Winston Churchill: The Roaring Lion and his black dog

Clementine Churchill knew she and her husband were opposites from the moment they met. Winston met her at a 1904 dance — where he neither asked her to dance nor spoke a word. She could then, best describe him as “very gauche” and their politics was poles apart, and he could be stubborn and temperamental. Only a year into their marriage, she had found herself saving Winston from the burden of his own tongue after a militant suffragist had thrust him toward a moving train in Bristol, in response to his public stance against votes for women, much to Clementine’s vexation. Yet, she had remained his fiercest ally; making her way past stacks of luggage, she had seized him by the coattails, yanking him back to safety.

Years later, when her daughter Mary would pen her Winston’s biography, she would reflect on such moments of passion. Moments where her mother had hurled a spinach plate at her father in a fit of rage, and yet, despite such tempests, how they had weathered 57 years of marriage, of household and state life. Clementine was, as Mary and Winston both noted, his closest companion—after his beloved nanny from childhood, of course. Born in Blenheim Palace, the largesse of his valiant ancestry, Churchill lived a childhood of splendid neglect. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill was a brilliant yet mercurial Tory politician and his mother Jennie Jerome, an American belle, would rather charm London society than indulge her son’s hysterics. Winston, then nicknamed the ‘little bulldog’, had earned a reputation for tenacious squabbles, fuelling his father’s perpetual disappointment in his future prospects. Despite this, he had venerated the distant father, gobbled and gulped his speeches, and squirreled away every word of him in print.

However, a notable lisp and a persistently disastrous academic record through all three boarding schools he attended, aided little the paternal discontent. At the age of seven, his mother had dropped him off coldly at the Paddington station to join St. George’s School at Ascot where he suffered terribly at the hands of bullies and the stick of stern headmasters.

The years that followed were marked by a similar dismay that Churchill recalled as the “barren” period of his life. Thus, true to the trend of the academic underachievers of his time, he opted for a career in the army and finally began to cut the mustard in martial education at Sandhurst. And when in 1895, Churchill joined the 4th Hussars, he spent eventful years amidst the acrid tang of gunpowder, atop galloping horses in Cuba, in India, in Sudan, writing two books and several articles as a military correspondent.

He had found his stride but the parliament was next. Although his attempt to join the House of Commons in 1899 had failed, in a striking display of bravado, he had managed to escape unhurt from South Africa where he had been taken prisoner during the war with the Boers. This valorous tale brought him the acclaim he was so terribly chasing and paved his way into the parliament. In 1900, Churchill began his political career in the House of Commons as a member of the Conservative Party.

The soldier likened politics to war and true to his word, he sparred on many subjects with members of his party. The young parliamentarian’s convictions often courted controversy. In 1904, after he “crossed over” to the Liberal Party over matters of fair trade, his ideological pirouettes had earned him a new nickname by his political rivals — “the Blenheim rat.” His “ratting” had deemed him untrustworthy and some of his opinions lingered to many, only right of Attila the Hun. It was however, during World War I, in 1915 that he suffered a disastrous blow to his career. Eager to end the trench war on the western front, the British rallied a military attack under the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. A naval attack through the Dardanelles Strait and a land invasion on the Gallipoli peninsula went astray as 46,000 Allied troops and even more Turkish ones succumbed, forcing Churchill to resign. He would have to, during the course of his political exile and for decades after, “remember the Dardanelles”. This period marked Churchill’s fierce opposition to Indian independence, a stance he held unwaveringly, owing to his imperialist outlook.

Appointed to the Colonial Office after WW-I, he wrote to the Governor of Bombay’s wife in 1922, reaffirming his aversion to Home Rule. Churchill harboured no fondness for Gandhi, whom he dismissed as “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer”, and by 1930, he called India’s independence “a shameful act of cowardice, desertion and dishonor”. At his speech, even Viceroy Lord Irwin had recoiled, exclaiming, “What a monstrous speech Churchill has just made.” Churchill’s last-ditch effort came in 1935. He had delivered sixty-eight speeches in three months in the House of Commons to derail India’s independence, but to his dismay, India slipped away regardless. Soon, however, far larger pursuits awaited him. Yet, Churchill’s finest hour came in defiance of tyranny in the “darkest hour”. In 1940, with France fallen and the Luftwaffe dominating the skies, Britain faced the looming threat of invasion across the Channel. It was here that he rallied a beleaguered Britain. In events, now all too familiar to history, he declared: “We shall fight on the beaches...We shall never surrender.”

In 1939, Churchill had been called to lead Britain as First Lord of the Admiralty, and by 1940, he was the Prime Minister, stepping in after Chamberlain’s appeasement policy with Hitler collapsed under the Nazi blitzkrieg. With Europe crumbling—Poland, France, and the Low Countries swiftly falling—Britain stood alone, its morale battered and its army retreating from Dunkirk.

The spectre of invasion loomed and in his first speech as Prime Minister on May 13, 1940, Churchill declared, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Forging an alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union after Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941, he brought Roosevelt’s United States to war. By 1945, Germany lay defeated and Churchill stood as a symbol of Allied victory. Yet, that same year, his wartime leadership did not translate into peacetime support. In the general election of July 1945, voters, eager for postwar reform, turned to Labour’s Clement Attlee.

Although Churchill became the Prime Minister again in 1951, his health began to decline after a series of strokes in the early 1950s, forcing his resignation in 1955. A decade later, in January 1965, he suffered a final stroke and passed away at the age of 90.

His state funeral, the largest in British history at the time, saw over 320,000 people file past his coffin.

A poignant farewell to the “end of an era” and a life of great tumult! And in moments of stillness when the man wasn’t rallying the nation to victory, dismissing the independence of the empire’s crown jewel, deriding its people as “beastly” and their leader as a “seditious fakir”, or winning a Nobel Prize, he was mourning his lost daughter, Marigold. The “roaring lion” was struggling with his “black dog”.