Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (6 page)

Churchill’s life on the public stage had begun just a few months earlier, when he gave his first political speech before he had even become a politician. While visiting the Conservative Party headquarters in London, he had spotted a book with a white label that read, in words that had filled him with the thrill of possibility, “
SPEAKERS WANTED
.” Scanning the pages “with the eye of an urchin looking through a pastrycook’s window,” he had alighted upon an opportunity in Bath, speaking to the Primrose League. Although he had given that speech on a platform made of four boards precariously balanced over a row of barrels, he had immediately been hooked. For Churchill, few things in life could compete with the thrill of climbing onto a stage, stepping behind a podium and commanding the attention of every man in the room.

As much as he loved public speaking, it did not come naturally to him. To begin with, he had a speech impediment that had plagued him since childhood.
Unable to pronounce the letter
s
, he had practiced over and over the sibilant sentence “The Spanish ships I cannot see for they are not in sight.” Before leaving for India, he had turned for help to a family friend, Sir Felix Semon, who was a renowned throat specialist. Semon had assured him that he did not have a physical deformation and should be able to overcome the problem with “practice and perseverance.”

Instead, Churchill slowly came not only to accept but even value his distinctive way of speaking. A number of men whom he admired, from the Prince of Wales to the prince’s close friend Colonel John Palmer Brabazon, could not pronounce the letter
r
, a defect that, because of the Prince of Wales, was considered fashionable in many circles. Churchill would admiringly recall Brabazon shouting, “
Where is the London twain?” and, when told that it had already left, demanding haughtily, “Gone! Bwing another.”

Although he would become famous for his sharp wit, Churchill was also uncomfortable addressing an audience unless he had carefully written and exhaustively rehearsed every line of his speech. Unlike his father, who was famous for his long, witheringly eloquent extemporaneous speeches, Winston spent hours preparing for every formal lecture or even brief remarks, and would do so throughout his life. His close friend Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, would later joke that “
Winston has spent the best years of his life composing his impromptu speeches.”

Neither his speech impediment, however, nor the long nights spent writing and rehearsing had dimmed Churchill’s delight in campaigning, or his confidence that he could captivate any crowd. “
Personally I am very popular here,” he wrote unselfconsciously to his cousin Sunny early in the campaign. “I am always received with the greatest enthusiasm.”

Nor did it take Churchill long to realize that he had something more than just personal charm at the podium. Not only was he a uniquely talented orator, but even at just twenty-three years of age it was clear to him that he had the potential to become a great one, perhaps one of the greatest. “
I improve every time,” he would write to a friend just before the election, strikingly aware of what the future might hold. “At each meeting I am conscious of growing powers.”

On the night of Churchill’s first speech in Oldham, among the many faces in the crowded, darkened theater was one that he had
only begun to recognize—that of his running mate, James Mawdsley. Mawdsley, bearded, balding and fifty-one years old, was as different from Winston Churchill as it was possible to be. The father of seven children, he had been born a cotton spinner’s son and had worked in a cotton mill himself from the time he was nine years old. Mawdsley knew firsthand what it meant to be a member of the working class in Victorian England and had been politically active for decades, serving as chairman of the Trades Union Congress and holding the position of general secretary of the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners since 1878, when Churchill was four years old.

The press, thrilled with this odd pairing, had christened Churchill and Mawdsley “the Scion and the Socialist,” a nickname that embarrassed Churchill not at all. Although, of the two, Mawdsley was the only one with any actual political experience, Churchill was not shy about what he believed to be his own contributions to their candidacy. Mawdsley, he would later write, “
was proud to stand upon the platform with a ‘scion’ of the ancient British aristocracy.” Not surprisingly, the newspapers often saw things differently. “
We shall see throughout the contest,” predicted the
Manchester Evening News
, “Mr. Churchill, who as a politician is hardly out of his swaddling clothes, pushed to the fore in order that Mr. Mawdsley may be able to carry him into Parliament.”

The audience at the Theatre Royal, however, which was made up almost entirely of cotton spinners and textile workers, did not seem to mind that they had in their midst a young man whose life had been nothing like their own. When Churchill, who was the first to speak, took the stage, it was to the sound of raucous cheers. As he began to speak, his carefully prepared notes before him,
his hands either placed confidently on both hips or raised in the air to emphasize a point, he found that the audience was not just willing to listen but was an enthusiastic and active participant in his speech. “
Throughout he was listened to with the closest attention,” a reporter from the
Morning Post
would write, “the only interruptions being those of hearty spontaneous applause, or the interjections of the delighted
auditors….‘That’s plain speaking,’ shouted a stentorian voice, ‘we understand that, and we like it.’ ”

Although Churchill’s speech lasted nearly an hour and covered everything from workingmen’s compensation to the future of imperialism, making the argument that England without a navy “would be like Oldham with all its tall chimneys broken, all its furnaces cold, all its factories deserted,” the audience’s interest never waned. Nor did its enthusiasm for this young patrician, this scion of the British aristocracy. He has “
a touch of mysticism that attracts the mob,” a writer for
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
would write the following year. “A born orator, with power to move people as he wills, Winston Spencer Churchill must go far.”

