Churchill

Churchill’s reading programme began with Edward Gibbon’s 4,000-page The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – which he was to re-read twice more over the course of his life, and parts of which he could quote from memory. He followed it with Gibbon’s autobiography and then read Macaulay’s six-volume History of England, which he loved (except for the attacks on the 1st Duke of Marlborough) and the Lays of Ancient Rome.40 After that he read Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic, and the key texts of Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin, Adam Smith, Henry Hallam, Samuel Laing, William Lecky, the Marquis de Rochefort and very many others – though no novels. The sheer breadth of his reading matter was astonishing, and it gave him enormous intellectual self-confidence, to add to the other kinds he already had. A friend recalled lending Dr Welldon’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics to Churchill. It was very good, he rejoined, ‘But it is extraordinary how much of it I had already thought out for myself.’41 Churchill told his mother that he wanted his reading to give him ‘a scaffolding of logical and consistent views’.42 She replied to say that his bank had bounced a cheque for £11, which she would nonetheless honour. Churchill’s autodidacticism meant that there were inevitably gaps in his knowledge. As late as 1906 he had not heard of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and he confused the poet William Blake with the admiral Robert Blake. But once this was pointed out, a friend recorded, ‘the next time I met him, he had learned not merely this, but all the odes of Keats by heart – and he recited them to me mercilessly from start to finish, not sparing me a syllable!’ (Location 1367)

In the three volumes for 1874, 1875 and 1876, which covered all the legislation debated in Parliament at the time of his birth and infancy, he even wrote out the speeches that he would have delivered had he been in politics at the time, which he then pasted into the books.44 The Scotch Church Patronage Bill, the Endowed Schools Act Amendment Bill, the Judicature Amendment Act: nothing was too obscure for Churchill’s considered reactions. (Location 1385)

For all the later Nazi propaganda, and his own jokes about his drinking, Churchill had an extraordinary capacity for alcohol and it rarely affected his judgement. ‘A single glass of champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration,’ he was to write. ‘The nerves are braced; the imagination is agreeably stirred; the wits become more nimble. A bottle produces a contrary effect. Excess causes a comatose insensibility. So it is with war, and the quality of both is best discovered by sipping.’69 The overwhelming evidence is that Churchill loved alcohol, drank steadily by sipping, had a hardy constitution and was only very rarely affected by it. (Location 1484)

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world. Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his offices, whoever can command this power is still formidable … A meeting of grave citizens, protected by all the cynicism of these prosaic days, is unable to resist its influence. From unresponsive silence they advance to grudging approval and thence to complete agreement with the speaker. The cheers become louder and more frequent; the enthusiasm momentarily increases; until they are convulsed by emotions they are unable to control and shaken by passions of which they have resigned the direction … It appears there are certain features common to all the finest speeches in the English language … Rhetorical power is neither wholly bestowed nor wholly acquired, but cultivated. The peculiar temperament and talents of the orator must be his by nature, their development is encouraged by practice. The orator is real. The rhetoric is partly artificial … The orator is the embodiment of the passions of the multitude … Before he can move their tears his own must flow. To convince them he must himself believe. He may be often inconsistent. He is never consciously insincere.85 (Location 1554)

Churchill believed there were five ‘elements’ to great oratory. First was the ‘exact appreciation of words’, that is, ‘the continual employment of the best possible word’. He instanced ‘dour’ to describe the Scots. He believed in using ‘short, homely words of common usage’. Although the words should be short, sentences did not need to be, provided they had an internal rhythm. The second element of oratory was sound: ‘The influence of sound on the human brain is well known,’ he wrote. ‘The sentences of the orator when he appeals to his art become long, rolling and sonorous. The peculiar balance of the phrases produces a cadence which resembles blank verse rather than prose.’89 His reference to blank verse reflects his lifelong love of Shakespeare, whose works had a profound effect on his oratory, written style and sense of British exceptionalism, and influenced his later practice of writing out his speech notes in blank-verse form. (He also playfully developed a line in cod-Shakespeare, which often fooled those less familiar with the plays than he was.) The third element in oratory was the steady accumulation of argument. ‘A series of facts is brought forward all pointing in a common direction,’ he wrote. ‘The crowd anticipate the conclusion and the last words fall amid a thunder of assent.’90 Fourth was the use of analogy, which can ‘translate an established truth into simple language’, and of which he gave examples from the speeches of Lord Salisbury and Macaulay, as well as his own father’s remark that ‘Our rule in India is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread over and keeping free from storms a vast and profound ocean of humanity.’91 Churchill used analogy constantly in his speeches, seemingly naturally, but, as this essay shows, it was all part of a highly considered artistry. ‘A tendency to wild extravagance of language – to extravagance so wild that reason recoils – is evident in most perorations,’ Church...

