The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (53 page)

In a sense this was true, but the object of his designs was not the marriage bed but political office. Pamela can scarcely be blamed if she found this unflattering. In retrospect Winston appears to have been a very eligible bachelor. Yet vaunting ambition can be unattractive in a young man. It can even be unpleasant for him. In a revealing note, Churchill wrote that though tempted, “I have no right to dally in the pleasant valleys of amusement.” Then, in gnawing terror: “What an awful thing it will be if I don’t come off. It will break my heart for I have nothing else but ambition to cling to.” So he turned from arms which would have welcomed him and sought hands that could help him up. He lunched at the Carlton Club with rising Tories of his generation: Ian Malcolm, Lord Hugh Cecil, Lord Percy, and Lord Balcarres. The discussion was sharper and far more clever than anything he had heard in his regimental mess; he felt like an “earthen pot among the brass” and considered attending Oxford or Cambridge—until he learned he must first pass examinations in Latin and Greek. Then he discovered that companions at the Tory club possessed another political asset he lacked. They were rich. At Conservative party headquarters Fitzroy Stewart introduced him to Richard Middleton, “the Skipper,” or party manager. Middleton greeted him warmly. He said the party would certainly find him a seat, and soon. Then he delicately raised the question of money. How much could Churchill pay for a constituency? Winston, taken aback, replied that he could meet his campaign expenses and no more. The Skipper grew distant. Safe seats, he said, cost MPs as much as £1,000 a year; “forlorn hopes” were cheap, but few were free. Churchill had already decided that he could not afford to serve HRH’s mother as an army officer—“Her Majesty was so stinted by Parliament,” he later said, “that she was not able to pay even a living wage”—and this strengthened his resolve. His pen had already brought him five times as much as his soldier’s salary. His Sudan dispatches alone had produced £300. Now the
Pioneer
was offering him £3 a week for letters from London. That in itself would be more than the income of a subaltern. As he wrote Duchess Fanny: “I can live cheaper & earn more as a writer, special correspondent or journalist: and this work is moreover more congenial and more likely to assist me in pursuing the larger ends of life.”
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He would have quit the army then, while his
Morning Post
pieces were still the talk of Fleet Street, had it not been for India’s annual Inter-Regimental Tournament, now imminent. It may seem strange that a young man afire with ambition should journey halfway around the world to play a game, but to Churchill polo was “the emperor of games,” almost a religion. So he sailed the first week in December aboard the S.S.
Osiris
and rejoined the Fourth Hussars just before Christmas. The trip north from Bangalore to the tournament ground at Meerut was another fourteen hundred miles by special train, with a two-week pause spent as guests of Sir Pertab Singh, regent of Jodhpur. They practiced there with local players, though it was eerie; the field was constantly enveloped in clouds of red dust, through which turbaned figures galloped at full speed, following the ball by the sound of its whistle. Then, the night before they were to leave for Meerut, calamity befell them. Churchill slipped on a stone staircase, and out went his shoulder. The team was dismayed. He was their No. 1. They had brought along an extra player, and he suggested a substitution, but they voted to keep him in, his elbow bound to his side. The weather was fine, the crowd huge, and their opponents, in the final, the formidable Fourth Dragoon Guards. In a close, furious match, the Fourth Hussars won the cup, 4–3. And Churchill, despite his disability, was the star. He wrote his mother from Calcutta on March 3: “I hit three goals out of four in the winning match so that my journey to India was not futile as far as the regiment was concerned.”
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Pamela Plowden, 1892

