The devil’s in the detail, they say. Again and again I have to admit that’s true, when I’m trying to refresh my knowledge of history, as I do for my podcast, A History of England. But sometimes it’s also in the detail that I find the most fun.
The greatest pleasure can be in the personal anecdotes. Especially when they concern historical giants whose main achievements are familiar to us. That’s the case, for instance, of the strange strokes of luck in Winston Churchill’s early life.
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Cartoon of Churchill by ‘Spy’ (Sir Leslie Ward), |
Churchill didn’t bother with university but went straight into the army. Once there, he was constantly demanding to be sent into combat, even though the unit to which he’d been assigned wasn’t due any action. He had himself seconded to a different regiment so that he could take part in fighting on the northwest frontier of British imperial holdings in India. He did the same when he accompanied a military expedition into Sudan.
Often, he’d only be allowed to join this kind of mission at very considerable expense to himself. He covered his costs with his pen – it turns out that in Churchill’s case, the pen may have been mightier than the sword, but he proved good at wielding both together – writing articles for the press at the time, or books, which enjoyed considerable success, about his experiences afterwards.
This worked well for him when Britain went to war against the Boer republics in South Africa. He pleaded to be allowed to go and eventually, after much badgering by him and lobbying by his supporters, was allowed out there, but only at his own cost. That he covered by persuading the Morning Post newspaper to pay him £250 a month for a four-month assignment. In modern terms, that’s close to £40,000 a month or over £150,000 in total, a sum most of us would regard as very welcome.
Early in his stay in South Africa, he was on an armoured train that was ambushed by Boer troops. He immediately got stuck into the job of getting the train and the wounded out of there, something he did highly effectively, but which was hardly the work of a newspaper correspondent.
At the end of the engagement, he was captured and held at a prisoner of war camp in Pretoria. However, within weeks he’d escaped. That’s all a bit controversial, since he left behind two others who’d been planning to escape with him. Did he leave them behind? Or were they slow at getting their act together? It now seems that he probably did nothing wrong, but one at least of his fellow prisoners apparently never forgave him for going without him.
He was now wandering through tough territory, on his own, trying to get to the port of Lourenço Marques, today Maputo, in the then Portuguese territory of Mozambique. That was 280 miles (450 km) away.
He eventually decided he could take no more of struggling along the road without proper food or shelter, and knocked at the door of a house near a mine. And that’s where luck struck for him. The man who opened the door to him was an English mine manager called John Howard. Once Churchill abandoned the ludicrous cover story he’d invented to try to explain what he was doing alone and dishevelled on the road at night, and admitted what he was really up to, Howard agreed to help.
A first piece of luck.
Howard called in another Englishman, Dan Dewsnap, from Oldham near Manchester, who lowered Churchill down a mine shaft with plenty of provisions.
He stayed for a week until they were able to get him onto a train where he could hide among goods being taken to the Portuguese port, on behalf of another Englishman, Charles Burnham. The train trip was due to last 16 hours but in fact took more like 64, with frequent stops and holdups. Later Churchill talked of his luck in avoiding discovery during any of them, but the real luck was that Burnham had decided to travel on the train with him and distributed bribes judiciously to make sure it got through the various blocks without over-zealous scrutiny of the cargo.
A second piece of luck.
Before he left England, Churchill had been selected by the Conservative Party to stand in a by-election in Oldham. He was beaten though he did reasonably well. He was back from South Africa in time to stand there again in the 1900 general election. At a public meeting, he told the story of the help he’d received in South Africa from Dan Dewsnap, from Oldham, the town which Churchill hoped to represent in parliament and where he was speaking.
‘His wife’s in the gallery,’ a voice shouted out from the audience.
It’s hard to say how much that helped Churchill's election chances, but it felt like a good omen. Dan Dewsnap had assured him that, after his 1899 defeat, ‘they’d all vote for you next time’. Surely, he’d win the seat on his second attempt?
He did. However, the swing in voting to Churchill between 1899 and 1900 had been only 6%. That’s nothing historic. So much for ‘they’d all vote for you’ – it was far fewer than ‘all’.
Then again, that had been enough. Who needs more than enough? He was in and that was all that mattered.
His third piece of good luck.
His victory in Oldham launched Churchill’s career in politics. As it happens, it would really take off following the next general election, in 1906. At which he won a different seat, and not as a Conservative, but as a Liberal.
That, though, is another story. And it, too, involved a good share of luck. Perhaps I can tell that one too, some time.
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