Churchill’s Early Life - Andrew Roberts

good afternoon as mr. Valda said my name is Catherine sinkovitz I am from Richland Michigan and it is my honor to introduce our speaker this afternoon Andrew Roberts is a historian and an honorary senior scholar at GaN Ville and Keys College Cambridge dr. Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Society of literature a trustee of the Margaret Thatcher archive trust and a director of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation he is the recipient of numerous book awards including the Wolfson history prize the intercollegiate studies institute prize the Emory Reeves prize the British Army Military Book of the Year award and a history prize from foundation Napoleon a regular guest on British and American television and radio dr. Roberts writes for The Sunday Telegraph The Spectator literary review mail on Sunday and the Wall Street Journal he is the author of several books including eminent Churchill Ian's Hitler and Churchill secrets of leadership a history of the english-speaking peoples since 1900 master and commanders how four Titans won the war in the West the storm of war a new history of the Second World War a book which reached number 2 on the Sunday Times bestseller list and Napoleon a life which our speaker just informed me has just been auctioned by Harvey Weinstein for a TV series please join me in welcoming dr. Andrew Roberts ladies and gentlemen it's a great honor to be invited to address you today and thank you very much indeed for those kind words perfectly true that my book got to number two and the bestseller list beaten only by a book about Michael Jackson the title of my talk Churchill's early life is a deliberately ambiguous rather dextrous one because it allows me not only to speak about his youth but also about his autobiography my early life and the times review of that book which appeared on the publication day on the 20th of October 1930 mentioned not only the charm and briskness of this book but also its humor headlong excitement quiet irony melancholy regret for vanished customs and glories love of sport and the pleasures of friendship although it also made the slightly snide point that the material is of course splendid as mr. Churchill will agree the child is the father of the man wrote William Wordsworth and in many ways this is true of Winston Churchill recalling that great day on the 10th of May 1940 which as was mentioned we've just celebrated the 75th anniversary of the day in which he became prime minister but also of course the dreadful day that Hitler unleashed his blitzkrieg on the West Churchill wrote in his in his war memoirs I felt as if I were walk-in with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial and in a sense what I'd like to do today is to look at his early life and to look at the way that it was indeed his youth was indeed a preparation for the hour and the trial of 1940 because it showed again and again the extraordinary leadership capacities that he had the sheer character and personality of the man shines through again and again from the many different vicissitudes that he face not just physical but also moral vicissitudes now clearly this is no rags to riches story of the type so beloved by modern-day biopics we're an outsider from nowhere triumphs over the establishment or anything like that he was the grandson of the Duke and not just any old common or garden Duke he was the grandson of the Duke of Marlborough and so as I take you through his life I'd like you to keep in mind several things and many of them mentioned in that Times Review in fact the sense of humor the effect his family life or the lack of it had on his psychological development his powerful sense of not having much time completely absurd as it turned out in fact he lived to be 90 but he didn't believe that he had that much time and so therefore he was always in a tearing hurry his extraordinary lust for adventure his intense competitiveness with his contemporary and the contemporaries and how incredibly accident-prone he was with constants near-death experiences when you go to Dublin Castle which I was there last week in fact and you in the state apartments can see a very large room which is decorated with nothing but the paintings of former Viceroy of Ireland almost all of them British aristocrats in fact in the ten years before and ten years after Winston Churchill's grandfather the seventh Duke of Marlborough was a Viceroy of Ireland the post was held by two Dukes one Marquess and three Earl's and Winston Churchill lived there from the age of two because his father Lord Randolph Churchill was private sent that secretary to his own father the the seventh Duke and it was in a park in Dublin around the age of four that Winston Churchill was thrown from a donkey in in Ireland and concussed when they thought they'd come across what they believed was a Fenian demonstration but in fact turned out to be a rout march of British troops I was thrown off and had concussion of the brain later Rose this was my first introduction to Irish politics it was his first introduction but it was hardly life-threatening but they were going to be many more accidents to come one of the most famous passages in my early life concerns his mother Jennie Jerome the beautiful daughter of a Brooklyn business tycoon Leonard Jerome my mother always seemed to me a fairy princess he wrote famously a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power she shone for me like the evening star I loved her dearly but at a distance the untrue word in that was always she was not a radiant being much for him after he discovered that he and his brother Jack Adam had their inheritance from their father misappropriated by Jennie Jerome but instead because she was so distance affection and love and surrogate motherhood was provided by his governess mrs. Everest a lady whose photograph he kept by his bed for the rest of his life and he also paid for the upkeep during his life of her of her