The Rest Is History - 239: Young Churchill: Born to Lead

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

‘The child is the father of the man.’ In the first episode of this mini-series on Young Churchill, Tom and Dominic explore the early life of Winston Churchill. They discuss the cruelty of his parents, his deeply imbued sense of destiny, and the razor sharp wit of the future Prime Minister. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app over a now peaceful world. Great upheavals, terrible struggles, wars such as one cannot imagine.

And I tell you, London will be in danger. London will be attacked. And I shall be very prominent in the defence of London. I see further ahead than you do. I see into the future. This country will be subjected somehow to a tremendous invasion, by what means I do not know. But I tell you, I shall be in command of the defence of London and I shall save London and England. Dominic, no question who that was, because the impression was absolutely spot on. That was, of course, Winston Churchill. But Dominic, I'm playing a trick because he didn't actually sound like that because when he said that he was 16. He was a harrow and he was he was looking into the future um and it's a reminder

so if we you know with wordsworth we say the child is father to the man the idea of churchill as the savior of his nation was there in the great man's head perhaps right from the very beginning um and so you suggested didn't you that it might be fun to do not not because we haven't actually done any episodes focused on churchill up until now but to do one looking at young churchill the making of the man yes tom so that was 1891 the summer of 1891 and churchill was a harrow uh he had gone to chapel it's a funny story he'd gone to chapel even song and he and his friend merlin evans who went on to become a funny story. He'd gone to chapel, even song. And he and his friend Merlin Evans, who went on to become a diplomat, they went back to their boarding house.

And they were just sort of messing around as teenagers are just chatting. And they talk about what they're going to do when they grow up. And I think Merlin Evans says, well, I'll probably be a diplomat like my father. And Churchill, as your uncanny impersonation captures, basically i'm gonna save the empire and um of course if it was anybody else well if it was if it was anybody you would say what a demented and incredibly bumptious thing and ludicrous thing for teenage boys but it was very well i mean there's a lot of bumptiousness in churchill's story isn't there but but it's not just the bumptiousness it's also the the slight faith in the supernatural the sense of a kind of destiny um a sense of the weird as the uh the anglo-saxons might put it because he he was interested in the idea that the future could

be foretold because um a few years later in 1898 he gets taken by his aunt to see a woman called Mrs. Charlotte Robinson, who apparently was the most famous palm reader of the day. So he took over. What did Mrs. Robinson discover? He will save the empire. So Churchill, right from the beginning, has a sense of his own destiny, that he's destined for great things. And when he goes off on campaign,

when bullets are pinging around him, when he's performing, frankly, insane feats of courage and bravery, he seems to do it almost in the consciousness that he is fated to survive, that he could not have been born simply to be snuffed out, you know, in some obscure skirmish on the Northwest frontier, that he has been born and is living for some great purpose. And he does seem to have taken that relatively serious, doesn't he? He definitely thinks that his life is a great drama. So Andrew Roberts' biography, the most recent biography, is sort of the theme of it, is this idea. It sort of takes its cue from these famous words that Churchill writes after he became Prime Minister. So in the summer of 1940,

when Britain is at its lowest ebb in the Second World War, facing apparent Nazi invasion and so on. And Churchill famously wrote afterwards, I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial. And it's sort of the classic sort of slightly overblown, grandiose thing that Churchill says and writes. And yet you're absolutely right, I think, that he believed it. He believed he was walking with destiny. The other funny thing, though, is that his father died young and Churchill will come on to his father because it's an absolutely engrossing, fascinating story about Churchill's relationship with his family and how that formed him. But his father died young, and I think Churchill, you know,

he thought he would probably have 40 to 50 years on earth, and he was determined to wring out of them in a way that puts the rest of us, makes the rest of us feel so limp and pallid by comparison. He was determined to wring out of every moment to an almost sort of superhuman degree and frankly i would agree that a lot of people found incredibly irritating he was determined to always be the center of attention always get the absolute the most fun and adventure out of every single moment yeah and and it's almost kind of scandalous isn't it it's it's a cause of scandal his determination to be the center of attention everywhere. But it's clearly really, really important. So 1897, a year before he goes to see the palm reader, he's on the Hindu Kusha and he writes to his mother, I have faith in my star conviction that you have to be born into the aristocracy of the greatest power on the face of the earth, really, to feel blazing within you from the early years, do you think?

I suppose so, Tom. I mean, it's the kind of thing a Roman senator might have said or someone at the top of the chinese imperial apparatus it's easier to think that if of course if you have the habit of global rule and you're at the top of you're the top of the social pyramid i mean churchill is incredibly pampered all his life he doesn't ever have to cook for himself there's this famous thing i saw you put the quotation on twitter i i his wife asks him if he could cook or something. In the 1950s, he says, I can boil an egg. I have seen it done.

But then he never actually does it. He could pour out champagne. Yes. He once writes, I think when he's a teenager, he writes to his parents or to one of his friends or something, and he says that he's had the ultimate indignity. He's had to travel second class on the train. He'll never do it again.

