The Rest Is History - 240. Young Churchill: Soldier of Empire

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Join Tom and Dominic in the second episode of our mini-series on Young Churchill as they dive into his imperial exploits. From Cuba to Sudan, they explore his obsession with adventure, the ambiguities that existed within his own moral universe, and his swashbuckling prose. 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 in just a few clicks. From very early youth, I had brooded about soldiers and war, and often I had imagined, in dreams and daydreams,

the sensations attendant upon being for the first time under fire. It seemed to my youthful mind that it must be a thrilling and immense experience to hear the whistle of bullets all around, and to play at hazard from moment to moment with death and wounds. Moreover, now that I had assumed professional obligations in the matter, I thought that it might be as well to have a private rehearsal, a secluded trial trip, in order to make sure that the ordeal was not one

unsuited to my temperament. Accordingly, it was to Cuba that I turned my eyes. That, Dominic, was yet again a brilliant, brilliant impression of Winston Churchill. Ever less comprehensible

your church but he if you listen to him he is pretty incomprehensible so for this i did actually bother to listen to how he spoke rather than just you know this kind of fantasy impression which i done before and actually he is quite pretty incomprehensible and he has a speech impediment and yes of course i thought that was, I mastered the impression there. Master the impersonation. No, because you sound too clear. You sound too clear.

So the whole point of this, dear listeners, is that we are in part two of our survey of the early life of Winston Churchill and Dominic in part one, we looked at his family background, his childhood, his education. So in 1894, in December, he passed out of Sandhurst. He'd come 20th out of his class of 150. That's not bad. And then the following month, 24th of January, 1895, his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, dies. And we talked in part one about how Churchill hero worshipped his father lord randolph churchill dies and we talked in part one about how churchill hero

worshipped his father but how his father was was basically i mean a monster i mean a terrible man and a terrible parent so in a way do you think this is a kind of liberation for him or does it just intensify that that desire to to demonstrate his worth to the shade the now the the departed shade of his father? That's a good question, Tom. I'm not sure. I don't, I think, I mean, that's pure amateur sort of psychology, isn't it?

I think- Well, you know I love a bit of cold psychology. I know, but I do too. Of course, we all do when we look at historical figures and Churchill, not least. I think it must have been in some sense a liberation. I mean, Churchill's not going to get any more letters from his father telling him he's a mere social wastrel anymore. But on the other hand, Churchill, the hero worship of his father never lessens.

I mean, if anything, it intensifies. I mean, years and years later, his friend Violet Asquith said of him, he worshipped at the altar of his unknown father and Churchill does things like you know he will sort of carry his father's old dispatch boxes or he'll dress up in his father's old robes or he he consciously kind of copies his father's mannerisms he puts his hand on his hip in exactly the same way that his father did deliberately wears his father's robes as Chancellor of the Exchequer, calls his son Randolph. So his father is in a sense, is he liberated? I don't know. I mean, his father is in a sense always on his shoulder, I think, or this fantasy image of his father anyway, that he feels he has to live up to. But that quotation that you started with, that Churchill on war, I mean mean that's something that we would find

most people now would find very unsettling and indeed later on so they build up to the first world war lots of sort of liberal politicians churchill was a liberal would say of churchill there was something sinister about his bloodthirstiness and his his you know his fascination with war how much he enjoys it how much he thinks it's all a game. And I think Churchill had, to a degree that was unusual, even by the standards of the 1890s, an obsession with adventure, didn't he? I mean, he really, life to him is one long Indiana Jones. But it's not necessarily adventure for adventure's sake, is it?

It's adventure for amplifying his fame, for making a name for himself, and that he can then leverage to have the kind of career that he feels to engage in the cult of psychologising would impress his father. Yes, I'm sure that's right. And of course, his mother, with whom he now starts to have a much, I mean, they're not close, but he writes letters to his mother and his mother actually deigns to reply yes so he's well he's financially dependent on his mother i mean they're both they that that he's he's slightly straightened actually they're the classic sort of aristocratic family that would appear enormously rich yeah as it were social inferiors but actually are struggling the whole time to keep up the kind of show that they need.

They have an income of 3,000 and they spend 6,000. Yeah, that's right. You have to be Mr. McCorver to realise that that can generate problems. Well, Churchill is incredibly extravagant. He's always extravagant. I mean, anyone who knows anything about him before he becomes prime minister knows that

Clemmie, his wife, was always upbraiding him about spending ludicrous sums of money on champagne and cake and all these kinds of things. And Churchill always says, well, you have to do it. And that's because, of course, he's in this late Victorian Edwardian world in which ostentatious display is a crucial part of your status. Anyway, the war stuff, Churchill has this almost, it really is a kind of schoolboy's fantasy image of war. And the classic example of that is, as you say, to Cuba. four thazars which are very dashing you know all those jackets or you know fabulous stuff but he's not content with that because the four thazars are clearly not going to war and so in a way that i

don't entirely understand how this works he he parks that and goes off as a war correspondent to cuba where the the americans are fighting the spanish well he has a period of leave but it seems odd that he's just got commissioned. And then he immediately, you know, a few months later, he gets leave to go off to be a war correspondent. I mean, it seems an odd pairing of careers. Yeah, but he's not going primarily as a war correspondent, he's going as a military observer. So he's got 10 weeks leave. And most people, most of his sort of aristocratic contemporaries will spend that time fox hunting because it's the fox hunting season. Churchill, because of that issue that you said about the funds, he doesn't have enough money to buy the horses

and all the sort of stuff that he needs for that. So he's looking for something to do. And in those days, the British army, they actually encouraged you if you were an aristocratic officer and you said, I'd like to go and have a look at a war. They said, oh, spend it on me. It's a bit like sort of resting football managers who say, oh, I go and spend a few months with Barcelona to watch their training.

