The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor

By Jonathan Rose

“An interesting and at times surprising account of Churchill's tastes as a reader…many of [these] nuggets will be new even to Churchill junkies.”—TheWall Street Journal
 
This strikingly original book introduces a Winston Churchill we haven’t known before. Award-winning author Jonathan Rose explores Churchill’s careers as statesman and author, revealing the profound influence of literature and theater on Churchill’s personal, carefully composed grand story and the decisions he made throughout his political life.
 
In this expansive literary biography, Rose provides an analysis of Churchill’s writings and their reception (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 and was a best-selling author), and a chronicle of his dealings with publishers, editors, literary agents, and censors. The book also identifies an array of authors who shaped Churchill’s own writings and politics: George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, and many more. Rose investigates the effect of Churchill’s passion for theater on his approach to reportage, memoirs, and historical works. Perhaps most remarkably, Rose reveals the unmistakable influence of Churchill’s reading on every important episode of his public life, including his championship of social reform, plans for the Gallipoli invasion, command during the Blitz, crusade for Zionism, and efforts to prevent a nuclear arms race. Finally, Rose traces the significance of Churchill’s writings to later generations of politicians—among them President John F. Kennedy as he struggled to extricate the U.S. from the Cuban Missile Crisis.
 
“Immensely enjoyable…This gracefully written book is an original and textured study of Churchill’s imagination.”—The Washington Post

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Release date: May 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9780300206234

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Copyright © 2014 Jonathan Rose

The right of Jonathan Rose to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Rose, Jonathan, 1952

  The literary Churchill: author, reader, actor / Jonathan Rose.

    pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-300-20407-0 (cl : alk. paper)

  1. Churchill, Winston, 1874–1965—Literary art. 2. Great Britain—History— 20th century. I. Title.

  DA566.9.C5R649 2014

  941.084092—dc23

2013041979

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress and from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface: A Literary History of Politics

1 The Theatre Rage

2 An Uneducated Man

3 A Pushing Age

4 War of the Worlds

5 A Portrait of the Artist

6 Publicity Capital

7 Things to Come

8 Comédie Anglaise

9 On the Stage of History

10 What Actually Happened

11 Revolutionaries

12 The Chancellor's Star Turn

13 That Special Relationship

14 The Apple Cart

15 The Producer

16 Blackout

17 The Loaded Pause

18 The Hour of Fate and the Crack of Doom

19 This Different England

20 The War Poet

21 Victory?

22 The Summit

23 The Last Whig

24 The Terrible Ifs

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1. The English Rose, at the Adelphi Theatre in the Penny Illustrated Paper, 9 August 1890.

2. Kiralfy Bro's. "Michael Strogoff". www.kiralfy.net/Productions.htm.

3a and 3b. She prayed for the victory of the rebel she loved over her husband, the president and Antonio Molara lay on the three lowest steps of the entrance of his palace. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

4. A cartoon of the imagined exploits of Churchill in the Boer War. Churchill Archives Centre, CHAR 2/129.

5. The Home Secretary at Sidney Street. Wikipedia Commons.

6. Churchill, self-portrait, c.1920. Reproduced with permission of Anthea Morton-Saner on behalf of Churchill Heritage Ltd © Churchill Heritage Ltd.

7. David Low, If Bolshevism came to England in the Evening Standard, 19 July 1928. British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, and Solo Syndication/Associated Newspapers Ltd.

8. Max Beerbohm, The Churchill–Wells Controversy, 1920. Houghton Library, Harvard University, pf MS Eng 696 (20).

9. Will Dyson, Take my child, but spare, oh spare, me! in the Daily Herald, 1938. British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, and Solo Syndication/Associated Newspapers Ltd.

10. David Low, Trial of a new model in the Evening Standard, 14 October 1938. British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, and Solo Syndication/Associated Newspapers Ltd.

11. David Low, Triumphal Tour in the Evening Standard, 30 May 1940. British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, and Solo Syndication/Associated Newspapers Ltd.

12. John F. Kennedy with Spencer Tracy, November 1940. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

1 Churchill's favorite Irish melodrama, The English Rose (Penny Illustrated Paper, 9 August 1890).

2 Churchill was in the audience for Jules Verne's spectacular melodrama Michael Strogoff, which portrayed an invasion of Russia a half-century before Operation Barbarossa.

3a and 3b From a 1908 illustrated paperback edition of Savrola.

4 A highly romanticized contemporary newspaper cartoon imagines Churchill's exploits in the Boer War.

5 The Siege of Sidney Street – which in a sense was the reenactment of Savrola.

6 Self-portait in self-doubt, around 1920.

7 David Low imagines Churchill as a British dictator commanding all authors to serve his cult of personality (Evening Standard, 19 July 1928).

8 The Churchill–Wells Controversy, pencil and wash drawing by Max Beerbohm, 1920. Churchill: You were only 14 days in Russia! Wells: Your mother's an American!

9 The Will Dyson cartoon that so upset Joseph Goebbels and Lord Halifax (Daily Herald, 1938).

10 David Low on pro-appeasement censorship, with Duff Cooper, Anthony Eden, and Churchill casting a cold eye (Evening Standard, 14 October 1938).

11 After the surrender of the Belgian Army, David Low meant to ridicule Hitler's prophesies of victory, but this cartoon may have had the opposite effect on British morale (Evening Standard, 30 May 1940).

12 Young John F. Kennedy autographs his early assessment of Churchill, Why England Slept, for actor Spencer Tracy, November 1940.

Acknowledgments

The superbly organized Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College Cambridge was, of course, indispensable to this project. But no less important were the Interlibrary Loan staff at Drew University Library, whom I ran ragged. I thank the Churchill Estate, Firestone Library at Princeton University, the Special Collections Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum for permission to quote from unpublished documents. Quotations from Churchill's published and unpublished writings are reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill, © Winston S. Churchill.

I am equally grateful for access to the book and manuscript collections at the British Library, the New York Public Library, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, Columbia University Library, Yale University Library, the Library of Congress, the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University, Syracuse University Library, Ball State University Library, the Guildhall Library, the Archive of British Publishing and Printing at the University of Reading, and the Forbes Collection. Images were supplied by the Churchill Archives Centre, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Getty Images, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Trust, the British Cartoon Archive, Argenta Images, Solo Syndication/Associated Newspapers Ltd., the Max Beerbohm estate, and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

My research was supported by the Presidential Initiatives Fund at Drew University and by a Visiting Fellowship with the Victorian Studies Group at Cambridge University. One tremendous asset was Norman Tomlinson's collection of Churchilliana – some of it donated to Drew University Library, and some given directly to me.