I will never travel second again by Jove. So this, you're absolutely right, he's completely spoiled and well, he is and he isn't. We should come on to, because when you tell the life story of Churchill, the young Churchill, one of the nice things

about it is we don't have to get into all the controversies that attend his later years yet, because they're far around the corner. But also, that life story is actually, in many ways, it seems like it's going to be the narrative of somebody who ends up terribly disturbed or an utter failure, because he has actually a pretty awful family upbringing. His parents treat him abysmally and i always think the story of churchill i i don't think i've apart from maybe general gordon i don't think i've had as much fun researching a subject for the rest of history as i did with this it is isn't it he is such an ebullient character he's also conscious of himself as a character so his book my early life is an

absolutely wonderful read and if listeners you, if they take anything from this podcast, you know, you can read it online. It's funny. It's one of the great autobiographies, actually. I think one of the most enjoyable autobiographies. Well, it's – so when he was at Harrow, he was addicted to tales of Daring Do, Ryder Haggard and all that kind of stuff. And in a way, he goes out and he leads that kind of life. And Conan Doyle, who was a war correspondent with him in South Africa, not as well paid as Churchill, because Churchill by that point was the best paid war correspondent probably in the world. But he said that of Churchill's prose know it was the most masterly and that that ability of churchill not just to write an adventure story but to situate

himself in the center of it is pretty unique i think yeah i mean really i'm trying to i mean maybe caesar nobody else really yes for people who hate Churchill, it must be very annoying that he's such a good writer, as well as his life contains so many episodes of conspicuous courage. You know, it's impossible to dislike him after reading all these stories. You said the controversy is part. I mean, one of the things, of course, that has made Churchill controversial is that he's an unabashed apologist for the empire. I mean, he loves the empire. He loves everything about it. And what he loves about the empire is the

kind of thing that enthused people in the 1890s and the 1900s. So in other words, it's not about tariffs or imperial preference or all the kind of, you know, the economic side of it. It's the dash, it's the colour. It's the kind of thing that James Morris, who then became Jan Morris, wrote about in her great trilogy about the British Empire. It's the colour, it's the swagger of it, it's the fun of it. And when I say the fun of it, it's the fun of it if you are a British adventurer, surviving endless scrapes, and then coming back and being able to write it up. And that, I think, is what Churchill is all about. He sees it as a playground, I think, as a colossal playground where he can go and have adventures at the drop of a hat.

It's a kind of computer game, a real computer game, that kind of thing where you go from level to level and you have adventure after adventure. It's that kind of thing, I think. So there are all these episodes to come, which we will turn to. So he goes to Cuba. He goes to the Northwest Frontier. He goes to the Sudan. I mean, that's an incredible story.

And then, of course, South Africa, when he's taken prisoner and he escapes from the Boer. Well, actually, it's like Flashman, isn't it? It's like the way that Flashman pops up in every major campaign going. For a brief period, Churchill is at the heart of every imperial adventure that there is i mean it's astonishing and i i'm going to confess dominic that i i have never read a straight biography of churchill i just kind of and it's a terrible thing to admit but i um it's a bit like people who say they've never listened to a beatles album all the way through because it's ubiquitous it's ubiquitous so i kind of have a vague sense of the story but like you i found i

found this just riotously entertaining and i had no idea well at least i had no i hadn't fully understood just how dramatic a story this is yeah it really is brilliant and i think the comparison with general gordon is is exact except that general gordon was a much more austere serious self-contained figure whereas churchill you would it was none of those things well churchill has two things i think which will really come out in this story one is he really does even if you despise churchill you despise the empire he despises everything he stood for he has an absolutely tremendous sense of humor and he's very aware of himself as a comic character, as well as a heroic one.

So I think that's one thing. But he also has this enormous generosity of spirit, actually. So the way he talks about his adversaries, we'll come onto this, in the Northwest Frontier, or on the Northwest Frontier, in the Sudan, there is a sort of, and it was a terrible cliche, there is an irrepressible humanity to him. He never demonizes the people he's sort of

shooting at in fact he often says what tremendously noble opponents they are all this kind of thing um which makes him a very endearing character i think to to read about so should we start at the beginning tom yes and i suppose at the beginning really is um john churchill who becomes the first duke of marlborough would you say yeah i suppose so because he's the great model for churchill he's his ancestor it's very important to churchill um that he's descended from marlborough in the tv film the gathering storm where albert finney played churchill so it's about churchill in the 1930s about 20 years ago lovely film actually that starts with churchill having a vision of marlborough at the battle of blenheim so having won the battle of blenheim in 1704, Churchill's great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough,

was rewarded with Blenheim Palace, the most magnificent house in England, if not perhaps in Europe. Do you know what he wrote on the evening of the Battle of Blenheim in his diary? No. He wrote, won the Battle of Blenheim, which is one of my favourite ever diary entries. So he was already conscious of it being the Battle of Blenheim, which is one of my favourite ever diary entries. So he was already conscious of it being the Battle of Blenheim. Yeah, he was. Well, because he named it, because he'd won it. So he had the right to name it. So we should just say, shouldn't we, that this is part of a European land war in which the British land forces win a succession of astonishing victories, almost entirely due to the generalship

of John Churchill, who becomes the Duke of Marlborough. And he gets given this enormous house, kind of Versailles of England, Blenheim Palace. And this in due course is where Churchill will be born. Right, exactly. So it's 1874. It's the 30th of November, 1874, 1.30 in the morning. It's in a ground floor room.

