Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill

Praise for

YOUNG TITAN

Perceptive and entertaining.

—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

A vivid portrait of a young man on the make, as ambitious as he was gifted . . . Enthralling.

—Newsweek digital edition

Entertaining and erudite. . . . Shelden is full of sharp literary insights about Churchill, as one would expect from a biographer of his rank.

—The Wall Street Journal

[As this] glowing portrait makes clear, the young Churchill was as beloved as he was despised: his intelligence, industry, and wit made him a darling of the press, and he was often seen as a future Prime Minister.

—The New Yorker

"Much has been written about Winston Churchill, but there is still much to learn, especially about those early years when he seemed destined for greatness. Michael Shelden now thoughtfully explores those years in Young Titan. . . . An engaging as well as perceptive take on the man who believed that while we are all worms ‘he was a glowworm’—a belief history would splendidly vindicate."

—Richmond Times-Dispatch

Just when you think there can be nothing fresh to be said about the long life of Winston Churchill, along comes biographer Michael Shelden’s page-turner about Churchill from age 26 to 40. . . . many readers who assume they’ve read it all will find Mr. Shelden’s lively account a must-add for their groaning shelves.

—The Washington Times

"Swiftly narrated. . . . Shelden, a noted biographer whose 1992 Orwell was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, explores the young titan in entertaining depth, with deep regard for Churchill’s achievements and no end of colorful detail."

—USA Today

A biographer of note, [Shelden] actually found a fresh angle on England’s man with the big cigar that should appeal to avid history fans.

—Ft. Worth Star-Telegram

In sparkling prose, Shelden explores the tendentious world of high-level Edwardian politics as Churchill worked with and competed against the likes of Herbert H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, and other notables.

—Library Journal

A fluid and informative examination of the early career of one of modern Britain’s most outstanding political leaders.

—Publishers Weekly

[A] charming new biography. . . . Shelden has capitalized on an understudied period of an iconic life and proved that such a study can still surprise.

—New Criterion

[A] solid biography covering the first four decades of Winston Churchill’s life, marked by both ambition and heartbreak. . . . Shelden offers an unadorned account of Churchill’s dogged pursuit to build his legacy against some long odds.

—Kirkus Reviews

Michael Shelden has done the nigh-impossible: he has found original things to say about the man Isaiah Berlin called ‘the largest human being of our time’—Winston Churchill. In this entertaining and deeply researched book, Shelden paints a memorable portrait of the young Churchill’s life and loves.

—Jon Meacham, author of American Lion

"Young Titan gives us an exciting, needed look at Winston Churchill in his years as a Liberal. Breaking with the Conservatives, he battled for better working conditions, for unemployment insurance, for improvements in education. He waged a two-front war: against the Tories on the right, the socialists on the left. It is the young Churchill at his best, a great foretelling of what was to come when Britain and the world needed him most."

—Chris Matthews, author of Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero and anchor of MSNBC’s Hardball

"For history buffs, Winston Churchill is the gift that keeps on giving, and in Young Titan Michael Shelden has given us the gift of Churchill’s fascinating formative years. It’s all here—the boy wonder, adventurer, romantic, orator, and eloquent man in the arena. I didn’t want it to end."

—Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation

CONTENTS

To my daughters, Sarah and Vanessa

The force of character is cumulative.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

PRELUDE:

THE PRIME MINISTER

Near midnight on a Saturday in May 1941 a great wave of planes appeared over London, their silhouettes against a moonlit sky. As they roared past Westminster Bridge, whole streets were set ablaze, fires broke out at Westminster Abbey, and shrapnel pounded the tower of Big Ben. Soon flames were sweeping through the debating chamber of the House of Commons. Its roof fell away, the galleries collapsed, and a shower of twisted steel and masonry buried the rows of green leather benches where so many famous debates had raged over the decades. Only the scorched walls were left standing.

The next afternoon, while parts of London were still burning and the smell of smoke was everywhere, Winston Churchill came to Parliament to inspect the damage. This was the second spring of Adolf Hitler’s war against Great Britain, and Churchill was just completing his first year as prime minister. To everyone’s surprise, the clock tower—though blackened and pockmarked—withstood the raid, and Big Ben was continuing to strike the hours. Because the attack had come late at night, only a few people had been in the building, and the death toll was limited to three, including two policemen. Over the whole of London, however, the casualty rate was appalling, with more than three thousand killed or injured. It would prove to be the worst night of the Blitz.

