I’m not
going to bother recounting the specific events of this book like I usually do.
In the second volume, Manchester conveniently summarizes the first volume, so I’ll
just put that summary below. Instead, I’ll comment on the writing of the book
and the most interesting things about Churchill himself. The summary is
underneath the stuff I wrote. I like how the book is divided. There are no
chapters, just parts. They are Part One: Headwaters, 1874-1895; Part Two:
Stream, 1895-1901; Part Three: River, 1901-1914; Part Four: cataract 1914-1918;
Part Five: Oxbow, 1918-1932. The author writes very well and injects a bit of
personality into the book sometimes, like when he says “it’s extraordinary how
many crises caught him bathing” in a funny little exasperated tone. I think that
Manchester really has top-notch skills and I would put him in the same league
(though not quite the same level) as Robert Caro. That said, I have only read
one book of his and so the rest might be even better.
Manchester does this really cool
thing in the book where he talks about where are the leaders were at a certain
time. For example, “Could any other nation in 1901 offer its young politicians
the chance for greatness which was now his? Not the insular United States of
nineteen-year-old Franklin Roosevelt, then an immature, unpromising Harvard freshman
in a country of fewer than 76 million—less than a fifth of the Empire’s 412
million—which largely ignored the rest of civilization. Not the vast China of
thirteen-year-old Chiang Kai-shek; its few pretensions to a national identity
had been shattered with the crushing of the Boxer uprising the previous summer.
Certainly not the locked medieval oriental kingdom of sixteen-year-old Hideki
Tojo’s Japan. The domain of the Turk—the home of nineteen-year-old Mustapha
Kemal—was an empire in name only. Czarist Russia seethed with anarchy, terror,
despotism, nihilism, and intrigue, and was constantly menaced by uprisings in
the Ukraine, the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and Georgia, where Joseph
Stalin, then Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aged twenty-one, had just been
fired from the only nonpolitical job he ever held, a clerkship in the Tiflis
observatory. In Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, the
Hapsburg emperor presided over an equally unstable polyglot of Serbs, Croats,
Poles, Magyars, Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Austrians, including, in the Austrian
town of Linz, a sullen eleven-year-old schoolboy named Adolf Hitler.” The book
is has two of these moments where it discusses several other leaders and it has
a few more moments where it discusses what Hitler was doing at the time.
Something I want to just point out as
maybe one of the most interesting things in the book is how terribly Winston’s
parents treated him as a child. His father was outright mean to him and his
mother was neglectful and had no interest in him. He would send her so many
letters from boarding school (where he was sent at 7 years old) and hardly
received any in return. He never breastfed and was raised entirely by his
nanny. In those first years at boarding school he was beaten savagely and
changed schools. On that occasion Manchester interjects to point out that
Winston’s father likely did not even know of the incident, as he did not even
know how old Winston was. This is apparently the stuff that makes great men.
Winston Churchill is an incredibly
unusual person. He lives in a world that is very Victorian and based on the
highest ideals of honor. All of his policies and thought flow from these ideals
of British supremacy and magnanimity. He loves the hierarchy of the aristocracy.
He would see any visitor in his bedroom except for the king and had the common
aristocratic disdain for the working class. That said, he would later support social
welfare legislation in that European-style noblesse oblige sort of way. His
life is honestly fascinating as it’s filled with interesting people, war,
prison breaks, and excitement. Churchill seems to have been at the center of so
many major events, like when he found himself in New York on Black Tuesday. His
life is incredibly fascinating and I had to pick up volume two right away.
Summary
THE GRANDSON of a duke, Winston
Churchill was born in splendrous Blenheim Palace during the autumn of 1874,
when the British Empire was the world’s mightiest power. Almost immediately the
infant was entrusted to his plump nanny, “Woom,” who became his only source of
childhood happiness. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a brilliant if
erratic member of Parliament — he was, briefly, chancellor of the Exchequer —
actually loathed Winston. The boy’s breathtakingly beautiful American mother,
Jennie, devoted most of her time to sexual intrigue, slipping between the
sheets with handsome, powerful men in Britain, in the United States, and on the
Continent. Her husband was in no position to object. He was an incurable
syphilitic.