Parts of this book were published earlier as articles in the Sewanee Review and Historically Speaking. They are reproduced here, with some revisions, with the kind permission of the editors.

I must thank Jan-Pieter Barbian, James Brophy, Luis Campos, David Cannadine, James Carter, Ronald I. Cohen, James J. Connolly, Robert Darnton, Donald G. Davis, Jr., Frank Felsenstein, Simon Frost, Edith Hall, Barbara Hochman, James R. Kelly, Dane Kennedy, Mark Samuels Lasner, Jon Lawrence, Peter Logan, Kate Longworth, Peter Mandler, Cary Mazer, Alistair McCleery, Matthew Rubery, Christopher Rundle, Andrew Scrimgeour, Mark Sheridan, Ronald Tetreault, Anders Toftgaard, Michele Troy, Ine van Linthout, Robert Weisbuch, and James L. W. West III for their advice and commentary. Beyond that, every academic study is fertilized by informal conversations with colleagues, and in that respect I owe much to a host of friends in the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. And it was a privilege to work (once again) with Robert Baldock and his team at Yale University Press, who are scholars as well as editors. My careful copy-editor, Richard Mason, and my proofreader, Loulou Brown, saved me from a number of embarrassments.

More than I can say, I have been aided and comforted by Gayle, my partner in life in every way. It always helped to talk through issues at home – not necessarily about Churchill specifically, but more broadly about the business of literature and cultural analysis. Here we are both fortunate to have a professional author in the family, so this book is rightfully dedicated to Jennifer.

Jonathan Rose

September 2013

Preface: A Literary History of Politics

In February 2002, when the world was debating what should be done about Iraq, Europeans reached for a metaphor they like to apply to Americans. President George W. Bush and his advisors, they protested, were behaving like Hollywood cowboys. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, R. James Woolsey, the former director of Central Intelligence, accepted that label as a badge of pride. Yes, he agreed, you could compare us to Gary Cooper in High Noon (his favorite movie). When evildoers descended on the marshal's town, only he was willing to stand up to them. His neighbors all turned out to be appeasers or pacifists or cowards or potential collaborators, but the marshal wouldn't give up doing his duty just because everyone else found excuses to stay out of the fight.¹

Meanwhile, Dominique de Villepin, Secretary General to the President of France, and soon to become French Foreign Minister, spun out a parallel but different narrative. He had just published Le Cent Jours ou l'Esprit de Sacrifice, his account of Waterloo, another legendary gunfight. In his review, Denis MacShane, Britain's Minister for Europe, called it simply a thrilling read … His description of characters is as good as any popular historian and his sense of narrative pace carries the reader along, though the book might leave one with the impression that Napoleon won the battle. Waterloo, wrote de Villepin, glows with the aura worthy of a victory, for as a diplomat and a prolific author, he always insisted that France could not be France unless she pursued epic collective adventures.²

So here we have two nations following two narratives on a diplomatic collision course, an episode that illustrates the power of stories to steer politics. You may object that politics is really a matter of national interests, however this begs the question: what are nations interested in? Of course they want power, wealth, trade, land, and security. But political actors also act out stories, which can have a force and a momentum of their own, and which may not always serve the more material national interests. Foreign policies inspired by Napoleon or Gary Cooper do not necessarily benefit France or the United States, and they may not have served the personal interests of M. Chirac or Mr. Bush. All politicians, however, tell stories, whether they are grand Bonapartist myths or homey Reaganesque anecdotes, and these stories can drive policy. After all, a few years ago Americans catapulted an obscure politician into the White House largely because they loved reading his life story.

All politicians are authors. Very few of them write anything like an 800-page critique of French poetry, as Dominique de Villepin has, but they all create and publish texts: oral texts, printed texts, filmed texts, broadcast texts. Most politicians, like most authors, are hacks who simply recycle clichés; a few are genuinely creative visionaries. But either way, what they write (or have others write) sets politics in motion. And obviously all politicians are actors, usually performing from a crafted script, but occasionally improvising.

Therefore, we can write political history as literary history. That is, we gain a deeper understanding of politics if we employ the methods developed by literary historians, especially theatre historians and historians of the book. We can ask of politicians the same questions that these scholars ask of authors. What did they read? When they wrote, what were their generic models? How were their writings refashioned by editors, publishers, literary agents, researchers, co-authors, lawyers, and censors? How were their political careers made and unmade by the sociology and economics of authorship, print technology, the structure of media ownership, the machinery of publicity and distribution, book reviewers, and the demands of the literary marketplace? How did they achieve the kind of dramatic effects that are so important in politics? Which literary circles did these political actors move in? Which audiences did they appeal to? How did readers respond to what they wrote, and did that feedback cause them to revise their methods of composition? What can we discover by comparing the successive drafts and editions of their works? And how were those writings translated into other languages and other media, especially film and television? (This study defines literature broadly, to include journalism, historical writing, movies, and broadcasting.) When we address these issues, we delve into a mostly unexplored dimension of politics, and we may be able to explain certain kinds of political behavior that might otherwise seem baffling.

Winston Churchill is an ideal subject for experimenting with this new methodology. Winner in 1953 of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a tremendously successful middlebrow author, he clearly could have made a handsome living from his pen even if he had never been elected to public office. In the Churchill Archives at Cambridge, one out of eight boxes is devoted to his literary affairs. And yet scholars have scarcely touched on that side of his life. He may be one of the most intensively studied individuals of modern times, according to Historical Abstracts, but he has only a handful of entries in the MLA Bibliography. Some entries refer to an altogether different Winston Churchill, an American novelist (1871–1947) of the Progressive era. Manfred Weidhorn and Paul Alkon wrote appreciative literary criticism of the British Churchill, and perceptive analyses of the composition of The Second World War and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples have been produced by David Reynolds and Peter Clarke.³ But this volume has a different and broader objective: it surveys all of Churchill's important writings, reconstructs (as far as we can) his reading and theatre-going experiences, and assesses their impact on his politics. For Churchill, politics and literature were two sides of the same career, impossible to prise apart. His political goals and methods were shaped by what he read in books and saw on the stage. In turn, he recast his political experiences as literature, inevitably with some artistic license. In fact he made important policy decisions and composed memoranda with a view toward how they would appear on the page, in the grand story that he spent his life composing. He was an artist who used politics as his creative medium, as other writers used paper.