As he poked through the rubble, Churchill paused beside some charred beams and cast a solemn gaze over the destruction. With its roof gone, the wrecked chamber was illuminated by a pale shaft of sunlight, and the air was thick with dust. There were no relics to salvage, nothing new to learn about the enemy’s methods. At one level this was simply the latest in a long list of venerable buildings to suffer the fury of modern war. But, of course, there was a greater casualty here—a direct hit on the very heart of British political life. In a flash Hitler’s bombers had gutted the home of one of the world’s most important democratic assemblies. As Churchill would later put it, Our old House of Commons has been blown to smithereens.¹

The loss was personal. The prime minister had spent much of his life in this chamber, beginning with his appearance on its floor as a new member forty years earlier, when he was a slender young man with fine, reddish hair, sharp blue eyes, and a boy’s freckled face. Here, as he would say, I learnt my craft. On this ground his father—Lord Randolph Churchill—had stood as an ally of Disraeli and an adversary of Gladstone. In the Ladies’ Gallery his American-born mother—the indomitable Jennie—had watched proudly as her son gave his maiden speech. He had sparred with friends and enemies here—from the early days of the century when he matched wits with the political powerhouse Joseph Chamberlain, to more recent times when he challenged the judgment of Joe’s younger son, Neville, who so badly misjudged Hitler in the 1930s.²

Here he had enjoyed moments of triumph and endured defeats; given brilliant speeches and, occasionally, a dull one; earned the admiration of many; and enraged not a few. On one memorable occasion early in his career an opponent had jumped up during a raucous debate, grabbed the Speaker’s bound volume of the rules of the House and thrown it at him, hitting him in the face and drawing blood. During the abdication crisis of 1936, when he had tried to offer words of support for Edward VIII, howls of protest had filled the chamber, silencing him and causing some to predict that his political career was at an end.

Just three days before Hitler’s planes dropped their bombs on this spot, Churchill’s old friend and rival from the early years—David Lloyd George—had risen in the debates to paint a bleak picture of the progress of the war, complaining of discouraging setbacks. In what was to be his last speech in the old chamber Churchill responded to Lloyd George’s pessimism with an impassioned declaration of his faith in the war effort. I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest, he said on Wednesday, May 7. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.

Little did anyone suspect that the tempest would soon roar and rage in the very place where he spoke.

Now, as he surveyed the damage of that fiery Saturday night, tears began to trickle down his cheeks, and then to flow. He did not try to stop them, noted a reporter standing nearby, or even wipe them away. Motionless in the sunlight—one hand in his overcoat, his feet planted firmly on a mound of rubble—he looked for a second like a statue that had miraculously survived the bombing.

The next moment, however, he pulled himself together and declared decisively, The Chamber must be rebuilt—just as it was.

Then he turned and walked carefully back to his waiting car. A crowd had gathered outside, where debris from the bombing was spread in all directions, with burned bits of paper blowing in gutters. In the background could be heard what an observer later called one of the most horrible sounds of the war—the tinkle of glass being swept up. Yet Churchill showed no sign of indecision or gloom. He waved confidently and a rousing cry greeted him.³

History likes winners, and the image of the older, victorious Churchill has long overshadowed the story of the eager younger man who soared to prominence only to find he had overreached, and who left office with his reputation in tatters. Yet in many ways the early period is the most colorful of his career and the key to his character. It was an exhilarating time full of high drama, political intrigue, personal courage, and grave miscalculations.

Churchill thought his chance for greatness on a grand scale would come early in life, and for such a restless, ambitious man the long wait was difficult to bear. By the time he became prime minister at sixty-five, he was more than ready for the job and was able to offer the world much of what it expects from its heroes—except the excitement and glamour of youth.

