House was divided into Liberals, Conservatives, and Irish Nationalists; Randolph, without relinquishing his Tory label, founded what he called “the Fourth Party.” There were four members: himself, Sir Henry Wolff, Sir John Gorst, and Arthur Balfour. Salisbury picked up the torch of Conservative leadership after Disraeli’s death, but in his grasp it flickered low. The four free lances concentrated their fire on Gladstone and his ministers, but they did not spare the Tories’ shadow government. They dubbed Tory insiders “the Old Gang”; Salisbury’s weaker colleagues were “the Goats.” Nothing was sacred to the four, not even Disraeli’s spirit. Dizzy’s policy had been Imperium abroad and Libertas at home. Randolph challenged both. He attacked Gladstone’s occupation of Egypt and embarrassed both Gladstone and Salisbury by squaring off against Charles Bradlaugh, a professed atheist who, when elected to Parliament by Northampton, refused to take the religious oath of allegiance. There was a fiery scene in the House on February 21, 1882, when Bradlaugh appeared, produced a book, identified it as “a Testament,” and swore himself in. Randolph bounded up from his corner seat below the gangway and called the oath a farce. The book could have been anything, he said; “it might have been Fruits of Philosophy”—an appeal for birth control of which Bradlaugh was coauthor. After a series of complicated parliamentary maneuvers, Randolph persuaded the House to expel the member from Northampton. It was a brilliant coup, but it left a bad taste. Disraeli, wiser men knew, would never have permitted it. Then they remembered that Randolph, unlike his father, had never deferred to Disraeli—had, in fact, scarred him with the same rapier he was brandishing now.⁵⁰

The week after his “chips” speech, Randolph stunned England by announcing that in the next election he would contest John Bright’s Birmingham seat. This was carrying the battle into the very stronghold of liberalism, the home ground of the mighty Joe Chamberlain.^* He had no chance of winning, but his audacity invigorated his party and brought it recruits in workmen’s pubs, where spirit was admired. Winston, of course, was too young to appreciate this strategy. He wrote Jennie from Ascot: “Mrs Kynnersley went to Birmingham this week. And she heard they were betting two to one that Papa would get in for Birmingham.” In fact, he polled 4,216 votes to Bright’s 4,989. It was an impressive moral victory, and the next day an admirer stepped down in South Paddington, giving Randolph his seat. Randolph, by now, was the fighting heart of his party. As he moved from triumph to triumph, the House came to realize that eventually he would challenge Salisbury’s role as Conservative leader. He was still in his thirties, his following in the country was growing, and he had a rallying cry: “Tory democracy.” The party, he argued, needed new blood and wider popular appeal. Democracy was less than a charmed word among entrenched Tory diehards. The mere mention of it made Salisbury shudder, and he rejected Randolph’s proposal to bring more rank-and-file members into the party’s inner councils. The two split in 1884 in a struggle for control of the National Union of Conservative Associations. Winston, aged nine, wrote to Jennie, “Has Papa got in I hope he has. You must let me no if he does.” Papa did get in; he and Salisbury then staged a public reconciliation, each giving a little. Salisbury was still the leader, but the challenger was inching closer. “Trust the people, and the people will trust you!” Randolph told an enthusiastic crowd in Birmingham that same year. It sounded selfless. It wasn’t. Randolph had become a shrewd campaigner. The Liberals were winning elections, he concluded, because the workmen felt closer to them than to the aristocratic Conservatives. “But,” he said, “my feeling is that this earl or that marquis is much more in sympathy with the working man than the greedy nonconformist butcher or baker or candlestick maker. I want you to seize my point because it explains what I have always meant when I speak of myself as a Tory-democrat. The best class and the lowest class in England come together naturally. They like and esteem each other. They are not greasy hypocrites talking of morality and frequenting the Sunday school while sanding the sugar. They are united in England in the bonds of a frank immorality.”⁵¹

If this was devious, it wasn’t a patch on his Irish policy, which had ripened slowly during the early 1880s and was held in abeyance, to be revealed at the right moment. As Randolph’s gibes wore Gladstone down, Home Rule became the key issue in Parliament. In a close election between the two major parties, the Irish Nationalists would hold the balance of power. It says much for England’s ignorance of Ireland that Randolph’s three years in Dublin made him an expert on the country in the eyes of Parliament, even though his knowledge of the people was largely confined to glimpses from the saddle while foxhunting. Thus his exile there, which had been looked upon as punishment, turned out to be a political asset. Gladstone, whose whole career would eventually hinge on this one question, had spent only three weeks in Ireland. Yet he was on good terms with Parnell, the Nationalists’ militant leader, and he regarded that as his trump card when, on June 8, 1885, his government fell over a minor budget bill. Salisbury formed a caretaker government, but both sides knew that was of small consequence. The main event was the imminent general election.