The men and women of Oldham heartily agreed. By the end of the night, the town’s alderman would invite the audience to “
recognize in Mr. Winston Spencer Churchill a Statesman of the future.” An audience member, perhaps seeing in Churchill’s speech what Mrs. Robinson saw in his palm, went even further. “We have, I do believe, if God should spare his life,” he predicted, “the future Premier of England.”

Although Churchill was quick to believe every good thing ever said about his potential, he wasn’t willing to leave anything to chance. On Election Day, therefore, he used his most powerful political weapon: his mother.

Unlike his opponents, the middle-aged Alfred Emmott and Walter Runciman, Churchill did not have a wife to help him campaign. He had something better—a highly unusual, uniquely powerful mother; and he did not hesitate to use guilt, flattery or any power at his disposal to persuade her to help him. “
Mrs. Runciman goes everywhere with her husband and it is thought that this is of value to him,” he had written to her on July 2, just four days before the election. “How much more!—but you will complete the sentence for yourself.”

Churchill’s mother, Jennie, was many things, each of them more appealing or shocking, depending on the point of view, than the last, but she was never boring. Blindingly beautiful, with thick black hair and porcelain skin, she was said to be part Native American, the great-granddaughter of a woman who had been raped by an Iroquois. She moved with an assurance and sensuality that made her an irresistible force to nearly every man she met, and a threat to every woman. Lord D’Abernon, the British ambassador to Berlin, would write years later that Jennie had “
more of the panther than of the woman in her look.” Recalling her as she looked the first time he saw her, in Dublin not long after her marriage to Randolph Churchill, he described her in almost reverent tones as “a dark, lithe figure, standing somewhat apart and appearing to be of another texture to those around her, radiant, translucent, intense.”

The daughter of the American financier and speculator Leonard Jerome, Jennie had spent a privileged childhood in Brooklyn until the age of fifteen, when her mother, who had had enough of her husband’s serial infidelities, had moved to France, taking her three daughters with her. Even though Jerome, who had founded the American Jockey Club and briefly co-owned the
New York Times
, was famous for his flamboyant and conspicuous consumption, he had lost as many fortunes as he had made and could offer his daughters very little in the way of a dowry. He had, moreover, the type of reputation that made Americans take notice and Britons take flight.

None of that had mattered to Randolph Churchill, however, the first time he laid eyes on Jennie. He had been in the middle of a conversation with the Prince of Wales during a ball aboard the royal yacht HMS
Ariadne
when Jennie, nineteen years old and wearing a white tulle dress with fresh flowers, her hair shining like a dark jewel, appeared at the door. Before she had even said a word, she had Randolph’s undivided attention, as well as that of every other person in the room.

Jennie was well aware not only of her beauty, but of the power it gave her. She used it as both a weapon and a wand, breaking hearts and enthralling anyone who caught her eye. Even when Randolph
was still alive, there had been rumors of flirtations, possibly even affairs, but after his death she was openly surrounded by a legion of powerful older men and, to her sons’ dismay, handsome younger ones.

She had had a friendship with the Prince of Wales that was so lasting and intimate that many believed her to be not just one of his many mistresses but his favorite. Because the prince was himself married, and had such a wandering eye that he was nicknamed Edward the Caresser, he did not much complain about Jennie’s dalliances. In fact, he had scolded her only twice: The first time was just a year earlier, when she had had an affair with
Major Caryl Ramsden, a man who was so strikingly handsome he was nicknamed Beauty and who was fourteen years her junior. “
You had better have stuck to your old friends,” the prince had chided her after her very passionate and public breakup with Ramsden on a trip to Egypt. “Old friends are best!”

Now, however, the prince’s reprimand was more severe because Jennie’s latest love affair was more serious, and more dangerous. Apparently determined to risk everything—the prince’s displeasure, her reputation, her sons’ happiness—she had fallen in love with a dashing young officer who was not only well known to Winston but only two weeks older than he was.

Like Randolph, George Frederick Myddleton Cornwallis-West came from an aristocratic family and traveled in the same social circles as the Prince of Wales. In fact, one of Jennie’s few real rivals for the prince’s affection over the years had been
Patsy Cornwallis-West, George’s mother. There had even been rumors that George could be the prince’s son. None of which had added to the prince’s enthusiasm for Jennie’s choice of companion. “
You are evidently up to your old game again,” he had written archly to her after finding out about her affair with George. “It is a pity that you have got yourself so talked about—& remember you are not 25!”

Jennie, however, had never been interested in other people’s opinions about her life, even the prince’s, and she continued to do exactly as she liked. “
I suppose you think I’m very foolish,” she had written
to a friend. “But I don’t care. I’m having such
fun
.” At forty-five years of age, she was as beautiful as she had been the day Randolph first saw her, and Winston, like every young man in her orbit, could not help but adore her. “
She shone for me like the Evening Star,” he wrote. “I loved her dearly—but at a distance.”

Over the years, Churchill’s mother had, on occasion, made life difficult for him, but she had also been extremely useful.
At his insistence, she had charmed and coaxed everyone from the Duke of Cambridge to the prime minister to the Prince of Wales in a blatant attempt to help her son win military appointments. Now he needed her more than ever. “
This is a pushing age,” he had written to her. “We must push with the best.”