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Articles
Bourke Cockran: “Becoming Churchill” Becomes Better
- By GREGORY BELL SMITH
- | April 10, 2023
- Category: Books
Michael McMenamin & Curt Zoller, Becoming Winston Churchill: The Untold Story of Young Winston and his American Mentor [Bourke Cockran]. Second Expanded Edition, Sarasota. Fla.: First Edition Design Publishing, 2022, 482 pages softbound, $18.95, Amazon $14.82, Kindle $8.99. Note: If ordering, be sure to specify the Second Edition, pictured below.
Bourke Cockran: “To hold thousands in thrall”
In the 1950s, Sir Winston Churchill met Adlai Stevenson II, a two-time Democratic candidate for President. In the first volume of his father’s official biography, Randolph Churchill quoted an extraordinary recollection of that meeting. The writer was Sir Winston’s first cousin, Anita Leslie. The subject was Bourke Cockran—a Democrat Adlai Stevenson II had never heard of, although his grandfather Adlai had known him very well (see cartoon above).
It is just a week since I was sitting in the pavilion at Syon with Adlai Stevenson…. Learning I was Winston Churchill’s cousin, he suddenly started to reminisce about his last meeting with him in the early 1950s. He said: “I asked him something I’d always wanted to know…on whom or what he had based his oratorical style.
WSC replied: “It was an American statesman who inspired me when I was 19 and taught me how to use every note of the human voice like an organ.” “You’d never have heard of him,” said Adlai Stevenson. “He wasn’t a great statesman, just an Irish politician with the gift of the gab, but Winston called him a statesman. His name was Bourke Cockran….
“Winston then to my amazement started to quote long excerpts from Bourke Cockran’s speeches of 60 years before.” [So] there was Winston pouring out to him this tremendous impact on his youth saying, “He was my model. I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall,” and quoting with terrific force. Within 24 hours of telling me all this, which moved him greatly, Adlai Stevenson was dead.1
“Darling Uncle Bourke”
At the time Anita Leslie had told Stevenson that Cockran married her aunt, and “left us every penny we had.” She then told Randolph of her own recollections of “Darling Uncle Bourke”:
Such a character. I adored him. I was 12 when he died and his great voice and thickset shoulders and granite ugly deeply hewn face came back to me. How Bourke would have loved to have known what a lot he could give to that young man. That his own talent for oratory, wasted on tiresome American financial problems, should in the end help a voice that would hold fortunate Europe through its most terrible hour.2
It is sad that Cockran died two decades before his acolyte reached the pinnacle. By 1946 another world war had come and gone, leaving Cockran’s protégé the most famous man in the world. Churchill had frequently invoked Bourke Cockran before, including to Americans.3 But now, at Fulton, in 1946, he identified his mentor by name:
I have often used words which I learned 50 years ago from a great Irish-American orator, a friend of mine, Mr. Bourke Cockran, “There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother; she will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace.”4
The original edition
All this is in the 2007 edition of Becoming Winston Churchill, which Finest Hour called “the most important new book about Churchill” of the year—“one you’ll come back to again and again for its extraordinary insights into Churchill’s genius.” Reviewer Celia Sandys admired the authors’ use of brief fictional passages to introduce their chapters: “It brings to life details about Cockran’s little-known but remarkable life and career…. He was a friend and economic adviser to two presidents, Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican Theodore Roosevelt.”5 Cockran also backed an opponent of them both, William Jennings Bryan.
The 2007 text included the entire Churchill-Cockran correspondence, the authors focusing on how Churchill educated himself for his political career. It covered Churchill’s romances with three beautiful women before he met Clementine Hozier (and Cockran’s romance with WSC’s mother). But above all the book showed the profound effect Cockran had on young Winston, which cannot be understated. Recalling Cockran eight years after his death, Churchill was still mesmerized:
I have never seen his like, or in some respects his equal. With his enormous head, gleaming eyes and flexible countenance, he looked uncommonly like the portraits of Charles James Fox. It was not my fortune to hear any of his orations, but his conversation, in point, in pith, in rotundity, in antithesis, and in comprehension, exceeded anything I have ever heard.6
Becoming Winston becomes better
This new edition of Becoming Winston Churchill, in paperback and e-book format, takes the work to a higher level. Michael McMenamin has added 182 pages, 60% more than the original. New material includes additional letters between Churchill and his parents, more excerpts from speeches by Cockran and Churchill, and newspaper accounts of their speeches. It includes all of Bourke Cockran’s letters to Theodore Roosevelt on the causes of the Panic of 1907.
Missing no detail, McMenamin adds “Retrospective: Bombay 1899,” by Christine Lewis Conover, an early semi-romantic acquaintance Churchill met traveling between India and England as a young subaltern. Additional commentary relates Churchill’s youthful development to the theories of Daniel J. Levinson in his book The Seasons of a Man’s Life.
There are three new valuable Appendices. They compare the oratory of Cockran and Churchill in three speeches, mostly relating to Free Trade. Together, they dramatically show how Churchill followed Cockran’s line of thinking on a subject that occupied much of his career. The book is slightly marred by the many typographical errors, particularly the running together of words, which may have been caused by computer glitches.
No understanding of Winston Churchill is complete without an appreciation of just how he became who he was. Well written and readable, Becoming Winston Churchill explains precisely how Bourke Cockran was intrinsic to that development. Everyone interested in what Lady Soames called “The Saga” should read it.
Endnote
1 Anita Leslie to Randolph Churchill, 20 July 1965, in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 1, Youth, 1874-1899 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2006), 282-83.
2 Ibid.
3 Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2016), 117, 258, 334-35, 383, 508.
4 Winston S. Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace,” Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), VII, 7288.
5 Celia Sandys, “New [Paperback] Edition of a Classic Work,” in Finest Hour 145, The Churchill Centre, Winter 2009-10, 44.
6 Winston S. Churchill, “Personal Contacts,” Strand Magazine, February 1931, in Langworth, Churchill by Himself.
Further reading
Fred Glueckstein, “Great Contemporaries: William Bourke Cockran” (2016).
The author
Gregory Bell Smith, of Sonoma, California, is author of The American Ancestry of Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (2014) and the longtime director of Bay Area Churchillians.