Gladstone had miscalculated. Unable to pry an acceptable Home Rule pledge from him, Parnell issued a “Vote Tory” manifesto. Salisbury, meanwhile, had appointed Randolph to his first office. Denying him a post was impractical; his strength had been evident for a year. He had been told in camera that he would become secretary of state for India—hence his trip there, to get ready—but a problem now arose, and it was revealing. Randolph was sulking. He refused to be sworn in until he had been assured that a rival, Sir Stafford Northcote, would be denied the office of leader of the House in the caretaker government. The Queen was shocked. She wired Salisbury: “With due consideration to Lord R., do not think he should be allowed to dictate entirely his own terms, especially as he has never held office before.”⁵² Salisbury sought a meeting. Randolph refused; he had taken his stand, and that was that. Yielding, the new prime minister sent the rival to the House of Lords as the Earl of Iddesleigh, and Randolph received his seals of office from the Queen. Then, to the astonishment of all London, the man who had denounced imperialism in Egypt launched the Third Burmese War and annexed the country. Aristocratic disdain for consequences was common, but this went beyond that. The first rumors about Randolph’s unreliability and bad judgment spread through Parliament and beyond.

In effect, the election was a dead heat. The voters returned 335 Liberals, 249 Conservatives, and 86 Irish Nationalists. Salisbury and Parnell could lock the GOM in stalemate. But after the results were in, Gladstone’s youngest son revealed that his father did in fact favor Home Rule. The Irish then swung behind him, and he was again prime minister. Randolph now played a deep game. He courted the support of Irishmen on both sides of the Home Rule issue. His fight against Bradlaugh had won him the admiration of Catholics; that was one reason he had fought it. Privately, he assured Parnell that he favored Irish self-government on the local level and would oppose the coercion bill, which permitted the arrest and detention of Irish suspects without trial. Publicly, however, he became the most eloquent of Unionists; that is, opponents of Home Rule. Speaking in Belfast’s Ulster Hall, he told Irish Unionists—Protestants—that he would stick with them to the end. By now he had had a great deal of experience in demagoguery and had got into the way of it. He compared Gladstone to Macbeth before the murder of Duncan and predicted that if politicians “should be so utterly lost to every feeling and dictate of honour and courage as to hand over coldly… the lives and liberties of the Loyalists of Ireland to their hereditary and most bitter foes, make no doubt on this point: Ulster at the proper moment will resort to the supreme arbitrament of force; Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right.”⁵³ This mischievous slogan was to be his chief contribution to history. It outlived him and his son. People are still dying for it in Northern Ireland.

Parliament rejected Gladstone’s Home Rule bill in June 1886—a quarter of his Liberals defected—and the country went to the polls again. This time the result was a Conservative landslide. The Tories held a clear majority of 118 seats over the Liberals, Irish Nationalists, and Unionists combined. Salisbury was now prime minister with a clear mandate, but as Randolph’s grandson wrote, “It had been Lord Randolph’s victory. He had pioneered it, engineered it and executed it. His exceptional services to the Party had to be recognised. He was indispensable to it.” Harris observed, “When the House met again Lord Randolph’s power had grown: he had deposed Gladstone, had won a greater position in the House than Gladstone himself.” Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, offered the post of party leader of the House by Salisbury, insisted on stepping aside for the Tories’ most brilliant campaigner. He wrote: “I felt that Lord Randolph Churchill was superior in eloquence, ability and influence to myself; that the position of Leader in name, but not in fact, would be intolerable; and that it was better for the party and the country that the Leader in fact should also be Leader in name.” Randolph was good in the job. He was always in his seat, always informed, always an able tactician. And he could be charming when he chose. Margot Asquith boldly invited both him and Gladstone to her Grosvenor Square home. Randolph, she recalled afterward, “had made himself famous by attacking and abusing the Grand Old Man with such virulence that everyone thought it impossible that they could ever meet in intimacy…. I was not awed by this but asked them to a luncheon-party; and they both accepted. I need hardly say that when they met they talked with fluency and interest, for it was as impossible for Mr Gladstone to be gauche or rude as it was for anyone to be ill at ease with Lord Randolph Churchill. The news of their lunching with us spread all over London; and the West End buzzed round me with questions: all the political ladies, including the Duchess of Manchester, were torn with curiosity to know whether Randolph was going to join the Liberal Party.”⁵⁴

