The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (33 page)

T
he examination, a screening of candidates for admission to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, had been looming before Winston ever since his father’s decision, based on a display of toy soldiers in a nursery, to make his son an army officer. Other Harrovians were following the same star—so many, indeed, that Welldon had created a special Army Class. Winston had joined it in September 1889, when he was fourteen. In effect these boys were cramming for military exams. Moriarty and another master decided early that Winston’s math was too poor for Woolwich, the academy that prepared cadets for commissions in the artillery and engineers. Instead, they piloted him toward Sandhurst, which turned out subalterns of infantry and cavalry.

After four months in the Army Class, Winston had written his mother, “I am getting along capitally…. I am going up for my ‘preliminary Exam’ for ‘Sandhurst’ in June.” His confidence, here as so often before, was wholly unjustified. Welldon withdrew his name, explaining to him that he wasn’t ready for the test; among other things, his grasp of geometrical drawing was hopelessly deficient. But the headmaster gave him the green light six months later, and then Winston had three pieces of good luck. This was the last Sandhurst preliminary in which Latin was an optional subject. Second, an essay question dealt with the American Civil War, and Jennie’s mother had seen to it that he knew a great deal about that long before he entered Harrow. The third stroke of fortune was remarkable. He had known there would be a map question, but did not know of which country. Therefore, he wrote the names of twenty-five countries on scraps of paper the night before the exam, put them in a hat, and drew one. He had picked New Zealand. He memorized it. And in the morning the geographical problem was: “Draw a map of New Zealand.” So he passed all subjects, becoming one of twelve out of the twenty-nine Harrow candidates to succeed. He wrote his mother: “I have received congratulations from scores of boys and many masters. Dudley”—Dudley Marjoribanks, the son of Randolph’s sister Fanny—“has not spoken to me. Vive la joie! He has not passed and is furious.” Jennie wrote her husband: “I think you might make him a present of a gun as a reward. He is pining for one, and ought to have a little encouragement.”
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No gun arrived, there was no pat on the back from Randolph, and the edge of Winston’s enthusiasm for a military career was briefly blunted. He toyed with the notion of taking holy orders. In a postscript home he wrote: “Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the church would suit me better.” Looking back long afterward, he reflected that “I might have gone into the Church and preached orthodox sermons in a spirit of audacious contradiction to the age.” But it had been a preposterous notion; while Churchill can easily be pictured in a pulpit, one cannot imagine him on his knees. As a boy, he would say in later life, he had to go to church every week and “this was very good. I had accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Bank of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since. Weddings, christenings, and funerals have brought in a steady annual income, and I have never made too close enquiries about the state of my account. It might well even be that I should find an overdraft.” He wrote trenchantly of World War I: “Religion, having discreetly avoided conflict on the fundamental issues, offered its encouragement and consolations through all its forms impartially to all the combatants.” Toward the end of his life he said: “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is ready to meet me is another question.” To those who pressed him, he quoted Disraeli: “Sensible men are all of the same religion.” Asked what that was, he quoted him again: “Sensible men never tell.”
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But Disraeli had also said that “what we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expected generally happens,” and this was Winston’s immediate problem in the summer of 1892, when he was seventeen. Having leapt over the preliminary hurdle, he assumed that he was as good as accepted by Sandhurst. Thus he was rudely shaken when, having taken the main entrance examination, he learned that he had flunked, and flunked badly. Not only had he failed to qualify for an infantry cadetship; his marks were also inadequate for the cavalry, which accepted lower performances. He had scored 39 percent in freehand drawing, 30 percent in Latin, and 28 percent in math, and had excelled only in English composition. Counting French, English history, chemistry, and geometry, he was 300 marks below the minimum and 700 below his cousin Dudley, who had caught up with the other successful applicants. Moriarty consoled Winston—“I think your marks and place very creditable for your first try”—but Welldon was brusque: “I feel it essential that in coming back to school you should come resolved to work not by fits and starts but with regular persistent industry.” The headmaster considered recommending a free-lance tutor, then decided against it. Randolph, predictably, was disgusted. He was also unsurprised. On the few occasions he had questioned his son about his education, he had been distinctly unimpressed. Once he had turned on him and suddenly asked: “What was the Grand Remonstrance against Charles I?” This had been a complicated issue in 1641, turning on parliamentary influence in the monarch’s court and the Anglican church. Winston’s reply was: “Parliament beat the king and cut his head off.” (Decapitation “seemed to me,” he later said wistfully, “the grandest remonstrance imaginable.”) But his father had sworn to himself and turned away. Now, with the results from Sandhurst, Randolph felt confirmed. He glumly awaited Winston’s second attempt to matriculate, writing Duchess Fanny that his “next try is on Nov. 24th. If he fails again I shall think about putting him in business.” Trade would have been even less suitable for Winston than the ministry, and he knew it. Thus, his last term at Harrow was clouded by the possibility of an aborted career. Welldon kept giving him pep talks and seems to have convinced himself that they were justified; on the eve of the second exam he wrote Randolph that the boy’s “work this term has been excellent. He understands now the need of taking trouble, and the way to take it…. It is due him to say that of late he has done all that could be asked of him.”
