The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (40 page)

His mother had scarcely recovered from this, and he had hardly seen the last of the bull-lunged Jocko, when real trouble loomed, a scandal which could have ruined him. Alan Bruce, a Sandhurst classmate, was about to join the Fourth Hussars. He had been an unpopular cadet, as ill-adjusted there as Winston had been at Harrow. Winston and his new confreres in the officers’ mess decided they didn’t want him; they took him to dinner at the Nimrod Club in London and told him that his father’s allowance of £500 would be inadequate. That was preposterous, and he said so. Since he had failed to take their hint, they discouraged him in other ways. The details are unclear, but it is not a pretty story. Bruce was accused of using foul language, of being familiar with enlisted men, of abusing regimental sergeants. The upshot was that he was asked to resign from the army. His infuriated father, A. C. Bruce-Pryce, persuaded the weekly review
Truth
to mount a press crusade against an “undisguised conspiracy formed against this subaltern before he joined to have him out of the regiment unless he consented to go voluntarily.” That was the last way to engage the affections of those who had maneuvered Bruce’s dismissal, and the incident would have been swiftly forgotten if Bruce-Pryce hadn’t taken leave of his senses. He charged that Winston Churchill had been guilty of “acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type.”
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Winston moved fast. He hired the Holborn solicitors Lewis and Lewis, who, four days later, issued a writ demanding damages of £20,000. Within a month he got £500, an apology, and a complete withdrawal: “I unreservedly withdraw all and every imputation against your character complained of by you in paragraph 2 of your Statement of Claim and I hereby express my regret for having made the same.”
Truth
howled on, now charging that the point-to-point had been rigged, but the great reef had been skirted. Except for an absurd remark by Lord Beaverbrook—that Winston had told him he once went to bed with a man to see what it was like—nothing in Churchill’s life offers the remotest ground for intimations of homosexuality. At the time, however, the barest rumor of it, unless instantly suppressed, could have been calamitous. As Brabazon wrote him, expressing “very great relief” at the outcome, “one cannot touch pitch without soiling one’s hands however clean they may originally have been and the world is so ill natured and suspicious that there would always have been found some ill natured sneak or perhaps some d——d good natured friend to hem & ha! & wink over it—perhaps in years to come, when everyone even yourself had forgotten all about the disagreeable incident. You took the only line possible…. For malignant, preposterous as it was, it would have been impossible to have left such a charge unchallenged.” Thus, with the colonel’s sanction, the regiment regarded Winston as a martyr. The triumph of irony was complete. The Harrovian who had been at odds with his peers and a rebel against school authority was now accepted, and content with his acceptance, in an authoritarian sodality.
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Hubert Gough, later recalling his days at Aldershot as a subaltern in the Sixteenth Lancers, said: “We led a cheerful, care-free life; what duties we had to do… did not call for much mental effort. Afternoons were usually free for most officers.” Winston’s life there followed a relaxed routine. His batman brought him breakfast in bed. A subaltern’s only obligations in a typical day were to spend two hours riding, an hour with the horses in the stables, and ninety minutes drilling. The rest of his time was his own. If he remained in barracks, Winston might play bezique for threepence a point, “a shocking descent from the shillings at Deepdene,” he wrote, or whist, “a most uninteresting game and one at which I have but little luck.” He liked games he could win. He described golf, one of his failures, as “a curious sport whose object is to put a very small ball in a very small hole with implements ill-designed for the purpose.” Polo and steeplechasing occupied him more and more, though he paid for his recklessness; after one fall, which confined him to bed for three days, he explained to his mother that at a jump “the animal refused and swerved. I tried to cram him in and he took the wings. Very nearly did he break my leg, but as it is I am only bruised and stiff.” Another young officer might have kept that information to himself. Winston didn’t; he was still an egotistical, bumptious, rude youth. But these traits were common among young Victorian officers. Besides, he was witty, daring, generous, entertaining. Jennie had found the right word for him. He was
interesting
.
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Because Aldershot was only thirty-two miles from London, celebrities often visited to take the salute. Once the hussars rehearsed in the Long Valley under the scrutiny of a rising cavalryman, Captain Douglas Haig. It was “a very fine thing,” Winston wrote, to see “a cavalry division of thirty or forty squadrons” maneuvered “as if it were one single unit…. When the line was finally formed and the regiment or brigade was committed to the charge, one could hardly help shouting in joyous wrath.” As the grandson of a duke, Winston was chosen to escort the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, the Duke of Connaught, Field Marshal Lord Roberts, and the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George V and Queen Mary). Best of all were the “splendid parades when Queen Victoria sat in her carriage at the saluting point and… the whole Aldershot garrison, perhaps 25,000 strong, blue and gold, scarlet and steel, passed before her, Horse, Foot, and Artillery… in a broad and scintillating flood.” The purpose of all this was obscure. Winston later wrote: “Certainly no Jingo Lieutenant or Fire-eating Staff Officer in the Aldershot Command in 1895, even in his most sanguine moments, would have believed that our little army would ever again be sent to Europe.”