grave which I was very proud at lunch today to discover has been kept up after that by Richard and Barbara langworth who were here in the audience today the first boarding school that he went to some George's and asked at a skirt he actually started to attend a month prior to his 8th birthday so he went off to boarding school at the age of 7 ladies and gentlemen this is not child abuse I know it sounds like it but my father and grandfather and great-grandfather went to boarding school at similar ages as did I and say to my children ripping children from their parents at attender an impressionable age and handing them over to sexually questionable total strangers is not a primer facie case of child abuse but something instead that is called the British education system some of Churchill's earliest memories of some George's must be called into question not least because he kept referring to it as some James's in my early life he made himself out to be a dim child intellectually whereas his school reports actually showed that he's shown at some subjects like English and history in Latin however his contemporaries did far better than him which seems to have led to a slight sense of chipping us towards the academically gifted especially those who went on to read classics at Oxford and Cambridge faced with an inability to grasp the first declension he wrote there was one thing I could do I could learn by heart and his ability to memorize huge amounts of verse and prose stayed with him for life and would astonish contemporaries many of the occasions when he would quote reams of poetry or old musical songs or speeches from plays and he'd do it from memory half a century after having learned them how I hated this school he later wrote and small wonder because in all the 12 years of his education no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet and that some George's quote two or three times a month the whole school was marshaled in the library and one or more delinquents were hauled off to an adjoining apartment by the two head boys and they're flogged until they bled freely while the rest sat quaking listening to their screams such beatings usually but not always carried out without overtly sadistic undertones were immensely common in the British public school system and indeed carried on until the late 1970s as my own parts of my own body can attest i've always since noticed thou when supporters of capital punishment confidently attest it never did me any harm my private judgment is always I'll be the judge of that such beatings nearly broke Churchill's health entirely and after a serious illness his parents took him away in 1883 aged nine he was transferred to a school in Brighton kept by two ladies where he stayed for three years he nearly died from an attack of double pneumonia but overall he was much happier there where he could learn the things that interested him in a happy environment French history learning poetry by heart riding swimming in the Chapel Royal that Brighton that aged about ten while the whole school turned to the east when the Apostles Creed was recited Churchill thought that the low church mrs. Everest would consider that a bluefish practice and I conceived it my duty to testify against it I therefore stood solidly to my front I was conscious that having created a sensation I prepared myself for martyrdom however when we got home no comment of any kind was made about my behavior I was almost disappointed and looked forward to the next occasion for a further demonstration of my faith he didn't get it because the following week this school was shown to pews facing east-west rather than north-south but this was an early that's how it was this an early indication of Churchill's willingness to stand up for what he believed in in net if necessary totally alone or was it a deliberate perversity combined with an element of showing off as implied by his sense of disappointment at the lack of official response might the Anglican school not have responded because they didn't want to get involved in accusations of Anglo Catholic practices with the transfer of the accept Exchequer's son within a decade of the highly controversial public worship Regulation Act these are matters for Churchill experts let none say pedants such as Richard langworth and Mary Ellen and myself to resolve in 1888 aged 13 Churchill entered Harrow less than eighteen months after his father's sensational resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer because of his father's fame when roll call was taken when he was in his first year at Harrow with a name starting with s4 Spencer Churchill and in the bottom form because of his low examination marks in Greek and Latin he came at the very end of the hundreds of boys filing past they had master in the school yard coat large numbers of visitors of both sexes used to wait on the school stage in order to see me March by and I frequently used to hear the irreverent comment why he's the last of all such and humiliation could have had a devastating effect on a lesser child but for Churchill it was obviously a spur he believed that by being put in the lowest form at Harrow it meant I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys they all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that but I was taught English the word splendid in that sentence was clearly meant sarcastically by the way though Churchill employed sarcasm far less in my early life in his other writings than its far smarter cousin rich English high irony his excellent English teacher Robert Somerville taught him grammar I learned it thoroughly thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence which is a noble thing elsewhere he wrote I would make them all learn English talking about about school children and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor and Greek as a treat he was joking again about the classics later writing they told me how mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun which I