Young Titan Read online

  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

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  CONTENTS

  Prelude: The Prime Minister

  Introduction: The Young Titan

  PART I: 1901–1905

  I

  A New World

  II

  A Family Affair

  III

  Born for Opposition

  IV

  The Duke’s Smile

  V

  Empire Dreams

  VI

  The Great Rift

  VII

  Departures

  VIII

  The Bachelor and the Heiress

  IX

  Fortunate Son

  PART II: 1906–1910

  X

  Winners and Losers

  XI

  The World at His Feet

  XII

  Private Lives

  XIII

  The Political Maiden

  XIV

  A Place in the Sun

  XV

  Best-Laid Plans

  XVI

  The Castle

  XVII

  Eminent Edwardian

  XVIII

  Sound and Fury

  XIX

  Life and Death

  PART III: 1910–1915

  XX

  Valiant

  XXI

  Storm Signals

  XXII

  Armada

  XXIII

  The Old Man and the Sea

  XXIV

  Wings

  XXV

  Countdown

  XXVI

  Last Stand

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Michael Shelden

  Illustration Credits

  Notes

  Selected Books by Winston S. Churchill

  Bibliography

  Index

  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 illuminat
ed 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 decl
aiming 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.”