This is basically what Churchill's doing. He literally looks at the sort of map and says, there's a war in Cuba, and off he goes. And it's actually not the Americans. So the Americans are yet to get involved in Cuba. So it's guerrillas, it's local sort of independence fighters who are fighting the Spanish authorities. And as you say, the war correspondence is a means to pay for this. So

Churchill basically gets it through his mum. So Jenny pays for his ticket to go to America. His father had once written for the Daily Graphic. And so Churchill basically manages to catch a deal that he will file dispatches from Cuba for the Daily Graphic. So off he goes to New York and actually has an encounter in New York that's really important and not much known. So he stays with this bloke who's an old sort of flame or an admirer of Jenny's, who's called Burke Cochran, who's now utterly unknown and forgotten. He was an American congressman who kept changing parties. He was a Democrat for a lot of the time, but then he would walk out of the Democrats and join other little parties and then come back to the Democrats. So he's a real showman in New York politics.

And Churchill adores him and models himself on Bert Cochran to the extent that even some of Churchill's most famous speeches are direct cribs from Bert Cochran's speeches. So, for example, Bert Cochran said of the Irish Home Rule Bill, never before in the history of the English-speaking people has there been a victory which was so great a triumph as that attained by Mr. Gladstone. Is that how he spoke? That's not how Bert Cochran spoke, but that's how Churchill spoke. Churchill, of course, copies that line and uses it about the Battle of Britain. And Churchill admits this.

He'll say later on, Bert Cochran was my model. I copied everything from him, including flouncing in and out of political parties. But of course, Bert Cochran is now completely forgotten, so nobody cares. And his readiness to model himself on an American politician is also expressive of his broader admiration for America, isn't it? Yeah, he loves America. He loves the energy. He loves the pace, the vigor of it all. Very, very taken by it.

He writes to his brother, Jack, and he says, picture to yourself, the American people is a great lusty youth who treads on all your sensibilities, perpetuates every possible horror of ill manners, but who moves about his affairs with a good hearted freshness, which may well be the envy of the older nations of the earth. Well, good hearted freshness is what Churchill is all about, isn't it? It is actually. I mean, actually, we haven't really sort of stopped for a second. But Churchill at this point, he's a very, very likable character, isn't he? I mean, the good-hearted freshness. I know a lot of people listen to this will maybe be Churchill sceptics and they'll roll their eyes and say, oh, surprise, surprise,

kind of the British history podcasters waxing lyrical about Churchill. But I think if you read My Early Life to this point, it would be very hard to take a dislike to him because he's also so self-aware. He's quite self-mocking. The fun that he had in describing all his sort of scrapes at school and stuff, but also the sort of touching sentimentalism of the way he goes on about his parents who are such monsters. It's a very inimitable mix of deep and unapologetic sentimentality with a profound element of self-awareness. And it's a very peculiar mixture.

And I agree, it is very, very likable. One might almost say lovable. Yeah. But with a kind of gunpowder tiggerishness about it that suggests that the whole thing may blow up at any moment. And that, you know, if life is an awfully great adventure, so is death. And Cuba is, I suppose, so he goes to Cuba. So he sails from New York to Cuba. And he has this wonderful passage in his book, My Early Life. He says, when first in the dim light of early morning, I saw the shores of Cuba rise and define themselves

from dark blue horizons. I felt as if I sailed with Captain Silver and first gazed on Treasure Island. Here was a place where real things were going on. Yeah, and that is a motif that runs throughout his prose, isn't it? Or indeed his comments. He will see war, he will see foreign cities, he will see manifestations of, say, say industrial power and he will compare it to figures from stories so treasure island in that case yeah um later on when he's in the

burr war he compares the armored steam trains which will play a key role in his story to knight's errant all that kind of thing he he is always painting the vivid scenes of life in the 1890s in the colors of picture books story books medieval romances and so on and that's clearly not an affectation it's rising from the absolute wellsprings of everything that makes him what he is people often said of churchill later in life that he was terribly immature. They would sort of say that boyishness is immensely annoying and hard. He's impossible to work with. You know,

he behaves like a, he's a schoolboy trapped in a sort of, in a prime minister's body. And you definitely, that schoolboyishness never, he's never ashamed of it, is he? You know,

it's like in its treasure island, which a lot of people would have said maybe at the time, you know's a children's story why are you you know have you not put aside childish things now churchill and he never puts aside childish things he has that sort of irrepressible um almost innocence and it seems a very strange expression to say somebody's going off to watch a war there is a kind of childishness about a lot of the writing of the british empire at this time that you know henty books and yeah rider haggard that imperial adventures are portrayed as as boys adventures and perhaps that's a way of i don't know not avoiding getting drawn into broader, more difficult questions. Dealing with the moral ambiguities.

