The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (28 page)

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.
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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.”
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D
id 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Most important, in tracing Harrovian influences on Winston, were the school’s patriotic songs:

And:

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: