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Articles
Who Really “Shaped” Winston Churchill?
- By MICHAEL MCMENAMIN
- | February 9, 2024
- Category: Books
David Reynolds, Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him (New York: Basic Books, 2024), 418 pages, $32.50, Amazon $19.99 (pre-order price), Kindle $19.99.
I apologize, but after four chapters (on Churchill’s father and wife, Lloyd George and Adolf Hitler), I could not bring myself to finish this book. Not that it is lacking in sound research (exceptions to which are noted) for which the author’s seminal book on Churchill’s war memoirs is well known. But the contents contradict the promise of the title. A possible explanation is that the publisher’s marketing department was responsible for the words “Shaped Him.”
Who shaped whom?
The author himself seems to suggest that “Shaped Him” doesn’t fit. Commenting on the closeness between Clementine Churchill and her youngest daughter, he writes: “The older children never enjoyed such a rapprochement. Well into their twenties, they were firmly set in their characters and their problems, above all trying to create their own identities.” (348)
Exactly. And by his twenties, Winston Churchill too was “firmly set” in his character and politics. Arguably, he was beyond serious “shaping” by his wife, and most of the others mentioned. Except for Lloyd George, all came along much later in his life: Neville Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, FDR, Stalin, de Gaulle, Gandhi and Attlee. None—and I do mean none—“shaped” Churchill.
Lloyd George is the only “leader” mentioned who knew Churchill in early adulthood. But there’s nothing new, and no evidence that Lloyd George shaped young Winston, in ways personal or political. WSC was thirty years old by the time they became political allies in May 1904, when he crossed the floor to join the Liberals and sit beside Lloyd George.
Martin Gilbert’s Churchill’s Political Philosophy makes clear that Churchill’s political and economic views were by then well established. He cites a lunch with Lloyd George in December 1903 when Churchill noticed that Lloyd George shared his political views. The Welshman “was in favour of Churchill’s concept of a constructive social program which would link the Unionist Free Traders and the Liberal Party in a common policy.” The fact that Lloyd George later was instrumental in furthering Churchill’s political career, especially when, as Prime Minister, he brought him back into government after the Dardanelles episode, does not constitute “shaping” Churchill.
Lord Randolph Churchill
Winston Churchill didn’t suffer fools gladly and had a sharp, cutting voice from his early days in the House of Commons. This was shaped by his father, whose speech and mannerisms he strove to duplicate. But Churchill himself gave more credit to the American Bourke Cockran as the leader who “shaped” his oratory. A comparison of their Free Trade speeches in the 1900s confirms this.
Yet we can search Cockran’s speeches in vain for the ad hominem attacks on adversaries that characterized Churchill and his father. His “boneless wonder” jibe at Ramsay MacDonald in the 1930s was mild compared to his merciless attacks on the Tories and Loyalists over Irish Home Rule before the Great War. Watching Robert Hardy‘s brilliant characterization in The Wilderness Years, WSC’s sharp rhetoric in private and public is very much in evidence. When it comes to personal invective, he was his father’s son.
What shaped his drive for learning?
Lord Randolph died in 1895, but the chapter rolls on. In 1896-97, “with time on his hands, the twenty-two-year-old Churchill was seized by ‘a desire for learning’ of the sort never generated by Harrow or Sandhurst.” (13) Seized? By whom or what? Reynolds simply implies boredom. That is just not so. Winston began his self-education in 1895, promptly upon graduating from Sandhurst, when he was only 20. In August he wrote his mother: “My mind has never received that polish which for instance Oxford or Cambridge gives. He told her he was reading classical liberal scholars like Fawcett and Lecky, with Gibbon next on his list. Not many 20-year-olds have such driving desire to learn what they have missed.
Impressed by Fawcett’s views on Free Trade, Churchill was still twenty when he met Cockran, his political and oratorical role model. They held the same views on the importance of Free Trade and free markets. Dr. Reynolds is apparently unaware that Cockran had in his own library all the books Churchill read in India. Churchill wrote Bourke in 1904: “…you have powerfully influenced me in the political conceptions I have formed and I like to think that under different skies and different lands we are fighting in one long line of battle for a common cause.” He even quoted Cockran in 1946 in his “Sinews of Peace” speech in Fulton, Missouri. Now there is someone who shaped Churchill.
Afraid of being called a coward?
We are told that Winston’s “poor health and lack of physical strength marginalized him from the camaraderie of team sport.” Winning the Public Schools Fencing Championship doesn’t require physical strength? What about winning a polo championship and scoring two goals with a bum shoulder? Fencing and polo teams don’t have “camaraderie”? Maybe the author was never a jock. I’ve not played polo, but I have been on fencing and tennis teams. We had plenty of “camaraderie,” although jocks don’t often use that word. We practiced against each other every week before our individual matches and cheered our teammates when they won.
Dr. Reynolds further writes: “Fearful of being judged a coward, Winston indulged in daredevil acts, often at the cost of serious injury” (15). He offers no evidence of such a fear, nor how “often” it caused him “serious injury.” Young Winston was at times a daredevil, but “fear of being judged a coward” is just an invention, for which no evidence is offered.