The moral ambiguities. Yeah. I mean, these are, you know, this is not Heart of Darkness. This is not, or even some of Kipling's stories of the men who would be king. Now, these are morally less complex narratives that perhaps avoid having to stare into the heart of darkness do you think that's maybe yeah i think there's maybe some truth in it because churchill never really he does have a moral sense as we'll come to when we get to the sudan he does he absolutely does have a sense that you should be sporting i suppose but again the way that he sees it in

those terms you could say is more of this sort of infantilization. Play up and play the game. Yeah, absolutely. And I think he, the sort of the world is an awfully big adventure. That never, ever leaves him. I mean, even the way, I suppose, if you were being very harsh, you would say even the way he talks about becoming prime minister in 1940, I was walking with destiny. And he sees it as the culmination of what has been coming since he

had those schoolboy fantasies i mean he's still the schoolboy in the boarding house talking about saving the empire isn't he we talked about that sense of destiny right at the beginning of part one and perhaps before we we we plunge him into the the drama and excitement of his time in cuba and then after that northwest france and the sud. Perhaps we should talk, dare I say, about his religious beliefs, his understanding of the metaphysical dimension. You've shown tremendous self-restraint, Tom. Well, because Churchill famously said he was like a buttress. He was outside the church supporting it rather than being inside. So he's not really a believer.

He's not a believing Christian, but he does have a kind of almost pagan sense of his destiny, his genius, that he's been actually, I mean, rather like Hitler, or perhaps that both of them have this rather strange sense that they've been shaped by destiny for great things. They do believe in a God, but it's not the Christian God. However, the difference between Hitler and Churchill is that Churchill, in his attitude to his moral responsibilities, does seem to have a kind of, you know, a sense of empathy with the underdog. Well, the noblesse oblige that we talked about. Yes, it's an aristocratic sense of responsibility. And of course, he also has this sense that the British have a moral responsibility towards the people that they rule. But perhaps, Dominic, we should come to that when we should look at that question. And the question of how racist was he? I think he was racist when he goes to the Northwest Frontier. But for now, he's in Cuba. And he claimed, didn't he? That he'd heard his first shots fired in anger on his 21st birthday.

In fact, it was the day after. That's classic Churchill. He will, well, I mean, he would shape the narrative, but who doesn't?

I mean, who, who heard their first shots fired the day after their 21st birthday? You know, smooth that story in and move them a few hours earlier. Of course he does that. So it's the 1st of December, 1895. He's been there just for a few weeks. And what he does is he's hanging around with the Spanish kind of colonial authorities who were trying to put down this uprising that will

ultimately lead to the Spanish-American war. And they're just sort of riding around randomly looking for rebels in this sort of very raggedy kind of way and uh they're by a forest and shots ring out the horse next to him is shot in the ribs i mean that would for most people if that happened to you and me tom but that would be the defining moment of our lives yeah i've been talking about that forever the horse next to me this for churchill is just a i mean it's not even a barely even a footnote and he says in a mildly life I could not help reflecting that the bullet which has struck the chestnut horse had certainly passed within a foot of my head so at any rate I'd been under fire that was something

yes here we go he's excited by that he's delighted because that's what he's um that's what he's come to see and they sort of ride about a bit and they sort of potter around and they see people shooting the distance but actually he's not really i mean he's there and he's an observer so he's not really in the thick of the action but when he comes back so when he comes back he gets a medal doesn't he gets a medal from the spanish even though red cross of spain he's sympathizing with with the rebels but he has to keep that quiet but he comes back and he can know two things about himself that are going to stand him in very good stead the first is that he is indeed brave under fire that yeah you know he enjoys it so that's something to sort away but also he knows that um he's a his mastery of english prose means that he can write incredibly well so this is great news for his future as a war correspondent

and that will be a running theme but also tight deadlines all that kind of stuff he's very good journalist but also in the long run of course it will you know he he can know that he can write history and all kinds of other stuff as well so his trip to Cuba teaches him that he has these two you know these two qualities that will serve him in very good stead throughout the rest of his life yeah so he comes back from cuba um as you say he's it's all gone splendidly from that point of view uh he sails with his so he rejoins his regiment and they sail off to um to mumbai to bombay churchill being churchill he he falls off the boat as they're docking and he suffers an injury that again with that anybody else would be a sort of life-defining injury he falls he dislocates his shoulder,

and his shoulder from that point onwards is always being dislocated. He's always popping out. So he can never play tennis, for example, a very popular game in the 1890s. He's desperate to play polo, but he always has to play with part of his arm strapped to his body, which is a huge impediment. And actually, it says a great deal about Churchill's ability at polo, that he goes on to play in all kinds of teams and win tournaments and things despite the facts do you score goals in polo he scores loads of is it goals

is that what you score points or tries or whatever you score in polo anyway he scores them yeah he also um can't use a sword he has to use a pistol so later on in the battle of omdurman um the fact that he's got a pistol stands him in very good stead basically because you know if he wields a sword his arm will fall off okay so um so anyway he gets to bangalore that's the headquarters of the madras presidency and a long way from any action yeah but he was i was, I mean, at that point, there's not that much action going on in India. He's just a post frontier.