Everyone who had worked closely with Randolph knew that he had a dark underside. Certainly Salisbury was aware of it. He would have disputed Mrs. Asquith; he was always ill at ease with Churchill. He had found him rude, peevish, temperamental, and, much of the time, unapproachable. The four crosses he bore, he said, were “the Prime Ministership, the Foreign Office, the Queen, and Randolph Churchill—and the burden of them increases in that order.” Randolph had been an exasperating colleague in the India Office the year before. Salisbury’s friends were appalled, therefore, when he appointed him chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful position in the government. Even Randolph’s friends were apprehensive. Lord Rosebery wrote that the new chancellor had displayed “certain defects of brain and character which are inconsistent with the highest statesmanship.” And the Exchequer was the last place where he might succeed. Commenting on the columns of decimals in his budget, he growled, “I could never make out what those damned dots meant.” But Salisbury knew what he was doing. He owed his landslide to Randolph. No one could say he was ungrateful now. At the same time, he was alert to the fact that Randolph was after his job. So he had put him into an impossible position and then sat back, waiting for him to destroy himself.⁵⁵

It took six months. “Very soon,” Harris heard, “there were rumors of disputes in the Cabinet.”⁵⁶ Churchill was restive in harness; being a critic had been more fun. Tiring of the damned dots, he took a subversive interest in the affairs of other ministers. On October 3, without consulting Salisbury, he delivered a sensational speech before fourteen thousand people at Oakfield Park, Dartford, demanding more sovereignty for local governments in England, close ties with Germany and Austria-Hungary, and stiff protests against Russian influence in the Balkans—all at odds with the prime minister’s programs. Next he submitted a startling budget to the cabinet. He proposed to reduce taxes and military spending: a plank right out of Gladstone’s platform. Salisbury calmly rejected it. Churchill then decided to force his hand. He did it in the worst possible way.

His relationship with the Queen had been improving steadily. Victoria admired success. And he had been courting her. She disliked the patronizing Gladstone—“He always addresses me as though I were a public meeting,” she complained—and was pleased by Randolph’s more graceful approach. He wrote to her constantly, explaining political developments without a flicker of condescension. On September 22 she had expressed her gratitude to him: “Now that the session is over, the Queen wishes to write and thank Lord Randolph Churchill for his regular and full and interesting reports of the debates in the House of Commons, which must have been most trying. Lord Randolph has shown much skill and judgement in his leadership during the exceptional session of Parliament.” She asked him to dine with her at Windsor Castle on December 20. He was immensely pleased; it was his first royal invitation since the row over her son’s love letters to Lady Aylesford. The dinner went exceptionally well. On his return he glowed. Victoria, he told Harris, had called him “a true statesman.” He in return felt that she was “a great woman, one of the wisest and best of women.” What he did not tell Harris was that he had used the Queen’s letter paper to write a letter of resignation from the cabinet. He had shown it to a fellow guest at the castle, Lord George Hamilton, the first lord of the Admiralty. Hamilton had remonstrated: “You cannot send a letter like that to Salisbury. Won’t you consult somebody?” Randolph had replied, “No, I won’t consult anybody.” Nor had he. By Tuesday, December 21, the letter was in the prime minister’s hands.⁵⁷

On Wednesday evening, while Churchill was dining at the Carlton Club with Sir Henry Wolff, a messenger handed him Salisbury’s reply. His resignation had been accepted. As Winston later wrote, Salisbury was doubtless “glad to have the whole power in his hands, instead of dividing it with a restless rival, entrenched in the leadership of the House of Commons and the control of the public purse.” Randolph hadn’t expected this—he had come to think of himself as indispensable—but he wasn’t dejected. Indeed, he seemed strangely euphoric. Taking a cab to Connaught Place, he and Sir Henry picked up Jennie, and the three of them proceeded to the Strand Theatre. The play was Sheridan’s School for Scandal, a theme of special interest to Jennie. She knew nothing of his letter. As they settled in the stalls, she mentioned the guest list for an official reception she was planning. He said enigmatically, “Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that if I were you. It probably will never take place.” Before she could ask him what he meant, the curtain rose, and when it fell on the first act, he excused himself, saying that he was returning to the club.⁵⁸

Actually, he went to The Times and gave the editor copies of his correspondence with the prime minister, including a final, savage note from him to Salisbury. The editor read this last and said, “You can’t send that.” Lord Randolph said, “It has already gone.” He then said he expected, in exchange for the scoop, editorial support from The Times. Nothing doing, the editor replied; indeed, the paper would attack him. That jarred Randolph, but not much; he was under the illusion that the party would rise up, depose Salisbury, and make him Salisbury’s successor. He told a friend, “There is only one place, that is Prime Minister. I like to be boss. I like to hold the reins.” In the morning he welcomed Harris to Connaught Place with the merry cry: “What do you think of it? More than two hundred and fifty Tory members come to attest their allegiance to me. I’ve won! The Old Gang will have to give in.” But when Harris returned a few days later, Randolph said gloomily, “The rats desert the sinking ship.”⁵⁹