Like most radical ideas, this method of writing history is not entirely new. We have studies of the literary diets of Thomas Jefferson,⁴ William Gladstone,⁵ Adolf Hitler,⁶ Harold Macmillan,⁷ John F. Kennedy,⁸ and Barack Obama,⁹ not to mention Nixon at the Movies.¹⁰ But they are still only a handful: we are only beginning to grasp how far politics and literature overlap. Like Churchill, Douglas Hurd, Jeffrey Archer, Anne Widdecombe, Edwina Currie, Iain Duncan Smith, Jimmy Carter, Barbara Boxer, Newt Gingrich, Barbara Milkulski, William Weld, William S. Cohen, and Gary Hart have all published novels – and that only counts recent British and American politicians. If we look to France, the list of political littérateurs becomes practically endless.

And Churchill was clearly not the only statesman of his generation to treat politics as performance art. In the grand drama of the Second World War, he played opposite an unforgettable cast. An earlier dull grey cadre of bourgeois politicians had by then given way to Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, De Gaulle, and Churchill, all of them dazzling actors who played off each other and exploited their own personal charisma. This book, then, is not only a literary biography: it explores the crucial and under-appreciated role of theatre in both politics and armed conflict, by placing Churchill and his contemporaries in the context of theatre history.

Every historical study should begin with these cautious words: This does not explain everything. I emphasize here the literary and theatrical dimensions of politics because they are neglected and important, but certainly not all-important. The everyday business of government is, by and large, an inartistic routine of nudging bureaucracies, negotiating deals, balancing competing interests, and serving constituents. Political historians should not stop doing psephological analyses and research in diplomatic archives. But they should recognize that literature can illuminate political behavior in ways that more conventional methodologies cannot. If the trajectory of an atomic particle follows no known laws of physics, then it is probably in the grip of an unknown force, something we need to understand and work into our calculations. And the political orbit of Winston Churchill could be breathtakingly eccentric.

CHAPTER 1

The Theatre Rage

Everyone knows that as a boy he loved playing with toy soldiers, but biographers do not often mention an equally significant fact: he was no less fond of his miniature theatre. Churchill was thirteen when his aunts Leonie and Clara presented him with a toy stage, which at the time he called a source of unparalleled amusement. He had the evident approval of his tutor, James Theodore Best, who told me that the Theatre Rage is very great. His letters to his mother are filled with breathless demands for accessories, as well as a promise to give a grand performance when I come home.¹ As Churchill recalled many years later, I certainly remember visiting Mr [W. J.] Webb of Old Street – the great Victorian impresario of toy theatres – and also purchasing from him from time to time some of his plays. The one I remember best is ‘The Miller and His Men.’ For three or four years of my life a model theatre was a great amusement to me. This suggests that he continued playing with it to the advanced age of sixteen or seventeen. Webb's son remembered his frequent patronage and his enthusiasm: He was a jolly and impulsive lad, and I shall never forget the way he would vault over my counter.²

Churchill was throughout his life a passionate theatregoer. Several files in his archives are stuffed with ticket receipts from booking agencies, but unfortunately the receipts do not reveal what plays he attended.³ However, from other sources we can reconstruct much of that record, which is essential to understanding his political career. More than most politicians, he was a public performer, always on stage and in character. His prose was distinguished by a lifelong addiction to dramatic metaphors. Many of his most crucial political decisions were essentially acts of theatre, and some of them only make sense when placed in the context of theatre history.

In the late Victorian upper-class milieu of his childhood, the theatre had become respectable, fashionable, and ubiquitous. Churchill once alluded to his youthful infatuation with private dramatic performances, and he was enthusiastic about school theatricals, performing Robin Hood in an operetta and Martine in Molière's Le Médecin Malgré Lui. He enjoyed Gilbert and Sullivan and Christmas pantomimes. He made a point of memorizing Shakespeare at Harrow for a prize competition, in which he placed fourth out of about twenty-five boys.⁴ He may have even tried his hand as a playwright: in October 1887 his brother Jack reported to their father that Winston is going to write a Greek play for Christmas.⁵

His mother Jennie had grown up in a Manhattan mansion equipped with a 600-seat private theatre.⁶ Throughout their marriage, she and Lord Randolph exchanged notes about the latest plays.⁷ In 1909 she would write and produce her own play, His Borrowed Plumes. It had a short run but a fair share of clever epigrams, including: Is there so much difference between politicians and actors? Both are equally eager for popular applause and both equally doubtful whether they will get it.⁸ She probably had in mind both Winston and Lord Randolph. The son learned political theatre at first hand from the father, whom Beatrice Webb considered a dazzling public performer:

Surely we shall look back on the last fifty years of the nineteenth century as the peculiar period of political artists: we have no statesmen – all our successful politicians, the men who lead the parties, are artists and nothing else: Gladstone, Disraeli, Randolph Churchill, Chamberlain, and the unsuccessful Rosebery, all these men have the characteristics of actors – personal charm, extraordinary pliability and quick-wittedness.⁹

As a drama critic Max Beerbohm proclaimed that in or around 1880 human nature changed. He identified at that point in time a great change in the constitution of English society, which cast off Victorian reserve and became flamboyantly theatrical: The sphere of fashion converged with the sphere of art, and a revolution was the result. The Aesthetic movement permeated everything, including parliamentary politics, now enlivened by the incomparable performances of Liberal tribune W. E. Gladstone, Irish firebrand Charles Stewart Parnell, and militant atheist Charles Bradlaugh. In that company Randolph Churchill, despite his halting speech, foppish mien and rather coarse fibre of mind, was yet the greatest Parliamentarian of his day.¹⁰

He led a small circle of upstart Tory MPs, the Fourth Party, which succeeded in winning plenty of sympathetic publicity in the Morning Post and Vanity Fair. In July 1880 the latter identified Lord Randolph as the group's most brilliant actor, even if he did not attach great importance to being earnest:

He does not care much for facts, it is true, and his blows are not always perfectly legitimate; while he scarcely pretends to be too much in earnest; but surely after all he is therein right. … The House of Commons should really be taken to be what it is – that is to say, a club of gentlemen who for the most part have a fair amount of money and no particular occupation in life but that of finding an escape from being bored. If men in that frame of mind come down to the House after their dinners, they want to be made to laugh, and have a profound dislike of heroics, unless when really well acted, and recalling memories of Modjeska or Bernhardt. Lord Randolph Churchill has grasped this fact, and il ira loin.¹¹