thought served him right at Harrow Churchill won a prize for reciting no fewer than twelve hundred lines of Macaulay's lays of ancient Rome without error this would have been possible only if he were utterly bound up with the tales they told tales of heroism in the ancient world an important influence on his patriotism written by Harry masters such as John farmer who wrote the music and he Bowen who wrote the lyrics they were intended to link the presents the pupils present-day conduct and Cratchit ISM to hairos and Britain's glorious past articulating the strong continuum between them thus the song states Fortuna Domus of 1891 which was first performed when Churchill was at the school has a stanza that goes tonight we praise the former days in patriotic chorus and celebrate the good and great who trod the hill before us where Sheridan and peal began in days of Whig and Tory where Ashleigh vowed to serve the crowd and Byron rose to glory in giants another song that Churchill sang her Oh viens were specifically enjoying to remember that the hero race may come and go that doesn't exactly die for all of we whoever we maybe come up to the giants of old you see thus his this historical glory was not just something to respect in all but to try to emulate and even to better Churchill was not therefore just in competition with his contemporaries but he felt he was also in competition with Sheridan Peale Ashley and Byron on leaving Harrow his father agreed to let him go into the army for years I thought my father with his experience and flair discerned in me the qualities of military genius but I was later told that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the bar Churchill had a collection of toy soldiers ultimately nearly 1,500 strong and he'd long been fascinated by warfare moreover it was a way that he could leapfrog those of his contemporaries who were going to Oxford and Cambridge but back to his accidents in January 1893 visiting his aunt's Lady Wimborne at Bournemouth he attempted to jump the deep cleft lost his hold and fell 29 feet from a bridge onto hard ground he was unconscious for three days in bed nearly three months he suffered a ruptured kimrie kidney hemorrhage and broke a bone in his mid-back which was only discovered in an x-ray in 1962 for a year I looked around at looked at light round a corner he rose he was lucky he looked at it at all and truly extraordinary that he had achieved all he did by 1962 with an undiagnosed broken bone in his back it was in 1893 that Churchill met Arthur Balfour Joseph Chamberlain Edward Carson Lord Rosebery Herbert Asquith and John Morley the great politicians of the Victorian late Victorian era so soon as I was convalescent I began to go to the House of Commons and listen to the great debates he rose he was present at the most climactic debate in the 19th of the entire nineteenth-century Gladstone's winding up at the second reading of the Irish Home Rule bill on the 21st of April 1893 and in retrospect it's clear that the early death of his father aged only 46 meant that Churchill who was 20 at the time would be sure to enter politics one day in June 1893 he qualified for the Sandhurst cadetship in the cavalry on his third attempt in my early life he considered what might have happened if he hadn't gone to Sandhurst making the excellent joke that I might have gravitated to the bar and persons might have been hanged through my defence who now nursed their guilty secret complacency he entered the cavalry because it offered easier entry than the more intellectual or less unintellectual infantry and artillery besides as he wrote the uniforms were much more magnificent his father was unimpressed and quote I received from him a long and very severe letter expressing the bleakest view of my educational career showing a marked lack of appreciation of my success in examination and warning me of the danger in which I plainly lay of being a social wastrel it's hard to make Lord Randolph Churchill ladies and gentlemen out to be much more than a harsh Victorian father that summer Churchill and his younger brother Jack went on a walking tour of Switzerland and they climbed the Vetter horn and the monterosso mountains he also knit not the kind of thing the one does that social wastrels necessarily do he was also nearly drowned at Lake Lausanne when he and his brother Jack who he curiously only refers to as a younger companion in his autobiography went swimming and a breeze picked up and then sailed away the boat faster than he could swim towards it bang in the middle of Lake Zurich Lausanne he was facing yet another brush with death and this time he even gave it a color I saw death as near as I believe I have ever seen him he later wrote he was swimming at in the water at our side whispering from time to time in the rising wind which continue to carry the boat away from us at about the same speed we could swim no help was near unaided we could never reach we could never reach the the what's the thing by the survived on the edge of lakes the shore to everything I've got the floor here unaided we could never reach the shore I now swam for life I scrambled in and rowed back for my companion who though tired had not apparently realized the dull yellow glare of mortal peril that had so suddenly played around us in spring 1894 it became clear to everyone that his father was gravely ill of course no medical diagnosis of his illness was offered by Churchill in my early life who himself believed along with most other people at the time that it was syphilis although several historians today believe instead it was a rare disease of the brain of his father he wrote in a line surely as autobiographical as biographical he embodied that force Caprice and charm which so often Springs from genius in June he said goodbye to his father as his father went off on a round-the-world tour he patted me on the knee in a gesture which however simple was perfectly informing I never saw him again except as a swiftly fading shadow