In fact, he had come closer to bringing Salisbury down than most commentators realized. It took the prime minister twelve days to find another Conservative willing to serve as chancellor. But with that, the crisis was over. Randolph was finished. In a moment of arrogance and folly he had gambled everything and lost. He was thirty-seven years old. He would never hold office again.^* Jennie was bitter: “It was gall and wormwood,” she said, “to hear Randolph abused in every quarter,” often by men who owed “their political existence to him.” Randolph himself wrote vainly, “What a fool Lord S. was to let me go so easily.” For a time he affected gaiety. His appearances on the back benches became infrequent. He was seen more often at racecourses, where he entered horses from his own stable and bet heavily. He won often. “People smiled,” wrote Harris, “as at the aberrations of a boy.”⁶⁰

Did you go to Harrow or Eton?” Winston wrote Randolph the following October. “I should like to know.” It is extraordinary that he did not know already. Since 1722, Churchill boys—six generations of them—had been Etonians. But Dr. Roose urged a break in the tradition. Eton, hard by Windsor Castle, often cloaked and soaked in the fogs rolling off the Thames, was highly unsuitable for a boy with a weak chest. Randolph’s brother had sent his son Charles (“Sunny”) to Winchester. The cousins had been playmates; Sunny liked the school; it seemed the logical choice for Winston. On May 30, 1885, when he was ten, Winston wrote that he was “rather backward with Greek, but I suppose I must know it to get into Winchester so I will try and work it up,” and as late as the summer of 1887 he was still bearing down on Greek because it was “my weak point & I cannot get into Winchester without it.” But then Randolph and his brother quarreled. Their father had died. George was duke. Like his predecessors, he was improvident; to pay his debts he sold the family library, paintings, and jewels. Randolph denounced George with his customary venom and the two stopped speaking. Dr. Roose then recommended Harrow—“Harrow-on-the-Hill”—as best for Winston’s health, and the boy was piloted in that direction. On October 8 Winston wrote his father: “I am very glad to hear that I am going to Harrow & not Winchester. I think I shall pass the Entrance Examination, which is not so hard as Winchester.”⁶¹

It was characteristic of him in his teens that he always approached tests of his learning with breezy confidence and, in the breach, always performed wretchedly. In this instance Brighton may have been partly responsible for his failure. He had just won two more prizes there, in English and Scripture, but the level of instruction was perhaps not all it might have been: “A master here is going to give a lecture on Chemistry, is it not wonderful to think that water is made up of two gases namely hydrogdgen and nitrodgen, I like it, only it seems funny that two gases should make water.” But to scapegoat the Thomson sisters would be unfair. The pattern continued until the end of his school days. He was not, as many have assumed, a victim of dyslexia. Nor could he have been as stupid as he seemed. Confronted with the testing ritual, he seemed stricken by the kind of paralysis that can afflict men in moments of unbearable stress, when the mind seems fathoms down, like some poor land creature entangled in the weeds of the sea. Later he would write poignantly of his entrance into “the inhospitable regions of examinations, through which, for the next seven years, I was destined to journey. These examinations were a great trial to me. The subjects which were dearest to the examiners were almost invariably those I fancied least…. I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.”⁶²

The explanation, of course, was hostility, and it angered his parents, who never dreamed that they themselves, by their rejection of him, might have been responsible for it. They assumed that he was lazy. But he really wanted to get into Harrow. He boned up weeks in advance; on February 28, 1888, he wrote Jennie, “I am working hard for Harrow,” and a week later he wrote his father, “I am working hard for my examination which is a very Elementary one, so there is all the more reason to be careful & not to miss in the easy things.” On Friday, March 16, a day of shocking weather—the roads, in his words, “were in a horrible condition mud & water & in some places the road was covered with water which reached up to the carriage step and extended for over 200 yrd”—Charlotte Thomson accompanied him to Harrow, where they were received by the headmaster, J. E. C. Welldon. Winston thought Welldon “very nice,” but then he was led into a classroom and the ordeal was upon him. There were no questions about the subjects he felt he had mastered: grammar, history, French, geography. Instead, he was asked to translate passages in Greek and Latin. His mind went blank. He couldn’t even remember the Greek alphabet. Then, as he recalled afterward, he found himself “unable to answer a single question in the Latin paper. I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question, ‘I.’ After much reflection I put a bracket round it, thus, ‘(I).’ But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true. Incidentally there arrived from nowhere in particular a blot and several smudges. I gazed for two whole hours at this sad spectacle; and then merciful ushers collected up my piece of foolscap and carried it up to the Headmaster’s table.”⁶³

