The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (45 page)

Romance first reared its violin-shaped head in Winston’s life on November 3, 1896. He wrote home from Trimulgherry that he had just been introduced “to Miss Pamela Plowden—who lives here. I must say that she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen—‘Bar none’ as the Duchess Lily says. We are going to try and do the City of Hyderabad together—on an elephant.” Pamela would be in and out of his life for years. Other girls did not attract him. Returning from a racecourse he reported that he had seen “a lot of horrid Anglo-Indian women” there, and that “nice people in India are few & far between. They are like oases in the desert…. I have lived the life of a recluse out here. The vulgar Anglo-Indians have commented on my not ‘calling’ as is the absurd custom of the country…. I know perhaps three people who are agreeable and I have no ambitions to extend my acquaintance.” But there were other diversions. For a time he collected butterflies in the gardens around his bungalow—swallowtails, white admirals, purple emperors, and rare species. He sent home for nets, collecting boxes, pins, boards, and a killing tin. Barnes and Baring protested that he was turning the house into a taxidermist’s shop. Then disaster struck. “My butterfly collection,” he mournfully wrote Jack, “which included upwards of 65 different sorts, has been destroyed by the malevolence of a rat who crawled into the cabinet and devoured all the specimens.” Undaunted, he cultivated roses: Maréchal Niel, La France, Gloire de Dijon—“over 50 different kinds of roses,” he wrote his mother, adding, “if it would not worry you I would like you very much to send a few English seeds—Wallflowers, Stocks, Tulips etc.”
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Winston’s one great passion in those first months continued to be polo. His fellow officers shared it, and they concocted a plan. Never in the history of the Raj had a cavalry regiment from southern India won the Indian Empire’s Regimental Cup. But the officers of the Fourth Hussars, pooling their resources, helped to break this precedent. Their scheme was to approach the Poona Light Horse. Because this regiment was permanently stationed in the country, the Poona sepoys, largely officered by Britons, had a clear advantage in securing the Arabian ponies so prized by polo players. Specifically, they had first choice of mounts arriving at the Byculla stables in Bombay, where Arab steeds were imported. During the Fourth Hussars’ pause in Maharashtra, Churchill and his comrades had admired these animals. Now they bought an entire stud of twenty-five ponies from the Poona Light Horse. Ordinarily two or three years’ practice was believed essential before a regiment could field a passable team, but six weeks after their landing they challenged the Nineteenth Hussars for the Golconda Cup in Hyderabad. Although the match was considered a joke—and the laughter grew when the crowd saw that one subaltern from Bangalore had to ride one-armed—it was preceded by customary ceremonies. The native army of the nizam of Hyderabad paraded in full dress. The British troops followed. Elephants hauling cannon raised their trunks in salute as they passed the reviewing stand. After tiffin the game began, and the lithe, darting Nineteenth Hussars, as expected, quickly scored three goals. They were held to that, however, while the Fourth Hussars, with the one-armed officer leading them, scored nine times, thus establishing a record, never broken, of a regiment’s winning a major tournament within fifty days of landing in India. One of Churchill’s contemporaries, Patrick Thompson, believed that if you wanted to understand him, you had to see him play polo. “He rides in the game,” Thompson said, “like heavy cavalry getting into position for the assault. He trots about, keenly watchful, biding his time, a master of tactics and strategy. Abruptly he sees his chance, and he gathers his pony and charges in, neither deft nor graceful, but full of tearing physical energy—and skillful with it, too. He bears down opposition by the weight of his dash and strikes the ball. Did I say ‘strikes’? He
slashes
the ball.”
