A History of Britain, Volume 3 (52 page)

Miraculously, however – not least because he was soft on a coercive ‘Crimes Bill’ – Randolph managed to be on good terms with Parnell as well as with the Belfast Unionists, to the point of being instrumental in getting the Irish MPs to bring down Gladstone’s government (the ultimate case of cutting off a nose to spite a face). When a Tory administration was established on the ruins of Home Rule in July 1886, Salisbury (perhaps through gritted teeth) felt he had no option but to share power with Randolph Churchill. At 37 years old he became leader of the House of Commons and chancellor of the exchequer. But his appetite grew with the eating. Churchill began to meddle egregiously with foreign policy, the acknowledged preserve of the prime minister. A fight was picked with Salisbury over the army and navy estimates. Failing to get his way, and fatally over-estimating his indispensability, Randolph threatened to resign. The bluff was called. He had been chancellor of the exchequer for just four months. One imagines Salisbury and Northcote lifting a private glass in huge relief.

Lord Randolph’s time in power was over before most politicians had begun theirs. Worse than being kept at a distance from office was his accurate certainty that he would never recover it. He collapsed into a baleful, bitter, taciturn gloom that settled on the whole Churchill–Marlborough clan like a coating of ash. ‘Darling Mummy’ letters from Winston became more pathetically needy while Darling Mummy was taking lovers and failing to show up on parents’ days. Summers at Blenheim presided over by the aged Duchess Fanny, around whom slippered footmen obsequiously shuffled in the candlelight, were especially grim. Encounters between father and son were rare, which was just as well since Winston, physically unprepossessing, halting of speech and, so Randolph thought, irremediably dim, had become an intolerable irritant to his short, sharp temper: ‘I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy & futile existence.’ Frightened of tongue-lashings, Winston invariably committed the small crimes and misdemeanours that guaranteed them. At
Harrow
he remained lonely, conscious of his clumsiness (he managed to fall from a tricycle and concuss himself) and carrying the distinction of his birth and rank like a sorry burden. ‘I would far rather have been apprenticed as a bricklayer’s mate,’ he would later write, ‘or run errands as a messenger boy, or helped my father dress the front windows of a grocer’s shop. It would have been real; it would have been natural, it would have taught me more, and I would have done it much better. Also I should have got to know my father, which would have been a joy to me.’

Later, Winston wrote that he had had no more than than three or four long conversations with Randolph in his entire life. One of them, however, changed his life. Catching Winston marshalling his now massive army of lead soldiers with what seemed a surprisingly shrewd tactical eye, Randolph asked whether he might not like to go into the army? For the father, of course, the sub-text was that Winston was too dense to become something solid like a lawyer or a churchman, much less a politician. But the son heard the bugle call of history’s vindication. He would pick up his father’s broken sword and charge the enemy. That would show them what he was made of.

The ‘Army Class’ (not for the future Gladstones) at Harrow was followed by Sandhurst (after three tries at the entrance examination). There, Winston’s uncoordinated energies were at last given some sort of outlet; he became more gregarious even while lamenting that the great age of generals and battles was over, dreaming dreams of dragoons. He hoped to get into a cavalry regiment, but Randolph balked at investing in the horses from which he assumed Winston would fall. Undaunted, with his mother’s help he hired them from the local livery stables and dashed around a good deal after foxes. Inevitably, there were mishaps of the kind which brought down the wrath of Randolph, by now terminally ill with what seems to have been not syphilis, as traditionally accepted, but some sort of wasting neural disease. A gold watch given to Winston by his father had been damaged in a collision with another cadet and then secretly repaired. But two weeks later the doomed timepiece fell out of Winston’s fob pocket into a stream that fed a large pond. Horrified at the disaster, Winston did what Churchills did best: he mobilized a small army of 23 infantrymen and a fire engine to pump the pond, where eventually the timepiece was found covered in mud and irreparably ruined. When his father caught wind of the accident, there was nothing for it now but to own up: ‘I know I have been very foolish and clumsy with the watch and fully deserved to have it taken away. I am very sorry to have been so stupid and careless – but I hope that you will not be cross with me. … Once more saying how sorry I am to have made you angry, I remain ever your
loving
son. … Please don’t judge me entirely on the strength of the watch.’ The appeals from the 19-year-old to his father were in vain. He received back a stinging denunciation of his irresponsibility and general worthlessness (unlike his brother Jack, so much more trustworthy and mature; why do I bother etc. etc.).