In the corridor he was near hysteria. He told Miss Thomson that he had never been asked to render Latin into English before. She knew he had been translating Vergil for a year and Caesar longer, but, wisely, did not contradict him. To their mutual astonishment, Harrow accepted him. She wrote Randolph, “I hear from Mr Welldon today that Winston passed the examination yesterday.” She didn’t try to camouflage the truth: “My worst fears were realised with regard to the effect the nervous excitement would produce on his work: and he had only scraped through…. He had a severe attack of sickness after we left Harrow and we only reached Victoria in time for the 7.5 train. If Mr Welldon would allow him to try again on the 18th April, I believe that Winston would do himself more justice; but I think the permission would be difficult to obtain.” It was, in fact, denied. Winston didn’t think it mattered. He wrote: “I have passed, but it was far harder than I expected…. However I am through, which is the great thing.”⁶⁴

It wasn’t that simple. Had he been another boy, he would have been automatically rejected. His sole qualification was that he was the son of a former cabinet minister. Thus, even before he was enrolled, the masters at Harrow regarded him as a special problem. On April 17, after a holiday at Blenheim with Duchess Fanny, he arrived at the school with his baggage and wrote his mother: “I will write tomorrow evening to say what form I’m in. It is going to be read out in the speech room tomorrow.” The news was crushing. He was assigned to the lowest form. Only two boys in all Harrow were below him, and when both withdrew he was left as the school dunce. On visitors’ days, the roll (“Bill”) was called outside the Old School, and boys filed past in the order of their scholastic record. Other parents, curious about the son of the famous Lord Randolph, would await Winston’s appearance and then whisper to one another: “Why, he’s the last of all!”⁶⁵

Today Harrow is part of Greater London, but in the 1880s it stood in open country. Peering toward the city from Headmaster’s House you saw nothing but green fields, and the churchyard provided an unbroken view of rolling English landscape as far as Windsor, which could be seen on a clear day. Old Boys muttered indignantly about the Metropolitan Railway, which had begun to inch this way, and the new bicycle craze, which, in the phrase of the day, was “annihilating distance.” Proud of their school, conscious of its role in English history, which to them meant the history of the world, they wanted nothing to change there. Strangers were shown the flat churchyard tombstone where Byron had brooded beneath the elms and the Fourth Form Room, dating from 1609, whose walls were inscribed with the names of Harrow boys who had made their mark. The Bill was followed closely for pupils of promise; already two of Winston’s contemporaries, John Galsworthy and Stanley Baldwin, had been marked for future greatness. Harrovian traditions, encrusted by generations of observance, were considered sacred. Some seem odd. The food was inedible. Boys needed generous allowances to survive; such delicacies as eggs and sardines were available only in the private “tuck-shops” in High and West streets. If you wanted to read anything but classical literature, you had to buy it in J. F. Moore’s bookshop. And masters were regarded as the natural enemies of boys, though Welldon, then in his third year as head of the school, was personally popular. In appearance he resembled the twentieth-century British actor Jack Hawkins. One of Winston’s classmates later wrote that the headmaster’s “great massive form, as he swung into Fourth Form Room or Speech Room to take prayers or introduce a lecturer or ascended the pulpit to deliver one of his impressive sermons, produced a feeling of confidence.”⁶⁶ Most important, in tracing Harrovian influences on Winston, were the school’s patriotic songs:

So today—and oh! if ever
Duty’s voice is ringing clear
Bidding men to brave endeavour—
Be our answer, “We are here.”

God give us bases to guard or beleaguer,
    Games to play out whether earnest or fun;
Fights for the fearless and goals for the eager,
    Twenty and thirty and forty years on.

In 1940 Churchill revisited Harrow and heard these stanzas again from another generation. Afterward he said: “Listening to those boys singing all those well-remembered songs I could see myself fifty years before, singing with them those tales of great men and wondering with intensity how I could ever do something glorious for my country.” Here his memory was perhaps selective—songfests were not typical of his Harrow experience—but that is true of most Old Boy memories. Moreover, when one of their number becomes famous, many former schoolmates tend to edit their recollections, or even to distort them. It happens to old retainers, too. In the aftermath of Dunkirk, when Churchillian rhetoric seemed Britain’s only shield against Nazi conquest, a reporter interviewed Wright Cooper, whose confectioner’s store had been Harrow’s most popular tuck-shop of the 1880s and 1890s. Cooper said:

Churchill was an extraordinarily good boy. He was honest and generous in a day when robust appetites were not always accompanied by well-lined pockets. My family lived over the shop, and when Churchill was downstairs we all knew it. Boys crowded round his table…. He was witty and critical and kept the other boys in roars of laughter. He was exceedingly popular and even the seniors sought his company. He was well behaved and had the ear of everyone. When his father or his mother came to see him, he used to book a table in the tuck shop, and that was a great occasion for him. He was extremely happy at Harrow and full of high spirits. I knew him well in the tuck-shop days and it is one of the proudest memories of my life that I should have known the Prime Minister when he was preparing for his great career.⁶⁷