There's always, well, the Northwest frontier will, will, yeah, that will come. But for the, for the,

for the time being, he basically spends that first winter reading because he, you know, in the first podcast, we talked about how Churchill, um, had portrayed himself as this dunce to school, which he absolutely wasn't,

but it's true that he absolutely wasn't. But it's true that he perhaps wasn't quite as well-read as he could have been. But with classic sort of Churchillian sort of dedication, he decides, I'm going to become incredibly well-read. So he starts off by reading Gibbon, Edward Gibbon, very much a friend of the rest of his history, I think it's fair to say. Absolutely a friend of the rest of his history, yeah. And he has this lovely description. If you sort of think, oh, Churchill's greatly overrated,

it's all just sort of smoke and mirrors, you read the way when Churchill in his autobiography, My Early Life, he talks about reading Gibbon. All through the long glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted stables to the evening shadows, proclaimed the hour of Polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and i enjoyed it all and that sort of he absorbs i think gibbon's sense of irony when he

talks about history his sense of sweep and character his sense that this is a tremendously enjoyable melodrama and and the fact that an english sentence is a noble thing yeah that you can do incredible things with english prose yeah he's given him a corley so macaulay is his other great um his other great love he's gutted that macaulay doesn't think much of the duke of marlborough and i was grieved to read his harsh judgments and uh but then he's funny about macaulay he says there was no one to tell me that this historian with his captivating style and devastating self-confidence was the prince of literary rogues who always preferred the tale to the truth and smirched or glorified great men and

garbled documents according to how they affected his drama nobody would ever say that of this podcast tom no of course not not not ever uh But my favourite thing about Churchill's kind of autodidacticism, where he's just hoovering up all this stuff that he clearly hadn't read at Harrow, is that he reads Aristotle. He reads Aristotle's Ethics. He says it was very good, but it's extraordinary how much of it I had already thought out for myself. That's what I always think about Greek philosophy, though, Tom. Is that a lot of curtsy when you were 10? mean yeah self-explanatory all this sort of stuff there is a certain harshness perhaps to aristotle's

ethics that you could see might appeal to churchill yeah so aristotle i mean aristotle notoriously defy you know separated the world into Greeks and barbarians. He essentially said that Greeks had the right to rule barbarians. And so perhaps that's something that went with the grain of Churchill's thinking. There are people out in the empire who have doubts about it, who are troubled by the assumption of racial superiority. Churchill doesn't. Well, I mean, that is a christian impetus isn't it yeah essentially i mean if all men are created equally in the image of god then

they're equal but churchill has a has a more racist sense of their being that humans are different racially see i don't i think the word racist there is really i is it unhelpful or misleading maybe a bit of both, because we use it to describe a lot of very different things. So there's a kind of racial prejudice, which is, as it were, hateful, which is shot through with resentment and bitterness and sort of a sense of a really sort of horrible sort of sense of disgust and all these kinds of things. I don't think Churchill has that at all. He undoubtedly has something slightly different, I would say, which is an unwavering

sense of superiority. He doesn't think that other races are horrible or disgusting or brutish. He's actually often quite interested in them. But he just thinks the British are the best. And he loves the empire. It would never occur to him to question the empire. The empire is his creed, his mission. And the way he thinks about it, we talked about his sort of childishness, is a little bit like how a child thinks of, don't you think? Yeah, okay. I do do but i also think that it is and this may be kind of mediated through but i think it's reflective of the darwinian spirit of the age that yeah for the first time has been able to provide a kind of scientific rationale

for the gut prejudice that imperial peoples have always had that somehow they have won a great empire because they're the best i mean that you know there has never been an imperial people who didn't think that they were the best because they look you know they they look around at their own greatness relative to the people that they rule and say well of course we're best that's that's that's self-evident what darwinism does is to provide what seems to be a scientific explanation for it essentially that different races have evolved at different speeds and therefore some are better than others and i think that churchill i mean whether he's read darwin or

not i don't know maybe he's darwin is part of his reading in bangalore i can't remember yeah but i think that he just has that kind of instinctive assumption look around the might and splendor of the empire of course we're better but it's rather like you know him looking after his nanny he or kept you know tipping i don't know the porter or whatever it the british are to other races in churchill's opinion as the british aristocracy are to the vast mass of the british people yeah that's a good comparison that they have privilege but they also have responsibility. And I guess that that would be the difference between Churchill and Hitler, say.