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Apart from polo, he had acquired a taste for horse racing, with himself as jockey. Duchess Lily had promised him a pony, and he had expected to find it waiting for him in Bombay. It wasn’t there. He wrote Jennie of his disappointment. She was unsympathetic: “It may be dead for all I know, but if it is not I want you to promise me to sell it.” She and the Prince of Wales had discussed it, “& he begged me to tell you that you ought not to race… it is next to impossible to race in India & keep clean hands.” Winston bridled: “I do not at all want to sell it—and I cannot see that it is unwise of me to keep it…. Everyone out here possesses an animal of one sort or another which they race in the numerous local meetings…. Now I cannot believe that all who race—
on this small scale
—must necessarily soil their hands.” He scoffed at HRH: “He always loves ‘glittering generalities’ and it is so easy to say, ‘They are all cheats in India.’ Such a statement is of course nonsense and I am sure you will not believe it.” His mother shot back, “They all tell me that the racing in India is a very shifty unsatisfactory thing.” He boldly retorted: “You should tell His Royal Highness, if he says anything further about racing in India, that I intend to be just as much an example to the Indian turf as he is to the English as far as fair play goes.”
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Anticlimax followed. The pony, which arrived in November, was a lemon. Riding it, he came in third three times, and, of course, even second place would have been unacceptable to him. But in London his second cousin, the Marquess of Londonderry, put him up for the Turf Club; Brabazon seconded the nomination, and he was in. Loyally he registered his father’s old racing colors, chocolate and pink.

C
omradeship, ease, butterflies, roses, horses—obviously his new life was enchanting. But a new hunger was growing within him. That appetite, and the means he took to satisfy it, marks the end of his youth and the incipient signs of his emergence as an exceptional man. The transformation began with early pangs of intellectual curiosity. He found that he had “a liking for words and for the feel of words fitting and falling into their places like pennies in the slot. I caught myself using a good many words the meaning of which I could not define precisely. I admired these words, but was afraid to use them for fear of being absurd.” On the day his troopship left Southampton a friend had told him, “Christ’s gospel was the last word in ethics.” Churchill had been puzzled. What, he wondered, were ethics? Judging from the context, he assumed they meant the Public School Spirit, Playing the Game, honorable behavior, or patriotism. Then someone else remarked to him that ethics dealt, not merely with what you ought to do, but with why it ought to be done, and that there was a vast literature on the subject. He knew tactics, he had some grasp of politics, but “here in Bangalore there was no one to tell me about Ethics for love or money.” Next he remembered his father’s gibe about the Grand Remonstrance during the reign of Charles I. It occurred to him that his knowledge of history was limited and something ought to be done about it. He overheard a man using the phrase “the Socratic method.” Churchill wondered who Socrates was, or had been. He made inquiries. They were unsatisfactory. He was told that Socrates was a contentious Greek, hounded by a nagging wife, who became so troublesome that he was forced to take his own life. But Winston knew there must have been more to it than that. More than twenty-three hundred years had passed since the Greek’s death, and people were still arguing about it. “Such antagonisms,” Churchill reasoned, “do not spring from petty issues. Evidently Socrates had called something into being long ago which was very explosive. Intellectual dynamite! A moral bomb! But there was nothing about it in
The Queen’s Regulations.
”
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In the winter of 1896, as he approached his twenty-second birthday, he “resolved to read history, philosophy, economics, and things like that; and I wrote to my mother asking for such books as I had heard of on these topics.” He began with Gibbon’s eight-volume
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
At Harrow his history text had been
The Student’s Hume,
and he had found it dull. Now, “all through the glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of Polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it… and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the pages.” On January 14, 1897, we find him writing Jennie, “The eighth volume of Gibbon is still unread as I have been lured from its completion by [Winwood Reade’s]
The Martyrdom of Man
& a fine translation of the Republic of Plato: both of which are fascinating.” Then, remembering Woom’s brother-in-law by the fire at Ventnor, he tackled twelve volumes of Macaulay. On March 17 he wrote, “I have completed Macaulay’s History and very nearly finished his Essays.” He thought that Macaulay “is easier reading than Gibbon and in quite a different style. Macaulay crisp and forcible, Gibbon stately and impressive. Both are fascinating and show what a fine language English is since it can be pleasing in styles so different.” He was covering “fifty pages of Macaulay and twenty-five of Gibbon every day. There are only 100 of the latter’s 4,000 odd left now.”