all my dreams have comradeship with him of entering Parliament to decide and in his support were ended they remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory the previous November Churchill had become twenty years old writing later 22:25 those are the years don't be content with things as they are you'll make all kinds of mistakes but as long as you're generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or seriously distress her she was made to be wooed and won by youth on the 20th of February 1895 he was commissioned into the Queen's 4th Queen's Own huzzah as a second lieutenant I had the ill luck to strain my tailors muscle that the Sartorius muscle it's the longest muscle in the in the body it's the one that goes down the thigh on which one's grip on a horse depends in consequence I suffered tortures galvanic treatment was then unknown one simply had to go on tearing at a lacerated muscle with the awful penalty of being thought of boobie if one begged off even for a day the physical courage ladies and gentlemen of Churchill it equals his his moral courage which is rare in the closing decade of the Victorian era the Empire had enjoyed so long a spell of almost unbroken piece he wrote that middles and all they represented an experience and adventure were becoming extremely se scarce on the British Army as so often it was the honesty of my early life that gave ammunition to Churchill's detractors he was accused of being a mere medal hunter with this sentence often held up as evidence but the key wording is all they represented in experience and adventure war service was the path to distinguish story distinction he wasn't rich enough to maintain hunters as well as polo pet ponies his father Lord Randolph was the younger son of the Duke and so instead of being able to afford to do this he took the decision to use his ten weeks leave to visit the Cuban Civil War joining the side of the Spanish captain general Marshall Martinez Campos he went there via New York writing to his mother on the 10th of November what an extraordinary people the Americans are their hospitality is a revelation to me and they make you feel at home and at ease in a way that I've never before experienced it's good that some things don't change you might call it tomfoolery he also wrote to travel thousands of miles with money one can ill afford to get up at four o'clock in the morning in the hope of getting into a scrape in the company of perfect strangers is certainly hardly a rational proceeding the 10th the the 30th of November was my 21st birthday and on that day for the first time I heard shots fired in anger and heard bullets strike flesh or whistle through the air that's half true ladies and gentleman in fact it was the next day on the day itself he might have heard bullets fired in anger but he didn't hear them whistle through the air there's a new book by hands clip hack about precisely this this period in Churchill's life but certainly on the 1st of December whilst eating a chicken outside a place called Arroyo Blanco which is right in the center of Cuba at which I visited in fact in May of this year Churchill heard a ragged volley rang out from the edge of the forest the horse immediately next to me not my horse gave a bound it had been shot in the ribs and as I watched these proceedings I could not help reflecting that the bullets which had struck the chestnut had certainly passed within a foot of my head so at any rate I had been under fire that was something nevertheless I began to take a more thoughtful view of our enterprise than I had hitherto that night not only shots but volleys were resounded through the night a bullet ripped through the fatch of our tent another wounded and wounded and oddly just outside I fortified myself by dwelling on the fact that the Spanish officer whose hammock was slung between me and the enemy's fire was a man of substantial physique indeed one might have called him fat I've never been prejudiced against fat men at any rate I didn't grudge this one his meals of the fighting the next day he said there were sounds about us sometimes like a sigh sometimes like a whistle and at other times like the buzz of an offended Hornet he returned from Cuba with three things that stayed with him for life his love of cigars of siestas and being in the thick of wherever was the most important thing happening at the time in october 1896 he to the Sassoon dock in bombay harbor in in india modern-day mumbai he sure enough had another accident we came across alongside a great stone wall with dripping steps and iron rings for hand holds he days rose the boat rose and fell four or five feet with the surges I put out my hand and grasp it as a ring but before I could get my feet on the steps the swipe the boat swung away giving my right shoulder a sharp and peculiar wrench a scrambled Apple right made a few remarks of a general nature mostly beginning with the early letters of the alphabet hugged my shoulder and soon thought no more about it yet in fact his dislocated shoulder an end that I had sustained an injury which was to last me in my life in which was to me at polo to prevent me ever playing tennis and to be a grave embarrassment to me in moments of peril violence and effort once it nearly went out through a too expensive gesture in the House of Commons yet it wasn't all bad news because keep had he been able to use a sword at the Battle of Omdurman rather than a Mauser pistol my story might not have got so far in the telling he philosophized in my early life when you make a mistake it may very easily serve you better than the best advise decision life is a hole and luck is a hole and no part of them can be separated from the rest it extraordinarily ladies and gentleman he wrote that in 1930 the very year before he resigned from the Tory front bench which allowed him to be out of office during the wilderness years and thus unsullied by any collective responsibility for a peace mode in the winter of 1896 the desire for learning came