In November 1894, about to graduate quite creditably from Sandhurst, Winston appeared for the first time as a public tribune. But the target of his and his friends’ demonstration was evidently chosen as much for its hilarity as for the high constitutional principles that Churchill pretended were at stake. Shocked by spotting tarts at the theatre bar, Mrs Laura Ormiston Chant of the Purity League had forced the owners of the Empire, Leicester Square, to put up a canvas screen in the promenade separating the vicious from the virtuous – a puritanical interference, Churchill claimed, with the liberties of free-born Englishmen. A speech invoking the shade of John Hampden (not famous for his penchant for prostitutes) was written but not delivered before the screen was torn down. Standing on the wreckage, Winston addressed his first crowd: ‘I discarded the constitutional argument entirely and appealed directly to sentiment and even passion, finishing up by saying, “You have seen us tear down these barricades to-night; see that you pull down those who are responsible for them at the coming election.’” Much cheering followed. Winston, sailing uproariously into Leicester Square, was reminded of the demolition of the Bastille. The Purity League caper would have been just the kind of juvenile outing – more prank than politics, complete with young bloods dissolved in hilarity and Taittinger, missing last trains back to Sandhurst, with much midnight giggling and hammering on doors (‘Stout yeoman, pray lend us your trap’) – to provoke one of Randolph’s fulminations. But Randolph was beyond fulmination, well into the final stages of his illness. Ironically, the last months before he left with Jennie for a world tour were the friendliest he ever spent with his still deeply intimidated elder son. The boy seems to have smartened up a bit, was Randolph’s thought, and he meant it as a compliment to more than Winston’s inherited dandyism. He was smart enough, at any rate, to be introduced to the Tory statesman Arthur Balfour and the Liberal imperialist, Lord Rosebery, and saw that political adversaries could be supper-club friends.

It was too late, however, to make up for lost opportunities. Rushed back to London in a state of near paralysis, Randolph died in January 1895 at the age of 45. ‘Woom’ Everest, whom Winston had enjoyed parading down the High Street at Harrow, died the following July. Now there were just his brother Jack, with whom he had an easy-going but never
very
close relationship; and of course Mummy, still only 40, still luscious, available and irresistible. The New York social tigress re-emerged, her fur and claws trimmed for the job at hand, which was to open doors for her boy. For Winston, his father was a lot easier to deal with as a memory. Liberated from that reproachful stare, he could devote himself to his father’s vindication, whether on the battlefield or the hustings, and become the successor Randolph could never have imagined. Winston’s journey to filial redemption culminated in 1905 in an almost hagio-graphic biography of the misunderstood, ill-treated genius father.

A conventional military-imperial career was possible. The commander of the 4th Hussars, the Irish peer Colonel John Brabazon, whom Winston remembered for his lordly inability to pronounce his ‘r’s (‘Where is the London twain?’ ‘It has gone, Colonel.’ ‘Gone? Bwing another!’), had returned the compliment by noticing Winston at Sandhurst and Aldershot. But even at 21, before his Bangalore epiphany with Gibbon and Macaulay, Winston knew he needed to carve out a different kind of life from the mess room and the parade ground. He was not at all sure, he confessed to his mother, that the military
métier
was really right for him. But if he were to wield the pen along with the sword, making two kinds of imperial history simultaneously, now that would be something.

So Lady Randolph did her best anticipation of Evelyn Waugh’s Lady Metroland and assignments were duly landed and introductions made, not least in New York, where Winston listened to the Irish-American politician William Bourke Cockran, the snap-brimmed Tammany Hall manipulator of money and men, and thought his oratory just fine. From Cuba, where the Spanish rulers were fighting a guerrilla war, he sent the
Daily Graphic
his first war reports. They confirmed a flair for the kind of campfire journalistic adventurism that sold newspapers, especially of the new kind, which thrived on Our Man Under Fire moments, the ancestor of the on-the-spot television correspondent: ‘We are on our horses, in uniform; our revolvers are loaded. In the dusk and half-light, long files of armed and laden men are shuffling off towards the enemy. He may be very near; perhaps he is waiting for us a mile away. We cannot tell.’