No doubt the great man weeping among the ruins of his parliamentary past was a better leader because he had spent a lifetime preparing for his part. But there was a period in his twenties and thirties—in the distant Edwardian past—when success had beckoned on the world stage, and when the vigor of a more dashing, youthful character was at his command. The adventures and ordeals of those early years were essential to the making of the man who triumphed in the Second World War. Young Winston’s career began with dreams of success that fueled a spectacular political rise, but which ended in dramatic failures, creating an equally spectacular fall. At forty he was largely written off as a man whose best days were behind him.

As Churchill confessed in old age, he had felt so misunderstood in those younger days that he thought he had become in the eyes of many a freak—always that—but much hated & ruled out. Redeeming the promise of his youth became the great challenge of his later life.⁴

INTRODUCTION:

THE YOUNG TITAN

Winston Churchill didn’t stumble into greatness. In a conscious and methodical way, he set out as a young man to become the hero that he believed his era of great events demanded. He fashioned his career as a grand experiment to prove that he could work his will on his times, persevering in that approach despite repeated setbacks and the often harsh ridicule of those who didn’t share his high opinion of himself. Many of his contemporaries accepted that history is the Biography of great men, as the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle put it, but whether Churchill belonged among the great was always a subject of hot debate, and—for some—it still is. He had few doubts about his destiny, however, and raced to establish himself as the most dynamic and imaginative politician in the British Empire.

At the heart of his story is an irrepressible spirit whose tough character was shaped in part by a romantic temperament that flowered in his youth and never entirely disappeared. It arose from a powerful concept of personal will that Churchill embraced early in adulthood. I believe in personality, he declared in one of his earliest political speeches, confidently endorsing the notion that the heroics of great leaders—not vast movements or impersonal systems—shape history. We live in an age of great events and little men, he said, and if we are not to become the slaves of our own system . . . it will only be by the bold efforts of originality, by repeated experiment, and by the dispassionate consideration of the results of sustained and unflinching thought.

The details of party platforms and manifestos were never as important to him as the larger issue of providing vigorous national leadership equal to any challenge. Almost from the start, critics saw him as a power-hungry egotist, calling him the embodiment of pugnacity and a hustler of the first class. He saw himself as an imaginative figure of high purpose and decisive action. Little men, he argued, let events take their course. I like things to happen, and if they don’t happen I like to make them happen.¹

As one political opponent observed, his ear was sensitively attuned to the bugle note of history. He heard it loud and clear in the heroic story of his legendary ancestor, John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough—the victor of the Battle of Blenheim in 1704—whom he called an Olympian figure, boasting that the duke never fought a battle that he did not win, nor besieged a fortress he did not take. Inspiration came as well from the ambitious ideals of his father’s early supporter, Benjamin Disraeli. His praise for one of Disraeli’s most admirable qualities as a leader could also be applied to him: He loved his country with a romantic passion.²

Like the young Disraeli, he found encouragement for his passionate nature in the writings of the Romantic poet who created a veritable blueprint for the heroic life—Lord Byron. In old age Churchill often surprised admirers by suddenly declaiming from memory long stretches of Byron’s verse. He could do it by the hour, as his daughter Sarah discovered to her amazement on a trip in 1945: "My father, relaxed and fortified, recited for an hour from Childe Harold by Byron and then had about thirty minutes’ sleep. When Franklin Roosevelt suggested in 1941 that the Allied powers should call themselves the United Nations, Churchill was quick to agree and just as quick to quote a relevant verse from Byron about the Battle of Waterloo: Here, where the sword united nations drew, / Our countrymen were warring on that day!"

Churchill was not merely showing off. From early youth he was drawn to Byron as a stirring example of the man of action who was also a man of ideas. He was so intimately acquainted with the poet’s work that it became deeply embedded in his mind and always seemed close at hand to supply a reference for any idea or event. One of his most resounding statements—his great rallying cry for wartime sacrifice in 1940, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat—has its parallel in Lord Byron’s scathing attack on the lack of sacrifice in an earlier war when Britain’s landed gentry sent their brethren out to battle and enriched themselves with millions in wartime profits. Safe in their barns, Byron’s The Age of Bronze says of the gentry, they grew fat from their blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions.

