The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (8 page)

To see how bonkers this was, remember that it was then just ten years since the very dawn of flight. It was only in 1903 that Orville and Wilbur Wright had finally taken off at Kitty Hawk, in their bizarre contraption. Here was Churchill, a not-especially-fit thirty-nine-year-old, asking for tuition in flying these objects that—to modern eyes—are barely recognisable as planes. They look like weird giant canvas box kites mounted on pram wheels with a lawn-mower
engine shoved on one end, and the whole thing lashed together with ropes or leather straps.

They look lethal. They were. It has been calculated that in 1912
one flight in five thousand ended in death. By modern standards, that is insanely dangerous. Compare another mode of transport that is sometimes—irrationally—held to be dangerous, such as cycling in London, where one journey in about 14 million ends in a fatality; and you see the risk that Churchill was running.

These days no one would be allowed aloft in one of those planes, let alone a senior government minister. One of Churchill’s first instructors was a twenty-three-year-old sprig of the aristocracy called Spenser Grey—until Spenser had to bow out, after having a serious prang and suffering life-changing injuries.

Churchill’s friends begged him to stop.
His cousin Sunny, the Duke of Marlborough, said: ‘
I do not suppose I shall get the chance of writing you many more letters if you continue your journeys in the Air. Really, I consider you owe it to your wife, family and friends to desist from a practice or pastime—whichever you call it—which is fraught with so much danger to life. It really is wrong of you.’ F. E. Smith told him he was being ‘
foolish’ and ‘unfair to his family’.

His cousin Lady Londonderry said he was ‘evil’. His wife, Clementine, was distraught—and sometimes Churchill would steal away without even telling her. ‘
I have been very naughty today about flying,’ he confessed on 29 November 1913, as though he had been to the larder and eaten the children’s pudding.

His next instructor was another dashing young captain, Gilbert Wildman-Lushington. On 30 November—his birthday—Churchill spent the whole day with Lushington, much of it in the air. The captain wrote to his fiancée, Miss Airlie Hynes, about his exuberant pupil. ‘
I started Winston off on his instruction about 12.15, and he
got so bitten with it I could hardly get him out of the machine, in fact except for about ¾ of an hour for lunch we were in the machine till 3.30. He showed great promise, and is coming down again for further instruction and practice.’

The brief lunch had taken place in Lushington’s cabin, where Churchill spotted a photo of the young woman. When was the wedding? he asked. Captain Lushington replied that he was saving up for it—and you can imagine that teaching Churchill was a useful freelance income. Alas, the wedding never took place. Three days later Lushington himself was killed, side-slipping in the very plane he had used for the lesson.

There is
an eerie letter from Churchill to Lushington, presumably written on the evening of the day they had spent together. He asks why he couldn’t seem to make the rudder work, and why it seemed so stiff. ‘Probably the explanation is that I was pushing against myself,’ he says, cryptically. Lushington writes back, confirming that this is indeed probably the case. He has tried the rudder and it seems fine: ‘You were pushing against yourself,’ says Lushington, before taking off again for his last doomed flight.

We might ask: how can you push against yourself? What does that mean? Did Churchill really understand what was happening with these primitive flaps and levers? Did anyone?

He swore to Clementine that he would give up, after the death of Lushington. Then in 1914 he swore again that he would do so, after he invited French air ace Gustav Hamel to come over the Channel from Paris, and give a display to the Royal Flying Corps.

Hamel took off from Paris and was never seen again. And yet on Churchill went with his flying.
He was constantly nipping over to France, glorying lark-like in the high places, boasting about the speed and the convenience of the air. By 1919 he was back at the
controls, and in the immediate run-up to this fateful episode at Croydon he had been given all sorts of presentiments of doom.

On one occasion he had got completely lost in a storm over northern France, and had to descend until he could see a railway line by which to steer his course. Only the previous month he had sustained a serious smash at the Buc aerodrome near Paris. The long grass had slowed his take-off, so that the plane’s skis hit the edge of a concealed road at the end of the runway.

