Young Churchill
Beddow, Reid
Young Churchill Reviewed by Reid Beddow Oir Winston has a best seller from ^ beyond the grave, and he meant it to be that way. The opening page of this first volume in Randolph S. Churchill's...
...cabled Randolph...
...The nanny's death, not Lord Randolph's, is Volume I's most poignant moment...
...He went home to an electoral victory and the on rushing Twentieth Century...
...Instead, we get the thrill of the polo field and the high adventure of riding an elephant in India...
...While she writes "My darling dear Boy you are one of ten thousand," Lord Randolph pens a snarling "I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays . . . you will become a mere social wastrel...
...he was captured by the Boers and electrified England by escaping through 300 miles of enemy territory...
...The Prince of Wales, the prime minister, the king of Greece, the foreign minister of Spain, ambassadors, proconsuls, and generals were all approached so that he could hear the whine of bullets in various colonial wars...
...Thus the touching devotion of his nanny, Mrs...
...but if it is, it is also the source of his anachronistic greatness...
...Everest —"Woom" he called her—assumes unlooked-for importance...
...This is perhaps the later Winston's tragedy...
...It is terrible to think how little time remains...
...and it is a tribute to the objectivity of Winston's son that Mrs...
...There were a few moments of self-doubt...
...Randolph stitches them together with deft summaries of the political, social, and family backgrounds...
...Though the stage is crowded, the show is never dull...
...Fortune favored him spectacularly...
...Here too are favorite Victorian scandals whispered of from behind fans and potted palms: divorces of Marlborough aunts and cousins, a disastrous speculation in fraudulent American stocks by Churchill's mother, a false charge against Winston "of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type," and the meteoric political career and tragic death of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill...
...In letter after letter, Winston begged to visit his parents...
...Today it looks more like hundreds of thousands...
...Everest, and his commanding general, the magnificently named Sir Bindon Blood, move across the stage, form tableaux—a favorite Victorian game—utter their lines, and step into the niches history and memory have carved...
...The result is much more than an exercise in filial devotion, and Randolph is to be congratulated...
...Here are all those elephantine issues that so agitated Victorian hearts: Home Rule for Ireland, Tory Democracy, Reform, Empire, Free Trade...
...The great characters of the epoch from Gladstone and the old Queen on down, and a host of attendant figures, like Winston's beloved nanny, Mrs...
...The work is planned for five volumes, each with one or two companion volumes of documents...
...the requests were thoughtlessly and almost cruelly rebuffed...
...What a pity Lord Randolph could not see his "social wastrel" son become, to borrow Macaulay's judgment of Oliver Cromwell, "the greatest prince ever to rule England...
...With sole access to his father's papers (eighteen tons of them, says one report), Randolph is assembling the most definitive life we can ever have of the great man...
...Only a leader imbued with the knowledge of a thousand years of national splendor could hurl such defiance at a mortal enemy in 1940...
...Everest receives her due at the expense of the biographer's grandparents...
...It is a lively tale, and the reader will look forward eagerly to succeeding volumes in hopes of major revelations when the years of power are encompassed...
...But it is clear that the opinions of a lifetime have already been formed...
...He visited the United States and was impressed by the vitality and vulgarity of McKinley's America...
...Ever attracted by martial pomp, possessed of regiments of toy soldiers, Winston chose a soldier's career and went to Sandhurst, the British West Point...
...What we will ultimately have, appropriately enough for an individual half American and all Nineteenth Century British, is a Victorian device: history by the yard...
...Later he regretted the choice and wished he had gone to Oxford to study history and philosophy...
...In this volume, subtitled "Youth 1874-1900," Winston's pen does most of the writing in hitherto unpublished letters...
...Mrs...
...We cannot be sorry...
...The glittering Lord and Lady Randolph had little time for their high-spirited son...
...The opening page of this first volume in Randolph S. Churchill's biography of his father records the plan in a 1932 exchange of telegrams between Winston, lecturing in America, and Randolph, in London: "Have been offered 450 pounds advance on substantial royalties for biography of you have you any objection...
...mercifully, we are spared the student's search for first principles and theological niceties that plunges so many Victorian "Life and Letters" into paralyzing thickets of metaphysics...
...His goal was already set...
...I shall be Prime Minister of England before I'm finished," he announced at twenty-two...
...He pulled strings in the most blatant way...
...He reached manhood a hotly ambitious, open-hearted Hotspur with the kind of erratic genius that the English sum up when they say a person is "too clever by half...
...Churchill turned to books for his university, devoured Gibbon, Macaulay, and Plato, and developed a feel for English prose...
...You have two duties to perform," he told the Southsea Conservative Association in 1898, "the support of the Empire abroad and the support of liberty at home...
...This installment chronicles the years from Winston's birth to his election to Parliament at the age of twenty-five...
...He wrote three books, including a novel, and made a name as a journalist...
...The thought did not occur to him that these goals might be antithetical...
...The reply crossed the Atlantic swiftly: "Strongly deprecate premature attempt hope some day you will make thousands instead of hundreds out of my archives most improvident now . . . Father...
...and so, in an era when impoverished English aristocrats sell off their valuable paintings to make ends meet, the Churchills prosper...
...Everest, for one, might not have been too surprised...
...Resigning his commission, he stood for Parliament, lost narrowly, and went off to cover the Boer War...
...What emerges as the surprise in all this is Winston's incredibly lonely childhood...
...I am twenty-five today," he mourned in 1899...
Vol. 31 • February 1967 • No. 2