Lord Randolph's favorite theatrical device was the political coup, a stroke so unexpected that it shocked even his cronies in the Fourth Party. During the First Boer War he suggested that, like a thunderbolt in a clear sky, they should call for an end to British military operations and peace talks with the Boers. He proposed to set off political dynamite with an amendment to limit the 1881 Irish Coercion Bill to one year.¹² These stands were hardly consistent with mainstream Conservatism, but he conceded that his Tory Democracy was chiefly opportunism, which succeeded brilliantly in garnering public attention.¹³ His public speeches were marked by melodramatic hand gestures and walking about the platform as though it were really a stage, the Pall Mall Gazette observed.¹⁴ He dispatched his opponents with facile catchphrases that journalists liked to pick up and repeat: Gladstone was the Moloch of Midlothian, Joseph Chamberlain this pinchbeck Robespierre.¹⁵ One of his most famous (and self-revealing) assaults on Gladstone came in Blackpool, on 24 January 1884:

Gentlemen, we live in an age of advertisement, the age of Holloway's pills, of Colman's mustard, and of Horniman's pure tea; and the policy of lavish advertisement has been so successful in commerce that the Liberal party, with its usual enterprise, had adapted it to politics. The Prime Minister is the greatest living master of the art of personal political advertisement. Holloway, Colman, and Horniman are nothing compared with him. Every act of his, whether it be for the purposes of health, or of recreation, or of religious devotion, is spread before the eyes of every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom on large and glaring placards.

At Hawarden Castle, his Flintshire estate, Gladstone conspicuously chopped down trees as staged media events. Once he hosted a delegation of workmen:

One would have thought that the deputation would have been received in the house, in the study, in the drawing-room, or even in the dining room. Not at all. That would have been out of harmony with the advertisement boom. Another scene had been arranged. The working men were guided through the ornamental grounds, into the wide-spreading park … [where] the Prime Minister … in scanty attire and profuse perspiration, engaged in the destruction of a gigantic oak, just giving its last dying groan. They are permitted to gaze and to worship and adore and, having conducted themselves with exemplary propriety, are each of them presented with a few chips as a memorial of that memorable scene.…

Likewise Gladstone's celebrated Midlothian campaigns, first staged in 1880 and reprised over the next few years, were ridiculed by Lord Randolph as play-acting: The old stage properties have been brought out at every station: all the old scenery, all the old decorations, the old troupe, they have all been brought forward in a sadly tarnished and bedraggled condition. …¹⁶ This was perfect hypocrisy: no politician was more ruthless at self-publicity than Lord Randolph Churchill. He fully grasped that the enfranchisement of a broad electorate, the creation of a mass-circulation press, and the rise of the advertising industry, had transformed the ground rules of politics. Delivering Olympian speeches in Parliament was no longer enough: one had to exploit the new culture of celebrity, which placed a premium on flamboyant public performance. Lord Randolph had an advertising agent's talent for inventing catchy slogans, either rhyming jingles (Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right) or clichés with an unexpected twist (Gladstone was an old man in a hurry).¹⁷ He strategically positioned himself as President of the Conservative News Agency. The Central News Agency (a competitor of Reuters) reported his speeches in their entirety: only Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain, and Lord Salisbury (the Conservative Party leader) enjoyed the same level of coverage.¹⁸

More conventional politicians might distrust and resent Lord Randolph, but for the time being they had to do business with him. By 1885 Punch was portraying him as a prima donna dictating terms to impresario Lord Salisbury.¹⁹ J. B. Crozier, an early and unfriendly biographer, found Lord Randolph a dull public speaker whose reputation for verbal fireworks had been puffed up by the press. His clever catchphrases, which would now be called sound bites, oversimplified issues and caricatured opponents, but were endlessly repeated by the newspapers. They might denounce him in editorials, but they gave him the coverage he craved in their news columns.²⁰ The best thing that can happen to a politician is to be abused by the press, Lord Randolph cheerfully observed. It does him some good to be praised. But when he's ignored altogether, it's the devil!²¹

Young Winston was paying attention and learning his lessons. As he put it in the 1906 biography of his father, "Instead of that paragraph of mutilated misrepresentation with which so many eminent Ministers and ex-Ministers have to remain dissatisfied, column after column of the Times was filled with the oratory of an unproved stripling of thirty-two." His speeches upheld no consistent principles and advocated no coherent policies, but they attracted attention because

they were entirely fresh and original. Wit, abuse, epigrams, imagery, argument – all were Randolphian. No one could guess beforehand what he was going to say nor how he would say it. No one else said the same kind of things, or said them in the same kind of way. He possessed the strange quality, unconsciously exerted and not by any means to be simulated, of compelling attention, and of getting himself talked about. Every word he spoke was studied with interest and apprehension. Each step he took was greeted with a gathering chorus of astonished cries.

Winston had revolted against his classical education and rarely resorted to Latin tags, but now he deployed a quotation from Tacitus: Omnium quae dixerat, feceratque quadam ostentator (He had the showman's knack of drawing attention to everything he said or did).²² And if that aroused the suspicions of stodgy Tories, Winston quoted first Pope, and then Machiavelli:

Sworn to no master, of no sect am I,

As drives the storm, at any door I knock.²³

Of this, however, I am well persuaded, that it is better to be impetuous than cautious. For Fortune is a woman who to be kept under must be beaten and roughly handled; and we see that she suffers herself to be more readily mastered by those who treat her so, than by those who are more timid in their approaches. And always, like a woman, she favours the young, because they are less scrupulous and fiercer, and command her with greater audacity.²⁴

In this culture of celebrity, the distinction between fiction and reality dissolved. One could never know whether Lord Randolph had any real core convictions or was simply playing to the gallery. Was he an actual person, or a theatrical persona created by himself? In fact he appeared as a character in several literary and stage works, at least some of which were familiar to Winston. Lord Randolph was thinly disguised in Justin McCarthy's novel The Rebel Rose (1887) and W. F. Rae's An American Duchess (1890), and not disguised at all in Rae's Miss Bayle's Romance (1887) and J. M. Barrie's first novel, Better Dead (1888). In the last of these, Lord Randolph invents an ingenious quantitative method for calculating fame, an early form of media research. He haunts tobacconists' shops and counts the celebrities' faces appearing on matchboxes, anxiously comparing his totals to those of Gladstone, Chamberlain, and Lily Langtry.²⁵ In 1883 Jennie took Winston to a pantomime that starred a poodle named Lord Randolph Churchill.²⁶ Early in 1885 Jennie saw another play, The Candidate, which mentioned her husband.²⁷ In February 1890 Winston's Aunt Frances wrote to him about a burlesque of Victor Hugo's play Ruy Blas (1838), that including satiric topical songs with allusions to your Father! In the same letter she reported that Lord Randolph also starred in that week's full-page cartoon in Punch, which twitted him for introducing temperance legislation.²⁸ In 1891 Randolph was spoofed on stage once again, in the political extravaganza Joan of Arc, until the Lord Chamberlain ordered the satire to be toned down. In his turn, Winston too would be incarnated as a character in a number of novels.