The plane did a somersault—like a shot rabbit, he said—and he ended up hanging upside down by his harness. Now he was about to be violently and involuntarily reunited with the soil of Croydon, and if his life had flashed before him he might have reflected that he had behaved recklessly for years.

When we look at the prodigious bravery of his early military career, we are driven to the conclusion that he actively courted danger. It is as though he hungered—like Achilles or some Arthurian knight—for the prestige that goes not just with being in the thick of battle, but above all for being seen in the thick of battle.

His exploits began in Cuba at the age of twenty, when he first found himself in that ambiguous role that was to serve him so well: at once an officer of the British army, and yet also a front-line reporter. Sandhurst had ended satisfactorily, in the sense that he became a bold and skilful horseman and graduated twentieth out of a class of 130, before enlisting as a cornet in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars. The army was expensive, however, and he saw journalism as an ingenious way of supplementing his income and personally burnishing his own reputation.

When the Cubans rebelled against their Spanish colonial masters, Churchill wangled himself into the Spanish forces. Ostensibly he was there to report for the
Daily Graphic
; in reality he hoped to get as close as possible to a live bullet without actually being hit.

He got lucky quickly. On his twenty-first birthday he was in the jungle, when shots rang out. The horse behind him copped it; a red stain spread over his chestnut coat, and he died. Churchill’s account quivered with excitement, as he described how the bullet had come ‘
within a foot of my head’. The next day he was bathing in a river and more shots were heard. ‘
The bullets whizzed over our heads,’ he said with pride.

All this was glorious in its way, but it could hardly be described as a full-scale battle. He wanted active service in the British army. He wanted to do some shooting himself—and preferably against Her Majesty’s enemies. Thanks to some nifty lobbying by his mother (who is said to have used all her resources of feminine charm to bend the generals to her will) he got himself a billet, two years later, with the Malakand Field Force, commanded by Sir Bindon Blood.

The mission of this well-moustachioed imperialist was to make life tough for some Afridi rebels—Muslim tribesmen on India’s North-West Frontier, the borderland between what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan. They had risen against the British Empire, in a region that still shelters some of the world’s most hardened fanatics and terrorists. Then as now, the operation was no picnic.

The Afridis fought back ferociously. Churchill’s hankering for action was answered—and how. It is pretty hair-raising to read his accounts of the engagements: men cut to pieces next to him; tribesmen charging towards him until he shoots them; British infantry scattering in panic, leaving a wounded officer to be carved up on his stretcher by the fanatical Afridis. He was under fire for hour after hour.

On one occasion he blazed away with his pistol, then dropped it and picked up a rifle. He later reported, ‘I fired 40 rounds with some effect at close quarters.
I cannot be certain, but I think I hit four men. At any rate, they fell.’ Sometimes he seemed to be positively
swanking about the way he exposed himself to fire. ‘
I rode my grey pony all along the skirmish line when everyone else was lying down in cover. Foolish perhaps, but I play for high stakes and given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble.’

He behaved, all in, with the kind of suicidal daring displayed by those 1980s millennialist tribesmen of northern Kenya, who believed that they could ward off bullets by smearing themselves with nut oil. His exploits in Malakand would earn a modern soldier the Victoria Cross, or at least some pretty serious gong. And then he repeated and excelled them.

In 1898, at Omdurman in the Sudan, he took part in the last full cavalry charge by the British army. Once again, Churchill was in the role of colonial suppressor, helping to put down a revolt by Sudanese Muslims who resented British rule and, among other grievances, the attempt by London to abolish the slavery of black Africans. Once again, Jennie had been instrumental in getting him the position as a hybrid soldier-cum-reporter—much to the disgust of the army top brass. This time he was a more important player—a scout who at one point actually told the even more lushly moustachioed General Kitchener the whereabouts of the Sudanese Islamic army.

The objective of the mission was to defeat the Muslim leader, and to avenge the killing of General Charles Gordon—whose frenzied skewering at Khartoum, thirteen years earlier, had shocked the Victorian world. At 8.40 a.m. on 2 September 1898 Churchill found himself riding towards the 60,000-strong Dervish army, admittedly after they had been pounded for an hour or more by British guns. Churchill and his men thought they were taking on a bunch of 150 native spearmen—only to find they were riflemen.