For the first time, Winston was shot at. A horse behind him was ripped open and died. The bullet, he reflected, was only a few feet away from hitting him and he felt the adrenalin-surge of survived peril. A parade of imperial adventures followed in which this early sense of physical fearlessness (never to be lost) made him an impetuous soldier and a brilliant war correspondent who intuited that history-making needed both writing and fighting. Instinctively, Winston went where the most imperial action was.

On the northwest frontier of India – where fighting would continue, on and off, for another century into our own time – he served under Sir Bindon Blood (noting, of course, that the general was directly descended from the Colonel Blood who had tried to steal Charles II’s Crown Jewels from the Tower of London and as a reward for his temerity had been given an estate in Ireland rather than a beheading by the magnanimous king). This family history of noble larceny, Winston commented, gave Sir Bindon a healthy sympathy with his foes, the Pathans or Pashtoun tribes of the Afghan border.

Skirmishes became copy for articles. Articles turned into book manuscripts, which Jennie sent to Longmans, who had published Macaulay. The publicity opened some doors and closed others. His father’s old nemesis, Lord Salisbury, actually sent for the young author of
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
(1898), gave him his blessing and pretended there had been no ill will. But Major-General Kitchener, conducting operations in the Sudan against the Islamic fundamentalist Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed, resisted almost to the last having Churchill foisted on him (a suspicion that would endure right through to their shared disaster at Gallipoli in 1915). None the less Winston was there at the battle of Omdurman in 1898 – and there, moreover, in the most epic persona he could contrive, as a dark-blue 21st Lancer in the thick of the last great, massively futile cavalry charge in British military history, colliding with the ‘Dervish’ army as ‘two living walls crashed together’. The experience provided Churchill with the perfect subject for his word-painting, a skill that was getting better, even cinematically gripping, with every adventure: ‘Riderless horses galloped across the plain. Men, clinging to their saddles, lurched helplessly about, covered with blood from perhaps a dozen wounds. Horses, streaming from tremendous gashes, limped and staggered with their riders. In 120 seconds five officers, 66 men, and 119 horses … had been killed or wounded.’

Even by the time he published
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan
– quickly in 1899 – Churchill knew that sympathy for the gallant, fallen, dusky foe was a crucial ingredient of the successful ripping yarn. But, following Gibbon’s famously sympathetic, even heroic, portrait of Muhammad and the birth of Islam, Churchill too attacked the wicked cast of characters, the ‘greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier and the lying speculator’ who had perverted the ideals, especially of Anglo-Egyptian government in the Sudan. Muhammad Ahmed appears not as ‘the mad Mullah’ of imperial caricature, but as the austere and puritanical reformer he actually was, whose call to rebellion was entirely understandable. This leaves Churchill (again
in
ripely pseudo-Gibbonian form) to lament that ‘the warm generous blood of a patriotic religious revolt congealed into the dark clot of a military empire’. But he still reserves some of his most powerful writing for the mutilated horsemen and foot soldiers of the ‘Dervish’ army; and was genuinely horrified to hear that Kitchener had allowed the Mahdi’s tomb to be desecrated and that the skull of the holy warrior was being used as a conversation piece for the general’s desk.

Whilst he had his doubts about the generals, he had none about the results of their battles. The creation of a euphemistically titled ‘Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’ in turn made possible a continuous belt of British Africa running Cape-to-Cairo along with the railway. Churchill accepted the defensive rationalization for the lion’s share of the partition of Africa – that it had happened, pre-emptively, to contain what would otherwise have been unacceptable instability in Egypt, the lifeline to India, trebly threatened by the Khedive’s profligacy, French military expansionism and Islamic fundamentalism. Never mind, of course, that this was precisely the wilful muddling of means and ends that had landed Britain with an immense territorial empire in India a century before. And never mind that the India syndrome was already repeating itself, with the military and governmental costs of the ‘holding operation’ pushing its custodians into yet more adventures in the hope of capturing the perfect bonanza (palm oil in West Africa, gold in South Africa), which would deny it to its European competitors, above all the French, and one day would surely balance the books. The redness of the British Empire was already a fiscal, as well as a cartographic, compulsion.