In August 1886 Lord Randolph became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Salisbury, but then his hunger for publicity finally did for him. He wanted to score yet another political coup by cutting income tax, but that would require both the Army and Navy to cut costs, usually not a policy favored by Conservative governments. When it was clear that the Cabinet would not agree to those reductions, Lord Randolph resigned in December, without discussing the matter with his wife beforehand. Probably it was yet another act of political theatre: as Chamberlain explained, it was only the classical annual resignation of a Chancellor of the Exchequer designed to pressure the government to trim the budget. But Salisbury outmaneuvered Lord Randolph by accepting his resignation. The result was a public relations disaster: Lord Randolph was denounced by all major newspapers except the Morning Post, and his career never recovered.²⁹ And yet, even if he was a political failure and a cold father, his son saw in his life a great and vivid drama.³⁰ Winston was keenly aware that Lord Randolph had successfully fashioned himself into a media phenomenon, and studied carefully how he had done it:

We saw as children the passers-by take off their hats in the streets and the workmen grin when they saw his big moustache. For years I had read every word he spoke and what the newspapers said about him. Although he was only a private member and quite isolated, everything he said even at the tiniest bazaar was reported verbatim in all the newspapers, and every phrase was scrutinized and weighed.³¹

By 1930, when he published My Early Life, Winston had come to understand why his father's theatrical style of politics had ended in failure. He had posed as the daring pilot in extremity, and that did not play well in an era of political calm and retrenchment – as Churchill the son discovered in the early 1930s. But Winston nevertheless insisted that Lord Randolph's greatness had to be measured by the persona he created, not by his words and actions, but by the impression which his personality made upon his contemporaries. This was intense, and had circumstances continued favourable, might well have manifested itself in decisive episodes. He embodied that force, caprice and charm which so often springs from genius.³²

By age fifteen, when he was probably still playing with his toy stage, Winston was attending legitimate theatres in London. Often he saw melodramas, with titles such as A Million of Money. Churchill's rhetoric and politics would be profoundly shaped by melodrama – a connection between low literature and high statecraft that is more common than we might imagine. When George W. Bush said Bin Laden: Dead or Alive, we all saw the allusion, because we all know the clichés of the American Western. We don't easily recognize that Churchill's prose was saturated with allusions to melodrama, because melodramatic conventions are today forgotten by everyone except a handful of theatre historians. But Churchill's contemporaries knew those conventions well and saw that he was in thrall to them. Even for his bodyguard, melodramatic was the word that summed up the great man.³³ Therefore a brief tutorial on the essentials of melodrama is necessary before proceeding further.

Melodrama dominated British popular culture in the century between Waterloo and the Somme, just as the Western dominated American popular culture between Appomattox and the Tet Offensive. It pervaded the theatre, novels (especially Scott and Dickens), journalism, and historical writing. Political rhetoric often employed the themes and language of melodrama, as in popular protests against the 1834 Poor Law.³⁴ Michael Booth, the leading scholar of the genre, defined melodrama as a world of certainties where confusion, doubt, and perplexity are absent; a world of absolutes where virtue and vice coexist in pure whiteness and pure blackness; and a world of justice where after immense struggle and torment good triumphs over and punishes evil, and virtue receives tangible material rewards. Good people suffer terrible ordeals, but:

The shootings, strangling, hangings, poisonings, drowning, stabbings, suicides, explosions, conflagrations, avalanches, earthquakes, eruptions, shipwrecks, train wrecks, apparitions, tortured heroines, persecuted heroes, and fearsome villains are only a lengthy prelude to inevitable happiness and the apotheosis of virtue. Audiences could enjoy crime and villainy and horror in the full knowledge that the bright sword of justice would always fall in the right place, and that bags of gold would always be awarded to the right people. Evil can only destroy itself, no matter how hard it tries.

Melodramatic characters are therefore stereotyped and entirely predictable. The plot is driven by the villain: he thinks, chooses, initiates action, alters his plans, makes new ones. And in asides to the audience, he explicitly reveals those plans. The hero, however, must be unaware of the villain's machinations, otherwise he would take appropriate countermeasures, and there would be no play. Necessarily, Booth concedes, The basic hero is really rather stupid.³⁵ But the ideology of melodrama was radically and rousingly libertarian: yeomen denounce noblemen, workers resist capitalists, sailors stand up to officers, rebels fight tyrants, virtuous women defy sexual predators, and (a favorite theme) innocent men are imprisoned but ultimately set free.³⁶ The hero always resists evil, never surrenders, forgives his defeated enemies, and deals honestly and charitably with everyone. Or, as Churchill formulated it:

IN WAR: RESOLUTION

IN DEFEAT: DEFIANCE

IN VICTORY: MAGNANIMITY

IN PEACE: GOOD WILL

Melodrama relied on sensational and rapid action shifting from scene to scene, though this was difficult and expensive to produce on the stage. It often climaxed with spectacular explosions, whether of boilers, railway locomotives, or kegs of gunpowder. This was something that children could try at home with a miniature theatre and the right accessories, before there were tiresome regulations governing toy safety. Isaac Pocock's The Miller and His Men, young Winston's favorite play, concluded with an unforgettable pyrotechnic display.³⁷ And melodramatic diction was typically exaggerated and histrionic, often relying on rolled r's³⁸ – even when there were no r's to roll, as when Churchill rallied his countrymen to resist the Narzis.

London's Adelphi Theatre specialized in this genre, to the point where Adelphi melodrama was a universally recognized brand. In September 1890 one such new work electrified the fifteen-year-old Winston: George R. Sims and Robert Buchanan's ripping piece, The English Rose. Well acted – well put on – excellently carried out – beautiful scenery – capital songs, he gushed to his mother. Already Winston understood melodramatic stagecraft, noting that The English Rose had its three essential elements: Capital girl – good old hero – splendid villain.³⁹ The English Rose was an Irish melodrama, but in some ways it departed from the conventions of that popular genre. The critic of The Times⁴⁰ applauded Sims and Buchanan for resisting the temptation to portray Ireland as

a land of kneebreeches and brimless hats, sprigs of shillelagh, wakes, jigs, shebeens, and jaunting cars, with a population of black-eyed and short-skirted colleens, bhoys who are always spoiling for a fight, shovel-hatted priests, familiarly addressed as your riverince, and soldiers wearing the uniform of the Georges. … They have brought the Ireland of the stage up to date. They have swept away the comic opera personnel which has hitherto represented the Irish character.