Winston rebelled against school
authority, first becoming a disciplinary problem and then, at Harrow, the
lowest-ranked scholar in the lower form. His dismal academic record ruled out
Oxford or Cambridge, so he went to Sandhurst, England’s West Point. On February
20, 1895, less than a month after his father’s death from paresis, young
Churchill was commissioned a second lieutenant and gazetted to the Fourth
Hussars, preparing to embark for India. In Bangalore Churchill succeeded where
his schoolmasters failed. During the long, sweltering siestas, he educated
himself, reading Plato, Aristotle, Gibbon, Macaulay, Schopenhauer, and poring
over thousands of pages of parliamentary debates. Developing a flair for the
language, he found he could earn money writing newspaper and magazine articles
and books. At the same time he felt strong stirrings of ambition. He would, he
decided, seek a seat in Parliament. But first he must become famous. Ruthlessly
manipulating his mother’s lovers (who included the Prince of Wales), he managed
to appear wherever the fighting was fiercest. By 1899 lie was in South Africa.
Taken prisoner in the Boer War by the Boers, he managed a sensational escape
from a POW stockade, making his way across three hundred miles of enemy territory
to freedom. His breakout made him a national figure. Returning home, he was
elected to Parliament while Victoria still reigned.
In the House of Commons his rise
was meteoric. At thirty-three he was a cabinet minister. Appointed president of
the Board of Trade, he joined with David Lloyd George, the new chancellor of
the Exchequer, in the move to abolish sweated labor despite die-hard peers in
the House of Lords. In 1908, working in tandem, they conceived and then guided
through the Commons an unprecedented program of liberal legislation:
unemployment compensation, health insurance, and pensions for the aged, all of
them to be financed by taxes on the rich and the landed gentry. Winston
denounced the aristocracy in savage speeches, and titled relatives stopped
speaking to him. But he had a new, exciting supporter: Clementine Hozier, who
became Mrs. Winston Churchill in 1908. Long afterward the groom said that they
had “lived happily ever afterwards.” In fact, they remained deeply in love
until his death nearly sixty years later.
When the Central Powers, led by
Germany and Austria-Hungary, plunged all Europe into the Great War of
1914-1918, Churchill had anticipated it. Since 1911 he had been first lord of
the Admiralty. The fleet was ready. But on the western front the great armies
were locked in a bloody, hopeless stalemate. It would be years before either
side could hope for victory in the west. Churchill saw a way to break the
deadlock. He proposed that the Allied navies open a new front in the eastern
Mediterranean, exploiting the weakness of the Central Powers’ unstable ally,
Turkey. If the Dardanelles strait were forced by battleships, Constantinople
would fall within hours. The French and British could then join hands with
their Russian ally and sweep up the Danube into Hungary, Austria, Bavaria, and
Wurttemberg, ripping open the Second Reich’s undefended southern flank.
Today military historians agree
that the Dardanelles strategy could have ended the war in 1916 with a German
defeat. But a timid British admiral, who had been sweeping all before him,
turned tail at the first sign of resistance — even as the Turks, believing
themselves beaten, abandoned their forts on the strait and began the evacuation
of their capital. Then equally incompetent British generals botched the
landings on Gallipoli Peninsula, which flanked the Dardanelles. The British
public demanded a scapegoat, and Churchill, as the stratagem’s most flamboyant
advocate, was dismissed from the Admiralty. He joined the army, crossed to
Flanders, and, as a lieutenant colonel, commanded a battalion in the trenches.
After the Versailles peace
conference, in which he played no part, he became secretary for war and air,
and established the Royal Air Force. Then, as colonial secretary, he was
responsible for Britain’s postwar diplomacy in the Middle East. He planned the
Jewish state, created the nations of Iraq and Jordan, and picked their rulers.
It was typical of Churchill, whatever the question, that he would open with a
ferocious stance. Negotiations would lead to compromise and solution. Thus he
responded to postwar IRA terrorism by creating a force of Black and Tans —
former British soldiers who became terrorists themselves. Yet in the end it was
he who befriended Michael Collins, the IRA guerrilla leader, and who piloted
the Irish Free State treaty through Parliament.