That Hitler's understanding of race is predatory and aggressive, and he sees it as a constant war between races. Churchill kind of assumes that, well, you know, maybe they'd make rather good Batman, I guess would be the difference. Do you think? Yeah, I think that's very fair, Tom. I think he has a strong sense of noblesse oblige. I think he has a sense of paternalism. Some listeners may say, and they're not necessarily wrong, that they find the sense of superiority completely overwhelmingly off-putting. I suppose you would say if you were, I i mean i think actually the sort of attack defense way of talking about people from the past is pointless anyway but that's let's indulge it for a second in his defense you would say um it's very common you know most probably most britains at the time like most frenchmen or indeed belians or Germans or whatever, Dutchmen, shared this sense of, had this sort of sense of superiority.

But basically it's impossible to rule an empire and not have that sense of superiority instilled in the upper classes because otherwise empires are by definition the things of smoke and mirrors. Where he tends to be aggressive, though, Tom, I think is when that is threatened. So in other words, when people challenge the empire, I mean, Gandhi is the most famous example in the interwar years. Churchill will often, and he always reaches

for the most emotive, extreme, aggressive rhetoric because that's almost the skill he's learned as a journalist, isn't it? He always goes over the top in every speech, every article, to go over the top is Churchill's kind of literary instinct. And so that's why I think you often end up with him saying things that are designed to shock or to make people laugh at the time or to make them write, you know, sort of almost that sort of tabloid style. I think that probably actually belies him to an extent,

because I think deep down, and maybe some listeners will say, oh, this is just special pleading. I don't know. I think deep down, he's more good natured than some of his more sort of aggressive put downs would lead you to believe. Yes. I mean, he always reaches for the emotive language of, dare I say, a brilliant columnist in a best-selling British tabloid. But of course, his greatest moment is where the force of that language meets with an object that merits that language. So the force of his rhetoric when he's talking about Hitler and the Nazis, it has the power that is able to express the scale of the evil that is being confronted obviously when he's applying it to gandhi it's ridiculous i mean it's well of course

it seemed ludicrous in the 1930s for precisely that reason because in the interwar years churchill had used this incredibly archaic children's storybook kind of language yeah crossed with the tabloid newspaper very aggressive very sort of almost cod Arthurian and people had just thought he was a joke been talking about independence in this way but as you say when he then that that archaic style proves perfect for rallying the nation in 1940 in a way that it didn't talk about complicated issues in the 1930s anyway Dominic we we're not talking about yeah we've got completely gone slatheric, we're not talking about Churchill. Yeah, we've gone completely... We've gone slathering off. We're not talking about Churchill

in the 30s and 40s. We're talking about young Churchill. We should take a break, Tom. So he is now in India. We should take a break. When we come back, we will look at his engagement in two classic imperial adventures,

a war on the Northwest Frontier and his journey with Kitchener to cartoon. So, uh, we will be discussing that after the break. We'll see you when we come back. Bye. Bye.

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Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are in the middle of the life, the early life of Winston Churchill. Tom, the Indian Northwestern Frontier and Sabindan Blood. It's the most brilliant name, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, only Churchill would have it. Have you seen a picture of him? No, I haven't. He's brilliant. Everything that you would expect with a name like Sabindan Blood.

The scale of his moustache, it's the most imperial looking moustache you've ever seen. I highly recommend anyone listening to this, go and look up, go and Google Sabindan Blood. You will not be disappointed at what you find. That's excellent news. So Sabindan Blood is the descendant. But you know, he died aged 98 in 1940. 1940, wow. Yeah, so very long old. So Sir Bindon Blood was the descendant of the Colonel Blood

who stole the crown jewels. Yeah. It's an uncommon name, isn't it? It's blood. Anyway, Sir Bindon Blood is a commander up in northwestern India. He's, again, yet another crony of Churchill's mother and their sort of posh friends. And Churchill has basically extracted from him a promise that if ever there's a rebellion on the northwest frontier and subdued blood has to put it down, he will let Churchill come with him. Surprise, surprise.

In August 1897, Churchill hears that the Pashtuns have indeed risen in the incredibly sort of remote valleys on the northwestern frontier of India. So that's what's now Pakistan. Pakistan, sort of Afghan border, I suppose. And Churchill immediately asks Subindan Blood if he can come. At first, Subindan Blood struggles to find a place for him. Churchill gets a job as a war correspondent again. So he's taking leave from his regiment, hasn't he? His regiment.

His mother yet again pulls some strings and arranges that some of his letters from the front will be published in the Daily Telegraph. They'll pay him £5 a time, which is good money in those days. And off goes Churchill to the northwest frontier to serve with Sir Bindon Blood and the

12,000 strong Malacan Field Force. So they're basically it's a punitive expedition to deal with these tribes that have been sort of robbing villages and just sort of in church as churchill would no doubt say making a nuisance of themselves yeah um and he in classic churchill style he describes the whole thing as this is the most tremendous laugh doesn't he so he says at one point they go with all these political officers and the political officers are constantly trying to sort of do deals with the tribesmen and none and churchill and his pals are aghast at this behavior because they just

want to have a huge fight and to his delight they do have a fight he says it was all very exciting and for those who did not get killed or hurt very jolly well yeah so a lot of people were killed on our side their widows have had to be pensioned by the imperial government and others were badly wounded and hopped around for the rest of their lives yeah yeah he thinks the whole thing is the most tremendous fun like most young fools i was looking for trouble and i hope that something exciting would happen it did big exclamation mark yeah but he but the funny thing about churchill when he describes this because the passages in about Churchill when he describes this, because the passages in his book about, I mean,