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The scope of his explorations was broadening—“I read three or four books at a time to avoid tedium”—and he was poring over Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin, Aristotle (on politics only), Henry Fawcett’s
Political Economy,
William Lecky’s
European Morals
and
Rise and Influence of Rationalism,
Pascal’s
Provincial Letters,
Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations,
Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations,
Liang’s
Modern Science and Modern Thought,
Victor-Henri Rochefort’s
Memoirs,
the memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon, and Henry Hallam’s
Constitutional History.
Incredibly, he asked his mother to send him all one hundred volumes of the
Annual Register,
the record of British public events founded by Burke. He explained that he wanted to know “the detailed Parliamentary history (Debates, Divisions, Parties, cliques & caves)
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of the last 100 years.” Jennie balked at the expense—fourteen shillings a volume—but she did send twenty-seven. In using them, he first set down his opinion of an issue, then studied the debates. By this practice he hoped “to build up a scaffolding of logical and consistent views which will perhaps tend to the creation of a logical and consistent mind. Of course the
Annual Register
is valuable only for its facts. A good knowledge of these would arm me with a sharp sword. Macaulay, Gibbon, Plato etc must train the muscles to wield that sword to the greatest effect.”
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He was scrawling letters to Jennie, Jack, Welldon, and Cockran, rekindling issues which had fired Parliaments of the past but were now resolved or at least dormant. Disraeli’s support for the popular election of Scottish clergymen won his approval; Gladstone’s opposition to parliamentary reform, his disapproval. He thought Lord Northbrook right in banning the export of Indian grain during the famine of 1873–1874. He favored the Irish Coercion Laws, advocated the establishment of a criminal appeals court in England, came down hard on the side of slum clearance, death duties, compulsory vaccination, and capital punishment in public (“Justice in every form should not shrink from publicity”), and rejected the charge that newspapers fanned the flames of war—a curious inference from one who knew the role of Pulitzer’s
World
and Hearst’s
Journal
in Cuba. What sort of education, he asked rhetorically, could a pupil anticipate in a tax-supported school? “Reading and writing, the knowledge of sufficient arithmetic to enable the individual to keep his accounts; the singing of patriotic songs and a gymnastic course is all that he may expect.” Woman suffrage was ridiculous, “contrary to natural law and the practice of civilized states.” Wives were “adequately represented by their husbands.” Spinsters would back religious intolerance and “every kind of hysterical fad.” Admit females to the polls and “all power passes to their hands.” Indeed, “if you give women votes you must ultimately allow women to sit as members of Parliament.” It was, he darkly prophesied, “only the thin end of the wedge.”
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His autodidacticism precipitated a religious crisis. At Harrow he had attended daily prayers and Sunday services; in the army he participated in church parades. Until now he had never doubted their value. The anticipation of a hereafter, he had assumed, justifiably disciplined the lower classes and served as an incentive for middle-class morality. Indian sects were similarly useful, provided they did not degenerate into fanaticism. But the books he was now reading challenged the underpinning of everything he had learned since childhood. Gibbon, Reade, and Lecky convinced him that he had been gulled, and as a consequence he “passed through a violent and aggressive anti-religious phase which, had it lasted, might have made me a nuisance.” This, of course, is a common experience among the self-educated. But Churchill’s resolution of it was unusual. In moments of danger in Cuba and later, he instinctively recited prayers he had learned at Woom’s knee. He survived. He asked for lesser gifts, “and nearly always in these years, and indeed throughout my life, I got what I wanted. This practice seemed perfectly natural, and just as real as the reasoning process which contradicted it so sharply.” In a book of quotations he had read:
“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.”
Why, he asked himself, should he discard the reasons of the heart for those of the head? Why not enjoy both? He therefore adopted “quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe, while at the same time leaving reason to pursue unfettered whatever paths she was capable of treading.”
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