His mother is an american socialite called jenny jerome and his father is lord randolph churchill who is a younger son of the duke of marlborough and you know where they met i do and i thought you would love this detail so they met no you tell you tell me you tell us because i know it means a lot to you so they met at uh the yachting regatta at cows and one can only assume that both of them were wearing the correct footwear because it was um it was a whirlwind romance wasn't it was a genuine passion of the heart lord randolph who is an a young tory politician kind of up-and-coming tory populist politician but second son so that's a key detail

exactly he proposed after three days to jenny jerome um so it's a key detail. Exactly. He proposed after three days to Jenny Jerome. So it's a genuine love match. And actually in later life, when people were rude about Churchill's parents, even after they were dead, Churchill sued them. Churchill sued them for libel. Somebody described him in 1937 as the first fruit of the first famous snob dollar marriage and churchill was outraged and won 500 pounds in damages from the publishers because he said it had been a genuine love match and it was very important to him yeah he thought his parent will come on to the extraordinary sentimental romanticization that churchill does of his parents who were both absolutely terrible people. Yes, they really were. But I mean, the force of that criticism that so upset Churchill was that it becomes a cliche, doesn't it? It becomes a kind of stereotype

of the impoverished English aristocrat marrying up with the daughter of some American plutocrat. And Jenny Churchill's father, I mean, he'd lost quite a lot of money in a kind of some crash or something that had happened that were always happening in America. Yeah, the crash of 1873. But I mean, he's still in the New York Times and a kind of vast chunk of Manhattan. And so he was quite well off. He was. And so that sense of being American as well as British obviously will be hugely important to Churchill, and particularly in the Second World War. But I mean, throughout his life.

Definitely in later life, yeah. And I think, so those two characters, so Jenny Jerome, Jenny Churchill, she becomes, is a very, I don't want to be too harsh on her, but really she emerges from the story as a very spoiled, superficial, self-interested person. She has a series of affairs. She rocks a tight riding habit. She does. She wears her riding habits very tightly cut she's all she's like skittles the uh the

mistress of the duke of cambridge are very much a friend of the rest is history she she's a society figure she's the kind of person who today would be constantly pictured in kind of gossip in hello magazine or or something and lord randolph so churchill's father he is i said he was a tory populist he's sort of disraelian politician and he's a conservative he believes in the empire and so on but he also he's sort of culture he's a demagogue and well his demagogue is too strong but he cultivates the masses mass appeal so he's he very much sort of believes in something he calls tory democracy which is sort of he gets asked doesn't he by a friend to to explain what he means by tory democracy to which lord randolph replied i believe it to

be principally opportunism engaging the honest reply so it's basically about sort of whipping up he's great at whipping up crowds with talk of the kind of the queen, the empire, socialists are terribly bad people. The liberals are all kind of prigs and misery gutses. And he sort of panders to the crowds and is very sort of successful at doing that and very popular as a sort of rising force in the Conservative Party. But he's also incredibly unreliable. He's an absolute shower, isn't he? Yeah, he's a terrible man. Terry Thomas would play him.

Yeah. But a sort of more sinister Terry Thomas, sort of syphilitic Terry Thomas. So I was reading Andrew Roberts' biography, and he talks about, so Churchill spends his early years in Dublin. You know, he's brought up in Dublin. And Lord Randolph has gone there to work as private secretary to his father, who has been appointed the Viceroy and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by Disraeli.

And Andrew Roberts has this sentence, which made my eyes pop. And I wanted to know more. Lord Randolph had to leave London because he was being socially ostracized by the Prince of Wales after trying unsuccessfully to blackmail him over a scandal involving Randolph's elder brother, the Marquess of Blanford, some compromising love letters and a married former mistress of the Prince. And Andrew Roberts just leaves that amazing sentence. Do you know what was going on there? I don't, but at the very next sentence, Andrew Roberts just says,

it was one of the very many unedifying scrapes in which Lord Randolph found himself during his short, unstable, but undeniably exciting life. Yes, so Lord Randolph, I don't know the details of this scandal. I mean, obviously the future Edward VII, he was always being involved in scandals to do with cards and women and so on. And Lord Randolph clearly moves on the,

he moves in his set, but is just seen by everybody as this- Absolutely rotter. Talented, but utterly unt seen by everybody as this talented, but utterly untrustworthy and unreliable. I mean, actually, funny enough, Boris Johnson models himself on Winston Churchill, but Lord Randolph might be a better comparison. So Lord Randolph is sort of banned from London for three years,

