The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (34 page)

Staggering to his feet, he plodded on. But he deceived neither himself nor his ward’s father. He was making little progress. In an April 29 report he gloomily warned his employer: “I do not think that his work is going on very satisfactorily.” Although the boy “has good abilities he does not apply himself with sufficient earnestness to his reading” and “I doubt his passing if he does not do this.” James delicately hinted at one difficulty. Randolph was making his last attempt at a political comeback, and his son could think of little else. The crammer realized that “at a time like the present it is difficult for him not to take an interest in current political topics, but if this be done to an extent which takes his mind away from his studies, the result is bad for the latter.” Every attempt must be made to impress upon him “the absolute necessity of single-minded devotion to the immediate object before him, and the extreme desirability of thoroughness and detail [sic] attention to all he attempts.”
¹¹³

The break came sometime in May. Winston gave ground. He yielded as little as possible, but he knew what was at stake, and though the job revolted him, he set his jaw and made some progress. Not much; just enough. On June 19, James wrote: “Without saying that your son is a certainty I think he ought to pass this time. He is working well and I think doing his best to get on but, as you know, he is at times inclined to take the bit in his teeth and go his own course.” The exam was upon them then, and this time Winston squeaked by. He came in too low to become an infantry cadet, but was admitted to the cavalry. He hadn’t changed much, even under his crammer’s pressure; most of the spring, when he should have been doing James’s lessons, he had been reading English history for pleasure, with the jarring effect—jarring for James, who had abandoned attempts to drill him in history—that he far outscored every other candidate in that subject. When the list of those who had passed was announced, Winston had left on a hiking trip in Switzerland with Jack and J. D. G. Little, a young Eton master. He was in Lucerne when he learned he had made it. Immediately he wired his father and then wrote him from the Schweizerhof Hotel: “I was so glad to be able to send you the good news on Thursday. I did not expect that the list would be published so soon & was starting off in the train, when Little congratulated me on getting in. I looked in the paper & found this to be true.” It was only fitting, he thought, that he should celebrate his achievement in such “a splendid hotel—lifts, electric light, & fireworks (every Saturday).”
¹¹⁴

Other congratulations arrived from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, but there was an ominous silence from Bad Kissingen, where Lord Randolph and Jennie were taking the cure. Unknown to his son, Randolph had been counting heavily on an infantry cadetship. That would have relieved him of the cost of horses. It would also have brought a social dividend; a friend of his, the aged, royal Duke of Cambridge, commander in chief of the army, had promised, once Winston had been commissioned, to find a place for him in the crack Sixtieth Rifles. Now the humiliated father had to tell His Grace that his boy was too stupid to become an infantry officer. Jennie saw the storm gathering in her husband. She sent a warning to Lucerne: “I am glad of course that you have got into Sandhurst but Papa is not pleased at yr getting in by the skin of yr teeth & missing the Infantry by 18 marks. He is not as pleased by yr exploits as you seem to be!”
¹¹⁵
That was putting it gently. A week later, in Milan, Winston received an extraordinary letter from his father.

Randolph was surprised that he had expressed “exultation over your inclusion in the Sandhurst list” instead of being ashamed of “your slovenly happy-go-lucky harum scarum style of work.” It was the same old story: “Never have I received a really good report of your conduct in your work from any master or tutor you had from time to time to do with. Always behind-hand, never advancing in your class, incessant complaints of total want of application, and this character which was constant in yr reports has shown the natural results clearly in your last army examination.” Thus “you have failed to get into the ‘60th Rifles’ one of the finest regiments in the army.” Furthermore, as a cavalry cadet, “you have imposed on me an extra charge of some £200 a year.” It got worse: “Do not think I am going to take the trouble of writing to you long letters after every failure you commit and undergo… I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say about your own acquirements & exploits.” Randolph predicted that “if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel one of the hundreds of the public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy & futile existence. If that is so you will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes yourself.” He ended venomously: “Your mother sends her love.”
¹¹⁶

Little wrote Randolph that Winston had showed him this letter and “was a good deal depressed.” Actually, he was stunned. It never occurred to him that this philippic might be the work of an unstable mind. He considered his father’s judgment above reproach, and believed that he had failed him again. In his reply he wrote that he was “very sorry indeed that you are displeased with me,” that he would “try to modify your opinion of me by my work at Sandhurst,” that “my extremely low place in passing
in
will have
no
effect whatever on my chance there,” and that Randolph needn’t worry about expenses there because “all the necessary equipment & outfit are supplied at Sandhurst at a charge of £30.” Here he erred. All cadets were charged £120 tuition, in addition to the cost of their mounts, to screen out applicants who were not considered suitable. But in a larger sense he was right. Sandhurst fees were a pittance when set against the costs Randolph’s own father had paid for his Oxford education; Randolph had raised the issue only to justify his wrath. Winston closed his own letter pathetically: “Thank you very much for writing to me.” And, once again, “I am very sorry indeed that I have done so badly.” Yet on a deeper level he may have smoldered. At the bottom he wrote: “P.S. Excuse smudge &c as pens & blotting paper are awfully bad.” The page was a mess. Hostility, though repressed, must have been there. By now it should have been clear that the relationship between father and son would be abrasive for both until one of them lay in his grave.
¹¹⁷