After a week in Calcutta as the guest of the new viceroy (the vicereine, Lady Curzon, wrote Jennie, “People in India have an immense opinion of Winston & his book”), he returned to Bangalore, forwarded his resignation papers to London, and sat misty-eyed while his fellow officers drank his health for the last time. “Discipline and comradeship” were the lessons he had learned in the regiment, he wrote, and “perhaps after all they are just as valuable as the lore of the universities. Still,” he added, “one would like to have both.” His university continued to be his books—he could now read at great speed—and his writing had become his livelihood.
Macmillan’s Magazine
was paying a hundred pounds for serial rights to
Savrola
. For
The River War,
as he now called his new manuscript, he had even greater expectations. He had worked on it during the voyage over, in Jodhpur, in Meerut, and Calcutta; he continued writing it in Bangalore and on the trip home. To his mother he wrote that he was at it “all day & every day…. My hand gets so cramped. I am writing every word twice & some parts three times. It ought to be good since it is the best I can do.”
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He was still learning. Macaulay was the real architect of
The River War,
and the balanced and ironical apothegms which appeared from time to time were borrowed from Gibbon. But his own style was nearly formed now. It was evident, not only on paper, but also in conversation, a fact noted during his trip homeward by a fellow passenger, the gifted G. W. Steevens of the
Daily Mail.
When they docked, Steevens filed a story about him, prophesying that he might become “a great popular leader, a great journalist, or the founder of a great advertising business.” He said Churchill was “born a demagogue, and he happens to know it. The master strain in his character is the rhetorician. Platform speeches and leading articles flow from him almost against his will. At dinner he talks and talks, and you can hardly tell when he leaves off quoting his one idol, Macaulay, and begins his other, Winston Churchill…. We shall hear more about this in the course of ten years…. At the rate he goes there will hardly be room for him in Parliament at thirty or in England at forty.”
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Kitchener tried to see to it that there was hardly room for him in Cairo, where he broke his journey to deepen his research on the Nile. The Sirdar had forbidden Major James Watson, his aide-de-camp in the Sudan, to furnish Churchill with any documents. Winston solved the problem, as many another writer has, by simply interviewing Watson. He also lunched with Lord Cromer, who “afterwards did me the honour of talking to me about the Soudan, its past and its future with reference to my book for more than two hours and a half.” Cromer saw him twice more, provided him with letters of introduction to everyone of importance in Egypt, and introduced him to the khedive. Winston’s letter to Jennie written at Cairo’s Savoy Hotel immediately afterward serves as a vintage example of the British contempt which outraged the Empire’s darker subjects. “I was much amused,” he told her, “by observing the relations between the British Agent and the
de jure
Ruler of Egypt. The Khedive’s attitude reminded me of a school-boy who is brought to see another school-boy in the presence of the head-master. But he seemed to me to be an amiable young man who tries to take an intelligent interest in the affairs of his kingdom, which, since they have passed entirely beyond his control is, to say the least, very praiseworthy.”
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He finished the manuscript—now destined to be two fat volumes, running, with maps, to nearly a thousand pages—in Great Cumberland Place. On May 3, 1899, he noted: “Miss P. has been vy much impressed with the Proofs of the first two chapters of
The River War.
” Pamela was still trying. Jennie, on the other hand, was busy pursuing literary ambitions of her own, launching a competitor to
Yellow Book
called the
Anglo-Saxon Review,
which, at a price of five dollars in the United States and a guinea in England, was destined to last eleven issues before she ran out of money. Winston’s own finances were unchanged. He had high and, as it turned out, justifiable hopes for his new work, but nothing in hand except the
Macmillan’s
check. Nevertheless, he was determined to stand for office now. He would, of course, run as a Conservative. It didn’t matter that Gibbon had been a protégé of a renegade Tory and Macaulay a Whig, a precursor of the Liberals, or that all the indignation over Kitchener’s profanation of the Mahdi’s remains lay on the Liberal side of the House of Commons, while the Conservatives, as he noted from the Strangers’ Gallery, seemed to think it “rather a lark.” The explanation, of course, is that to desert the Tories would have been to betray his father’s memory. He couldn’t do that, at least not in 1899.
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The constituency chosen for him was Oldham, a working-class district in Lancashire, and the chooser, at the outset, was Robert Ascroft, one of the two Tory MPs who represented it. Ascroft wanted Churchill to run with him. Suddenly he died. Oldham’s other MP resigned. That called for a double by-election. The Skipper expected to lose both seats, hoping he would win them back on the rebound in the next general election, and he picked Winston and a radical Conservative for the sacrifice. Winston knew how small his chances were, but reasoned that any fight was better than none. On June 20 he wrote Miss Plowden: “I have just returned from Oldham overnight. The whole thing is in my hands as far as the Tory Party there go.” He wanted her to campaign with him. She refused; reading proofs was one thing, sweaty politics quite another. She sent him encouragement, a charm, and word that she would remain in London. In his reply he said he understood; “it would perhaps have been a mistake—but I shall be sorry nevertheless.” He was still drawn to her, and kept her posted with bulletins on his progress. His left tonsil became inflamed; Dr. Roose, ever reliable, put a throat spray in the mail. On June 28 Winston wrote that “the big meeting was a great success and although I spoke for fifty minutes my throat is no worse—but rather better. We are now in the middle of the fight.” Four days later he reported, “A vy busy week has closed. I now make speeches involuntarily. Yesterday I delivered no fewer than eight.” He felt he was improving: “At each meeting I am conscious of growing powers and facilities of speech, and it is in this that I shall find my consolation should the result be, as is probable, unfortunate. But I still wear your charm—so who can tell. Write to me Pamela—I have had you in my mind more perhaps this week than ever.” The London papers had predicted his defeat. He didn’t doubt it, or resent it; “after all,” he told her, “the battle in the end must be to the strong.”
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Churchill in his first, unsuccessful, campaign for Parliament

This Nietzschean sloganeering, though in high favor at the time—Winston was actually quoting John Davidson, a popular poet of the 1890s—begs the question. The fact is that while he spoke well, he was not yet a competent politician. Disraeli had warned Conservatives never to neglect social issues when soliciting blue-collar votes; so, in fact, had Lord Randolph Churchill. Winston was addressing undernourished, underpaid textile workmen, most of whom still wore wooden clogs. He told them: “Never before were there so many people in England, and never before have they had so much to eat.” He praised the status quo, the Conservatives, Irish policy, “pride in our Empire,” and “love for the ancient traditions of the realm.” Although he also urged provisions for the poor—Woom was not forgotten—he was vulnerable to the charge that he represented the vested interests, despite the fact that both Liberal candidates were wealthy men. He even ran afoul of his own party. Salisbury had introduced a bill increasing government support of the Anglican church. Three days before the election Churchill announced that, if elected, he would vote against it. His words were flung at the embarrassed Tories in Parliament. Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader in the Commons—“the divine Arthur” of the fashionable Panshanger set—said, “I thought he was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises.”
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