To young Winston, the poet’s career as an eager adventurer, defiant freethinker, and proud visionary was partly an inspiration, and partly a warning against the dangers of living at such a high pitch. The two had several things in common, beginning with their aristocratic backgrounds, and their experiences—many decades apart—as pupils at Harrow. Both men were dazzled by the story of Napoleon’s rise and fall, and both kept cherished busts of the great French leader on their desks. Churchill was especially fascinated by Byron’s poetic meditation on Napoleon’s unbounded ambition (a fever at the core, the poet called it). Between the two world wars Churchill was a member of the Byron Society, and one of his most treasured possessions was a seventeen-volume edition of Byron’s works he purchased in 1906. In his only novel, Savrola—published when he was twenty-five—Churchill created an imaginary state to serve as the backdrop to the Byronic escapades of his young protagonist, a valiant defender of liberty and romance whose cast of mind is described as vehement, high and daring.³

Like Byron, Churchill was the chronicler of his own history. In a series of books written at a rapid pace in his early twenties he created vivid descriptions of his early adventures as a soldier and war correspondent. When I was 25 years old, he said in old age, I had, I believe, written as many books as Moses. Thanks to this torrent of prose in five books and many newspaper articles, almost everyone in Britain knew of young Churchill’s brave deeds on three continents between 1895 and 1900. He lived the adventures of a storybook character—fighting with the Bengal Lancers on the Indian frontier; scouting for rebels with the Spanish army in Cuba; traveling along the Nile to take part in what was to prove the last great cavalry charge of the British Army in the nineteenth century; and, most dramatic of all, surviving capture by the Boers in South Africa, and then making his escape across hundreds of miles of unfriendly territory. As a prominent magazine of the day remarked, He has both acted his romance and written it.⁴

Young Churchill lacked the rugged good looks of a Byronic hero—his pale, round face was no match for the poet’s dark, chiseled features—but he played the part with enthusiasm. He enjoyed taking risks, loved dramatic gestures, brooded intensely but not long over his failures, and often wore his heart on his sleeve. He thought playing for high stakes was the only way to live. This path had been blazed by his father, whose impetuous character, volatile career, and early death at forty-five had inspired at least one prominent eulogist to compare Lord Randolph to Lord Byron.

The two men resembled each other, the editor of the Saturday Review wrote of Randolph and the poet shortly after the statesman’s death in 1895. Mr. Matthew Arnold said of Lord Byron that he was the greatest elemental force in English poetry since Shakespeare; and it would be as true, we think, to say that Lord Randolph Churchill was the greatest elemental force in English politics since Cromwell. Such praise, exaggerated though it was, made a great impression on Winston, who later called the whole tribute in the Saturday Review the best article on his father that had appeared anywhere.⁵

Young Winston Churchill succumbed to Byron’s political romanticism with all his heart. Many of his Edwardian contemporaries perfectly understood its effect on him. Admirers saw Churchill as a reformer determined to improve the lives of ordinary people, and his words and manner reminded them of a misty past when the poor and the weak had gallant champions. As one newspaper editor remarked, young Churchill’s dashing style brought to mind the clatter of hoofs in the moonlight, the clash of swords on the turnpike road. It is the breath of romance stirring the prosaic air of politics. A friend said of him, His world was built and fashioned in heroic lines. He spoke its language.⁶

Believing himself a hero, Churchill worked the magic of making others believe it, too. Byron’s verse—so full of energy, passion, and political idealism—provided a spur for the young man’s imagination, giving him a way of seeing the world, and also a way of understanding how the world would see him.

*   *   *

Churchill’s romanticism was not confined to affairs of state. Biographers have often dismissed the notion that he thought much about falling in love, portraying him as a young man who was awkward around women, and whose occasional efforts at flirtation were the halfhearted actions of someone merely going through the motions.

The reality is much different. Far from being shy or inexperienced, he was still in his teens when he became an enthusiastic champion of the music-hall beauties in London, risking a scandal one night at the Empire Theatre when he started a riot after standing up in the festive crowd and launching a rousing tribute to the charms of the assembled women, who were then under attack from anti-vice campaigners. Where does the Englishman in London always find a welcome? nineteen-year-old Winston Churchill asked his fellow revelers before he was thrown out. Who is always there to greet him with a smile and join him in a drink? Who is ever faithful, ever true?—the Ladies of the Empire Promenade.

