The Young Winston
By NIGEL NICOLSON
MAY I be forgiven for calling them Winston and Randolph respectively and respect- fully? The familiarity has long since ceased to be an impertinence and become a compliment, and in this case it is a convenience. Here you have father and son intertwined—Winston the undoubted hero, Randolph describing himself as 'the author.'* More truly he is the editor, since his purpose is to allow the original docu- ments as far as possible to tell their own story; or rather, -chairman of the editorial board, since no fewer than six male and' nine female assistants are listed in the acknowledgements. What must life at East Bergholt "te like these days! The material is enormous,Atlit research meticulous, the publication on a colossal scale. To this volume alone, ending with Winston aged twenty-six, two volumes of documents are to be added in the spring.
Randolph's motive, he tells us, is to write 'a filial and objective biography.' Biography, in the usual sense, it is not, but it is all the better for it. It is mainly a collection of letters to, from and about Winston, and for much of the back- ground and detail the reader is referred to My Early Life, The Story of the Malakand Field Force and The River War, which are almost obligatory co-reading. In between the letters there are quotations from the autobiographical works and passages of narrative and comment by Randolph. 'Filial' it certainly , is, for his veneration for his father is evident on every page. 'Objective'? Well, we must wait for the later volumes to be sure. Here there is not much scope for objectivity. Winston had already denigrated such parts of his early life as seemed to him regrettable or wasted, but where a non- filial biographer might have deepened the shadows or dimmed the lustre, Randolph gives his father the benefit of the doubt, A private schoolmaster reported that Winston was 'rather greedy at meals.' Not at all, says Randolph: he simply enjoyed a, good appetite. Yet the very care with which the book is com- piled reassures the reader. Was ft General Botha who, as Winston always maintained, personally captured him after the incident of the armoured train? The evidence for and against is scrupu- lously examined, and the conclusion left open. The result of a point-to-point in which Winston rode, his tailor's bills, a polo match in India, are all analysed by reference to obscure original documents. Here we have as much material for the life of Winston as any historian could decently require. What we do not have, and did not expect to be given, is a sirmming-up free of all suspicion of partiality.
But the book is fascinating. Even if it had not been the prelude to so astonishing a career, it would still have been worth publishing as a record of high adventure and as the portrait of a young man in Victoria's last years. My Early Life has, of course, already skimmed the cream, and two brilliant pages reproduced from The River War, describing Winston lost in the desert, remind one of the literary gap between his con- sidered, worked-up narrative and contemporary jottings to his mother and his girl (Pamela Plowden, later Lady Lytton).
The letters are not contrived. They foresaw no other reader. They are breathless with • Wors-rou S. CHURCHILL. Yount. 1874-1900. By Randolph S. Churchill. (Heinemann, 63s.) urgency, reproach, love, conceit, indignation and audacity. His letter to Lady Randolph after Omdurman is dusty with exhaustion: 'It passed, like a dream, and some part of it I cannot recall,' though thirty years later he was able to set down every detaiL The letters are interesting for the very things that they do not say, for their confirmation or contradiction of his later recollections, and for the guessing game that they provoke, a game which Randolph himself plays with unquenched amusement. What *ere, the first indications of genius? Is it true tile. Winston was such a failure at school as he made out? What would have happened if he bad become Duke of Marlborough or had entered (as he momentarily considered) the Church?
My Early Life throws away his whole chig- hood as a bad joke. Randolph partly accepts his father's verdict. 'Winston's schooldays,' he writes, 'were the only..unhappy part of his life.' It is here that the reader first begins to question the legend. It is quite true that Lord Randolph noticed his son only to scold him, and that * mother was startled by the progeny which she hid borne but not reared. But unhappy? There. was Mrs Everest, whom he adored, and his brother Jack, who, though more than five years younger, soon became a devoted companion. There were the solaces of a comfortable house, of Blenheim and even of Bournemouth.
He was not a complete failure either at games or at work. He became Public Schools fenstag champion. He won the prize for declamation, cliein to the whole of Harrow. His masters were not of the type usually depicted in hard-luck accounts of their schooldays by those who later achi eminence. Small blame to the masters if did not discern in him qualities which escaped even his father. None of them bullied or neglected him. Mr Welldon, Headmaster ..of Harrow, was not likely to ignore among 11s pupils the son of the most brilliant politica figure in England, and he did not do so:. his many letters to Lord and Lady Randolph a14 penetrating and solicitous. Winston himself was too naughty to be unhappy. The two do- not usually go together. He was impish, mutinous, excitable, 'too clever and too much the boss' (the Duchess of Marlborough to Lord Randolph), erratic, lazy and industrious by fits and s seeker after short cuts, often 'slouching tiresome' (Lady Randolph to Lord Randol..), 'obstinate, rebellious and mischievous' (Ran- dolph), but not, one deduces from his own letters, miserable except when in disgrace, nor, as he wrote in My Early. Life, 'completely outclassed.' The latter charge Randolph does not support. 'We have seen enough of Winston's work to denounce this legend as false. He was not stupid; indeed he early showed originality of mind.'
The moment when his originality and driving force first began to appear is for every reader to determine from Winston's schoolboy letters printed in this volume. For me it comes in the closing phrase of a letter written to his mother in 1891: 'There are other and higher things in this world than learning, more powerful agents than the Civil Service Commissioners.' This, at last, has the authentic note, both of attitude and of style. With it emerged an arrogance and am- bition that were absent during his school4t4rs. It is a matter of individual reaction wheter one applauds or regrets the pertinacity, 'the string-pulling, the self-advertisement, the pushful- i ness that exceeds self-confidence, with which Winston, roping in his mother as an ally, pur- sued his early ambition. His achievement may be held to excuse his methods. Certainly Ran- dolph does not seek to conceal this side of his father's nature, nor is he dismayed by it.
But it is not to be wondered that Winston made many enemies on his way up. He desired glory not only for its own sake but as a means of self-advancement. He searched for wars, anyone's wars, switching regiments as easily as he switched theatres, as opportunities for making his name as a soldier and writer. 'Foolish perhaps,' he wrote to his mother aflt_ a par- ticularly desperate battle on the North-West Frontier, 'but I play for high stakes, and given an audience, there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.' Everyone sensed this. Even when he escaped from the Boers and became a national hero at the age of twenty-five, his fantastic exploits went unacknowledged by any decoration. (Another interesting speculation: would his career have been helped, or hindered if he had won the VC?) At home, among political and social leaders who could not deny his brilliance with sword and pen, there was suspicion tinged with jealousy. When my own father first heard his name, it was coupled with the sneer, 'the Blenheim pup.'
If Winston had been killed at Spion Kop in 1900, what memory of him would now remain? A young buccaneer who chanced his fate once too often; three swashbuckling books (includ- ing Savrola) of great promise; a sense of wastage and possibly of nemesis. He would not have been the Rupert Brooke or Richard Hillary of the frontier wars. His early life had still to be graced by the ease that comes with fulfilment. He was riding high when he entered Parliament in 1900, but the saddle was a little insecure. `There is no doubt,' he had written to Pamela Plowden from Oldham when he first, and un- successfully, contested the seat, 'that I personally have made a very good impression.' But there was some doubt, because he did not get in. Yet it was not Pamela who found Winston insup- portable; it was he who found her too tame.
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