Psychotherapists who have studied Winston’s childhood believe he had attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. One “daredevil” episode illustrates this diagnosis. Aged 18, while playing tag with his brother Jack and a cousin, he was trapped on a bridge above a 30-foot ravine. He sought escape by leaping from the bridge to a nearby treetop. He missed, fell, and was comatose for several days. In 1962 he learned from an x-ray that he had broken his back. Churchill was impulsive, common among those with ADD. But for good or ill, he was fearless, not fearful.
Clementine Churchill
There is much to dispute in the Clementine chapter. Winston, we are told, shaped his wife, “forcing her often to compromise her Liberal principles” (332). When? No citation is offered. I can confidently say—Paul Addison and Martin Gilbert would agree—that Churchill was a liberal all his life, regardless of party. And liberals sometimes disagree. But “forcing” his wife to agree with him is an assertion that needs to be backed up. Dr. Reynolds doesn’t.
Mirrors of Greatness implies that WSC chose his wife on superficial grounds: His view of women was based on their “beauty and bearing.” He “expected women to know their place.” This does disservice to the four women Churchill proposed to—none of whom “knew their place.” All were capable of forthright views. To be fair, all four (Clementine, Pamela Plowden, Ethel Barrymore, Muriel Wilson) were, in fact, beautiful. That hardly makes Churchill unusual or superficial.
Dr. Reynolds declares that there was “real physical attraction” between Winston and Clementine, “apparently a novelty for both of them” (334). Isn’t physical attraction one of the things that attracts people to each other? Winston was 34 with three marriage proposals behind him; Clementine was 24 with many more proposals. Are we to believe neither encountered “real physical attraction” before they met? I’ve not looked for photographs of Clemmie’s unsuccessful suitors, but photos of Plowden, Barrymore, Wilson and Clementine are in the official biography. To suggest that physical attraction was “a novelty for both” defies belief.
When Clementine “snapped”
“In early 1935,” we read, “something snapped.” Clementine went off on a four-month voyage to the South Seas—without Winston. He “disliked being confined on a boat for weeks on end” (345, 347). What? As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911-14, he spent months on the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, often with Clementine. Yet her escape is treated as a needed separation between incompatible personalities.
Here is the missing context: Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, a close friend of the Churchills and an Other Club member, had invited them both. The year before, they had cruised the Mediterranean with Moyne for “weeks on end” (26 September-18 October). Winston could not possibly be away four months. The India Bill was pending, the German challenge mounting. Göring was about to announce his thousand-bomber air force. Hitler was poised to renounce the Versailles Treaty.
Reynolds doesn’t mention this. Nor does he explain that the “companion” Moyne selected for Clementine was a 40-something art dealer, Terence Philip (described as “rich” with no citation). Philip was known as a “confirmed bachelor,” then often a code word for a homosexual.
Was Churchill jealous? We can read passages from Clemmie’s letters on which WSC might put the worst possible spin. But if there was an affair, would Clemmie have been so frank about her excursions with Philip to deserted islands? Would Winston suspect an affair with Philip based solely upon what his wife told him?
Reynolds concludes: “Quite what happened in the tropics we shall probably never know.” He then gives Winston equal time by referring to the long-punctured story of his supposed affair with Lady Castlerosse. Piously he tells us, “no hard evidence has been unearthed.” No—but plenty of hard evidence suggests that the Castlerosse affair is as mythical as the Phillips affair.
The shaped and the shapers
The people Mirrors of Greatness covers are mainly not those who “shaped” Churchill, but those he interacted with. There is nothing wrong with reflecting on them, but if one is to cover those who shaped, one needs to consider the shapers. Where are the people who really influenced Winston Churchill before he was “firmly set” in his character—in his mid-twenties, as Reynolds says his children were? Besides Bourke Cockran, whom he revered all his life, where are Elizabeth Everest, Lady Randolph Churchill, Pamela Plowden, John Morley, Bindon Blood and Bishop James Welldon? None are included.
You can read most of the Lloyd George and Lord Randolph chapters online on the free preview. There’s no question of course, that Randolph shaped his son, his sharp tongue toward opponents the major example. There’s a case for Lloyd George advancing his career at a low point, but nothing to support actual “shaping.” The book reads more like a potted biography—accurate enough, if laden with cliché quotations we’ve read time and time again. Had the title been something like David Dilks’s Churchill and Company, it would have conveyed more about the contents.
The editors insist that this review based on a partial read is as good as a plodding review of the whole thing. Whether they are right or not I leave to the judgment or clemency of the reader.
The author
Mr. McMenamin, a frequent contributor to the Churchill Project, the author of Churchill historical novels, is a contributing editor at Reason magazine and longtime writer of a Finest Hour column “Action This Day,” chronicling Churchill’s life at 25-year intervals. He is co-author with Curt Zoller of Becoming Winston Churchill: The Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor, recently republished in a new expanded edition.