From the comfort of middle age, Churchill recalled this outburst as his first public address, wryly remarking, In these somewhat unvirginal surroundings I . . . made my maiden speech.⁷

During his twenties and early thirties he pursued three of the most beautiful women of his time, and made such a powerful impression on each that even though they declined his marriage proposals they remained his devoted friends far into old age. All three remembered him not as a callow, uncertain youth, but as a stylish character who played polo, was fond of visiting galleries and museums, often attended plays in the West End, read voraciously, and pursued women with great passion.

The elegant young beauty Consuelo Vanderbilt—his cousin by marriage—described his character in those days as ardent and vital and said he had every intention of getting the most out of life, whether in sport, in love, in adventure or in politics.⁸

He was so ardent that when he finally decided to marry, he spent a week away from his fiancée to undertake an eleven-hundred-mile round-trip to a remote Scottish castle, where another young woman equally devoted to him was waiting for an explanation of his decision. The story of that emotionally fraught journey—made only three weeks before his wedding in London—is the subject of a later chapter, where it is told for the first time.

As a bachelor, he made an effort to play the dandy, carrying a walking stick and wearing a glossy top hat, starched wing collar, and frock coat with a sleek watch chain. His taste for fine clothing extended even to his choice of underclothes, which were made of an expensive silk weave. It is essential to my well-being, he said in defense of his yearly expenditure on silk underwear. It was a typical extravagance for him, along with his fondness for other luxuries like champagne and fine cigars. There has never been a day in my life, he reflected, when I could not order a bottle of champagne for myself and offer another to a friend.⁹

Even at the outset of his career his well-chosen words and ready wit drew attention. In 1900, as he was on the verge of winning his first election to Parliament, he defined a political candidate as someone who is asked to stand, wants to sit, and is expected to lie. The young man could also be amusingly satirical about the competitive nature of his glittering Edwardian era, judging the bejeweled women of his social circle as though each aspired to be another Helen of Troy. When a friend suggested that a certain young lady’s face might launch at least two hundred ships, Churchill replied, By no means. A covered sampan or small gunboat at most.¹⁰

*   *   *

In his fifties Churchill gave his own account of his life up to the beginning of his political career. My Early Life ends as the Edwardian age is beginning and does so abruptly, leaving the reader to wonder how this remarkable young man—still unmarried, and still untested as a politician in 1901—will make his way to the front ranks in a system dominated by much older, and much more experienced, men. In the following pages I take up the story where Churchill left off, tracing his progress from a novice politician to one of the most prominent members of the British Cabinet, a journey that will take him from the beginning of his twenty-sixth year to the end of his fortieth year. In the last chapters of the story, when the new century was facing its first assault from Germany, all eyes were on him as he served as First Lord of the Admiralty and readied the British fleet for action. In those heady days his was still the face of youth in the government, and many expected him to emerge from the war as the next prime minister.

But, within a year, everything went wrong. One by one his plans met with failure or stagnated for want of support. Friends turned against him, and enemies rejoiced in his downfall. Too late, the young politician discovered that he had placed too much faith in men who let him down, and in big ideas that didn’t work.

Blamed for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in the eastern Mediterranean, he was attacked in the British press as a danger to this country and soon lost his high position in the government. The German press mocked him by suggesting that the title Earl of Gallipoli should be given to him, and joked that he was London’s modern Lucifer: He has fallen from the heavens—the most beautiful morning star of some London seasons. In late 1915 he shed the last trappings of power and went to France to fight in the trenches, humbly donning the uniform of a major. What he learned from failure was crucial to his later success, but it was a devastating setback whose sting he would feel for years.¹¹

Between his rise and fall he built a modern navy, experimented with radical social reforms and did battle with others who thought he wasn’t radical enough, survived various threats on his life, made powerful enemies and a few good friends, fell in love (several times), became a husband and father, annoyed and delighted two British monarchs, took the measure of the German military machine as he rode at the side of Kaiser Wilhelm on maneuvers, risked his life in the air as a pilot in training, authorized executions of notorious murderers, and faced deadly artillery barrages on the Western Front.

