The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (30 page)

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.

Winston at Harrow in 1889

None of this was known to Welldon and his staff, but as term succeeded term an awareness grew among them that Winston was a baffling boy. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn the ablative absolute—a minor feat of memory—but he could recite twelve hundred lines of Macaulay without missing a word, and at no one’s urging he memorized whole scenes from three Shakespeare plays:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry VIII,
and
The Merchant of Venice.
There are learned men who do not know that
byss
is the opposite of
abyss
. He knew it; he had been haunting J. F. Moore’s bookshop and the school library. Teachers who misquoted English poets were corrected by him. He sat rapt through a lecture on the battle of Waterloo and then delivered a stunning critique of it, citing sources which were unknown to the lecturer but which, when checked, were confirmed. This merely convinced his masters that he could do the work if he wanted to and didn’t do it because he was obstinate. One of them would recall, “I formed the highest opinion of his abilities and never ceased to wonder why he did not rise higher in the School. But he hated the Classics, and in his time that kept him down…. On one field-day he came and asked me to let him act as my
aide-de-camp,
and his alertness and zeal for action were amazing.” Another wrote: “He was plainly uninterested in the academic subjects.” A third teacher came close to the truth; with a fine disregard for prepositional precedence he observed that “he was not an easy boy to deal with. Of course he had always a brilliant brain, but he would only work when he chose to and for the matters he approved of.”
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That would have been the solution: to put him under the spell of gifted teachers who, shunning pedantry, could engage his interest and persuade him that the challenge of some courses, at least, deserved his best response. It was pointless to scold him, as Jennie did in her letters: “Your report which I enclose is as you see a
very
bad one. You work in such a fitful inharmonious way, that you are bound to come out last—look at your place in the form!… If only you had a better place in your form, & were a little more methodical I would
try
& find an excuse for you. Dearest Winston you make me very unhappy…. Your work is an insult to your intelligence.” He could only reply: “I will not try to excuse myself for not working hard, because I know that what with one thing & another I have been rather lazy. Consequently when the month ended the crash came I got a bad report & got put on reports etc. etc…. My own Mummy I can tell you your letter cut me up very much…. I knew that work however hard at Mathematics I could not pass in that. All other boys going in were taught these things & I was not, so they said it was useless.” Such sterile exchanges merely led him farther down the low road. Luckily there were three masters at Harrow who knew how to guide him upward. One taught math, the very subject Winston thought hopeless. In afterlife Churchill wrote: “All my life from time to time I have had to get up disagreeable subjects at short notice, but I consider my triumph, moral and technical, was in learning Mathematics in six months…. I owe this achievement not only to my own ‘back-to-the-wall’ resolution—for which no credit is too great; but to the very kindly interest taken in my case by a much respected Harrow master, Mr. C. H. P. Mayo. He convinced me that Mathematics was not a hopeless bog of nonsense, and that there were meanings and rhythms behind the comical hieroglyphics.”
⁷⁸

Robert Somervell deserves a footnote in history. When Winston was about to go down for the third time, this perceptive young master—“a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great,” Winston said of him—took over the remedial English class. His pupils were considered dolts too simple to learn Latin and Greek. They must continue to try, but Harrow would be satisfied if they mastered their own language. Usually such assignments fall to teachers who are inept themselves, and had that been true of Somervell, Winston’s life might have taken a different turn. But not only was he not dull; he thought English inspiring, and his enthusiasm was infectious. In the words of Churchill: “He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it.” First they learned to parse sentences thoroughly. Then they practiced continuing grammatical analysis, using a system of Somervell’s which appealed to the playful instinct in every boy: using a spectrum of inks, he would score a long sentence, breaking it up into subject, verb, object; relative clauses, conditional clauses, conjunctive and disjunctive clauses. Each had its color and its bracket. “It was a kind of drill,” Churchill recalled. “We did it almost daily.” Since Winston remained obdurate in his refusal to study the classics, he remained in Somervell’s class for three terms. As a man he would write that he went through the drills “three times as long as anyone else. I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage.”
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At Harrow his lifelong fascination with words grew. He was thirteen, and Somervell was introducing him to literature. Except for best-sellers like Wilkie Collins’s
Moonstone,
few Harrovians read for pleasure. Winston was soon deep in Thackeray, Dickens, Wordsworth, and every biography he could lay his hands on. He knew what was good and found he liked it. Inevitably his vocabulary increased. In his letters he wrote of a toy given him by his aunts as “a source of unparalleled amusement,” his funds needed “replenishing,” welcome news was “pleasing intelligence.” The bookseller Moore, who saw him almost daily, noticed that he was displaying “evidences of his unusual command of words. He would argue in the shop on any subject, and, as a result of this, he was, I am afraid, often left in sole possession of the floor.”
⁸⁰
At this point another teacher, L. M. Moriarty, Winston’s fencing master, suggested that he drop in on him evenings at home to discuss essays and history. They talked, not only of content, but also of form, particularly essay techniques then being developed by Stevenson, Ruskin, Huxley, and Cardinal Newman. None of this was reflected in the report cards sent to Connaught Place, but the autodidactic pattern was forming. Winston was being taught to teach himself. He would always be a dud in the classroom and a failure in examinations, but in his own time, on his own terms, he would become one of the most learned statesmen of the coming century.