and he goes off to Dublin. And that's where Winston has his first memories. So his very first memory he writes in my early life, he says, I remember my grandfather, the Viceroy, unveiling the statue of Lord Goff, who was an imperial hero in 1878. And he remembers his grandfather talking to the crowd and using a particular phrase,

and with a withering volley, he shattered the enemy's line. Very kind of Churchillian phrase. Churchill claims that even though he was three, this phrase stuck in his memory. The other thing that's... So My Early Life is a genuinely very, very funny read. I mean, we have to stop the podcast just to generate into us reading out chunks. But the other thing that Churchill remembers from his time at Dublin,

he says, they were booked to go to a pantomime. Did you see this, Tom? He's were booked to go to a pantomime. Did you see this, Tom? He's all excited about going to this pantomime. And he says, then we were told we could not go to the pantomime because the theatre had been burned down. All that was found for the manager was the key that had been in his pocket. We were promised as a consolation for not going to the pantomime to go the next day and see the ruins of the building.

I wanted very much to see the key, but this request does not seem to have been well but it's brilliant isn't it because because it's you're seeing it through a child's eyes that's exactly the kind of thing a child would say and yes and it's it's a brilliant example of his ability to write prose i mean joyce would be proud of that you know the portrait of the artist's young man you know begins with the child's perspective and churchill's doing exactly the same there churchill is very good at getting into other people's heads in his books so there's a very very funny moment we'll come to where he talks about the obstacles that have been thrown in his path by people who think he's a he's a bumptious little sod basically and he's very funny at sort of imagining what they think of him but yes he so he's a he's a pretty

spoiled little boy there he is in dublin he's got a colossal think of him but yes he so he's a he's a pretty spoiled little boy there he is in dublin he's got a colossal number of toy soldiers and he his friends later say he he's obsessed with guns with swords with the army with all these kind of things well the fact that he remembers that phrase from his grandfather about the um the withering volley shattering the enemy's line and then he has this he has this complete attic doesn't he's kind of playroom full of lines and lines of soldiers um suggests that this is really the wellspring of his his enthusiasm i mean this is what he really really loves but the counter to that is that he so it sounds like an idyllic childhood but as we said

his parents are just awful people and they really they could not treat him more neglectfully or okay let's let's take a break there because this is such an important theme and it's it's such a kind of sad story really that i think it it would benefit from um from a fresh. So we will see you back after this break and when we come back, a terrible tale of neglectful parenting. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. This episode of The Rest Is History is sponsored by UnHerd, the online magazine where you can read

some of British journalism's most brilliant and original thinkers, like me. And as our subject today is the young Winston Churchill, why not check out Will Lloyd's piece about The Churchill Factor, a biography of the great man by one Boris Johnson, whatever happened to him. Will says the point of the Churchill factor to kick enough biographical sand in people's eyes until when they looked up, they could no longer see where Churchill started and Johnson ended. Churchill's distractors, says Johnson, are snobbish and a teensy bit jealous, like Johnson's. Churchill's writing was a way of dramatizing and publicizing jealous, like Johnson's. Churchill's writing was a way of dramatising and publicising himself, like Johnson's. Churchill's disloyalty to party colleagues was magnificent, like Johnson's. It becomes absurd. In habits, Churchill, and I can't find

another biographer who's made this claim, superficially resembled a Bertie Worcester figure, just like Johnson. Now, as ever, if you like the sound of that, a special offer awaits listeners of The Rest Is History for their daily hit of world-class writing. You get the first 10 weeks free, and thereafter, it will be just £1 a week, which is pretty much nothing, for an UnHerd subscription. So if you want to take them up on that splendid, unmissable, once-in-a-lifetime offer, then go to unherd.com slash rest. That's U-N-H-E-R-D dot com slash rest. Winston is going back to school today. Entre nous.

I do not feel very sorry, for he certainly is a handful. Is that Marilyn Monroe, Tom? That was Jenny Churchill. That was Winston Churchill's mother. She spoke exactly like that. Right. I assume, actually, she probably spoke in a pretty posh English accent, wouldn't she? She'd be like Kathar Catherine Hepburn, I imagine.

You know, that sort of mid-Atlantic kind of slightly aristocratic kind of voice. But I imagine after, you know, 20 years hanging out with Prince of Wales, she would probably have sounded pretty Downton Abbey. Yeah, so that's, I mean, she's very much taken on the traditional upper class British attitude to children, which is basically to have nothing to do with them, and pack them off to boarding schools as soon as possible, which was very much Churchill's fate. And this was absolutely standard behaviour. I mean, this is what every upper-class parent would do. But the behaviour of Churchill's parents are exceptional, even by the standards of the age, would you say? I definitely think that it's exceptional. So yes, you're absolutely right. Lots of aristocratic

children were packed off to boarding school, but that doesn't mean that their parents didn't show them interest and affection outside that. What happens to Churchill is his parents show him absolutely no affection and interest at all. In fact, quite the reverse. They constantly tell him that he's a failure, that he's an annoyance, that he's an intrusion. I mean, they really bully him, actually. I mean, there's no other way of describing it i mean if it's given a couple of example i mean he said he worships his parents he idolized his father lord randolph all his life he he dreamed of emulating his father and making his father he has a dream of his father coming to see him in the war in the second World War or something like that.