Proud and exuberant, he delighted in his ability to master the art of politics and proved time and again that he could outwit older and much more experienced rivals. His impressive skills as a legislator and administrator surprised both admirers and critics and taught him how to overcome bureaucratic and political obstacles to get things done quickly. Embracing the new reforming spirit of the Edwardian age, he learned to question the easy assumptions of his own aristocratic upbringing and to explore fresh approaches to old problems. Professional and personal disappointments schooled him in the virtue of patience and the dangers of overconfidence. In his friendships he came to treasure loyalty and to be wary of betrayal.

By the end of his first forty years he had a good understanding of how far his talents could take him, and how far he could fall. While political ideas changed with the times, what remained constant was his obedience to that bold, early declaration, I believe in personality. Exploring the heart of that personality is the aim of this biography.

In a lifetime that stretched from November 30, 1874—when Disraeli was prime minister—to January 24, 1965—when the music of the Beatles was Britain’s most famous export—Winston Churchill played many parts on the world stage. If he had died when he was forty—when his fortunes were low, and his youth behind him—his story would still be one of the best of the century, in part a riveting drama of ambition, in part a sobering tragedy. Fortunately, there was a second act.

PART I

1901–1905

I

A NEW WORLD

On a frigid winter night at the turn of the last century a young man of twenty-six sat in a stuffy railway carriage writing to a beautiful woman. The view from his window was of a dark, snow-swept prairie that seemed to go on forever under a vast, starless sky. More than four thousand miles from home, he was tired and lonely. His last stop had been St. Paul, Minnesota, and straight ahead was the Canadian border.

In the train to Winnipeg, Winston Churchill noted in black ink at the top of his stationery, then added the date, 20 Jan. 1901, and—skipping the salutation—began simply Pamela. He was writing to the great love of his young life, a glamorous figure back home whose charm and good looks had earned her praise as the brightest star in London’s social firmament. As he told her early in their relationship, she exercised a strange fascination over him. Unfortunately for him, many other men felt the same way.

For at least two years Winston had been sending her long letters full of devotion. My love is deep and strong, he declared in one letter. Nothing will ever change it. They had become acquainted in India, when both were twenty-two. He was a cavalry officer and she was the daughter of a colonial official. They took an elephant ride together, dined at her home, and made polite conversation at parties. Then, about a year and a half later, when they were both back in England, Winston resolved to capture her heart. But he found the beauty, with her seductive gray eyes, porcelain complexion, and smooth dark hair, besieged by other suitors. She was the center of attention at every ball and managed her time with various men so successfully that one of her society friends later referred to her lightheartedly as the most accomplished plate-spinner of her day.

Undeterred by competition, Churchill tried to impress her with the power of his words. One morning a heavy bundle arrived at her door containing the manuscript of his novel, Savrola, and a letter explaining that the story offered a mirror of the author’s mind. If she honored him by looking into it, he wrote, I am sure it will gain beauty by the reflection. When this and similar tactics failed to win her over, he raised the stakes. Marry me, he wrote a few months later, and I will conquer the world and lay it at your feet.¹

He may have taken this extravagant promise seriously, but Pamela Plowden didn’t. So, for the time being, he went back to pursuing his passions for soldiering and writing, and hoped for another chance to impress her. Separated from her by thousands of miles in South Africa during the Boer War—Britain’s fight with the fiercely independent Dutch settlers over gold, diamonds, and empire—Churchill kept his love alive by periodically gazing at three different portraits of Pamela tucked into a special wallet. During his imprisonment by the Boers in late 1899, he wrote her a brave, jaunty note from Pretoria: Among new and vivid scenes I think often of you. His plight couldn’t help but move her. When his mother gave Pamela the news that he had escaped from prison and was safe, she responded with a two-word telegram: Thank God.