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One bright spot for Winston that fall was that Jack was now a twelve-year-old Harrovian, and the brothers were allowed to share a room. (“We have now quite settled down,” he wrote home. “The room is very beautiful. We purchased in London sufficiency of ornaments to make it look simply magnificent.”) Moreover, Winston had finally mastered skills which won him the admiration of his peers. He made the swimming team, led the School Rifle Corps, starred in boxing, and became the fencing champion of Harrow. “I have won the fencing,” he wrote his mother, then in Monte Carlo. “A very fine cup. I was far and away first. Absolutely untouched in the finals.” Then he accomplished something spectacular. He was chosen to stand for Harrow in a tournament at Aldershot, the winner to be England’s public-school fencing champion. He wrote excitedly: “My fencing is now my great employment out of school as now that I represent the School it behoves me to ‘sweat up.’ ” On the great day he crossed foils with boys from Eton, Winchester, Bradfield, and Tonbridge and beat them all. His victory, the
Harrovian
reported, “was chiefly due to his quick and dashing attack which quite took his opponents by surprise.” The school paper commented: “Churchill must be congratulated on his success over all his opponents in the fencing line, many of whom must have been much taller and more formidable than himself.”
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He ought to have left Harrow on a rising tide of hope. Instead, he departed in despair. The second Sandhurst examination had not gone well. Traditionally, seniors passing out entertained their friends at a “Leaving Breakfast” in Hance’s Tuck Shop: mutton cutlets, steak and onions, ham, mushrooms, eggs, sausages, and deviled kidneys—all for sixpence. Winston wouldn’t have it. In December he quietly bade farewell to Jack and then slunk off to the station alone, like a fugitive. Sandhurst posted the exam results the next month; they then appeared in
The Times
. As he feared, he had failed again. His performance had actually worsened in Latin, French, and—the cruelest cut—English composition. It is astonishing that in this, of all subjects, the boy who would become one of the greatest masters of his native language scored 53 percent. Randolph pondered putting him out as a commercial apprentice to Rothschild, Farquharson, or Cassel, but relented when Welldon told him that he felt certain Winston would make it on the third try. The headmaster urged tutoring. There was no disgrace in this. In 1870 Lord Dufferin’s Royal Commission on Military Education had “earnestly” deprecated “the irregular system of ‘cramming’ ” because, as one member explained, they feared that the acceptance “of such a large proportion of crammed candidates would cause the Army to lose its ‘tone.’ ” Nevertheless, in Winston’s day seven out of every ten successful candidates for admission to Sandhurst had been rigorously tutored. Spencer Coyle, in Henry James’s story “Owen Wingrave,” was a typical Victorian crammer. The character was inspired by Captain Walter H. James, who, Welldon wrote Lord Randolph, was “the most successful ‘crammer’ for the Sandhurst Examination.” Randolph approved, and James then wrote him from 5 Lexam Gardens, London: “I shall be very happy to receive your son and should be pleased to see you at 12:30 on Monday next.”