The Dervishes suddenly knelt and started shooting at the detachment of lancers. What could they do? Beat it, or charge? They charged. Churchill had covered about a hundred yards in the direction of the
Dervishes when he realised that he was about to rush into a ravine full of ‘closely packed spearmen’, twelve deep.

What did he do? He kept charging. There was a terrific melee; many of the Dervishes were knocked over like skittles. Churchill fired the ten shots of his Mauser pistol’s magazine and came through without a scratch, either to himself or his horse. Having broken through the ravine, he then trotted around the scene, where Dervishes and British were hacking away at each other.

He ‘
rode up to individuals, firing my pistol in their faces and killing several—three for certain—two doubtful—one very doubtful’. When it is put like this, you might get the impression that these battles were a bit one-sided. After all, we had got the Maxim gun, and they had not.

That is totally to underestimate the risk. Of the 310 men in the charge, 21 had been killed and 49 wounded. As Churchill put it later, it was ‘
the most dangerous two minutes I shall live to see’.

Or was it? He then fought in the Boer War, and came under fire on many occasions from these tough Dutch farmers—who were better shots, and had better weapons, than either the Afridis or the Dervishes. We have no space here to repeat the whole drama of Churchill and the Boers; there have been books on it, not least two of them by Churchill himself.

In summary, he went out as a twenty-four-year-old reporter to this unfortunate war, in which the might of the British Empire was all but humiliated by bearded and glottally challenged characters from the pages of a veld novel by Wilbur Smith. In 1900 he managed to get himself into a colossal scrape that launched him finally on to the front page.

He was taking a train to a place called Colenso, in Natal, when it was ambushed by the enemy and derailed. He then showed great
coolness under fire, and disregard for his own safety, in organising resistance. As usual, he was shot at, and as usual he survived as if by a miracle. He was captured and escaped from prison; he jumped on a goods train; he hid in a wood; he was spooked by a vulture; he hid in a coal mine; he emerged to a hero’s welcome at Lourenço Marques in what is now Mozambique.

He later cycled through Pretoria with a price on his head; he was shot at again and very nearly killed at a place called Dewetsdorp; he showed ‘conspicuous gallantry’ at a battle called Diamond Hill . . . I hope I am beginning to make my point.

I could go on: I could add that when he joined the army in 1915, after Gallipoli, he went and
served with the troops on the Western Front, and went out into no man’s land thirty-six times, sometimes going so close to the German lines that he could hear them talking. I could tell you about his disregard for the shells and the bullets—but I believe that the reader may be getting the message.

As a young man, and indeed throughout his life, Churchill showed the courage of a lion. How many bullets and other missiles were fired in his general direction? A thousand? How many men did he kill, with his own hand? A dozen? Maybe more. No prime minister since Wellington had seen so much active service, or been so personally homicidal to any inhabitants of the developing world who offered him violence, and to some, no doubt, who did not.

He has the unique distinction, as a prime minister, of having been shot at on four continents. By this stage the sensitive reader may be willing to accept this overwhelming evidence of Churchill’s bravery—but want to know more about the psychology behind it. Why was he like this?

What wound his spring so tight? One of the great joys of Churchill’s character—and one of the reasons for his mental robustness—
is that he is capable of great honesty about his motives. He knows that he is playing to the gallery, he tells his mother, as he explains his conduct in Malakand. He needs the audience for the daring and the noble acts—because he has something to prove.

As he admits. ‘
Being in many ways a coward—particularly at school—there is no ambition I cherish so keenly as to gain a reputation for personal courage.’ The child is father to the man, and gingery young Churchill was a pretty runty sort of kid.

He was not in the team for Harrow football, the violent and hearty game that is a peculiarity of the school. He didn’t even play much cricket, and on one occasion the other boys threw cricket balls at him—and he scarpered and hid in the woods. The memory stuck with him; he felt judged and found wanting by his peers, just as he felt judged and found wanting by Randolph.