Gandhi & Churchill (9 page)

Randolph’s first severe attack, in 1881, had left him partially paralyzed and almost unable to speak; but he had then recovered, remission had set in, and he had seemed fine. Jennie, on the other hand, feared the worst. They had already ceased to sleep together. Her second son, Jack, was born in February 1880. Rumors flew that it was almost certainly not Randolph’s child.
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At the India Office, the bouts of mental instability grew worse. They may even have affected his decision to wage his wars on Burma and on Indian reform. When the Tories returned to power in June 1886, Lord Randolph was well enough to step up as chancellor of the exchequer and his party’s virtual leader in the House of Commons. But his quarrels with Lord Salisbury grew so bitter that on December 20, while staying at Windsor Castle, he impulsively sent in a letter of resignation.

To Randolph’s shock, Salisbury accepted it. He too sensed something was wrong with his wayward younger colleague and was relieved to see him go. Although Randolph talked to others about one day returning to office, even becoming prime minister, his political career was over. Now it was left to his family to deal with the growing physical and mental wreck that was Lord Randolph Churchill, and with his bouts of delirium and rage, especially against his eldest son.

Winston became a major focus of his father’s diseased wrath. Years later, in a very rare moment of candor about his father, he told friends: “He treated me as if I had been a fool; barked at me whenever I questioned him…He wouldn’t listen to me or consider anything I said…He was so self-centered no one else existed for him.”
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When Winston was eleven and at school in Brighton in October 1885, he learned his father had been in town but hadn’t bothered to visit. “Dearest Papa,” he wrote, “I cannot think why you did not come to see me, while you were in Brighton, I was very disappointed but I suppose you were too busy to come.” When Winston came down with pneumonia the following March and nearly died, Randolph barely interrupted his London routine to come to Brighton. When the boy recovered, he left again almost at once.
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All this took its toll on Winston’s personality. At twelve he already had the reputation of being a fiery troublemaker (ironically, just like his father). “The naughtiest little boy in the world,” one of his teachers at Brighton remembered. A fellow student, Maurice Baring, said, “His naughtiness appeared to have surpassed anything. He had been flogged for taking sugar from the pantry, and so far from being penitent, had taken the Headmaster’s sacred straw hat from where it hung over the door and kicked it to pieces. His sojourn at the school had been one long feud with authority.”
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And one long feud with his father. Exasperated with the boy, Randolph had him transferred to the Harrow school. There he went from being the naughtiest boy to the loneliest, shunned by his classmates and ignored by his parents. Jennie had just taken up with her latest lover, the Hungarian Count Kinsky—the list of paramours would grow steadily as her husband’s illness grew worse. With an unavailable mother and a father descending into madness, young Winston was a volatile bundle of verbal aggression and repressed anger. One classmate who tangled with him remembered him as small but “hard as nails.” Years later, while boar hunting in India, the man remembered seeing a cornered boar with “the same little beady eyes of warning” as it poised to charge, and had a “mental flash” of Winston Churchill at Harrow.
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Another classmate was Leopold Amery. More than half a century later, Amery would be Churchill’s secretary of state for India, but in 1889 he was captain of the school while Winston sat in the school’s bottom class. One day Winston, acting as class bully, shoved Amery into the swimming pool when his back was turned. Winston later apologized, saying he mistook Amery for a younger boy, because “you are so small.” Then he added, with pathetic pride, “My father too is small and he is also a great man.”

In fact, Randolph was now virtually out of control. When he made a rare visit to the House of Commons, embarrassed spectators described the speeches by this once-gifted orator as “foaming and incoherent.” He began traveling abroad widely and wildly as if to escape his terrible illness, sometimes taking Jennie with him, sometimes not.

An old friend who saw him in his last days was horrified at his changed appearance, with the haggard face, “his hair greyish and very thin on top…the heavy gummy bags under his miserable eyes, the shaking hand,” but also the “gleams of hate, anger, and fear in his eyes, the dreadful fear of those who have learned how close madness is.”
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In this state, Randolph’s reaction when he received reports about Winston at Harrow can be imagined. “You have demonstrated beyond refutation your slovenly, harum scarum style of work throughout your schooldays,” he raged, “always behind hand, never advancing in your class, incessant complaints and total want of application.” If Winston carried on like this any further, his father concluded, “my responsibility for you is over.”

But Randolph had, in a moment of lucidity, made the decision that would change his miserable son’s life forever, and for the better. He allowed him to take the exam to enter Sandhurst as an army cadet.

It was a decision born in Winston’s room at Portman Square when he was fourteen. Randolph had entered to find Winston’s toy soldiers drawn up in magnificent battle order on the floor, all fifteen hundred of them. His father examined the formations for almost twenty minutes and then asked Winston if he thought he might want to join the army. Winston, delighted at the rare and unexpected attention, immediately said yes—thinking, as he recounted years later, that his father had discerned in his toy battle the makings of a military genius. “But I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar” and that the only place left for his wayward and willful son was the Royal Military College at Sandhurst.

Winston tried twice to pass the exam for Sandhurst and failed. His father’s rages were almost beyond bearing. Then finally on the third try, after tremendous cramming and concentration, he officially passed the prelim exam in January 1893 and entered Sandhurst in September, ranked ninety-second out of 102 cadets.