In fact The English Rose was a hybrid of melodrama and problem play – that is, a theatre piece addressing a contemporary social or political issue. It portrayed

not the Ireland of Mr. Boucicault or Charles Lever, but that of the daily newspapers or the Parnell Commission—the Ireland of judicial rents, threatening letters, police protection, moonlight outrage, and murder, side by side with a fund of law-abiding sentiment and a fair sprinkling of the heroic virtues. It may be thought that these are dangerous elements to juggle with in a popular entertainment.

This was indeed treacherous terrain. A decade earlier, in The O'Dowd, Dion Boucicault had attempted to address Irish grievances on the stage, but the ensuing controversy compelled him to cancel the run. Irish nationalism could be fueled by Irish melodrama, and for that reason the Lord Chamberlain often censored inflammatory stage rhetoric.⁴¹ As The Times recognized, Sims and Buchanan therefore took great "care to hold the scale so evenly between all parties, to be so unbiased in their views, so unpolitical, in a word, that The English Rose can be applauded by Unionists and Home Rulers alike, if indeed under the spell of a strongly dramatic theme all political partisanship is not forgotten. In his 1968 essay The Affirmative Character of Culture, Herbert Marcuse argued that problem plays" served to contain political dissent by addressing social ills without resolving them, but the same principle was well understood in late Victorian West End theatres.

The plot of The English Rose involves an English gentleman, Sir Philip Kingston, who purchases Connemara land from impoverished Irish gentry, the Knight of Ballyreeny and his handsome son Harry O'Mailley. Inevitably, romance blossoms between O'Mailley and Kingston's fetching niece, Ethel. There is some grumbling among the tenants about paying rent to an Englishman, but the only real villain in the play is Sir Philip's agent, Macdonnell, who has embezzled from his employer and who covets Ethel's affections. To cover up his fraud and eliminate his rival, Macdonnell incites some tenants to murder Sir Philip and plans to pin the crime on O'Mailley. When he discovers the plot, O'Mailley gallops off on horseback to save Kingston, but he wrenches the murder weapon from the actual perpetrator a moment too late, and is discovered with the smoking gun in his hands. Tried and convicted of murder, O'Mailley is rescued by a righteously indignant mob, eventually vindicated, and affianced to Ethel.⁴²

The Times shrewdly recognized why the play succeeded: London audiences could flatter themselves that they were enjoying something more serious than the usual Irish romance, when in fact the authors have not diverged as widely from the beaten track of melodrama as would at first sight appear. With the exception of the nefarious agent, all the characters were essentially well intentioned. Sims and Buchanan reduced seven hundred years of Anglo-Irish conflict to a mere misunderstanding.

Churchill's views on Ireland, as they evolved, agreed entirely with the easy political optimism of The English Rose. He even-handedly presumed that both Unionists and Home Rulers (but not Republicans) had legitimate concerns and grievances, which could be reconciled. The Irish had been the victims of injustices, which, however, could be corrected by British justice, and Ireland should be allowed greater autonomy within (but not outside) the British Empire. Writing to the Irish-American politician Bourke Cochran in 1896, Churchill granted that England has treated Ireland disgracefully in the past, but he considered it unjust to arraign the deeds of earlier times before modern tribunals & to judge by modern standards. Centuries ago Irish Catholics had been cruelly oppressed, but no more so than the French Huguenots or the Russian serfs, and it would be unfair to hold Queen Victoria answerable for the sins of Oliver Cromwell. The Irish problem is nearly solved. … There is no tyranny in Ireland now. The Irish peasant is as free and as well represented as the English labourer. Everything that can be done to alleviate distress and heal the wounds of the past is done, in spite of troublemakers who were striving to keep the country up to the proper standard of indignation. He predicted that Ireland would eventually achieve a measure of Home Rule, but within some kind of greater imperial federation.⁴³

Some years later Churchill would see a send-up of Irish melodrama in the form of Bernard Shaw's play John Bull's Other Island, which took a much more jaundiced view of Irish underdevelopment and provinciality than The English Rose. Shaw decisively rejected the project of making St. George's Channel a frontier and hoist[ing] a green flag on College Green. … I want Ireland to be the brains and imagination of a big Commonwealth, not a Robinson Crusoe island. As Churchill later recalled the performance, We are no sooner captivated by Irish charm and atmosphere than we see the Irish race liveried in humbug and strait-jacketed in infirmity of purpose. The Liberal Home Ruler, who so hopefully expected from Bernard Shaw, justification and approval for his cause, found himself in a trice held up as an object of satire rarely equaled upon the stage.⁴⁴ Shaw did not oppose Home Rule, but his play sent the message that Ireland could only escape poverty and backwardness through integration with the larger Anglophone world.

Indirectly, The English Rose might have also engaged Churchill in Jewish issues. The play never mentions Jews or Judaism, but the plot strikingly parallels the Dreyfus affair, which erupted four years later in 1894: a gallant representative of a dispossessed race is villainously condemned for a crime he did not commit, but in the end is proved innocent. The first record of Churchill's commitment to a Jewish cause is a letter he wrote to his mother from Omdurman on 8 September 1898: Bravo Zola! I am delighted to witness the complete debacle of that monstrous conspiracy.⁴⁵ He was still obsessed with the controversy as late as 1929,⁴⁶ and it was precisely the political theatrics that always fascinated him. The developments of the Dreyfus case are wonderful, he told his mother. Never since gladiatorial combats were abolished has the world witnessed such a drama – with real flesh & blood for properties.⁴⁷ The Dreyfus affair gripped the European imagination largely because it had all the elements of melodrama – a sensational trial scene, a man unjustly accused and imprisoned, the hero shouting Vive la République after he is stripped of his uniform, the long righteous speeches in his defense. An 1895 Adelphi melodrama by Seymour Hicks and George Edwardes, One of the Best, reset the scandal in England – not very convincingly, in Bernard Shaw's opinion. The French govern by melodrama, and give everybody a part in the piece, whereas the English preferred "breaking and getting rid of our Dreyfuses in the quietest possible manner, instead of advertising them by regimental coups de théâtre."⁴⁸

The coup de théâtre was a perennial melodramatic device: a stunning reversal of fortune. It might work against the hero (as when O'Mailley is caught with the murder weapon) or in his favor (for instance, the last-minute rescue of Dick Dudgeon in Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple).⁴⁹ But either way it should be wholly unexpected and leave the audience gasping. It could as well be a political maneuver, often deployed by Lord Randolph Churchill, not always successfully: notably his resignation from the Exchequer. As we will see, the coup de théâtre would be one of Winston's favorite literary and political strokes, with very mixed results.