...ill wrote of his fifth and last element. ‘The emotions of the speaker and the listeners are alike aroused and some expression must be found that will represent all they are feeling. This usually embodies in an extreme form the principles they are supporting … The effect of such extravagances on a political struggle is tremendous. They become the watchwords of parties and the creeds of nationalities.’92 He cited speeches by William Pitt the Elder and the great American orator William Jennings Bryan, arguing that the orator cannot ‘resist the desire to express his opinions in an extreme form or to carry his argument to the culmination’. (Location 1574)

was critical of British generalship, though not of Bindon Blood himself. ‘The general who avoids all “dash”,’ he wrote, ‘who never starts in the morning looking for a fight and without any definite intention, who does not attempt heroic achievements, and who keeps his eye on his watch, will have few casualties and little glory.’ (Location 1646)

As was so often the case in Churchill’s life, what looked like a reverse at the time turned out in retrospect to have been good fortune. Had he squeaked into the House of Commons in 1899, he would not have gone to South Africa and would not have had the opportunity to make not just a local or national reputation for himself, but a truly international one. (Location 1914)

… when the prospects of a career like that of his father, Lord Randolph, excited him, then such a gleam shot from him that he was almost transfigured. I had not before encountered this sort of ambition, unabashed, frankly (Location 1931)

was during this period of his captivity that Churchill came to understand why the Boers had such an aversion to British rule, which he put down to ‘the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man’.73 Churchill had no sympathy for the aggressive white supremacism of the Afrikaner, from which his own paternalistic instincts were entirely different. (Location 1994)

His second Commons speech, on 13 May, came almost three months after his maiden. ‘I learnt it so thoroughly off by heart’, he told a journalist, ‘that it hardly mattered where I began it or how I turned it.’26 He did not refer to his notes once in the entire hour he spoke.fn3 (Location 2285)

‘My piece of advice is,’ he said of Tariff Reform in Manchester in January 1905, ‘in politics when you are in doubt what to do, do nothing. In politics when you are in doubt what to say, say what you really think. If the Prime Minister from the beginning of this controversy had acted on these principles it would have been much better for our country, much better for his own reputation, and much better for the party organization to which he attaches such extraordinary and undue importance.’ (Location 2624)

In the years that followed, Churchill did not allow others the necessary archival wherewithal to contradict him. Foster believes there was ‘a good deal of judicious weeding before the papers were made publicly available’, so ultimately the portrait that emerges was one in which ‘Churchill not only discovered his father, but also refashioned him in his own image.’10 Uncomfortable facts were not allowed to get in the way of Churchill’s elegant recruitment of his dead father as a posthumous mentor for himself. (Location 2711)

At a speech in Glasgow in October 1906, Churchill discussed his political philosophy. He said that he had opposed socialism all his life, but had come around to the idea that ‘The State should increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labour.’46 He also supported ‘the universal establishment of minimum standards of life and labour, and their progressive elevation as the increasing energies of production may permit’.47 This ‘minimum standard’ concept, which was also being adopted at that time by other influential Liberals such as David Lloyd George and Charles Masterman, was later to evolve into the modern welfare state. (Location 2859)

Uncounted generations will trample heedlessly upon our tombs. What is the use of living if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? … Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on – swinging bravely forward along the grand high road – and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun. (Location 3262)

Probably under the influence of his reading of Darwin, Churchill was briefly a convinced eugenicist. In October 1910 he noted that there were at least 120,000 ‘feeble-minded people at large in our midst’ in Britain whom he thought should be ‘segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations’.39 He was interested in the possibility of sterilization, telling Asquith in December that the ‘multiplication of the [mentally] unfit’ constituted ‘a very terrible danger to the race’.40 He saw sterilization as a liberating measure that would protect the feeble-minded from incarceration, but it was never introduced in Britain. As well as being an (absent) member of the first international Eugenics Conference in July 1912, Churchill was one of the early drafters of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, which defined four grades of what it called ‘mental defectives’ who could be incarcerated, namely ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’, ‘the feeble-minded’ and ‘moral defectives’, although it rejected sterilization. This thinking was so uncontroversial across all the parties in those days that the Bill passed with only three votes cast against. As with his views on race, Churchill’s support for eugenics needs to be seen in the context of the scientific beliefs of the day, which were shared by thinkers on the left such as H. G. Wells, Sydney Webb, John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge and distinguished jurists such as Oliver Wendell Holmes. (Location 3624)