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It is said that famous men are usually the product of unhappy childhood. The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished. Churchill, Marlborough
‘He was shielded in his own mind from self-distrust.’
before Churchill was ten years old the beatings had so damaged his health that his parents took him away from St George’s and sent him to a far kinder school in Hove, run by two sisters both called Miss Thomson.
The most important was not to threaten to resign unless one is prepared to go into the wilderness.
‘I am always ready to learn,’ Churchill was to say in 1952, ‘although I do not always like being taught.’
The neglect and emotional cruelty at the hands of his parents that could have crushed a lesser person instead gave Churchill an unquenchable desire to succeed in life, not only in general but in his father’s chosen profession of politics.
‘To understand a man,’ Napoleon once said, ‘look at the world when he was twenty.’
‘When I was twenty-two, with my small Army pay not covering expenses, I realized that I was . . . unable to live my life as I wanted to. I wanted learning and I wanted funds. I wanted freedom. I realized there was no freedom without funds. I had to make money to get essential independence; for only with independence can you let your own life express itself naturally. To be tied down to someone else’s routine, doing things you dislike – that is not life – not for me .
‘He taught me to use every note of the human voice as if playing an organ,’
‘If I am to avoid doing “unusual” things it is difficult to see what chance I have of being more than an average person,’
‘Of course – as you have known for some time – I believe in myself.’96
as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such.
You would rise in the world? . . . You must work while others amuse themselves.
He had to cross 300 miles of enemy territory with no map, compass, food, money, firearm or knowledge of Afrikaans.
Before the new MP had even taken his seat, he had fought in four wars, published five books (the most recent, Ian Hamilton’s March, the sequel to From London to Ladysmith, appeared twelve days after his election), written 215 newspaper and magazine articles, participated in the greatest cavalry charge in half a century and made a spectacular escape from prison. ‘At twenty-five he had fought in more continents than any soldier in history save Napoleon,’ a contemporary profile of him was to proclaim, ‘and seen as many campaigns as any living general.’115 Churchill was undeniably pushy. He cut
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‘To think you can make a man richer by putting on a tax is like a man thinking that he can stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle.’
In December 1905, Churchill shared a platform opposing the Tsarist pogroms with the Russian-born chemistry lecturer Dr Chaim Weizmann, who was later to play a formative part in his thinking on Zionism.
‘Few fathers had done less for their sons. Few sons have done more for their fathers.’
‘To be able to make your work your pleasure’, he said, ‘is the one class distinction in the world worth striving for.’
Of the joy he found in writing, he said, ‘To sit at one’s table on a sunny morning, with four clear hours of uninterruptible security, plenty of nice white paper, and a Squeezer pen* – that is true happiness.’
The Old Age Pensions Act 1908 introduced a pension of five shillings a week (approximately £23 in today’s money) for 600,000 old people for the first time, costing £4 million per annum. ‘It is not much,’ Churchill was to say of the very modest pension provision, ‘unless you have not got it.’
‘I never complain of hard words across the floor of the House,’ he said in a debate on the Parliament Bill on 4 April 1911, ‘but I claim to be allowed to match them with arguments equal to the attack which has been made’ – and he always did.
Churchill also learned that it was sometimes better to cut one’s losses than massively to increase the stakes.
‘I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes,’
‘I did not know what release from care meant. It is a blessed peace.’
Sometimes in war, as he was to say later, the truth has to be defended by a bodyguard of lies.
‘war is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile grin. If you can’t grin keep out of the way till you can.’
The United States entered the war on 6 April 1917, after Room 40 had intercepted a telegram from Arthur Zimmermann, the German Foreign Minister, encouraging the Mexicans to recapture Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. Without it, Churchill later wrote, the war ‘would have ended in a peace by negotiation, or, in other words, a German victory’.
‘My hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality. It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practise in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained.’
‘At the summit true politics and strategy are one,’
‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’. ‘Some people like Jews and some do not,’ he wrote, ‘but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.’
Back in November 1917, Churchill had supported Balfour’s Declaration in favour of a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine.
‘Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps towards the irrigation and electrification of Palestine.
I like things to happen and if they don’t happen I like to make them happen.
‘We do completely disagree on the main issue,’ Cecil had written to him as early as July. ‘You believe that future war is practically certain, that the best way of avoiding it is the old prescription of preparedness, and that in any case the first duty of the Government is to collect such armaments as may be necessary to prevent defeat.’37
‘The story of the human race is War,’ he wrote towards the end of this work. ‘Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.
It must be observed that economic problems, unlike political issues, cannot be solved by any expression, however vehement, of the national will, but only by taking the right action.
The public trusted him in 1940 not because they believed he had always, or even generally, been right – all too clearly he had not – but because they knew he had fought bravely for what he believed in,
‘If we look back on our past life we shall see that one of its most usual experiences is that we have been helped by our mistakes and injured by our most sagacious decisions.’
‘Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making. Once.’
To be so entirely convinced and vindicated in a matter of life and death to one’s country, and not to be able to make Parliament and the nation heed the warning, or bow to the proof by taking action, was an experience most painful.’
‘It is very much better sometimes to have a panic feeling beforehand, and then to be quite calm when things happen, than to be extremely calm beforehand and to get into a panic when things happen.’
‘Never confuse leadership with popularity.’158
‘Alexander the Great remarked that the people of Asia were slaves because they had not learned to pronounce the word “No”. Let that not be the epitaph of the English-speaking peoples or of Parliamentary democracy, or of France, or of the many surviving liberal states of Europe.’
Men and kings must be judged in the testing moments of their lives. Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because . . . it is the quality which guarantees the others.
‘Always see for yourself,’ Churchill advised Hore-Belisha. ‘Once you have seen a thing working, you know how it works.’78
Maisky concluded, ‘In peacetime the British often look like pampered, gluttonous sybarites, but in times of war and extremity they turn into vicious bulldogs, trapping their prey in a death grip.’88
He had always thrust himself into the arena, and felt no guilt or embarrassment about demanding what he saw as his due.
‘At last I had the authority to give direction over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial .
‘The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy. Thus the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.’11