He wrote to his father, “I will try to modify your opinion of me by my work and conduct at Sandhurst…My…low place in passing in will have no effect whatever on my chance there.” In fact, for the first time he found a life at school that suited him. Classes on drill and map-reading, riding and gymnastics, topography, tactics, and fortification suited him better than Brighton and Harrow’s dreary years of Latin, French, and mathematics.
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His only quarrel with his father now was over which branch of service he would enter. Randolph insisted on the infantry, but Winston’s heart was set on the cavalry, even though that meant paying an extra two hundred pounds a year for care and feeding of his mount. In the end, Winston won out. Finally, as a young cavalry cadet, Winston Churchill had found a secure place and an identity that made him useful and happy.

But even then he was thinking ahead. In January 1891, when he was sixteen and had just passed the first prelim exam for Sandhurst, he asked a London doctor, a distinguished specialist, what to do about his annoying lisp. The doctor told him it was minor and certainly wouldn’t hinder his career in the army. Whereupon Winston explained that his goal in the military was not a career but an experience that he could use to enter his father’s field: politics.

Of course he would finish at the Royal Military College, he told the doctor, and join a hussar regiment and serve for a year or two in India (all of which in fact he did). But after that, young Winston announced, he was going to become a great statesman like his father; he certainly didn’t intend to be held back by being unable to pronounce his s’s properly. After his patient left, the amazed doctor told his wife: “I have just seen the most extraordinary young man I have ever met.”
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His father’s approval meant everything to Winston, and he allowed literally nothing to stand in his way of winning it. As a present for entering the R.M.C., his father gave him a gold watch and warned him not to lose it. Deep in his second term Winston was walking along Sandhurst’s Wish Stream when the watch bounced out of his pocket and into six feet of water, “the only deep place for miles.” Winston instantly plunged in after it but after repeated dives couldn’t find it.

The next day he had the pool dredged; still nothing. Then he got permission from Sandhurst to requisition twenty-three soldiers, who under his orders dug a new course for the stream and rerouted it. Then with a large pump from the local fire station, they drained the pool—and found the watch.
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Unfortunately, Randolph had no approval left for his son to win, or anything else. Randolph’s illness was in its last horrible stages. Gaunt, incoherent, and shuffling, he planned one final round the world trip with his wife. One of the places he chose he had visited a decade earlier, and it still represented the only permanent achievements of his career: India. It is unclear what drew him back. Perhaps he wanted to see once more the vultures swooping over the Towers of Silence, or the Taj Mahal by moonlight, or the smoky glare of the funeral pyres along the banks of the Ganges, with the thousands bathing in its sacred waters—to see human beings at peace with themselves and their gods.

In any case, the couple arrived from Singapore in November 1893. But when they reached Madras, a doctor took one look at him and advised them to return at once to London. Randolph managed to reach his mother’s house in Grosvenor Square in the last days of December 1894. He would not leave it alive.

Grief-stricken, Winston waited out Randolph’s last days in the house of friends: his father could no longer even recognize him. Lord Randolph Spencer Churchill lingered on through the first three weeks of January 1895, rarely leaving his room; the morphine he took for the pain was increasingly ineffective, so that his screams reverberated through the house.

Finally, on January 22, after two terrible bouts of mania, he went into a coma and two days later slipped away. Winston was devastated. “All my dreams of companionship with him, of entering Parliament at his side and in his support were ended,” he wrote later. “There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.”
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And to a large extent, his political career would be an attempt to resurrect a father he never knew, and to win the parental approval he had never found. A decade later Randolph’s old friend Wilfred Blunt would notice how much young Winston resembled his father, as “a strange replica” of the dead Randolph, “with all his father’s suddenness and assurance and I should say more than his father’s ability.” Even Winston Churchill’s distinctive manner of speaking, later so famous, was directly modeled on his father’s.

Above all, Blunt found “something touching” in the fact that Winston had embraced all his father’s old causes and even his enmities.
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Opposition to Home Rule and hatred of Russia; support for free trade and a conservative populism embedded in the catchphrase Tory Democracy: Winston Churchill the politician would embrace them all.

But on one issue he would remain adamant and true to his father’s principles to the end. This was India and its place in the British Empire. Winston would be leaving for India in little more than a year, an experience that would change his life. And from his father he had absorbed two lessons about the place to which he was headed.

The first was that the British were essential to the survival and happiness of the subcontinent. He liked to quote one of Randolph’s speeches in which his father had told listeners, “Your rule in India is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread out over the surface of, and keeping calm and quiet and unruffled by storms, an immense and profound ocean of humanity.” Britain’s mission was to use “your knowledge, your law, and higher civilization” to bind India’s 230 million people “into a great, united people,” Randolph had said. “That is your task for India. That is your raison d’etre in India. That is your title to India”—and Winston Churchill never forgot it.
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But he also remembered his father’s other vital lesson. While Britain was essential to India, India was also essential to Britain. Randolph had remarked often on how India’s vast import market kept British manufacturers in business, and how it mattered more than Europe or America. “India,” he would say, “is the only free foreign market we have.” Randolph had calculated that more than two and a half million Britons were dependent on that connection, including 50,000 to 60,000 British seamen and the 100,000 salaried employees in India and their families.
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To lose India would not only be a strategic blunder and a devastating blow to British prestige. It would also tip Britain into economic chaos. As Winston Churchill himself put it years later, the loss of India would be “final and fatal to us.”

In 1885 the father had warned, “Without India, England would cease to be a nation.”
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In 1931 the son warned that without India, the British Empire “would pass at a stroke out of life into history.” Winston Churchill would dedicate his life to preventing that from happening, even as another man would dedicate his life to making it come true.

Chapter Three

ILLUSIONS OF POWER

The Gandhis, India, and British Rule

From the unreal lead me to the real!