upon me he liked the feel of words fitting and falling into their places like pennies in a slot he wrote he hadn't been to Oxford or Cambridge but claims not to have been chippy about it we never set much store by them all they're affected superiority he said of people who did go to Oxford and Cambridge remembering that they were only at their books while we were commanding men and guarding the Empire now I pity undergraduates when I see what frivolous lives many of them lead in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity after all a man's life must be nailed to the cross of either thought or action I'm not convinced about this that he that he didn't mind about the affected superiority of people who went to Oxford and Cambridge there are so many slighted references to them but nonetheless his walkabout guarding the Empire obviously didn't matter to him deeply because you can't have Churchill without Empire I was very pleased to see Larry on in his in his excellent book Churchill's trial puts the Empire in the middle there with with war and peace central areas of the book because Winston Churchill for not just for Britain and also of course for democracy but also he fought for the Empire and although it's not very popular at the moment the British Empire was absolutely epicentral to his to his entire outlook all through the long glistening middle hours of the Indian Day I divided given he wrote and then after that Edward Gibbons autobiography and then Macaulay but Churchill was shocked by Macaulay's history primarily because it was harsh about the first Duke of more Brown and was it from Gibbon that he got his religious agnosticism or from Winwood reads but the martyrdom of man which argued that all religions were essentially the same and and which denied the divinity of Jesus the remark he made about church-going was that at Harrow there were three services every Sunday besides morning and evening prayers throughout the week all this was very good I accumulated in those years of so fine a surplus in the book of observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since in India Churchill and displayed what he called ace extraordin he was able to read all this Gibbon and Macaulay and all the other people we also read Schopenhauer and Leckie and the great thinkers of the day and because you also suffered from what he called complete absorption in with the game of polo he played nevertheless than eight and more often ten or twelve chuckles of polo polo a day and never in the history of Indian polo had a Cavalry Regiment from southern India he was based in Bangalore and yeah one the interim ental cup yet they won that and his regiment the fourth desires one that even though Churchill had to play with his arm strapped to his side out of pain from his from his injury their dislocated shoulder just Chile extraordinary not least of course that he also scored the winning goal he was staying at Goodwood Park which is one of the Great's stately homes of England the house of the Duke of Richmond and he was on leave when he read of the pithan revolt on the northwest frontier and he immediately got himself attached to the new force that was being sent it was being got together there that Malik and field force and it was there that he learned to drink whiskey I've been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk except on very occasional exceptional occasions and a few anniversaries he wrote and I would like to have had the boozing scholars of the universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a great gift of the gods Churchill was incredibly politically incorrect to modern ears it it has to be said there's a there's a passage in the in my early life in which he says we had the very strong spirit of the diehards and the young bloods of the enemy they wanted to shoot at us and we wanted to shoot at them so a lot of people were killed and on our side the widow's have had to be pensioned by the imperial government and others were badly wounded and hopped around for the rest of their lives and it was all very exciting and for those of us who didn't get killed or hurt very jolly on a punitive expedition in the Malakand field force among the mud villages of the mamonde valley Churchill found himself with five British officers and about 85 Sikh soldiers when in an area that had seemed totally quiet suddenly the mountainside sprang to life swords flashed from behind rocks bright flags waved here and there a dozen widely scattered smoke puffs broke from the ragged face in front of us loud explosions resounded place from high above us on the crag 1,000 2,000 3,000 feet above us white or blue figures appear dropping down the mountainside from ledge to ledge like monkeys down the branches of a tall tree a shrill cry arose from many points and then moments later the British officer who was with him was spinning round just behind me his face a massive blood his right eye cut out yes it was certainly an adventure it was a point of honour not to leave wounded men behind death by inches and hideous mutilation the invariable measure meted out to those who fall in battle into the hands of the Pathan tribesman so in the course of saving this officer this wounded officer five Britons and Sikhs including Churchill went back to bring him back whereupon one of the sikhs was shot through the calf and Churchill got away got him back by dragging him along by his collar to safety and Churchill had risked his life therefore to save the soldiers in the same action the regimental adjutant was cut to pieces with a sword and Churchill was so keen to avenge him that he almost got cut off by the enemy I looked around I was all alone with the enemy not a friend was to be seen I ran as fast as I could there were bullets everywhere I got to the first null hurrah the Sikhs were holding the lower one yet another place brush with death ladies and gentlemen and the chance to show character and leadership but also the judgment to know when to run like hell such