this is a tiny war by British imperial standards. It's barely even a war. It's just a sort of raid, a raid and the repression of a raid. The funny thing is that on the one hand, he talks about it in this sort of this enjoyable skirmish crackled away, you know, this great, great, great fun. And yet at the same time, he say a few lines later he will say one man was shot through the breast and pouring with blood another lay on his back kicking and twisting the british officer was spinning around just

behind me his face a mass of blood his right eye cut out yes it was certainly an adventure and and at the end of the cap whether it was worth it i cannot tell at any rate at the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert and honor was satisfied uh you know and that leaving there's an echo of tacitus there the idea that yeah you know they created desert and called it peace call it peace um yeah and he says at the beginning he says that he doesn't actually think the British, you know, should have even bothered with all this, that he feels sorry for the tribesmen of the Northwest Frontier.

He kind of admires them. He doesn't think they should have been punished. So he has this weird, there's this strange ambiguity that reminds me, and this is such a peculiar comparison, it reminds me a tiny bit of the Flashman novels. So in the Flashman novels, Flashman, there's part of him that is always frightened and running away, which Churchill never does.

But there's part of him that loves all these adventures and loves the kind of romance of it. And yet at the same time, he's aware of the sort of hypocrisies and the moral ambiguity of what he's doing. And there's a little bit of a sense of that, I think, with Churchill, that he knows that there's part of him that knows that this is horrible, that people are being

horribly injured and killed. He writes about it in this comical way, but the humour of it derives from the fact that people have died or been maimed. Yeah. And I think, but also there is a kind of Darwinian sense that this is just what the strong do, just the way life is. And yet at the same time, he'll say that his friend, Lieutenant William Brown Clayton, was literally cut to pieces on a stretcher. And he says to his mother, he says, he cried. Churchill cried as he saw his friend. So it's not that he's unfeeling.

It's that maybe he just thinks the world is a place where... Well, I think his response is operating on many levels isn't it so there's the sentimentality that we've talked about the and the ability to feel grief sentimental is perhaps an unfair word ability to feel grief very very deeply a sense of excitement this is all tremendous fun a darwinian sense that it's just the way that the world is it always has been it always will be and perhaps uh a slight ache that that the british are not behaving better than they are behaving uh and i think that the evidence for that is in his response to what happens in his next adventure which is uh the sudan war so this really is the imperial adventure to end all imperial adventures so regular listeners will have listened

to our podcast about general gordon and his adventures in the Sudan, which had ended, I think it's fair to say, very badly, with General Gordon being killed in the residency in Khartoum by the insurgent kind of Islamist army of the Mahdi, who was this sort of self-appointed messiah who had led the people of of the sudan and this tremendous uprising against egypt and against egypt's kind of imperial sponsor britain so gordon had been killed in 1885 and that had left a tremendous impression on the british public i mean it really

was the kind of the running sore the uh the terrible defeat that must be avenged and there was ever since that for more than 10 years there had been this thirst for a final settling of accounts not with the mardi because the mardi had died but with his successor who was called the khalifa um who ruled what is now sudan and south sudan some bits of ethiopia and basically in 1898 this came to a head um the great imperial hero to the victorians anyway sir herbert kitchener is leading this force of 20 000 men south i mean this app you know it's the it's the sort of paradigmatic imperial adventure and once again churchill hears that it's happening and is

desperate to go tries to get his mother to pull strings he tries to get lord salisbury the prime minister to pull strings kitchener doesn't want him there um and they have a feud that lasts for the rest of their lives and it's at this point in his book i love this this passage tom churchill keeps applying to go and people keep blocking him because clearly at this stage he's already got a reputation yeah there's this sort of bumptious toe rack metal hunter a metal hunter he says i now perceive that there were many ill-informed and ill-disposed people who did not take a favourable view of my activities. What does he say?

The expression is medal hunter. A self-advertiser were used from time to time in some high and low military circles in a manner which would, I am sure, surprise and pain the readers of these notes. Astonished. He says, by a most curious and indeed unaccountable coincidence, similar accusations have always presented themselves

in the wake of my innocent footsteps. And I think that's one of the things about Churchill's lovability. He knows that he's an attention seeker and terribly bumptious and stuff. And he's funny about the fact that other people are. I think it's the sense of humor, the fact that he's able to be funny about himself that makes him more endearing than he might otherwise um that he might otherwise be but anyway he gets it doesn't he he pulls he pulls his strings and he's after he's after after the sedan as is the um as is classic churchill he he's also writing a column at the time so he's going to write for the morning post 15 pounds per column three times what he was paid in india uh he has

dinner before he goes with the head of the psychical research society and they make him promised that if he's killed he will communicate with them from death i'd imagine um churchill so off he goes and, if you ever doubted that Churchill was a wonderful writer, because of course, his great Second World War books, you know, there was an enormous number of collaborators with him on that.