So much for the infallibility of eyewitnesses. It would be difficult to find a statement more riddled with falsehood. He wasn’t a good boy; he was a disciplinary problem. He wasn’t generous; he couldn’t afford to be—“I am afraid I shall want more money,” he wrote on his third day at the school, and he never had enough to cover his debts. Other boys disliked him; Sir Gerald Wollaston, a classmate, later recalled that those who “had not met him personally soon heard about him, and what we heard created a somewhat unfavourable opinion.” Most seniors sought his company only when they wanted him to black their boots or make their beds; he had to fag for three years, performing menial tasks until he was nearly seventeen. Each of his parents visited him but once, and were never there together. And he was wretched most of the time. He himself said later that he was, “on the whole, considerably discouraged” during his Harrow years, and in another reminiscence he wrote that he had been “just a pack-horse that had to crop what herbage he could find by the roadside in the halts of long marches, a bit here and there.”⁶⁸

“High spirits,” however, rings true. His letters attest to his misery, but he concealed it from his masters and the other boys. They saw him as an energetic, abrasive, insolent miscreant who, in Sir Gerald’s words, “broke almost every rule made by masters or boys, was quite incorrigible, and had an unlimited vocabulary of ‘backchat’ which he produced with dauntless courage on every occasion of remonstrance.” The most frequent target of his back talk was Harrow’s ultimate authority figure, the headmaster. Once Welldon told him sternly, “Churchill, I have grave reason to be displeased with you.” Winston instantly replied, “And I, sir, have grave reason to be displeased with you.” Another time the headmaster, hearing reports that the boy was using bad language, called him on the carpet. He said: “Now, my boy, when was the last time you used bad language.” Winston had developed a stammer—which should have triggered suspicions that his self-confidence was frailer than it seemed—and he replied: “W-ell, sir, as I en-entered this r-room, I tr-tr-tripped over the do-do-or m-mat, and I am afr-fr-aid I s-s-said D-d-damn.” Pets were strictly forbidden, but he kept two dogs in a kennel on West Street. Parts of the town were out-of-bounds for Harrovians. He made it a point to trespass there. Once he tried to blow up an out-of-bounds building, Roxreth House on Bessborough Road, which was said to be haunted. Using gunpowder, a stone ginger-beer bottle, and a homemade fuse, Winston built a bomb, lit it, and lowered it into the gloomy cellar. When nothing happened, he peered down. At that instant it exploded. His face scorched and his eyebrows singed, he was rescued by a neighbor; she bathed him and sent him back to school. As he left he cheerily told her, “I expect this will get me the bag.” He wasn’t expelled, but he was birched. It wasn’t the first time for him. Harrow wasn’t Ascot, and Welldon was no sadist, but all public schools practiced corporal punishment then. Guilty Harrovians were birched before breakfast in the Fourth Form Room. In most cases it didn’t come to that. Usually it was enough for the headmaster to warn a boy that unless he mended his ways, “It might become my painful duty to swish you.” Winston, however, ignored these threats and was a frequent swishee. He didn’t seem to care. Perhaps the Reverend Sneyd-Kynnersley had hardened him to beatings.⁶⁹

Once he had a bad accident when playing and had to be confined to bed. Lord Salisbury heard about it from the father of another Harrow boy and asked how it had happened. “It was during a game of ‘Follow the Leader,’ ” he was told. Salisbury muttered, “He doesn’t take after his father.” But that is precisely what he was trying to do. During his first day at the school he tried to engage a master in political debate. The master may have been embarrassed; by then Randolph had tumbled into public disgrace. But Randolph was still his son’s idol. During his infrequent visits home, Winston begged his mother to introduce him to men prominent in Parliament. This, at least, was something Jennie could enjoy doing for her son. Invitations went out, and among the guests Winston met were three future prime ministers: Rosebery, Balfour, and Asquith. He later wrote: “It seemed a very great world where these men lived; a world in which high rules reigned and every trifle in public conduct counted; a duelling ground where although business might be ruthless, and the weapons loaded with ball, there was ceremonious personal courtesy and mutual respect.” During the convalescence after his fall, Sir Edward Carson, one of Jennie’s beaux, took Winston to dinner and then to the Strangers’ Gallery overlooking the House of Commons. There the boy peered down and listened, in his later words, to “the great parties ranged on each side fighting the Home Rule controversy.” Gladstone, he thought, resembled “a great white eagle, at once fierce and splendid.” He also witnessed the Grand Old Man’s tribute to Joe Chamberlain after the maiden speech of Joe’s son Austen. “It was,” the Grand Old Man said, “a speech which must have been dear and refreshing to a father’s heart.” The boy saw how moved Joe was: “He was hit as if a bullet had struck him.” Winston was touched, too. He thought how proud his own father would be if he were elected to Parliament and spoke well. Back at Harrow, he stood before a mirror, trying to imitate Randolph’s style and delivery. Except for his stammer, a speech impediment which was just becoming evident, and a certain guttural quality which was developing in his reedy adolescent voice, it went well.⁷⁰