brushes with death were to be repeated wrigley thereafter not least in a cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdurman his attempt to save an ambush trained in the Boer War his escape from the Boer prisoner of war camp in Pretoria and so on and so on yet Churchill didn't crave excitement for itself like some kind of extreme sports junkie today rather he knew that he needed the attention and medals that came with it in order to leapfrog his contemporaries especially the cleverer boys if he was to attain his dream of vindicating his brilliant stricken but distant and often disdainful father he needed Fame and he needed it on his own terms humor headlong excitement quiet irony melancholy regret for vanished cousins and glories love of sport the pleasures friendship that anonymous Times reviewer of my early life was uncannily accurate both about the book itself and about what actuated Winston Churchill when he came to the Premiership in May 1940 aged 65 it was as a fully formed leader possessed of all the attributes and personality traits necessary for this hour and this trial extraordinaire only though almost all of these they're not of course the political experience that was also necessary he had attained before the absurdly young age of 25 thank you very much indeed so we have plenty of time about 20 or minutes or so for questions from from anyone other than Richard langworth if you put your hands up this this lady in this gentleman again to give you the microphone please don't feel constrained just to ask questions about his early life I'll try and ask questions about wider thing as well I've read that book many times and the one thing that puzzles me is Churchill has a younger brother and we never hear anything about the younger brother tell us about Jack um yes that's right he is mentioned of course but he's not a central figure and he did actually cut him out of that Lausanne incident and and didn't mention that it was his brother whose life he had been put in danger and by jumping off the boat Jack was a brave man in his own right he fought in the Boer War he was Gallipoli he was put on into the he got onto the staff on the Western Front he became a stockbroker he loved his brother daily they were they were extremely friendly and close but he was not I think it's fair to say an essential figure in the Churchill Ian cannon he wasn't one of the the true intimates in the way that Bracken or breva Burke or or the Prophet Linderman or any of those other people were and so it was a it was a happy fraternal feeling that he had towards his brother and that his brother had towards him his brother was very proud of his achievements but he didn't take advice for example from from his brother but he was good to his brother when it came to finances family finances and everything they he was he's very decent and an honorable as he diffict it hi alex Bookman I'm a senior here at Hillsdale for many of us Churchill is a hero we have a statue of him obviously at Hill cell I was wondering who did Churchill look up to in his early life would that be through reading and it was it I guess people in in antiquity or even I guess his I guess superiors during his time in the military well of course the primary one was his father and he took many of his much of his political philosophy that he kept for the rest of his life from his father's concept his father really was the inventor of the concept of Tory democracy trust the people and that was something that the Churchill stated Churchill very much for the rest of his life and he admired when he when he grew up he he admired Benjamin Disraeli but he was only seven when Disraeli died he remembered Israelis death very very well and mentions it in my early life really though it's the it's the first you cook more bruh his great ancestor who was the victor in the war of Spanish Succession which was he was the greatest soldier along with the Duke of Wellington who's the greatest soldier in the history of the British Army and and so he was an ultimate hero for Winston Churchill and several more the Admiral Nelson and and Drake who he was related to very distantly these were the giants of British military history also Oliver Cromwell and he tried to have a ship named after Oliver Cromwell but failed when King George the fifth wouldn't put up with it understandably so considering and the chroman was a regicide but nonetheless it would have been 300 years also earlier he was very very well-versed in all of the laser ancient Rome the the great great ancients know that but these were the stories that he grew up with and as I say he was able to recite twelve hundred lines of Macaulay's ancient Rome it's a it's a it's a wonderful I do recommend it I haven't read the whole thing from comfort of cover I admit but the bits that I have read and was forced to learn at school are still pretty pretty magnificent and moving I was wondering if you could say something about his the marriage to Clementine yes well it thank you madam it doesn't crop up except for the last sentence of my early life where he said that he got married and lives happily ever after but that's that's pretty true that's what happened he he married a very remarkable and impressive lady in Clementine that Churchill who looked out for him she didn't like all of his friends which is perfect and because several of them must have been extremely difficult people to have got on with but nonetheless she provided the domestic stability that he needed love and affection for children and a home life in which he could which he knew that he could sally forth out to the House of Commons night after night very Rick very Wrigley the House of Commons wouldn't break up until midnight and so you know it that kind of thing is incredibly tough on on family life but there's no indication that it was too tough on his she was a very impressive remarkable woman during the Second World War she helped the the Red Cross aid to Russia funds with the helped the the Red Cross