It's actually an incredible story. He's having dinner with his daughter and his son. And there's a spare chair. And his daughter says to Sarah, says to Churchill, if you could have anyone in that chair right now, who would you have? Thinking he's going to say Napoleon or Julius Caesar or whatever. And he says, oh, obviously my father. And that is then the cue for him to say he had a dream about his father recently, in which his father visited him as a ghost. And his family persuaded him to write this down and turn it into a little story,

which he did, but he never published it. It was kept within the family. And in the dream, Lord Randolph comes to visit Churchill. and where everything every time churchill tries to tell him what he's done what he's achieved you know he did save the empire he was prime minister his father interrupts him and says oh you're a total failure i'll never talk about politics with you you don't know anything about it and then just as churchill is poised to tell him what he's actually achieved in his life his father vanishes um and he never gets the chance. And of course, there's an element of sort of self-nathologizing in this story, but it clearly speaks to a deep sort of lack at the heart of Churchill. I mean, Churchill says at one point, in another occasion, he's having dinner with his

son, Randolph, named after his father in the 1930s. And at the end of the dinner, Churchill said to his son, we have this evening had a longer period of continuous conversation together than the total, which I had with my father in the whole course of his life. So they never really talked together. His mother, he worshipped his mother. He said, in my early life, he says, my mother seemed to me a fairy princess, a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power. She shone for me like the evening star. I loved her dearly, but at a distance. And that, at a distance.

So when they sent him off to school, they take no interest in him. They don't answer his letters. Jenny, I mean, Andrew Roberts again in his biography, he's gone through her diaries. In 1882, in the first seven months of 1882, she sees her children 13 times. She goes shopping 11 times. She goes painting 25 times. She has lunch with her friend, Lady Blanche Hosier, 26 times. She has tea with the Conservative MP, Arthur Balfour, 10 times.

She goes out to parties literally every single night. But in all this period she barely ever sees her children and when she does she resents it and she'll often write them letters saying stop asking to see me stop asking to come home at christmas all these kinds of things right so that's bad but you've talked about them bullying young winston um and telling him he's useless telling me stupid all that kind of thing and he does seem to have internalized it because one of the odd things is that it's one of the famous details of my early life in which he says that he portrays himself as a dunce, that he's absolutely hopeless, that he can barely read. He's always the bottom of the form. But clearly this isn't true. I mean,

he's a very bright boy. I mean, obviously he's a bright boy of course he is but but he's he's recognized by his teachers as being bright he comes you know he's top of the form in classics and all kinds of things and again he makes this great play about how you know he doesn't know any latin or greek or anything but he did so what do you think is going on there do you think this is he's trying to to show that parents' poor opinion of him was right? Or what do you think? I think we all have narratives of ourselves, don't we? I mean, no matter how humdrum our lives might appear to be, we have our own kind of romantic melodramas of our own life.

And I think Churchill more than most. And this idea that he had triumphed over a kind of Dickensian upbringing of sort of being beaten and being downtrodden, I think is very important. Well, he was beaten. Well, he was. Yes, absolutely. He was. Because his first his first head teacher was a psychopath, wasn't he? Yes. A sadist, I think is the description. Yeah. It's the kind of guy who would he would pop up in in the news of the world when it was still being published.

Well, the sort of person from an Evelyn War novel or something. so his name is hw sneed kinnisley and churchill has a hilarious description of basically he's seven years old and somebody says to him you have to go to school and they take him to the school st george's ascot which is a kind of prep it's it's genuinely a preparatory school because it prepares you for Eton or for Harrow. And they go off and his mum has tea with the headmaster and then just leaves him. And he absolutely hates it. He is beaten all the time. One of his friends said later, they remembered him being flogged for taking sugar from the pantry. And then Churchill took the headmaster's straw hat and kicked it to pieces in rage. He's constantly in trouble with the headmaster. He's always being beaten. And actually, the school is so bad that even his parents take him out after two years.

So he goes to Hove, doesn't he? He goes to Hove. And there's a brilliant, I mean, I thought of you when I read this. Is this the thing with Mensa? Yeah. He meets the latin teacher for the first time so that the latin teacher introduces him to the word mensa and churchill says what does what does it mean and there's the whole sort of what is it called the declension or the conjugation i can't remember the and the the guy says uh mensa means a table then why does mensa also mean o table i inquired andired. And what does O-table mean?

Mensa O-table is the vocative case, says the teacher. And Churchill says, and the teacher then says, well, this is what you would use in addressing a table, in invoking a table. You would use it in speaking to a table, Churchill says. But I never do speak to a table. And then the teacher loses his temper and says, you're impertinent you'll be punished and punished let me tell you very severely and Churchill then has this wonderful line such was my first introduction to the classics from which I have been told many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit and this is the thing that he paints himself as the philistine who

doesn't understand latin and. But also someone who, because he then he has the famous line, doesn't he, that because he's not focusing on Latin and Greek, therefore he gets instruction in English. And thus I got into my bones, the central structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.