And that sort of suspicion that there's an awful lot of ghostwriting hung over his subsequent Nobel Prize for Literature. But the way he, his descriptions of the lead up to the Battle of Omdurman are incredibly evocative. So he goes across the desert from Cairo. literature but his the way he his descriptions of the lead-up to the battle of omdurman are

incredibly evocative so he goes across the desert from cairo i mean a classic churchill he gets lost in the desert he spends a night without food and water and has to wander for 70 miles before he rediscovers the convoy but again that's barely even that happens in sort of half a sentence yeah as you say i mean if we did that that would be the we'd never forget it you'd never talk of anything else if that happened to you that sort of happens to him just fleetingly on the way they arrive the anglo-egyptian army have almost reached khartoum they're in this place called omdurman uh there's 25 000 of them there's a colossal army of what are called the dervishes so this is the calhalifa's men the

sort of the islamist kind of tribesmen who are you know they there's a massive disparity one of the great disparities ever in terms of technology and weaponry because we have got the gatling gun yeah they have not but it's a maxim i think omdurman the machine guns and i think there are 50 of them. The dervishes obviously think this will be a classic battle in which they will sort of, you know, ride into action and wave their swords and rifles will sing out. And they're not really prepared for the machine guns. Industrial slaughter. Industrial slaughter.

I mean, Churchill, the way he describes this, you know, nothing like the Battle of Omdurman will ever be seen again. It was the last link in the long chain of those spectacular conflicts whose vivid and majestic splendor has done so much to invest war with glamour. So on the one hand, he sees this as the ultimate. I mean, this is the culmination. This is really, talking about that sense of destiny, this is the moment he has dreamed of since he was a boy. And as you say, his prose is so over over all the immense dome of the sky done to turquoise turquoise to deepest blue pierced by the flaming sun weighed hard and heavy on marching necks and shoulders i mean so good yeah so it's a it's

fantastically readable this sort of sense he absolutely has a sense that this is a moment of supreme imperial melodrama that he's been dreaming of since a moment of history isn't it because he recognizes that cavalry charges and men with spears and you know this is an ancient ancient story that perhaps is this is the last manifestation of it it's last time it ever happens and he's really conscious of that he um i forgot to mention he's traveled with all ever happens and he's really conscious of that he um i forgot to mention he's traveled with all the champagne and he has a lot of champagne with uh an officer commanding a gunboat called lieutenant david beatty and beatty is going to be one of the key

people in the first world war the battle of jutland so again one of these characters who will then pop up pops up yeah later on but dawn rises on the 2nd of September, 1898. And Churchill has this fantastic lyrical description of the dawn and the sense of tension and the sun rising over the desert. And he hears the noise of people coming towards him. He says, what is this sound which we hear? A deadened roar coming up to us in waves. They are cheering for God, his prophet and his holy khalifa they think they are going to win talk of fun where will you beat this i mean that's obviously not what a lot of the british soldiers yeah nothing they must have been absolutely terrified yeah and then there's this moment of i mean it really is the sort of the textbook clash of ancients and modern

where he and his, they ride into, the guns are singing out, the machine guns are beginning to rattle. But Churchill and the 21st Lancers launched this charge, the largest British cavalry charge since the Crimea, really the last great cavalry charge in all British history. Churchill has a troop of 25 men.

He's on this Arab pony. He's got his, because of his arm, he's got his pistol, his Mauser, and they're right down into this water course, and there are sort of dervishes looming up out of the scrub, and he is firing away with his revolver, and men are falling all around him, this kind of swords flashing. It is the most incredible swashbuckling scene. But in due course he when he looks at

the industrial scale of the slaughter and the disparity he pays due tribute to the courage of the men that that the british have been fighting yeah so he says the discipline and machinery triumphed over the most desperate valor and after And after an enormous carnage, certainly exceeding 20,000 men who strewed the ground in heaps and swathes like snowdrifts, the whole mass of the dervishes dissolved into fragments and into particles and streamed away into the fantastic mirages of the desert. These were as brave men as ever walked the earth, destroyed, not conquered by machinery. So this is not a kind of, he's not exalting in the slaughter. The battle is one of the high points, probably the high point of his life. The moment he's been dreaming of, the

exhilaration and the adrenaline of the cavalry charge. And he loves fighting the dervishes, but he sees them as noble, admirable even adversaries who've been cut down by machinery. And he feels very conflicted about that. And he specifically, he, it does, Kitchener's victory does nothing to reconcile Churchill to Kitchener as a moral figure. He despises Kitchener. Kitchener is a very austere man.

And the sort of, Kitchener is your sort of exhibit A in your sort of unsmiling, pith-helmeted, deeply repressed sort of British Imperial officer, isn't he? Sort of strange associations with young boys. Utterly unsparing, no mercy. And with a real streak of cruelty, I think. Well, so Kitchener orders that the Mahdi's tomb, because the Mahdi's already dead,

that the Mahdi's tomb in revenge for General Gordon, the Mahdi's tomb is desecrated and is is blown up uh but he then he demands that the mardy's head is is saved and he um keeps it in a kerosene tin although churchill says he pretended to have it in a kerosene tin but the tin may have contained anything perhaps ham sandwiches. Yeah. Very Churchillian detail. But Churchill is outraged by this. He thinks it's incredibly unsporting. He's also outraged by the treatment of captured dervishes after the battle. So this

is the classic example of Churchill's sort of sense of that everything is a game, but because it's a game, because it's a sporting encounter, you shake hands afterwards. So he says afterwards that he's seen people

killing dervish prisoners after the battle. He writes to his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, the general callousness which he, Kitchener, has repeatedly exhibited has disgusted me. I have seen acts of great barbarity perpetuated at Omdurman and I have been thoroughly sickened of human blood.