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Any member of England’s ruling families was, by that very fact, welcome in the London mansions and country homes of the aristocracy. Even Lord Randolph, diseased and mad, had not been excluded. And his son was not only a Churchill; he was also an eligible bachelor. “A gay and lordly life,” he wrote, “now opened upon me.” He had “a great many invitations and could go to a ball every night should I wish to.” The greatest affairs that Season were held in Stafford House and Devonshire House, and he was always present. “Everywhere one met friends and kinfolk,” he wrote. “The leading figures of Society were in many cases the leading statesmen in Parliament.” Present were “all the elements which made a gay and splendid social circle in close relation to the business of Parliament, the hierarchies of the Army and Navy, and the policy of the State.” It was almost always urbane; only once was he obliged to step between two men lunging at each other, one a participant in the Jameson Raid then on trial in Bow Street, the other a former Liberal minister who regarded the raid as an outrage. Neither thought it incongruous that a mere subaltern should step between them. It was Winston’s social standing, not his rank, which counted.
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In his regiment, he was glad to find, virtually all the officers were Conservatives, and since the country was going to the polls that summer, there was much talk of politics. Rosebery, though a Liberal, was personally popular, particularly with Winston, for he had been a good friend to the Churchills. But everyone agreed that he had fallen among bad companions; as prime minister he owed his office to the Irish Nationalists and hence was tainted with the Fenian brush. His government fell in June because, it was said, he had permitted the country’s stocks of cordite to run low. Why England needed cordite just then was unmentioned, and it wasn’t true anyway, but there were cheers in Aldershot when Salisbury was returned with a majority of 150. Winston attended a party at Devonshire House and found that the other guests included Salisbury’s new ministers, looking smart in their new blue-and-gold uniforms. “These uniforms were not so magnificent as ours,” he wrote, “but they had a style about them which commended them to my eye.” He fell into conversation with George Curzon, the new under secretary for foreign affairs. Curzon outlined his duties. In the House of Commons he would explain and defend Britain’s foreign policy. More important, in Whitehall he would share in making that policy. Specifically, he expected to guide Britain’s conduct toward other European powers. That was very different from galloping about and parading in an army which, everyone agreed, would never see action on the Continent. The difference between him and Curzon, Winston reflected gloomily, had nothing to do with braid and frogging. One had power and the other only the illusion of it. He studied the under secretary as he listened to him, looked around at the other ministerial uniforms, and “felt free to give rein to jealousy.”
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I
t was a year of funerals. His father had slipped away in January, his grandmother Clara died in April, and as hot weather approached he learned that Elizabeth Everest lay stricken with peritonitis. They had kept in touch; she was living with her sister Emma at 15 Crouch Hill in the Islington district of North London. On April I she had written him: “My darling Precious Boy, I have just recd £2. 10s from Cox & Co. Charing Cross on your account. I thank you very much indeed dearest it is awfully kind & thoughtful of you. My dear dear Boy you are one in ten thousand but I am afraid you will find your income not any too much for your expenses dear. It really is too good & kind of you I don’t know how to thank you enough. I am afraid Her Ladyship will think me a terrible imposter [sic].”
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Late in June her sister wrote him that Woom was ill, and he hurried to Islington. She knew her condition was grave, but Woom’s only anxiety was for him. He had passed through a heavy shower, his jacket was wet; she told him he might catch cold and would not rest until he spread out the jacket to dry. He had to return to Aldershot by the midnight train for an early parade, and he was there when a telegram arrived from Emma. His old nurse’s end was very near. Winston fetched Dr. Keith, engaged a private nurse, and hurried to Woom’s side. She recognized him, but as she spoke she sank into a coma. He sat there, holding her hand, until she died at 2:15 the following morning. He wrote: “Death came very easily to her. She had lived such an innocent and loving life of service to others and held such a simple faith, that she had no fears at all, and did not seem to mind very much.”
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He organized the funeral. Knowing that she had nursed the children of an archdeacon in Cumberland, he wired him, and the clergyman agreed to come and read the service. Winston didn’t want to telegraph Jack; he went to Harrow and told him, and they traveled together to London’s Manor Park cemetery. Jennie was in Paris and saw no reason to return, but Winston ordered a wreath in her name. He was surprised at the number of mourners. He wrote his mother: “All her relations were there—a good many of whom had travelled from Ventnor overnight—and I was quite surprised to find how many friends she had made in her quiet and simple life. The coffin was covered with wreaths & everything was as it should be.” Afterward he paid for a headstone:

Then he made arrangements with the local florist for the upkeep of the grave. “I feel very low,” he wrote Jennie, “and find that I never realized how much poor old Woom was to me.” It was “indeed another link with the past gone—& I look back with regret to the old days at Connaught Place when fortune still smiled.” Depressed, he made a pilgrimage to his father’s grave in Bladon and wrote his mother, who had never been there, that he “was so struck by the sense of quietness & peace as well as by the old world air of the place—that my sadness was not unmixed with solace… I think it would make you happier to see it.”
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The real source of his solace, although he could not have recognized it, was that all his links with the past were well broken. Except for his hours in the nursery with Woom, his early years had brought him very little pleasure and much pain. But they had fashioned him into a strong young man possessed of immense drive, ready to mount the steep slopes of challenge ahead.