Wonderful phrase. The ordinary British sentence, a noble thing. And it casts him, even as he is unapologetically aristocratic, he's also able to portray himself as the voice of the common man. Well, exactly, because this is when he's gone to Harrow. So he then goes to Harrow. He doesn't go to Eton, which might seem a surprise.

Harrow was fashionable at the end of the 19th century because it was on a hill. And so people thought, oh, it's healthy. You'll escape from the fetid air of London and breathe the clean air of Harrow on the hill. So he does the entrance exam in 1888. And he says, it was remarkable because I was found unable to answer a single question in the Latin paper.

I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question. One. After much reflection, I put a bracket around it. One. But thereafter, I could not think of anything connected with the question that was either relevant or true. So he leaves it completely blank.

And he gets into Harrow anyway. Or so he says. Yeah, so he says on the basis of his contacts and so on but he's put in the lowest form isn't he i mean he sort of says it was the darkest time in his life uh he was beaten all the time he was always in the bottom form and this is a bit of an exaggeration because as his biographers say he writes for the school magazine he wins poetry prizes he wins a fencing competition yes that's public that's quite a big deal that's not nothing but also harrow is byron's school and byron was a great one for keeping pets and churchill's very into that in that tradition so he keeps a bulldog a bulldog i

mean he couldn't make that no i mean it's he's also consistently rude to the teachers i mean he's been that all through his life so there's's a famous story that one teacher says to him when they're 14. He says, I don't know what to do with you boys. And Churchill shouts out, teacher, sir. And the other one is that he was called to see the headmaster who said, Churchill, I have very grave reason to be displeased with you. And Churchill unbelievably said, and I, sir, have very grave reason to be displeased with you, for which clearly he was obviously beaten. And then he's beaten by the head boy at one point, who while he's beating him, Churchill says to him, I shall be a greater man than you.

And this head boy goes on to be the Bishop of Lincoln. Very Episcopal behavior. But also he he pushes... They're standing by the swimming pool, aren't they? The Harrow. Yeah. And there's a small-looking boy standing with his back to Churchill. So Churchill does the obvious thing and pushes him in.

And this is very bad because... Do you know what you've done? It's Avery. He's in the sixth form. He's the head of his house. He's the champion at gym. He's got his football colours. Oh, no.

Churchill's very apologetic, not because he's pushed him into the swimming pool per se, but because he's pushed someone who's got his football colours and his head boy, head of the house or whatever. And he says to Leo Amory, I'm very sorry. My father, who is a great man, is also small. And this probably doesn't go down tremendously well either. But Leo Amory, of course, is a figure who will reappear over the course of Churchill's early life. And then in due course, of course, the events of the Second World War. Well, Leo Amory is the man who says, in the name of God, go to Neville Chamberlain in the Norway debates that paves the way for Churchill to be. And actually, Dominic, I mean, one of the things that's interesting about looking at Churchill's early life is how often he comes up against people who will, you know, have significant roles to play in subsequent decades.

And of course, you realize that that's what public schools are for, that, you know, they are breeding grounds of chaps who will then meet up and kind of run India or board of trade or that kind of stuff. So Churchill, some people would say he has this gilded, absolutely gilded background. He has all these opportunities. He makes all these friends and contacts. And yet at the same time, and again, I really would stress, this is not really the norm. It's easy to parody and caricature and say, oh, all 19th century people treated their children

with hatred and contempt but Churchill is getting letters well he's writing letters to his parents that say things like this please do do do do do do come down to see me please do come I've been so disappointed so many times about your coming and then his mother just ignores these these letters or she writes back and says things like this your father and I his his mother just ignores these these letters or she writes back and says things like this your father and i are both more disappointed in you than we can say i dare say you have a thousand excuses you make me very unhappy your work is an insult to your intelligence etc etc so at one point they tell him he can't come home at christmas i mean that's a pretty big deal for a boy who's at the boarding school to be told he can't come home at christmas

they're going to send him to france instead with a French family for help is French. And he writes this letter to his mother, which is absolutely heartrending. My darling mummy, never would I have believed you could be so unkind. I'm so utterly miserable. I can't tell you how wretched you've made me feel. Oh, my mummy, I expect you were too busy with your parties and arrangements for Christmas. I comfort myself by this. I am more unhappy than I can possibly say your loving son,

Winnie. She is outraged by this. She ignores him. He writes again, please, my darling mummy, be kind to your loving son. Don't let my silly letter make you so angry.