I should always be glad that I was one of those who took these brave men on with weapons, little better than theirs, who would only add discipline to back against their numbers. All the rest of the army merely fed out death by machinery. Yeah. And he calls Kitchener utterly callous. Yeah.

Which I think is a very fair description. Yeah. Well, I mean, Kitchener was, Kitchener was ruthless. As we will see when we come to the burr war yeah kitchener was absolutely ruthless and said i've got a job to do i'm going to do it and that's to kill as many dervishes as possible churchill is horrified about that because if you have this sense that everything is treasure island

and everything is king solomon's minds then as it were the sort of what you might see as one of the more admirable sides of that because of course they're less admirable sides but one of the more admirable sides is you think of your opponents as jolly brave you you almost romanticized sentimentalize your adversaries which churchill definitely well churchill's harrow they would be eaten yeah that's how he thinks yeah um so on the way home, one nice detail that I thought you would appreciate. I'm sorry that you haven't brought it up yourself is that Churchill makes friends with the most brilliant man in journalism I have ever met,

who is the star writer of a new newspaper. You know, the newspaper in question, Tom, you do know, you just don't want to say, you just don't want to say, I can't. So't so uh he would

it be the daily mail he writes friends with gw stevens the star writer of her majesty's as it then was daily mail um he churchill lends him a piece of paper so that stevens can write a dispatch about the war for the readers of the mail when churchill comes down, he says, I found that all he'd written on my nice sheet of paper was pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, bang. And Churchill was disgusted at this. That's the day he mailed on it. But then he says, Tom, he says, Stevens had many other styles besides that of the jaunty,

breezy, slapdash productions which he wrote for the Daily Mail. He finds that Stevens has written an enormous article about the future of the British Empire in which he has been credited as the new Gibbon. Wow. Well, can you imagine of that? Think of that. That kind of thing would never happen now.

A historian writing in a slapdash way, but also being the new Gibbon. Can't think. No, I can imagine you would. So Dominic, yes, that's a very important detail. I'm glad you got that in but i think this is probably a good note on which to end because essentially you know the narrative of um of the sudan war is effortless british superiority essentially military superiority

uh the assumption that they can go to war, that they can use their industrial heft, their military prowess, essentially to pulverize anyone who opposes them, throw their weight around, do what they like. And this is imperialism really not as an adventure, but as something altogether more predatory and murderous. It's a juggernaut, I suppose. A juggernaut and the final stage of let's call it young churchill this sequence of adventures uh in various imperial wars uh we'll cover in part three and that's the most extraordinary story of all and that's the most extraordinary story of all and it's it's basically it's a war that is a huge embarrassment to Britain. Britain behaves very badly. I mean, people may think Britain's behaving badly.

This is very harsh, Tom. I don't agree with any of this. It behaves very badly. Fake news. Dominic, no, Dominic. Britain does behave very, very badly in South Africa and behaves very poorly. And there is a point in the Burr War where almost the only good news that the British are getting is provided by Winston Churchill, who has been taken prisoner and then escapes. One of the most dramatic episodes of Daring Do in British imperial history.

And that will be the subject of our episode tomorrow. But before that, to cleanse people's palates after that shockingly unpatriotic ending from Tom Holland, I think we should have a bit of poetry, Tom. We haven't had any poetry in these episodes. Now, regular listeners to the rest of this history will know that we are great admirers of the poetry of William McGonagall, the world's worst poet, who of course wrote a poem about the Tay Bridge disaster, which we read out on this podcast, and I think also wrote a poem, didn't he, about the death of General Gordon, Tom? He did. We quoted him for that. So I think I would like to read what McGonagall had to say about the Battle of Omdurman,

because this is beautiful poetry. "'Twas the year of 1898, and on the 2nd of September, which the Khalifa and his surviving followers will long remember, because Sir Herbert Kitchener has annihilated them outright by the British troops and Sudanese in the Omdurman fight. The chief heroes in this fight were the 21st Lancers. They made a brilliant charge on the enemy with ringing cheers, and through the dusky warriors' bodies their lances they did thrust, whereby many of them were made to lick the dust. And when the Khalifa saw his noble army cut down, with rage and grief he did fret and frown. Then he spurred his noble steed, and swiftly it ran, while inwardly to himself he cried,

Catch me if you can! And Mardism now has received a crushing blow, for the Khalifa and his followers have met with a complete overthrow, and General Gordon has been avenged, the good Christian, by the defeat of the Khalifa at the Battle of Omdurman. Goodbye. Bye-bye. 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.

That's restishistorypod.com 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.