aid to Russia funds which in factually ladies I think which was important and all in all there there isn't a sort of whiff of negativity I think all deadly and scandal about a very remarkable woman what role did Winston Churchill's grandparents play in his early life his grandparents played pretty pretty small role he was the seventh Duke was the Viceroy of Ireland as I say so he was a he was a sort of extremely grand figure but he ritual tell me the age at which he died Churchill's age when when when the Duke died but I think he was fairly young wasn't he when that when the Duke died so it wasn't too much of a of an effect but the next Duke the eighth Duke Sonny became a great friend of was a great friend of Churchill's and of course Blenheim was a place that Churchill always felt was almost the second home to him and it was at Blenheim that he proposed to to Clementine to go back to the original earlier question but more importantly this moral connection was vital to him for two reasons and the first was that the Spencer Churchill name is one of the grandest and most aristocratic in Britain and therefore gave him a standing an automatic standing in society which also gave him the kind of confidence that would be needed in order to take all these risks and all with embark on all these adventures and and the second thing was that because of the history of her to go back to the question for that his great ancestor the first Duke this giant of British military history he also felt he had a lot to live up to and so it was a name in a sense rather like that phrase about about the Bonaparte's that about Napoleon the third his name was both his making and his undoing Winston Churchill's name could have been it was part of the making but also could have been the undoing if he hadn't managed to to live up to it as it is of course he lived up to it and and even put it in the shade could it be in sir my question is about Churchill's personality he's often described by several of his advisers as temperamental I was wondering if you would comment on his own personal leadership style and how it affected his conduct of a war yes he was indeed deeply temperamental and not least this is evidenced by the fact he kept bursting into tears he was the most lachrymose Prime Minister we've ever had there are some 30 occasions during the Second World War when when he is his described as having tears in his eyes and this is because he's a Regency figure he's not some stage lately Lake Victoria he's actually a throwback to a much grander and earlier past actually at the funeral of Lord Nelson every single one of the eight Admirals that carried his coffin they were all in tears men allowed their emotions to to show in the Regency period in a way that they simply didn't in the late Victorian period so yes he was temperamental he could he could shout at meetings and bang his fists and he would be immensely toffee would keep his chiefs of staff out till two or three or sometimes four o'clock in the morning and it was it was you know hard work for those around him but he was trying to win a world war and so you know that's perfectly understand we was trying to get his way and he used every every part of his personality to do that including his fabulous sense of humor there was one moment when Anthony Eden his foreign secretary was asking in a cabinet meeting what they could possibly do about Turkey this was in November 1943 they were desperate to try and get turkey into the war and and Turkey was resolutely neutral and and had been since the beginning of the war four years earlier and the question was with did they try to cajole Turkey did they try to threaten turkey did they try to bribe Turkey how could they get turkey into the war and at the end of this very hard-fought cabinet meeting in which the in which all the different points of view were put forward with great gusto by by the people who were presenting them and Winston Churchill said tell dirky that christmas is coming among those whom church of greatly admired some of whom you spoke of earlier do you think he admired Napoleon undoubtedly he hugely admired a podium which is very unusual for an English story of course who who basically English tourists think of Napoleon as another philip ii of spain kind of dictatorial figure who wants to invade us and therefore a bad thing Churchill on the other hand made endless references to Napoleon in the in the House of Commons in his speeches none of them negative he was a he in his private library he has no fewer than 160 books about Napoleon that he had found in his own by his own leather binder he wanted to write a biography of Napoleon and in the 1930s and never got around to it he wrote history of the english-speaking peoples instead and he wanted also to write a film script about Napoleon which would have been one of the fabulous things to have to have seen or in your case maybe to have acted any it would have been really something but no he did atmanah Polian and one can see why there are overlaps between the personalities the capacity for the compartmentalization of his of his mind Larry on refers to this in his book Churchill's trial the way in which Churchill was able to fasten on to a problem and concentrating on it to the exclusion of everything else until that problem was was settled in his mind is something that also you see in the Pony in a great deal Winston Churchill was always considered such a great speaker but yet I had read that he had a speech impediment particularly when he was younger what methods did he use to overcome that to really become such a great orator um well he he did have a sibilant a sibilant emphasis where s's became sh a--'s when he was younger you you hear much much less of it as his career progresses this isn't because he went to a speech therapist there are some stories about him speaking with stones in his small stones in his mouth I haven't seen any any collaborative evidence of that have you Richard no no I think it's practice it