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Winston didn’t keep the appointment. He was near death. In their study of boys marked for future greatness, the Goertzels found that among adventurous youths “there is almost always a history of accident-proneness.” Sometimes the youthful Winston seemed to move from crisis to crisis, risking his life in pointless adventures. That was true of him that year. His second failure as a Sandhurst candidate had left him tense and distraught, which probably contributed to his flirtation with disaster. Randolph’s sister-in-law, the “Duchess Lily,” had given his family the run of Deepdene, her estate at Branksome Dene, near Bournemouth, for the winter. Its fifty acres of pine forest, sloping down to the Channel, offered endless opportunities for the daring games Winston loved to play in the woods. Each morning he briefed Jack and a fourteen-year-old cousin on his newest game plan while the servants, Woom among them, wrung their hands and prayed for the children’s safety. In the wildest corner of the estate, a thicket was split by a deep cleft called the “chine.” The chine was bridged by a crude fifty-yard bridge. The boys were playing fox and hare, with Winston the hare, when he found himself in the middle of the bridge with a foe at either end. He contemplated jumping down into the cleft. It was thick with fir trees; he thought he might leap to one and slide down, snapping off tiers of branches as he descended and thus breaking his fall. In his words: “I looked at it. I computed it. I meditated. Meanwhile I climbed over the balustrade. My young pursuers stood wonderstruck at either end of the bridge. To plunge or not to plunge, that was the question! In a second I had plunged, throwing out my arms to embrace the summit of the fir tree. The argument was correct; the data were absolutely wrong.” He tumbled twenty-nine feet to hard ground and lay insensible. Jack and their cousin ran back to the mansion, crying, “He won’t speak to us!” This was real trouble, and it brought his parents flying. Jennie arrived first; Randolph, who had been spending Christmas at one of Lord Fitzgibbon’s interminable wild parties in Ireland, took the next express from Dublin. Dr. Roose appeared with Dr. John Rose, a Harley Street specialist. They found, among other things, that Winston had a ruptured kidney. He did not recover consciousness for three days. The physicians recommended three months in bed, Rose adding that “young Mr. Churchill should not return to hard study any more than he should take vigorous exercise.”
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Unfortunately, abstinence from study was out of the question. Winston’s last chance at Sandhurst loomed in June, and in Lexham Gardens Captain James sat waiting, pencils sharpened, textbooks open. Some forty years later Winston decided that he understood why this obscure half-pay officer had stood at the top of his small, curious profession. James, he wrote, had studied the minds of the men who drew up civil service examinations and could predict “with almost Papal infallibility the sort of questions which that sort of person would be bound on the average to ask on any of the selected subjects.” His skill lay in anticipating such questions and how best to answer them. He was “really the ingenious forerunner of the inventors of the artillery barrages of the Great War,” Churchill wrote. “He fired from carefully selected positions upon the areas which he knew must be tenanted by large bodies of enemy troops…. He did not need to see the enemy soldiers. Drill was all he had to teach his gunners. Thus year by year for at least two decades he held the Blue Ribbon among the Crammers.”
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But he had never dealt with anyone remotely like Winston. The crammer represents everything the creative youth despises: drill, contempt for intuition, slavish fixation on meaningless, unrelated facts. Winston, in his own words, found himself in “an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ world, at the portals of which stood ‘A Quadratic Equation,’ ” followed by the “dimchambers” inhabited by the “Differential Calculus” and then a “strange corridor” of sines and cosines “in a highly square-rooted condition.” Of mathematical skills he wrote: “I am assured they are most helpful in engineering, astronomy and things like that. It is important to build bridges and canals and to comprehend all the stresses and potentialities of matter, to say nothing of counting all the stars and even universes and measuring how far off they are, and foretelling eclipses, the arrival of comets and such like. I am glad there are quite a number of people born with a gift and a liking for all this.” He, however, was not one of them. The Goertzels found that most boys pregnant with genius have serious problems with school curricula and dull, irrational teachers. James was a distillate of these. He was concentrating on the courses Winston had found pointless, using the very methods Winston hated most. By March he must have wished that this exasperating boy had killed himself in his fall. Reporting to Randolph on March 7, he deplored his pupil’s “casual manner.” Winston was “distinctly inclined to be inattentive and to think too much of his abilities.” He had been “rather too much inclined up to the present to teach his instructors instead of endeavouring to learn from them.” In fact, “he suggested to me that his knowledge of history was such that he did not want any more teaching in it!… What he wants,” he concluded, “is very firm handling.” Unfortunately, James could not provide it for the moment. He was literally sick of Winston, “confined to my room.”
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