The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (37 page)

Because of this print revolution, Winston would reach millions of the newly literate, like Mrs. Everest’s brother-in-law, and, with checks from editors and book royalties, support his political career. He would also become a lifelong omnivorous reader of newspapers and one of the most well-informed men in the world on the events of his times. At Sandhurst, as at Brighton, he was scanning column after column of newsprint every evening. Among his discoveries, during his three terms at the school, were the passage of woman suffrage in New Zealand, the election of Keir Hardie as the first MP to represent Britain’s workingmen, and the court-martial conviction, in France, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, after which a mob outside chanted, “Death to the Jews!” Winston approved of none of these. He was more pleased by the West African explorations of the English naturalist Mary Kinsley, who traveled through cannibal country protected by Fan tribesmen, and by the expansion of French imperialism in Laos, French Guiana, and Dahomey; by Belgian imperialism in the Congo; by American imperialism in Hawaii; and by British imperialism in South Africa, where Cecil Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson had just suppressed a native revolt. (Already they were plotting the fateful Jameson Raid, to be carried out a few months after young Churchill had passed out of Sandhurst.) Czar Nicholas II had succeeded his father in Russia and seemed to be settling in for a long, stable reign. Winston liked that, too, and because he was fascinated by the trivial as well as the momentous, he was gratified by descriptions of the new Winchester rifle; by the first striptease, at the Bal des Quatre Arts in Paris; by the defeat of John L. Sullivan by James Corbett; and by the invention of the safety razor by an American bottle-stopper salesman named King Gillette.

Hubert Gough, recalling his own early days in uniform, wrote that on weekends he and his friends rode by “coach, with four horses and two men, all taken from the ranks, to almost every race meeting round London.”
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Winston liked horses, but he was developing other interests. On each excursion to the city he browsed through bookstores. The expansion of the publishing industry, he found, had not been confined to penny dailies. New magazines were also flourishing, from the popular
Strand Magazine
and the
Review of Reviews
through W. E. Henley’s
National Observer
and C. H. Pearson’s
National Life and Character,
both journals of imperialist thought, to the avant-garde
Yellow Book,
which carried Aubrey Beardsley’s black-and-white “art nouveau” drawings. The book counters offered a feast: Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
and
Jude the Obscure
, Marie Corelli’s
Sorrows of Satan,
Kipling’s
Jungle Book,
Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Ebb-Tide,
Anthony Hope’s
Prisoner of Zenda,
H. G. Well’s
Time Machine,
volumes of poems by A. E. Housman, Yeats, and Hardy; Robert Blatchford’s
Merrie England,
which sold over a million copies; A. Conan Doyle’s
Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
(in the December 1893 issue of the
Strand,
Conan Doyle had contrived to kill Holmes in the Reichenbach Falls, but his public successfully demanded a resurrection); and, if you were more fluent in continental languages than Winston was, Emile Zola’s
Débâcle,
just off the Paris presses, and thirty-nine-year-old Sigmund Freud’s
Studien über Hysterie
.

In knowledgeable circles
Yellow Book,
Oscar Wilde, and
fin de siècle
were code words. They signaled flagrant vice in the West End and, among most educated Englishmen, a collapse of morals. In the upper classes extramarital coitus was acceptable, but sodomy and fellatio were literally unmentionable. Everyone knew that certain public-school boys became confused about sexual roles. You didn’t talk about that. You didn’t let the side down. But these new people were advertising it. “Art for Art’s Sake” meant more than it said. Polite critics called it decadence, which was accurate, though hedonism, a broader term, was more applicable. What few grasped was that this was one of but three new forces which, by the 1890s, had evolved from the religious evangelism of Victoria’s prime years. The other two were Anglo-Catholicism—“High Church,” or “Ritualistic,” Christianity—and rationalism. Rationalism was the wave of the future. Charles Booth had begun his nine-volume inquiry into London poverty when eleven-year-old Winston caught double pneumonia in Brighton. Booth was still at it, and now, while Cadet Churchill was galloping across the meadows around Camberley, Sidney and Beatrice Webb brought out their
History of Trade Unionism
. Conscience, until now the province of men of the cloth, had found secular forms of expression. When Randolph had gone up to Oxford, the brightest students had been preparing for the ministry. Hardly any were now. Church attendance had dropped sharply all over England. Family prayers in upper-class households, though still prevalent, began to decline. One casualty of this shift was the Victorian Sabbath. Sunday papers were frowned upon, and public restaurants were closed on that day, but it was difficult to defend the old values when all London knew of the Prince of Wales’s showy Sunday dinner parties. Throughout the decade society receded from the old Sabbath observance. Museums and art galleries were thrown open on Sunday afternoon. The National Sunday League urged healthy Sunday recreation and organized Sunday railway excursions at cheap rates. The railroads, unwilling to haggle over old values when profits loomed, accommodated them.

The lower classes couldn’t afford the excursions, even at half price. Instead, they crowded into the music halls, which, responding to the new moral climate, permitted their comedians’ humor to grow broader and broader. This was the halls’ Augustan age. The stars, like their audiences, were mostly cockneys: Marie Lloyd, George Robey, Albert Chevalier, Little Titch, Dan Leno, Harry Champion. They sang “My Old Dutch,” “Don’t Dilly Dally,” “Two Lovely Black Eyes,” “Oh, Mr Porter,” “One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit,” and England’s greatest hit of 1892:

Sometimes celebrities paraded across the stage: Eugene Sandow, the German strong man; Blondin, the tightrope walker; Captain Webb, the Channel swimmer. Audiences were intensely patriotic, cheering every glimpse of the Union Jack and, when the chairman thumped his gavel and gave them their cue, belting out “Tommy, Tommy Atkins,” and “The Union Jack of Dear Old England.” The best of the halls were in the heart of London. The Eagle, the Alhambra, and the Empire in Leicester Square were the most popular. It was in the Empire, of all places, that Winston Churchill delivered his first speech. The date was Saturday, November 3, 1894. He was defending prostitution.