was just simply the extraordinary amount of time that he would practice he would memorize these great long speeches in his early years and then he would use Psalm form it was called the way that they were printed out on his typed out on his sheets of paper little 6 by 4 inch cards that he would use and he would sometimes spend as many hours practices of speech as there were minutes in the speech and it's a extraordinary thing he would march backwards and forwards often to the sound of marching music on the on the gramophone and would would rewrite the speech right up until the last moment just before he he stood up and gave it you can see the annotations to the speech within his handwriting at Churchill College Cambridge I really do recommend you do that if you have a chance when next to in England but there it was he understood you in his only novel severally which was published in 1900 he wrote about the power of oratory how important the power of oratory was and how it was capable of of working for people even even at the lowest point when no one will is following you at least if they're still listening you have a chance and of course that chance was put to incredible effect in the campaign against appeasement in the 1930s and then again of course uniting the nation in 1940 standing with Allen packwood holding a document at Churchill College Cambridge is indeed one of the thrills of life I have a question about destiny and you mentioned Churchill's quote from World War two the night he became Prime Minister felt as if I were walking with destiny he also told Merlin Evans when he was I think about 15 about his feeling of destiny do you recall that one where he's a student where what what about this destiny that Churchill felt and it was evidently replete throughout his life could you speak to Churchill's vision and his and his feelings for destiny yes it's another very good question and he had a very powerful sense of his own destiny and but I think as I mentioned with through Gibbon and Winwood read and then Leckie indeed he was not a Christian he didn't believe in the divinity of Christ but he did believe in in fate in Providence and in an almighty he refers to the old man he with a capital H he prayed to God when he was on the battlefield so there was obviously a religious sense a spiritual religious sense with regard to a divinity that was out there but when one looks at it it doesn't it doesn't seem that God had many other jobs except for taking care of Winston Churchill and and yet it was he never got to the point that such as I'd like Adolf Hitler did after the July plot in 1944 where he felt that his own will could over could even sort of over command that of Providence or destiny you know he knew that he was the he was the servant of Destiny rather than its master this wasn't a sort of insane feeling at all but it was one actually that I think that quite a few politicians probably even today do have and and I think it was important for him when in the First World War he just left a trench dug out in order to see his general and moments after he left a German whiz-bang high-explosive shell hit the dugout he was standing in and killed everybody inside it decapitated his Batman etc he put it down to two to Providence we have time for one more question could you say something about Churchill's early interest or training in science or the lack thereof and whether that played a role in his close relationship with Professor Lindemann regarding matters like the atom bomb for example yes he he was good at chemistry actually it at Harrow he discussed and was interested in physics but didn't I mean read about physics but wasn't examined in it or anything like that but when but very very early on he I think it was at 1923 or 1927 he wrote about the importance of the splitting of the atom and its possible military use and that was and his interest in physics also as you as you allude was at the heart of his friendship with or the Oxford professor of physics professor Lindemann later Lord Charles who was far and away during the war far and away the closest of his friends to him I've just been to checkers the Prime Minister's country house and the Prime Minister very sweetly allowed me to spend a couple of hours looking at all the people that the names in the visitors book of all the people who who visited checkers during the Second World War and then later after the war as well but I was particularly interested in the 1942 45 period during his first Premiership and Lord char wall turned up pretty much every single weekend that Winston Churchill was there far far more than pretty much all of the other close advisors of his put together it's a he couldn't but have had he didn't have an influence on Church what nobody had an influence on Churchill Churchill made up his own mind about everything but he certainly had and input that was that was second to none and they did discuss matters of physics which were so important during the Second World War when one thinks of the of the the beans that Ray beans the importance of radar the as you mentioned the atomic bomb you know Churchill had to be well up on all of these latest developments and and he was that was the last question but I just like to repeat especially for you young people here that that fabulous line from my early life and take it to heart please where he says 20 to 25 those are the years don't be content with things as they are you will make all kind of mistakes but as long as you're generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or seriously distress her she was made to be wooed and won by youth thank you very much indeed

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 17,526

Rating: 4.8202248 out of 5

Keywords: Andrew Roberts (Author), Winston Churchill (Military Commander), My Early Life, Hillsdale College (College/University), cca, center for constructive alternatives

Id: 7QAFIFyMJp4

Length: 56min 28sec (3388 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2015