The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (29 page)

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.”
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“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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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C
hurchillian 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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