Winston Churchill: The Unknown Story 1/6 - Beginings

Winston Churchill, a giant of history, famous for his inspiring leadership. Advanced Britannia, long lived the cause of freedom. But behind the legend lies a complicated character. People tend to see Churchill the icon, Churchill the bulldog warrior, and, of course, that's not the whole story. He was an aristocrat and a man of the people. It says a lot for his charisma and his humility that he was accepted and liked. A trailblazer who also had questionable beliefs. He is an old-school imperialist. He calls Indian people the dusky nation. This is the story of the man behind the myth, using rarely seen footage, personal photographs, and told by those who knew him well. When my grandfather was at home, everything revolved around him. Seemed to be a natural way of life. This is the real Churchill. This time, it's Churchill's early life. From an unloved and difficult child... Churchill never really got the affection that he wanted. ..to a famous soldier with the world at his feet. He is front-page news. People are interested to see what comes next for him. And the family tragedy behind Churchill's fierce determination to succeed. He is driven by this desire to prove himself to his father's ghost. Winston Churchill is just 20 years old and staying with friends in London. He receives an urgent message from his parents' home, which is nearby. He was summoned to be told, your father is on his way out, close to death, basically. You need to come. It's quite clear that Lord Randolph Churchill was now very ill. Churchill races across Groves and Square to be at his father's bedside. Churchill was hoping for a last sort of great conversation. He needs that. Churchill needs a loving word from his father. His future depends on it. It's 20 years earlier, the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria. Winston Churchill is born here. Winston Churchill is born here, at his father's family home, Blenheim Palace, the only non-royal palace in Britain. I think Churchill's aristocratic birth has an enormous impact on him. You've got pictures of your illustrious ancestors. That's going to rub off. You're going to be aware from the beginning that perhaps you're different to some of the other people around you. The key impact that it has on young Churchill is this sense of, this is what I've got to live up to. He's part of this aristocratic family. That doesn't necessarily mean you have a happy or loving childhood. Winston's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, is a younger son. He won't inherit the palace or dukedom. Lord Randolph is creating his own legacy in politics. One of the rising stars of Parliament, he's tipped as a future Prime Minister. At just 37, he's already Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Randolph Churchill was controversial, combative and egotistical. He was ambitious, driven, strict disciplinarian and he was occasionally very aggressive and had extremely high standards. Churchill will later say of his father that... My grandfather idolised his father. He thought he was absolutely wonderful and was striving all the time to get his father's attention. Churchill's mother, Jenny, is a glamorous socialite. She was beautiful, ambitious, vivacious, but someone who was a bit of a risk-taker as well. Jenny certainly had a number of affairs with high-profile people, including the Prince of Wales. There was sort of an element of danger about her. She had a small tattoo on her wrist of a serpent, which was quite unusual for a society woman at that time. Churchill's mother spends her time socialising at Henley and Ascot. She's hardly ever at home. This rarely seen family snap is of her with Churchill when he's just three. Jenny was kind of looking at Churchill like, what do I quite do with you? But there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of warmth. Churchill will later say he loved his mother, but at a distance. It's actually quite an isolating upbringing. Churchill was left to the care of his nanny, left to the care of his grandparents at Blenheim Palace. That was not unusual for someone of his class and status in Victorian society, but he seems to have felt it particularly keenly. He seems to have had quite a sort of sensitive nature as a child. Aged seven, Churchill is packed off to boarding school. That is the start of a clear trajectory for someone of his status in society. And politics was certainly one of the likely paths that Winston Churchill could have followed. So there would have been the expectation that he work hard and that he perform academically. Lord Randolph Churchill would have seen that as the first step. Churchill does not live up to his father's expectations. We have in the archives his school reports, and what they show is a willful, stubborn, rebellious young boy, a boy who's used to having the run of Blenheim Palace, who suddenly finds himself in the environment of a very strict, severe Victorian boarding school. And the two don't mix. His school reports say Churchill could be first, but he messes up because he is very naughty and troublesome. Lord Randolph makes a drastic decision about Churchill's future. Lord Randolph didn't have a high opinion of his son's academic abilities or, really, his career prospects. And he was wondering, really, what his son should do with his life when one day he found him playing with a big army of toy soldiers. And that seems to have been the moment at which he fixed on the army as the right career for his son. Winston, thinking how splendid it would be to be a general, said, yes, he'd love to. And his die was cast. And afterwards he said, you know, I thought that my father pictured me being a general, but he just had decided that I was too stupid to be a politician. Churchill writes letters home, sending his father kisses. Often, he doesn't even get a reply. Churchill reads in a newspaper that his father is making a speech just near his boarding school in Brighton. He relished the opportunity to see his father, but I don't think for Lord Randolph it would have crossed his mind. Lord Randolph doesn't use the chance to visit his son. Churchill writes to his father, I was very disappointed, but I suppose you were too busy to come. His father definitely was, I think, a brutal father. Not brutal physically, but brutal intellectually. And he gave his son no confidence at all. But he never did give in at trying to get his father's attention, and maybe that gave him the grit to get on with life and go and push forward and never give in. But something terrible is about to happen. After it, Churchill will never be free of his father. The Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Winston Churchill is sent here aged just 18. He's hoping to make it as an army officer, the career his father chose for him. Churchill is very keen, if not desperate, to get his father's approval. So this is a time where he's clearly working quite hard. But Churchill does not get into the top class at Sandhurst, the infantry. Instead, he's put into the cavalry. This really irritated Lord Randolph, because