Imperialist melodrama was another staple of the Adelphi and Empire Theatres, both of which young Winston frequently patronized.⁵⁰ In his writings he often alluded generally to the genre, if not to particular plays. The heroes were usually British (and occasionally French) soldiers in Africa or India, while the natives fell into three distinct categories. There were good natives: loyal, childlike, incapable of self-government, and properly grateful for British rule. They were oppressed or misled by wicked natives, defined as those who took up arms against the British. Then there was usually a treacherous character, who might be a native or a European: either way, he was inevitably unmasked as a traitor. A wicked native might be respected as a brave enemy, the familiar example being Rudyard Kipling's Fuzzy Wuzzy (You're a pore benighted ‘eathen but a first-class fightin’ man), but the treacherous character was always beneath contempt. In 1885 two London plays offered fanciful portrayals of General Gordon's defeat that same year, spinning it as a British victory, and in both treacherous Machiavels played key roles: in Khartoum! he tries to plant a bomb on a British troopship, and in Human Nature he opens the city gates to the Mahdi's assault. Khartoum! also features a good native, a glamorous Queen of the Desert who warns the Mahdi (the wicked one) that "The race you war against, though alien to ours, is destined yet to fill this land with faith and freedom that you cannot give because you know it not!⁵¹ We may laugh, but there were colonized people who talked like that. One of them, encouraging Indians to fight for the British Empire in 1918, assured his listeners that the English love justice. … The liberty of the individual is very dear to them. They have shielded men against oppression. … To sacrifice sons in the war ought to be a cause not of pain but of pleasure to brave men."⁵² The recruiting agent was Mohandas Gandhi. Imperial melodrama faded from the stage after the Boer War (1899–1902), but it enjoyed a second life in the movies. For a lesson in the conventions of this genre, see Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Gunga Din (1939), based on a poem of that name by Kipling and North West Frontier (as late as 1959, starring Kenneth More as the hero and Herbert Lom as a treacherous half-breed).

There is no direct evidence that Churchill ever saw Khartoum! or Human Nature, but imperial melodrama was a highly standardized product,⁵³ and he definitely was in the audience for a very similar play. In December 1891 he saw Michael Strogoff, a dramatization of Jules Verne's 1876 novel.⁵⁴ Nominally set in Russia, it is for all practical purposes a celebration of British imperialism, substituting Czar and Siberia for Queen and India. Tartar insurgents led by the Emir of Bokhara have invaded Asian Russia, and from there plan to attack Europe. The Russians have dispatched a relief column to besieged Irkutsk, but the telegraph line has been cut, so Captain Michael Strogoff is sent ahead on horseback to alert the garrison that help is on the way. Strogoff is captured by the Emir, who (following the instructions of the Koran) orders him to be blinded with a red-hot saber, an act simulated in plain view of the audience. The Tartars use incendiary weapons against Irkutsk, an opportunity for spectacular stage pyrotechnics. A turncoat Russian officer almost delivers the city to the invaders, but is foiled by Strogoff, who, it turns out, was not blinded after all. As he explains the miracle to his mother, When I thought I was looking on you for the last time, mother, my eyes were so filled with tears that the hot iron only dried my tears without destroying my sight.⁵⁵

That last touch helps to explain why melodrama was eventually laughed off the stage. With adolescent enthusiasm, Churchill had embraced a form of drama that metropolitan audiences increasingly regarded as tired, creaky, and ridiculous. The English Rose was a hit among plebeians but provoked yawns in quality papers such as The Times and the Pall Mall Gazette: for the latter it offered only cut-and-dried melodramatic conventionalities … the old bill of fare with an Irish dressing.⁵⁶ In 1895 George Bernard Shaw alluded to the hostility of that sceptical spirit which is now growing among first-night audiences in a very marked degree. This is an inevitable reaction against the artificialities, insincerities, and impossibilities which form about three-fourths of the stock-in-trade of those playwrights who seek safety and success in the assumption that it is impossible to underrate the taste and intelligence of the British public.⁵⁷ Most London audiences could no longer stomach such clichés as the thrashing of the villain, or the ‘Just before the battle, mother’ episode, otherwise than with its tongue in its cheek. The minority who are affected by these devices are disparaged as sentimentalists and greenhorns; it is a point of honour with the seasoned playgoer to grin cynically at such things as ‘rot,’ whilst affecting much connoisseurship in the cleverness with which they are contrived.⁵⁸ Shaw would appeal to those sniggering sophisticates with Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1900), which systematically lampooned all the traditions of imperialist melodrama. Something similar would be done to the American Western in Cat Ballou (1965), Little Big Man (1970), and Blazing Saddles (1974). Parody is the final illness of a dying literary form. But Churchill, to the end of his life, never accepted that melodrama was dead: he loved it and constantly performed it in politics. The Victorian stage offered numerous species of melodrama, in addition to Irish and imperialist versions: political melodrama, revolutionary melodrama, military melodrama, prison melodrama, capitalist melodrama, and temperance melodrama.⁵⁹ Churchill would act out all of these subgenres except (of course) the last.