Returning home a hero, he was emboldened to try his luck with her again, thinking that he knew her heart. No one would understand her as I do, he told his mother. On a fine October day in 1900 he proposed. He chose a suitably inspiring spot. His friend the Countess of Warwick invited Pamela to spend a weekend amid the medieval grandeur of her home at Warwick Castle. With soaring towers and battlements as a backdrop, the hopeful suitor asked Pamela to go punting on the River Avon, which flows majestically beside the castle. Everything went well until they were gliding along and he asked the question. She turned him down and broke his heart.²

He was still under her spell—still convinced that she was the only woman I could ever live happily with—when he left home in December to lecture on his South African adventures in a hastily arranged tour of Canada and the United States. Now—three months after his proposal—here he was in the dim light of the railcar writing yet another letter to her. As his train sped across northern Minnesota toward the Canadian border, his heartbreaking experience at the romantic castle must have seemed like something out of a bad dream. Perhaps he was thinking that one more letter from a remote part of the globe would catch her fancy and soften her resistance.

*   *   *

In the few years since his first acquaintance with Pamela in India, he had become an international celebrity, a boy wonder who could fight and write, and whose future seemed glowing. The newspapers in Winnipeg were trumpeting his visit as a major event, and a record crowd was expected at his lecture. In big black letters one ad for his forthcoming appearance at the Winnipeg Theatre began: Winston Spencer Churchill. The War As I Saw It. Ticket prices started at fifty cents and went all the way up to a dollar and a half.

Besides Savrola, other titles on display in the shop windows of Winnipeg were London to Ladysmith Via Pretoria, the tale of his flight to freedom in South Africa; and The River War, his two-volume account of the British campaign in the Sudan, where he had fought so bravely. Of this last book, published in 1899, the American war correspondent Richard Harding Davis wrote, It was a work that one would expect from a Lieutenant General when, after years of service in Egypt, he laid down his sword to pen the story of his life’s work. From a Second Lieutenant, who had been on the Nile hardly long enough to gain the desert tan, it was a revelation.

Winston had promised the world to Pamela, and he was the kind of man who thought he could give it to her. Yet she had turned him down. And now, no matter where he was, her image still haunted him, and he still believed that she had a place in the grand future he envisioned for himself. There is that between us, he wrote her on the train, which if it should grow no stronger, will last forever.³

Money was one of the major obstacles in their relationship. Society expected a woman of Pamela’s great beauty to marry a man with an impressive fortune. She ought to be a rich man’s wife, declared the urbane Colonel John Brabazon—commander of Churchill’s cavalry regiment—when he heard that Pamela and Winston were not going to marry. Churchill, though he was the grandson of a duke, had inherited relatively little money. Lord Randolph left many debts behind, and Winston’s fun-loving, gregarious mother was a hopeless spendthrift. (As a friend said of Jennie, Life didn’t begin for her on a basis of less than forty pairs of shoes.)

The Marlborough fortune—greatly enhanced by a few million dollars when Consuelo Vanderbilt married into the family—was in the hands of Winston’s cousin Sunny, otherwise known as Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough. For a couple of years—until Consuelo gave birth to the first of her two sons in 1897—Winston was next in line to inherit the title and all the riches that came with it, including his birthplace, Blenheim Palace. But he didn’t show much interest in becoming a mere duke when so many other paths of glory seemed open to him. Even his own grandmother—a Victorian relic who wore lace caps and used an ear trumpet—didn’t think he would make a good nobleman. He was too ambitious and driven. Your first duty, the old dowager duchess had solemnly informed Consuelo when she married Sunny, is to have a child, and it must be a son, because it would be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston become Duke.⁴

To most people, Sunny seemed a prickly and condescending character, but Winston—who was three years younger—was one of his few loyal friends and always tried to see the best in him. Sunny and I were like brothers, Churchill later said of their early relationship. The young duke was proud of his cousin and was happy to allow him the freedom to come and go at Blenheim more or less as he pleased. In 1900 he even allowed him to take over his old bachelor chambers in fashionable Mayfair at 105 Mount Street. Churchill moved there just one month before proposing to Pamela.⁵

A new job also came to Winston at this time, but it didn’t do anything to improve his financial prospects. In fact, it didn’t pay a penny. At the beginning of October the young hero of the Boer War successfully launched his political career by winning a seat in the House of Commons as a Conservative member for the Manchester suburb of Oldham. Churchill’s victory was an early signal of the party’s great triumph in the autumn general election of 1900, and he was immediately hailed as a rising political star who would do much to enliven the Commons when it met in February. In these circumstances proposing to Pamela may have seemed a good idea. But with no sign yet that MPs would one day be paid for their work, he couldn’t offer a new bride much in the way of security.