In 1922 Lloyd George’s coalition
government fell and was succeeded by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives. As a
Liberal, and then as a Liberal Free Trader, Churchill ran for Parliament in
three elections and was defeated each time. Changing parties, he won as a Tory
in 1924 and was appointed chancellor of the Exchequer — traditionally, a step
away from the prime ministry — by Baldwin. His appointment was in fact unwise.
Rejecting the counsel of John Maynard Keynes and accepting instead the advice
of the Bank of England, he returned Britain to the gold standard. Markets
abroad couldn’t afford British exports. A coal miners’ strike led to a
crippling general strike. Winston founded a strike-breaking newspaper; then,
after the strike had failed, he took up the coal miners’ cause and fought the
mine owners, including a close Churchill relative, for higher pay and safer
pits.
After Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour
party won the election of 1929, Winston held the Exchequer post in the Tory
shadow cabinet, which would return to power when Labour’s slim majority
disappeared. But before that could hap pen, he
fell again. The issue was a grant of dominion status for India, putting her on
a level with Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. He, like
Disraeli, regarded the British Raj as the brightest jewel in England’s imperial
crown. He told Parliament that India was “a geographical term. It is no more a
united nation than the Equator.” Facing a stone wall of hostile Tories,
Churchill resigned from the shadow government on January 27, 1931. Less than
seven months later a new government was formed, and in November what might have
been Churchill’s place at the Exchequer was filled by Neville Chamberlain.
Thrice fallen from grace — the Dardanelles, the lost elections, and now India
Churchill had become a political pariah, out of joint with the times.
In the early 1920s, a small legacy
and £20,000 in royalties from sales of his six-volume history of the Great War
had permitted him to buy Chartwell Manor, a country home near the small Kent
town of Westerham, where he did most of his writing. John Kenneth Galbraith has
pointed out that administrations suspicious of intellectuals unwittingly make
substantial contributions to scholarship and writing. “It comes about,” he
wrote, “from not employing the scholars or scribes.” During Churchill’s long
spell as a backbencher he wrote and published a million words.
His chief concern was that Britain
might be vanquished by a tacit conspiracy between Prussian aggression and
English pacifism. Typically in the House of Commons, he would contemplate his
colleagues, then lower his head like a bull confronting a matador and slowly
shake it. After a pitifully weak MP revolt against government policy, Aneurin
Bevan encountered him in the smoking room and asked: “What have you been up to?
We haven’t seen much of you in the fight lately.” “Fight?” growled Winston,
sweeping the room with a challenging glance. “I can’t see any fight. All I can
see in this Parliament is a lot of people leaning against each other.”
Miscellaneous Facts:
- In the old days of Victorian England, those travelling to India by ship would go “Port Out, Starboard Home,” which became the acronym and later the normal word, POSH.
- In the 1870’s, dry cleaning did not yet exist and “suits had to be picked apart at the seams, washed, and sewn back together. Patricians wore new clothes or had tailors who could resew the garments they had made in the first place.”
- Aristocrats were far more “sexually wayward” than one would think in the Victorian era. The prudishness that we think of was more about the middle classes and the aristocracy were having a lot of adulterous sex. In titled families they wouldn’t worry about the fatherhood of children after the first and Churchill’s mom, Jenny, slept with all of the most important Englishmen at the time.
- Churchill is descended from Sir Francis Drake.
- Churchill’s father, Randolph contracted syphilis from a prostitute when his friends drugged him as a young man. The disease drove him insane and killed him. Very bad prank.
- Something that I thought about was how the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 may have been an important required condition of World War One. Through her, most of the great monarchies of Europe were related and with her dead, they must have lost some affinity for one another. Her funeral was attended by five kings and forty members of Europe’s royal families.
- Winston tried and failed to woo Ethel Barrymore, Drew Barrymore’s great-aunt.
- If Britain had come closer to Constantinople in World War One, the Young Turks were ready to destroy the Hagia Sophia and other priceless buildings with dynamite.
- In one World War One offensive, the German general Ludendorff covered the sounds of his guns being moved into position by wrapping horses’ hooves in rags and masking the sounds of creaking gun carriages with cages of croaking frogs.
- At the turn of the century, England had a policy of spending twice as much on its navy as any other country. At the end of World War One, they allowed themselves to live with a ratio of 5 (Great Britain), 5 (USA), 3 (Japan), 1.75 (France), and 1.75 (Italy).
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