And then she, she basically says to her friends, Winston has been the most awful pain. He wants to come home at Christmas because she wants to see she's having an affair with the Austrian ambassador Prince Kinski and Count Kinski rather and she doesn't want and so she just ignores all these letters or she says Winston and sometimes she'll write him and she'll say I saw you you wrote me another of these drippy letters I haven't even opened it you make me sick you're kind of you're such a failure and all this stuff but Dominic meanwhile I mean talking being a failure talking being a failure, talking being a failure, meanwhile,

Lord Randolph Churchill's career, you know, he's hit the heights and then he's plummeted completely, hasn't he? So he's crashed and burned. Yeah, he has. He's, I mean, we talked about him as utterly unreliable. So he has, he reached the pinnacle really in the late 1880s, 1885, 86. He had campaigned very successfully around the country, sort of rabble-rousing for the Tories, Lord Salisbury's party.

They win. Lord Salisbury makes him Chancellor of the Exchequer. And then Lord Randolph, after five months, basically, he decides he's going to flounce out or threaten to flounce out about some defence spending, which he says is too high. It's basically just a sort of trial of strength. He's just showing off. And he doesn't think Lord Salisbury will accept his resignation.

Or call his bluff. Call his bluff. And Lord Salisbury just says, oh, right. Okay, fine. Off you go. And that's the end of Lord Randolph Churchill's entire political career. He just ludicrously shot himself in the foot. And from that point onwards, he goes into this terrible decline.

Which I had always thought was syphilis but it seems may not be no i think churchill was very very sensitive to the thought that his father might have had syphilis and he hated the idea and always tried to play it but but it now seems that he may have been some kind of brain illness i think um uh rather than the truth is is, of course, as always, where we try to sort of medicalise these things, to diagnose illnesses that are long distant, we can't really know. And in a way, maybe it doesn't matter.

What matters is that Lord Randolph goes into this terrible decline. And that, again, I think Churchill is a really interesting object lesson in temperament. Because with most people people this background of your parents treating you like dirt telling you you're a failure your father himself being a failure and all this it would sort of crush you don't you think yeah i do you would become a very bitter maybe introverted shy slightly sort of downtrodden person i certainly i would i think churchill never reacts really like that.

I mean, it makes him desperate to be the centre of attention, desperate to sort of win applause and friends and so on. But he also has this sort of tremendous generosity of spirit, which must be innate, because he definitely doesn't get it from his parents. Well, maybe he gets it from his beloved nanny, who he unbelievably calls a woomy. Because he definitely doesn't get it from his parents. Well, maybe he gets it from his beloved nanny, who he unbelievably calls a woomy.

Yeah, he calls her womb or woominy. It's very Freudian, isn't it, Tom? I mean, it couldn't be more Freudian. And he absolutely loves her. And she's from Kent, or she has family in Kent. I can't remember which. She's always telling him Kent is so beautiful. And, of course, Churchill ends up with a house in Kent, or she has family in Kent. I can't remember which. She's always telling him Kent is so beautiful. And, of course, Churchill ends up with a house in Kent, Chartwell,

and becomes obsessed with Kent and the Garden of England and stuff. He invites her to Harrow, walks around with her, devoted to her. And he's mocked by the other boys for walking around in the street arm in arm with his former nanny. Yeah. But, again, it's his self-confidence that he would do that because having been a boarding school boy myself, that's the absolute last thing I would have ever conceived of doing is walking around with a sort of an elderly lady arm in arm

through the streets while the other boys hurled abuse. Hurled it, yes. But inevitably she gets sacked by his evil parents when she's 19, cast off. But Churchill's very decent, isn't he? And no bless oblige, looks after her. Yes, he absolutely does have it. No bless oblige is the right phrase, Tom. He really has a strong sense of that, doesn't he? Well, yes, because he has no qualms about the idea that he is born to greatness. I mean,

he's unapologetic about that. We talked about that. But he does feel that it brings responsibilities. I mean, that's really the core of his politics, would you say, and perhaps his entire morality. And also, I think that's an element of his attitude to the empire, that the British should rule, but that they should look after the people that they rule. Yeah, I don't think there's anything, of course, listeners will have very strong views about this, but I don't think there's anything in Churchill's makeup that is terribly rapacious or personally exploitative. He is a classic paternalist, isn't he? He thinks it's his duty. He thinks, as you say, he's from a superior class. He'll never travel in a second class carriage on a train, but he thinks it's his duty to provide for those who do travel in the

second class carriage or indeed the third- or fourth-class carriages. And of course, he's often very snobbish and arrogant and all of these kinds of things. Yeah, so writing about Wumi, Elizabeth Everest, his nanny, when she dies, 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. He's writing about her dying. She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the 20 years i had lived and he pays for the upkeep of her grave for the rest of his life so churchill isn't incredibly

he's a perfect example of somebody he's incredibly sentimental he cries a lot you know he's never afraid of crying of crying in public of talking about crying he isn't he's never afraid of crying, of crying in public, of talking about crying. He is never afraid of kind of overt, ostentatious displays of emotion. I mean, famously, you know, we're recording this podcast a week or so after the death of the Queen. Churchill would burst into tears when he saw her portrait when she became Queen in the 1950s. He's a kind of hardened political campaigner. His emotions are incredibly vivid and he paints them in very, very bright colours. And I guess had he lived a less flamboyant, dramatic, heroic life, it would look ridiculous.