Aware of his growing intellect and increasing flair for expression, he was exasperated by his dismal marks. Welldon was also frustrated, and for the same reason. Shortly after Winston’s fourteenth birthday, the headmaster told Seely that he had never seen a boy with “such a love and veneration for the English language.”
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When he received a sparkling paper from a Sixth Former who was a brilliant classicist but clumsy with his native tongue, Welldon called the boy in. He told him he didn’t believe he had written the theme. Churchill, he said, was the only pupil who wrote that well. Confession followed. Welldon had uncovered a conspiracy. The Sixth Former had been translating Winston’s elementary Latin assignments. Then he had sat at his desk with paper and pencil while Winston, pacing back and forth, dictated the theme. There is no record of disciplinary action, but the incident is striking. It is the first known instance of the technique Churchill would use in writing his greatest books. And it is a devastating comment on public-school values. Eloquent and lucid in living English, Winston was a scholastic failure because of his disdain for two languages which would be almost useless to him.

He was writing now, submitting further contributions to the school paper as “Junius Junior.” They seldom appeared. He didn’t fit here, either. A fellow Old Boy recalled: “From time to time he sent notes on current events to
The Harrovian;
these could not always be printed, but they were extraordinarily witty and well expressed, and often caused the editors to roar with laughter.” This is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Krupp cannon which was sent to Saint Petersburg as a sample in the hope of stimulating sales. It fired so well that the Russians put it in a museum. Laughing editors spiked Winston’s copy because they felt that passing their amusement along to their readers would be undignified. Of his contributions which were accepted, only one survives, a lugubrious poem inspired by an epidemic of influenza raging on the Continent:
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T
he flu hit Winston during his first Christmas holidays from Harrow. On December 30 Randolph peevishly wrote his sister-in-law, “Of course the boys have made themselves ill with their Christmassing, & yesterday both were in bed with [Dr.] Roose and [Dr.] Gordon hopping in & out of the house. Jack is better this morning but Winston has a sore throat & some fever. I hope it is nothing but biliousness & indigestion.” He and Jennie didn’t hover around to find out. They left that day on a vacation of their own. Meanwhile, Winston worsened. Two days later he wrote his mother: “My throat is still painful & swelled—I get very hot in the night—& have very little appetite to speak of…. It is awful ‘rot’ spending ones holidays in bed or one room.” Another letter followed a few days later. He was “tired of bed and slops.” His new magic lantern didn’t work. The “Dr says I ought to go to the seaside, & then
I shan’t see you at all
.” He calculated that “1 week at the seaside leaves 1 week & that 1 week you will be away. It is an awful pity. I don’t know what to do.” Woom knew. She bundled him off to her brother-in-law’s cottage at Ventnor. Back at Harrow he wired her: “Am quite well.”
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But he wasn’t. Suffering a relapse the following month, he wrote his mother that he was “still far from well & am in bed because I can hardly stand. I am so weak as I have had very [little] food for 4 days.” Woom had come, and Mrs. Davidson had told him that “she hopes you will let Woomany come [again] tomorrow, because she says the company will do me good. I do not know how the day would have passed but for Woomany. I have had another big poultice on my liver to-day to make it worse [sic]. I hope you will allow Woomany to come tomorrow as I shall certainly be very disappointed if she does not turn up.” His need for his nurse is a thread running through his correspondence with his mother: “Thank you so much for letting Woom come down.” “Do let Woom come down tomorrow.” “Thanks awfully for letting Woom come down today.” Mrs. Everest, for her part, wrote him faithfully, but she couldn’t grasp his adolescent problems; she still thought of him as a small boy. She sent him “some fine flannel shirts to sleep in” and a new suit: “Winny dear do try to keep the new suit expressly for visiting, the brown one will do for everyday wear, please do this to please me. I hope you will not take cold my darling take care not to get wet or damp.” And: “I hope you have recovered from the effects of your dental operation deary…. I hope you wear your coat in this wet weather & change your Boots when they are damp, that is what gives you tooth ache sitting in wet boots.”
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Woom alone attended to his errands. She was anxious about his well-being and missed him terribly; in her long, gushing letters she told him again and again that she was always at his beck and call. She asked, “Did you get your luggage alright to Harrow this time it is always best to take it with you from the Station…. Have sent you 3 Black Waistcoats let me know dear also if you receive a small parcel of 2 shirts &c I sent off yesterday. I am sending you 1 dozen new Handkerchiefs on Monday with the hamper. Are you always going to have the room to yourself or is it only temporary. Old Mr Wickes sent me a lot of lovely grapes from Ventnor out of his green house. I am so glad you are well my sweet mind & try to get through the exam my precious loving darling old lamb—much love & kisses from Your old Woom.” If he neglected to write her, she was reproachful: “My darling Lamb, I have been looking for a letter from you all last week. I never have heard anything about you for a whole week. Are you well dear…. Did you get a Pocket Book or a Memorandum Book from me I sent you one…. Do send me a line there’s a dear Boy & tell me what you are going to do. Did Mamma bring you a Birthday present. I have no news to tell you so with fondest love to you my darling. I am ever your loving W.”
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