Mrs. Ormiston Chant, a crusader against vice, had been eyeing the theater with disapproval for some time. The management, like those of most of the halls, had built a promenade beside the men’s bar, and it was along this walk, as patrons emptied their glasses, that elegant doxies strolled back and forth, describing their specialties and citing their prices in stage whispers. Winston, now a Sandhurst senior, was not among their customers. He, like many of his peers, sublimated his sex drive and idealized women. He had a crush on Mabel Love, a performer at the Lyric, and at his written request she had sent him an autographed photograph; but his feelings for her were nothing if not chaste. His band of cadets regularly toured all London’s great music halls, however, and he was stung when he read that, at Mrs. Chant’s insistence, a “barricade” had been erected between the Empire and its promenade. Instinctively hostile toward authority, he wanted to lash out. He wrote, and then thrice rewrote, a speech which, Churchill the man would recall, was “a serious constitutional argument upon the inherent rights of British subjects; upon the dangers of State interference with the social habits of law-abiding persons; and upon the many evil consequences which inevitably follow upon repression not supported by healthy public opinion.” Reading in the
Daily Telegraph
that champions of the harlots were forming an “Entertainments Protective League” to defend their dishonor, he resolved to join up. The meeting was held in a seedy London hotel. When he arrived by hansom, he found there was only one other member. The man said sadly, “It’s very difficult to get people to do anything in England now. They take everything lying down. I do not know what’s happened to the country; they seem to have no spirit left.”
¹⁴⁰

Winston felt that someone had to speak for freedom. But organization needed funds. In the Strand he spotted the three golden balls hanging over Attenborough’s celebrated moneylending shop and hocked his watch, reflecting that, “after all, the Crown Jewels of great kingdoms [have] been pawned on hard occasions.” Three days later he rounded up fellow cadets out for lark, led them to the Empire, and found that the “barricade” was merely a canvas screen supported by a wooden framework. He had come prepared to incite a riot. The elements were there. The men already in the bar agreed with him and his friends that the barrier was a bloody shame. A silence spread among them, like the thickening in the air before a storm. One man poked a hole through the screen with his cane. A cadet gave it a shove. Someone else kicked it, and it moved. In a flash the whole crowd, suddenly excited and infuriated, rushed at the flimsy encumbrance and demolished it. Amid the din Winston shouted: “Ladies of the Empire! I stand for Liberty!” It turned out that there were no ladies present, soiled or otherwise; the prostitutes had prudently decamped. That ought to have been a letdown, but he felt flushed with victory. Leaping on a chair—his text, revised, was in his hand—he cried: “Where does the Englishman in London always find a welcome? Where does he first go when, battle-scarred and travel-worn, he reaches home? Who is always there to greet him with a smile and join him with a drink? Who is ever faithful, ever true? The ladies of the Empire promenade!”
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It was in vain. The London County Council, as licensing authority for the music halls, supported Mrs. Chant. Trollops were banned from all of them. Nonetheless, Winston felt a sense of achievement. He wrote Jack, at Harrow: “It was I who led the rioters—and made a speech to the crowd. I enclose a cutting from one of the papers so that you may see.” After the council had acted he wrote a formal denunciation of its decision and sent it to his father, who, though he didn’t know it, had strong personal reasons for favoring the suppression of tarts. “I am sure,” Winston wrote him, “you will disapprove of so coercive and futile a measure.” He wrote his aunt Leonie: “It is hard to say whether one dislikes the prudes or the weak-minded creatures who listen to them most. Both to me are extremely detestable. In trying to be original they have merely lapsed into the aboriginal. The ‘new woman’ is merely the old Eve in a divided skirt.” He also wrote an open letter to the
Westminster Gazette,
submitting that the only way to lasting reform lay in “educating the mind of the individual and improving the social conditions under which he lives,” but the editor refused to print it, hoping, perhaps, to conceal the identity of the crowd’s ringleader. If so, he failed. Mandel Creighton, the bishop of London, found out. He wrote
The Times:
“I never expected to see an heir of Marlborough greeted by a flourish of strumpets.”
¹⁴²

Winston, satisfied that he had at least drawn blood, continued to drop into music halls whenever he had a free evening. Shortly after he had been commissioned, he was at the Alhambra with a fellow officer when a flag-waving entertainer, inspired by a disagreement between Salisbury and the new czar over the Armenian crisis of 1896, sang:

Winston leaned toward his friend and asked: “Where are the Dardanelles
exactly?
”
¹⁴³

H
e reached the pinnacle of his Sandhurst days on December 2, 1894. Fifteen of the 127 seniors who had qualified to receive the Queen’s commission were chosen to compete for the school’s annual riding prize, and he was among them. He wrote his father, who was abroad with Jennie, “Well we rode—jumped with & without stirrups & with out reins—hands behind back & various other tricks. Then 5 were weeded out leaving only ten of us. Then we went in the field & rode over the numerous fences several times. 6 more were weeded out leaving only 4 in. I was wild with excitement and rode I think better than I have ever done before but failed to win the prize by 1 mark being 2nd with 199 out of 200 marks. I am awfully pleased with the result, which in a place where everyone rides means a great deal, as I shall have to ride before the Duke and also as it makes it very easy to pick regts when the Colonels know you can ride. I hope you will be pleased.”
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