Yeah. But he leads a life that is equal to the bright colours in which he paints his own emotions. And he's insanely brave as well. I mean, he seems to take risks purely for the sake of it. So he leaves Harrow. And in January 1893, he goes to stay with some cousins at Wimborne. And just for the fun of it it he jumps off a footbridge

and he assumes you know there are kind of branches of trees underneath and they will break his fall but they don't break his fall and his foot is about 30 feet or something and there's a kind of hard road underneath and you know it's insane he kind of ruptures his kidney he breaks a bone in his back and they only find that out in uh you know he has an x-ray in the 50s and it's also pointless but so kind of tiggerish oh here's a bridge i'll jump off it just for fun he's very tiggerish that there are so many incidents like that aren't there in his late so the next sort of 10 years of his life he's always falling off boats, almost drowning, you know, leaping off this.

He plays a lot of polo and is always being injured and so on. He is very physically brave. I suppose he feels he has to be to some extent because he already thinks of himself as a character in an imperial drama. So he's determined to go to Sandhurst to join the army. Politics is always at the back of his mind because he idolizes his father. He's seen his father in the House of Commons.

He's met a lot of politicians. But the army seems the obvious kind of stepping stone. He's sung all the patriotic songs at Harrow. He absolutely has a faith in the empire and his sort of part. And he goes to, he takes the Sandhurst exam. The first two times he fails to get in. So this is the great military training college, the officer's college. And is Lord Randolph Churchill supportive when his son fails?

No. Well, this is the thing. So Churchill passes on his third attempt, but he doesn't get into the infantry. So perhaps slightly counterintuitively for people who don't know much about the British army, it's the infantry regiments that are more prestigious. So the guards regiments, for example. But Churchill gets into the cavalry and he came 95th out of 389. I mean, that's not terrible.

That's not bad at all. And this is what his father wrote to him. So Churchill reproduced some of this letter in my early life, but he didn't reproduce the whole letter verbatim, probably because he says it's one of the most damning things he'd ever read about himself. And it may be because he's so cut and hurt by it. His father said, you appear to be much pleased that you've got into Sandhurst. The first extremely discreditable failure of your performance was missing the infantry, for in that failure is demonstrated beyond refutation your slovenly happy-go-lucky harem scale start of work for which you have been distinguished at your different schools never have i received a really good report of your conduct in your work from any master or tutor always behind hand never advancing in your, incessant complaints of total

want of application. He goes on and on like this. I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say about your own accomplishments and exploits. Make this position indelibly impressed in your mind that if your conduct and action is similar to what it has been in the other establishments, then my responsibility for you is over. If you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life that you have had during your school days, you will become a mere social waste of hundreds of public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby, unhappy, and futile existence. And if that is so, you will have to bear all the blame for such misconduct.

Well, June, yourself, your affectionate father, Randolph Spencer Churchill. I think if there are any parents listening with children who get school reports, there's an absolute model of how to respond there. Yeah. And your child too can grow up to be like Winston Churchill. Because as you say, he gets this kicking, you know, these repeated kickings from the man that he hero worships more than any other. And instead of embittering him, it just seems to make him more and more determined that he's going to prove himself.

And essentially, he wants to prove himself through insane displays of courage and bravery that in turn will make a name for himself and will then enable him to get ahead in parliament and become a great man. I mean, would you say that, I'm maybe being a bit reductionist there, but that essentially is his life plan? His plan is to have adventures. Churchill has read, you know, King Solomon's minds. He's read all the imperial stories. He loves them. Even though he hated his time at Harrow, it has kind of entered into his soul and he has this shining model of his father that he wants to emulate and also if his mother who is this fairy princess monstrous person who he idolizes and he thinks of as this kind of she's like a kind of medieval damsel or something in his mind isn't she i mean he's what's his fairy

tale queen or something and he's desperate to impress her. And as you say, he has this dream that he will do it by performing acts of immense physical courage for the empire and then becoming a politician. And the incredible thing is that he does it. Right. So I think we should take a break at this point. He has left school. He's gone to Sandhurst.

He graduates from Sandhurst pretty well. He comes 20th, doesn't't he out of i can't remember how many but i mean you know yeah 20 130 that's pretty good again pretty good he's shown himself to be good at riding and polo and all the essential qualifications to be a british officer and in a sense the world is now his oyster because he can go out and have these adventures um and prove himself and in the second part of our epic survey of the life of young churchill we will um we'll see what he gets up to we'll find ourselves in cuba won't we tom we find ourselves in cuba we'll find ourselves in the northwest frontier and we will find ourselves in the sudan so loads to look forward

to we'll be back with part two on th, and then we'll be back again next Monday for the final concluding episode in this epic Young Churchill trilogy. Now, if you simply can't wait till then to hear the rest of the series, all three episodes are available right now to, you guessed it, members of the Rest Is History Club.

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