Winston almost died first. His second skirting of the Styx immediately followed the posting of this response. He and a companion hired a boat on the shore of Lake Geneva and rowed out a mile. Stripping, they dove in for a swim. Suddenly a breeze sprang up and carried the boat away from them. Striking out desperately, Winston just managed to reach the hull, hoist himself aboard, and return for his friend. Afterward he wrote that he had seen Death “as near as I believe I have ever seen Him. He was swimming in the water, whispering from time to time in the rising wind.” Either because of this or because of Randolph’s tirade, he was still upset when he returned to London and found that the row over his poor showing in the exam had been entirely unnecessary. At 50 Grosvenor Square a letter from the military secretary awaited him, disclosing that several boys with higher scores than his had dropped out, so he needn’t go into the cavalry. He wrote his father: “I have no doubt that you will be pleased to find that I have got an Infantry cadetship and shall be able, after all, to enter the 60th.” Randolph’s pride enjoined an acknowledgment, but he wrote Duchess Fanny—as he had grown apart from Jennie, his mother had become the only woman he fully trusted—that “I am very glad Winston has got an infantry cadetship. It will save me £200 a year.”
¹¹⁸

On the afternoon of Friday, September 1, 1893, Winston switched from train to carriage in the village of Camberley and rode into the grounds of the Royal Military College, passing through a forest of pine, birch, and larch before debouching on the plain where, every year since 1812, young members of England’s upper classes had been certified as “officers and gentlemen.” The landscape was inviting: two lakes, athletic fields, rifle and revolver ranges, and, of course, parade grounds. As a “junior,” or plebe, he was assigned to “E” Company, led to the long, low, white stone building which would be his barracks for the next sixteen months, and measured for his cadet uniform, a gaudy costume featuring gold lace, pantaloons, and a pillbox cap. He studied the daily schedule he would be expected to meet, worried about his physical frailty, and wrote his mother, with a confidence he did not feel: “I suppose I shall get stronger during my stay here.”
¹¹⁹
His physique was in fact unimpressive. He was only five feet, six and a half inches tall, and his chest measured but thirty-one inches, with an expansion of two and a half inches—inadequate, unless he could improve upon it, for a commission. To succeed at Sandhurst he would summon strengths which, until now, had been unrevealed.

Even before the tailor had finished outfitting him, he had again incurred his father’s displeasure. Lord Randolph had decided to give him a ten-pound monthly allowance and little leave. “I wont have any running backwards & forwards to London,” he wrote Duchess Fanny. “He shall be kept to his work so that he may acquire the elementary principles of a military education.” But since his arrival on the post, Winston had discovered that his financial expectations required revision. He needed a batman to black his boots, pipe-clay his belt, clean his rifle, and carry away slops. He thought he ought to have a horse; other cadets had them. His room needed furnishing, and he not only wanted to visit the capital regularly—“going up to town,” as they said at Sandhurst—he also meant to join clubs there. His father would have none of it. To Duchess Fanny, Randolph explained: “I have demurred to ‘unrestricted leave,’ and have told him he can come to town when his mother is there. I have declined paying for horses…. Winston’s letters are generally full of requests for unnecessary things and articles.” The youth begged his mother to intervene. Without a horse, he said, he would be excluded from polo classes. “As to leave—it is very hard that Papa cannot grant me the same liberty that other boys in my position are granted. It is only a case of trusting
me
. As my company officer said, he ‘liked to know the boys whom their parents could trust’—and therefore recommended me to get the permission I asked for. However, it is no use trying to explain to Papa, & I suppose I shall go on being treated as ‘that boy’ till I am 50 years old.”
¹²⁰
Actually, it would be only a short time longer. But Winston had been kept at such a distance from his family that he knew nothing of the tensions within it. He couldn’t understand the niggling over money. He was keenly aware of his father’s reentry into politics. He did not, however, grasp the futility of it.

I
n the summer of 1892, when Winston was beginning his struggle to enter Sandhurst, the voters narrowly rejected Salisbury’s Conservatives, giving Gladstone the chance to form his last government. His position in the House of Commons was fragile. Even with the support of eighty Irish Nationalists, the Liberal majority was only forty. In 1886 Joe Chamberlain had deserted the Grand Old Man on the question of Home Rule and joined the Ulster Unionists, whom he would eventually leave to become a full-fledged Tory. The cabinet differed sharply among themselves on key issues. Obviously the Tories would soon return. But Randolph didn’t see it that way. He thought they needed his help. When Parliament met the following summer—the summer Winston scraped through his third examination—the political configuration looked like 1885 all over again. The GOM sat on the government bench, and Churchill, the master of invective, was preparing to display his brilliant talent once more. In Winston’s words, “It was thought that he would in Opposition swiftly regain the ascendancy in Parliament and in his party which had been destroyed by his resignation six years before. No one cherished these hopes more ardently than I…. We all looked forward to his reconquest of power…. Although he was only a private member and quite isolated, everything he said even at the tiniest bazaar was reported verbatim in all the newspapers, and every phrase was scrutinized and weighed. Now it seemed that his chance had come again.”
¹²¹

Only rarely could Winston observe the parliamentary maneuvering from the Strangers’ Gallery, and even then he deferred to his father’s wishes, asking his permission to attend: “I have had a letter from Mr Carson inviting me to dine with him at the House on Friday evening. I have accepted as I have very little work on Saturday. If you would rather I would not go Please send me a line.” He was fascinated by the civility between adversaries; at table “not only colleagues, but opponents, amicably interchanged opinions on the burning topics of the hour.” Apart from newspapers, his sources of information on what was happening behind the scenes in the House were his mother and his father’s brother-in-law Edward Marjoribanks, who, as Gladstone’s chief whip, was on the other side. Political civility also prevailed within the family, though Winston enjoyed trying to pin Marjoribanks down. He wrote his father: “Uncle Edward has been here to dinner. He spent nearly half an hour after dinner explaining to me the methods by which the Opposition of the House of Lords was going to be overcome. I wish you had been there to answer him, as I am sure there was an answer though I could not think of it.”
¹²²