It went too well. He was modeling his tone and phrases after those of an embittered man who denounced “a government which has boycotted and slandered me” and used the language to inflict painful wounds on the men who, he thought, had betrayed him. In the mouth of an adolescent who was already thought odd by his peers, Randolph’s studied invective and biting sarcasm were bound to alienate other boys. During his entire time at Harrow he made but one friend, an older boy, John—later Sir John—Milbanke. Even those who admired his nerve were put off by his truculence; one of them would recall in his memoirs how “this small red-haired snub-nosed jolly-faced youngster” darted up “during a house debate, against all rules, before he had been a year in the house, to refute one of his seniors.” He was also becoming cheeky at home. In the kitchen he taunted Rosa Ovenden, the Churchills’ cook, until she took a broom to him, shouting, “What the devil are you messing about here for? Hop it, copper-nob.” Clara Jerome came to see her grandson and left describing him as “a naughty, sandy-haired little bulldog.”⁷¹

In his first letter to Jennie from Harrow, he had told her: “I want to learn Gymnastics and carpentering.” Later he also became interested in fencing, but most of the time he was alone, sawing and hammering with the intensity of purpose he would later show in laying bricks; collecting mulberry leaves for a colony of silkworms he kept; poring over his stamp album; or going on long walks with his dogs, sometimes accompanied by a town detective he had befriended. He hated cricket, hated football, hated field days. He liked boxing in the gym and swimming in Ducker, the school swimming pool, and might have developed warm relationships with other boys there, but he would only box with a master, and his manner elsewhere discouraged intimacy. After Churchill had become prime minister, J. E. B. Seely, by then Lord Mottistone, recalled setting eyes on him for the first time at Ducker. Winston was trying unsuccessfully to push a floating log toward the bank. A Sixth Former said, “You see that little red-headed fellow having a row with the log? That’s young Churchill.” His companion called, “Hi, Churchill, I bet you two buns to one you don’t get it out.” Winston, said Seely, “bent his head down and appeared to be thinking deeply,” as he later did “in the House of Commons.” Then he turned his back on Seely, thereby snubbing a popular boy who could have helped him. On another occasion at Ducker, he sneaked up behind a slight figure and pushed him into the water. As the indignant boy climbed out, another swimmer said, “Now you’re for it. That’s Leo Amery, a Sixth Former.” Realizing that he had gone too far this time, Winston apologized ineptly: “I thought you were a Fourth Former because you are so small.” Sensing his blunder, he bit his tongue and added what, for him, was the supreme compliment: “My father is small, too, and he is a great man.”⁷²

As editor of the school paper, the Harrovian, Amery got even. Using the pseudonym “Junius Junior,” Winston sent, as a letter to the editor, an attack on the school’s gym policy. Amery thought part of it too abusive to print. He cut it, adding the note: “We have omitted a portion of our correspondent’s letter, which seemed to us to exceed the limits of fair criticism.” Winston was in tears; his best paragraphs, he protested, had been deleted. Actually, he should have been grateful for the blue-penciling. Even expurgated, the letter aroused Welldon; he resented its implied criticism of his authority. Amery quite properly refused to identify “Junius Junior.” The headmaster knew his boys, however; Winston was summoned and threatened with another swishing. By now he was regarded as the school subversive, a hoarder of grievances and defier of conventions. But some of his grievances were justified. Unreasonably, the school insisted upon listing him alphabetically under S—Spencer-Churchill instead of Churchill. Before his arrival, he had been promised a room in Welldon’s house; he had to wait a year for it. And in at least one instance his defiance was admirable. Public-school boys then were ashamed of their nannies. They would no sooner have invited one to Harrow than an upper-class American boy today would bring his teddy bear to his boarding school. Winston not only asked Woom to come; he paraded his old nurse, immensely fat and all smiles, down High Street, and then unashamedly kissed her in full view of his schoolmates. One of them was Seely, who later became a cabinet colleague of Winston’s and won the DSO in France. Seely called that kiss “one of the bravest acts I have ever seen.”⁷³

