Churchill Read Free

proved invaluable in enabling him to do so. He did not acquire fluency in the Latin and Greek it provided so plentifully. He learned a few trusty Latin quotations and skill at putting them to use. But he noticed that his headmaster, the Reverend J. E. C. Welldon (later his friend as bishop of Calcutta), winced as he pronounced them, and he perceived, later, the same expression cross the face of Prime Minister Asquith, a noted classical scholar, when he pronounced a Latin quote in cabinet. But if he never became a classicist, he achieved something much more worthwhile and valuable: fluency in the English language, written and spoken. Three years in the bottom form, under the eager tuition of the English master, Robert Somervell, made this possible. Winston became not merely adept but masterly in his use of words. And he loved them. They became the verbal current coursing through his veins as he shaped his political manhood. No English statesman has ever loved them more or made more persistent use of them to forward his career and redeem it in time of trouble. Words were also his main source of income throughout his life, from the age of twenty-one. Almost from the start he was unusually well paid, and his books eventually made prodigious sums for himself and his descendants. He wrote thousands of articles for newspapers and magazines and over forty books. Some were very long. His account of the Second World War is over 2,050,000 words. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by comparison is 1,100,000 words. I calculate his total of words in print, including published speeches, to be between 8 and 10 million. There can have been few boys who made such profitable use of something learned at school. In that sense, Winston’s education, contrary to the traditional view, was a notable success.
    In the process of turning words into cash, Lady Randolph played a key part, particularly in getting her son commissions. She had done all she could to alleviate Lord Randolph’s suffering in his slow and dreadful decline. But after his death in 1895, she was free to devote herself to furthering her elder son’s career, and this became the object of all her exertions. In begging for help for Winston she was fearless, shameless, persistent, and almost always successful. Her position in London society, her beauty and charm, and her cunning enabled her to worm her way into the good books of newspaper proprietors and editors, publishers and politicians—anyone in a position to help. “This is a pushing age,” Winston wrote to her, “and we must push with the best.” They became the pushiest couple in London, indeed in the empire, which then spread over nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface.
    No sooner commissioned into the army, Churchill (as we may now call him) began his plan of campaign to make himself famous, or at least conspicuous. A soldier needs war, and Churchill needed it more than most, for he could turn war into words, and so into cash. But if you sat still, expecting wars to come to you, you might be starved of action. You had to go to the wars. That became Churchill’s policy. The Fourth Hussars, under Colonel Brabazon, a family friend, was ordered to India. But there was a handsome war going on in Cuba, where America had sympathy for the insurgents. Brabazon’s agreement was reluctantly secured, and Churchill and his mother pulled strings to get him to the front and arranged a contract with the Daily Graphic to publish his dispatches. By November 1895 he was already under fire as well as braving outbreaks of yellow fever and smallpox. “For the first time,” he wrote, “I heard shots fired in anger and heard bullets strike flesh or whistle through the air.” This recalls the famous description by George Washington of first hearing bullets whistle in 1757. But unlike Washington, Churchill did not find “something pleasant in the sound.” On the contrary, he learned to take cover. He was under fire, I