In fact, Churchill's first act of political theatre was an anti-temperance burlesque. At Sandhurst military academy he enjoyed weekend leave twice a month, during which he and his friends frequented the Empire Theatre, congregating in the promenade behind the dress circle. There (he recalled in My Early Life) young people of both sexes … not only conversed together during the performance and its intervals, but also from time to time refreshed themselves with alcoholic liquors. In summer 1894 Laura Ormiston Chant, a suffragist on the London County Council, made a number of allegations affecting both the sobriety and the morals of these merrymakers; and she endeavoured to procure the closing of the Promenade and above all of the bars which abutted on it. The Daily Telegraph counter attacked with such leaders as Prudes on the Prowl, and other newspapers joined in the debate, which stirred Winston to action. He volunteered to become an activist for a libertarian organization, the Entertainments Protection League, until he discovered that it had no members other than the founder. But he succeeded in publishing a philippic in the Westminster Gazette:

The improvement in the standard of public decency is due rather to improved social conditions and to the spread of education than to the prowling of the prudes. … State intervention, whether in the form of a statute or by the decision of licensing committees, will never eradicate the evil. … The State should protect each member as far as possible from harm, and must govern men as they are and not as they ought to be. … Whereas the Vigilance Societies wish to abolish sin by Act of Parliament, and are willing to sacrifice much of the liberty of the subject into the bargain, the anti-prudes prefer a less coercive and more moderate procedure.⁶⁰

Mrs. Ormiston Chant ultimately had to accept what Churchill called a characteristically British compromise. It was settled that the offending bars were to be separated from the promenade by light canvas screens. Even this was too restrictive for the young bloods at the theatre, who tore down the barricade, whereupon Churchill delivered the first political speech of his career, congratulating the mob for striking a blow for British freedom. It reminded me of the death of Julius Caesar when the conspirators rushed forth into the street waving the bloody daggers with which they had slain the tyrant. (Always reticent about discussing sex in print, Churchill did not explicitly mention what really outraged the purity campaigners: the promenade was a haunt for prostitutes, and the dancers on stage were scantily clad.)⁶¹

In his debut, Churchill introduced several themes that he would develop throughout his political life, particularly his libertarianism and anti-puritanism. What is especially significant is that he made his first political speech and fought his first political battle in a theatre. For Winston, politics was performative, as it had been for Lord Randolph. He adopted his father's tricks for attracting newspaper attention, including the cliché with a twist: if Gladstone was an old man in a hurry, Mrs. Ormiston Chant and her sister vigilantes were old women in a hurry. The results were highly satisfactory: Winston showed off his newspaper clippings to his mother and brother, and sought applause from his difficult-to-please father (I am sure you will disapprove of so coercive and futile a measure).⁶²

It is possible that Churchill was inspired here by a celebrated anti-puritan dramatist. According to Vyvyan Holland, Winston Churchill was once asked whom he would like to meet and talk with in after life, and he replied, without hesitation: ‘Oscar Wilde’.⁶³ We might write off this remark as apocryphal, but there is more evidence, neither conclusive nor dismissable, of Oscar's influence on Winston. Churchill never produced an extended and explicit discussion of Wilde, as he did for Shaw and many other writers, but he may have written homages to Wilde without actually mentioning his name.

Wilde and Jennie Churchill were friends and mutual admirers. They corresponded as early as 1888,⁶⁴ and she liked to quote The Importance of Being Earnest. He considered her both beautiful and brilliant, and she returned the compliment: A more brilliant talker did not exist.⁶⁵ Winston clearly endorsed Oscar's enlightened hedonism: his bodyguard, Walter Thompson, once heard him say he wished he might at one time have had the opportunity to see whether he could carry as much as Oscar Wilde who could drink three bottles of brandy in a day, so it was said.⁶⁶ And Winston occasionally quoted Wilde's epigrams: he compared Lord Curzon's proposal to hang Kaiser Wilhelm to The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable (A Woman of No Importance, 1893).⁶⁷ Of course, it is possible that he picked up these quips from the newspapers or dinner conversations, without actually reading or seeing the plays. But in a retrospective on Bernard Shaw, Churchill wrote this sentence: Into the void left by the annihilation of Wilde he stepped armed with a keener wit, a tenser dialogue, a more challenging theme, a stronger construction, a deeper and more natural comprehension.⁶⁸ If Churchill was not familiar with Wilde's work, how could he have known that it was less clever than Shaw's?

If Churchill was a fan of Wilde, he had a motive for concealing the fact. In 1895 a group of young officers in the 4th Hussars, including Churchill, allegedly tried to prevent another new officer, Allan Bruce, from joining the regiment. In February 1896 Bruce's father, A. C. Bruce-Pryce, claimed that his son knew that Churchill had committed acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type at Sandhurst. Like Wilde, Churchill sued for libel. Unlike Wilde, he won, securing an apology and £500 in an out-of-court settlement.⁶⁹ However, that was not the end of the controversy. Henry Labouchere's Truth – a weekly journal devoted to denouncing Army scandals, miscarriages of justice, and Jews – pursued a vendetta against Winston, labeling him the ringleader of a conspiracy against Bruce.⁷⁰ The 25 June 1896 issue vaguely alluded to Bruce-Pryce's charges but professed to disbelieve them, slyly publicizing the accusation while avoiding the risk of another defamation suit.⁷¹ (Labouchere had authored Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 that outlawed all male homosexual acts and which had been used to prosecute Wilde in 1895.) In the following months, Truth continued to pursue the Bruce case,⁷² attacking and insinuating ("A Subaltern in a Cavalry regiment does anything that he pleases. Penalty: nil"),⁷³ all the while protesting that the journal would not be intimidated by threats of libel action.⁷⁴ In 1899 Truth reported Churchill's capture by the Boers with ill-concealed Schadenfreude, reminding its readers once again of the three-year-old scandal.⁷⁵

There is evidence that Churchill identified with Wilde, given that they had both faced the same accusation. By the standards of his times Winston was remarkably broadminded about homosexuality, which he occasionally had to deal with as a policy issue. His long and warm working relationship with his secretary Edward Marsh suggests that he enjoyed the company of homosexual aesthetes. But given his political ambitions, he had to tread very carefully. On 11 September 1912 he gave a speech in Dundee defending the achievements of the Liberal government, and at one point he offered this quip: Sir George Reid, a brilliant writer, whose life ended in tragedy, once said, ‘I can resist everything except temptation.’ (Laughter.)⁷⁶

Sir George Reid was neither a writer nor dead. He was an eminent Scottish painter who, as far as we know, never said anything about surrendering to the delectable. It may be that Churchill intended to give proper credit for the epigram, but at the last minute decided that to mention Wilde was politically risky in Presbyterian Dundee, and substituted the name of a more respectable figure. (Or perhaps it was a scandalized reporter who made the switch. At any rate, in a 1948 Commons debate Churchill attributed the quotation correctly.)⁷⁷

Like Wilde, young Winston wrote dissertations on aesthetics. In his 1897 unpublished essay The Scaffolding of Rhetoric⁷⁸ he laid out the rules for public speaking that we have come to call Churchillian. It was clearly written by a student of the drama, applying to politics the techniques he had observed on stage. Short Anglo-Saxon words have more