Pamela’s close friend and great benefactor in society, Lady Granby, later Duchess of Rutland—and a second mother to Pamela, whose own mother had died of a snake bite in India several years earlier—had no doubt advised her to wait for a proposal from a more prosperous suitor. Churchill knew that he was at a disadvantage. Before he went to South Africa, he wrote Pamela in reference to their relationship, For marriage, two conditions are necessary—money and the consent of both parties. One certainly, both probably are absent. Unable to win her consent, he did at least make a gallant effort to prove he could earn a small fortune if he needed to. He devised an ambitious plan immediately on his return from South Africa.

In demand as a speaker, he arranged to spend an entire month after the general election giving talks on the Boer War in more than two dozen British towns. He boasted that he could make £2,000 from the tour, which in those days was equal to the annual salary of the typical editor of a London newspaper. As it happened, the audiences were so large in November that he earned twice that figure. And this paled beside the riches he hoped to make from his North American tour, which began that December and was nearing its conclusion when he boarded the train taking him to frosty Winnipeg.⁶

*   *   *

Wearing a derby and a stylish double-breasted overcoat with a fur collar, Churchill arrived in Winnipeg around lunchtime on Monday, January 21, 1901. He was welcomed by a small committee that included a dapper grain tycoon who had become the province’s lieutenant governor. The temperature was around ten degrees Fahrenheit, a bitterly cold wind was scattering snow in the streets, and the mood of the city was grim. The weather wasn’t the cause of the long faces among the residents. They were used to the cold.

It was the latest news of the day that had cast a shadow over this remote outpost of the empire—fourteen hundred miles from any British town of importance, as Churchill described it. The big headline in the morning paper announced the impending event that had unsettled so many loyal Canadians: QUEEN VICTORIA ON DEATHBED. HER LAST HOURS.

News of the eighty-one-year-old monarch’s failing health had spread widely during the last few days, and now that her end seemed near, the queen’s many subjects in the empire were trying to come to grips with the realization that the old order was fading fast. It appeared as if some monstrous reversal of the course of nature was about to take place, one historian later observed. The vast majority of her subjects had never known a time when Queen Victoria had not been reigning over them. Her death was seen as a monumental event even by those who watched at her bedside as she endured the common suffering of a last illness. Her final hours, said the Duke of Argyll, were like a great three-decker ship sinking. She kept on rallying and then sinking.⁷

Before starting off on his journey to Canada, Churchill had seen the first reports that the queen was gravely ill, and he had mentioned this in his letter to Pamela. Though he knew only a few details of the unfolding drama back home, he was already trying to imagine what lay in store for the post-Victorian world.

In the short term he worried that Parliament would be dissolved and that he would have to stand for election again in the coming weeks. That would mean canceling what remained of his tour and losing the lecture fees. He was trying to put a lighthearted spin on this unhappy prospect when he wrote Pamela: See how [the queen’s death] complicates and clouds all my plans, disturbing not only nations but Winstons.⁸

For the moment, however, the imperial drama was good for business at the Winnipeg Theatre’s box office. In a city of only fifty thousand people, more than a thousand tickets had been sold for Churchill’s evening lecture, and so few regular seats were left that extra chairs were being added at the back of the hall and down in the orchestra pit. For these Canadians living so far away from the little world of British royals, aristocrats, and MPs, Lord Randolph’s son represented the closest link to the ruling class of the empire. It was worth a hard-earned dollar to listen to this celebrated figure who had traveled five hundred miles overnight to speak to them at a time when great change was in the air.

The high expectations of his visit delighted Churchill, for his lectures had not gone well on the other side of the border. Instead of improving on what he had earned from his talks in Britain, his American tour had experienced so many setbacks that he was making less than half of what he had collected at home. In some cities the audiences had been sparse or unsympathetic, or both. In Washington, D.C., his share of the box office receipts was the equivalent of only £50; in Baltimore it was £35; in Hartford it was an embarrassing £10.

Many Americans of German and Dutch descent identified with the independent Boers and didn’t look kindly on an Englishman who had made