Churchillian stubbornness, which would become the bane of Britain’s enemies, was the despair of his teachers. He refused to learn unless it suited him. Welldon put him in what today would be called a remedial reading class, where slow boys were taught English. He stared out the window. Math, Latin, Greek, and French were beneath his contempt. Questions “about these Cosines or Tangents in their squared or even cubed condition,” as he later called them, were in his opinion unworthy of answers. He repeated Horace’s Odes four times and remained ignorant of it. Looking back on those days, the man Churchill would write: “If the reader has ever learned any Latin prose he will know that at quite an early stage one comes across the Ablative Absolute…. I was often uncertain whether the Ablative Absolute should end in ‘e’ or ‘i’ or ‘is’ or ‘ibus,’ to the correct selection of which great importance was attached. Dr. Welldon seemed to be physically pained by a mistake being made in any of these letters…. It was more than annoyance; it was a pang.” His French accent was atrocious. It would always be atrocious. During World War II he remarked that one of the greatest ordeals of the French Resistance was hearing him address them in their own tongue over the BBC.^*⁷⁴

He had scarcely settled in at Harrow when he was put “on reports.” That meant that he had to acquire weekly accounts of his progress in each subject and discuss them with the headmaster. He begged his mother to come and “jaw Welldon about keeping me on reports for such a long time.” For once Jennie came, but the headmaster was immune to her charm; Winston’s status remained unchanged. The following week he wrote her: “It is a most shameful thing that he should keep me on like this…. I am awfully cross because now I am not able to come home for an absit [overnight leave] on Thursday which I very much wanted to do. I hope you don’t imagine I am happy here. It’s all very well for monitors & Cricket Captains but it is quite a different thing for fourth form boys. Of course what I should like best would be to leave this hell of a [italicized phrase underlined, then struck out] place but I cannot expect that at present.”⁷⁵

One member of the faculty who looked forward to seeing the last of Winston was H. O. D. Davidson, who, as his housemaster, was responsible for discipline and therefore his natural enemy. On July 12, when Winston had been enrolled less than three months, Davidson sent his mother an extraordinary complaint. He was a seasoned teacher, and had been a champion shot-putter at Oxford, but this thirteen-year-old boy was clearly beyond his competence. “After a good deal of hesitation and discussion with his form-master,” he wrote Jennie, “I have decided to allow Winston to have his exeat [“day out”]; but I must own that he has not deserved it. I do not think, nor does Mr [Robert] Somervell, that he is in any way wilfully troublesome; but his forgetfulness, carelessness, unpunctuality, and irregularity in every way, have really been so serious, that I write to ask you, when he is at home to speak very gravely to him on the subject.” New boys, he conceded, needed “a week or two” to adjust to Harrow. But “Winston, I am sorry to say, has, if anything got worse as the term passed. Constantly late for school, losing his books, and papers and various other things into which I need not enter—he is so regular in his irregularity that I really don’t know what to do; and sometimes think he cannot help it. But if he is unable to conquer this slovenliness… he will never make a success of a public school…. As far as ability goes he ought to be at the top of his form, whereas he is at the bottom. Yet I do not think he is idle; only his energy is fitful, and when he gets to his work it is generally too late for him to do it well.” Davidson thought it “very serious that he should have acquired such phenomenal slovenliness.” He felt “sure that unless a very determined effort is made it will grow upon him.” Winston, he concluded, “is a remarkable boy in many ways, and it would be a thousand pities if such good abilities were made useless by habitual negligence. I ought not to close without telling you that I am very much pleased with some history work he has done for me.”⁷⁶

Clearly there was something odd here. Winston, Davidson had conceded, was the ablest boy in his form. He was, in fact, remarkable. His grasp of history was outstanding. Yet he was considered a hopeless pupil. It occurred to no one that the fault might lie, not in the boy, but in the school. Samuel Butler defined genius as “a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds,” and it is ironic that geniuses are likeliest to be misunderstood in classrooms. Studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota have found that teachers smile on children with high IQs and frown upon those with creative minds. Intelligent but uncreative students accept conformity, never rebel, and complete their assignments with dispatch and to perfection. The creative child, on the other hand, is manipulative, imaginative, and intuitive. He is likely to harass the teacher. He is regarded as wild, naughty, silly, undependable, lacking in seriousness or even promise. His behavior is distracting; he doesn’t seem to be trying; he gives unique answers to banal questions, touching off laughter among the other children. E. Paul Torrance of Minnesota found that 70 percent of pupils rated high in creativity were rejected by teachers picking a special class for the intellectually gifted. The Goertzels concluded that a Stanford study of genius, under which teachers selected bright children, would have excluded Churchill, Edison, Picasso, and Mark Twain.

ONE

HEADWATERS

1874–1895