training as a cavalry candidate would cost an extra £200 a year, with all that extra kit and horses and so on. He sent him a pretty nasty letter, which sort of upbraided him for his lack of effort and sort of said he wasn't really going to amount to anything. The letter says, I am certain you will become a social wastrel, one of the hundreds of public school failures. That's quite a thing for a father to say to his son. Churchill's probably used to this treatment, but I think he generally would have been upset by it. This is a photograph of Churchill's father around this time. So all you can really tell from this is a kind of world-weary disapproval of everything he's considering, as well as the sense that he seems entirely sort of bored and withdrawn. Lord Randolph is ill. It's now reckoned the diagnosis may be wrong, but Lord Randolph's doctors believe he has syphilis, thought to have been caught when he was having an affair. Churchill was taken into confidence by his father's doctors, presumably at his mother's request, and that, I think, would have had an impact on him. He came to the belief that it falls upon him as the eldest son to restore his father's name and reputation. He's wanting to address those failings and do everything he can to safeguard his father's legacy. Churchill wants Lord Randolph to know that his reputation will be safe in his son's hands. But his father doesn't hear him, because Lord Randolph's illness is affecting his brain. In one instance, he's put in a straitjacket. He was really losing his mind and I think the whole thing was terribly distressing. It must have been painful for Winston. It's soon after the new year of 1895. As dawn breaks, the 20-year-old Churchill arrives at his parents' London home. He's been told his father is dying and he's raced to be here at the deathbed. No doubt he was hoping for some form of deathbed vindication. Churchill wanted nothing more than to be reconciled to his father. But Lord Randolph is comatose. He dies without ever waking up. When Lord Randolph Churchill dies, it had a huge effect on Winston. He was utterly prostrated with grief for the day and the night that followed his father's death. Completely inconsolable. Churchill picks himself up. After passing out of Sandhurst, he becomes an officer in the British Army. This photo of Second Lieutenant Churchill was taken just a few weeks after his father's death. Churchill, sometimes in his clothing and outfits, could be a bit sloppy, be a bit casual, but here very much you see he's very buttoned down and trying to be that sort of ideal young officer, someone who lives up to the memory of his father. Churchill is posted to India. The jewel in the crown of the British Empire. Army life is mostly about playing polo and drinking gin in the whites-only officers' club. But Churchill is eager to see real action. There's still this element of masculine tradition, that to be a man, to be an aristocratic man, you need to earn your stripes as a soldier or as an officer. And Churchill still harks back to this older military tradition. 18 months after his father died, Churchill gets his chance to fight. On the far north-west frontier, at Malakand, in what's now Pakistan, local Pashtun tribes are rising up against British rule. Churchill joins the force trying to suppress this revolt. There was all these stereotypes within British imperial culture about different types of Indians, and so if you were going to fight against any Indian, you would want to go and fight against the Pashtuns. Because they were seen as the rugged, manly tribal men, but still somehow the British man should always be able to triumph over someone like that. The campaign is a British victory, and Churchill returns from it a decorated veteran. But he cannot escape his father's legacy. It catches up with him in a surprising way. Well, I think once his father died, he suddenly finds the family didn't have any money. His parents had been very extravagant, his father had never had much money, and his mother had had some money, but that had all been spent. He doesn't have the money of other members of the upper classes, but Churchill shares their expensive tastes. In his early army career, Winston Churchill was spending money on his servants. He lived in a bungalow with two fellow officers. The three of them shared 28 servants in India. He spent money on clothes, on horses, and on good food and good wine. Churchill's army officer's salary wouldn't go very far at all by itself. He's often spent it before it actually arrives. He never quite knows where it goes. Then, Churchill has a brilliant idea that he steals from his father beyond the grave. Lord Randolph had occasionally bailed himself out of a financial problem by selling articles to the press. So Churchill sells articles too, about fighting in Malacca. He wrote about what he knew. He had a very accessible style. If you read anything that he's written, he didn't believe in writing in a convoluted style or having terribly long words. He said short words are good. He says the Malaccan campaign is necessary because the locals are one of the simple races. British rule will end their dreadful state of barbarism. Churchill believed in not just the might of the British Empire but also on its civilising capacity. He believed wholeheartedly. And I think that is unpalatable today. But he was a product of his class, his gender and his country. Churchill most definitely viewed himself as racially superior to so-called native people in India. And, I mean, I think we can see that as a fundamentally racist ideology in that he felt that his whiteness and his culture somehow entitled him to rule over that person and to rule in such a way that he could change the world. In such a way that he could change the civilisation, the culture of that other person. In the 1890s, the Empire is so popular that Churchill soon becomes a widely read and well-paid writer. A lot of people think of Winston Churchill as a politician, but he thought of himself as a writer. Whenever he wanted to make money, and that was from an early age, he wrote articles or books. That was the only way he had for making money, apart from his army pay, which certainly wasn't enough to look after his lifestyle. Only a few years after his father's death, Churchill is already a veteran soldier and a successful writer, but he's far from satisfied. The quest for glory is what motivates Winston. I think that he sees his father's career as, to some extent, glorious, and wants to emulate that and go into Parliament. This will prove himself as well to his father. His father didn't believe that he was going to be able to achieve anything. He wants to show that he can, and indeed, do that in the arena which his father thought was the most important one. So, aged just 24, Churchill resigns from the army and returns to Britain to launch his career in politics. What this leads to is extreme. A plan that will either get him into Parliament, or it will kill him. After leaving the army, Winston Churchill is in London. He's looking for a seat in Parliament. While he does that, he lives here, at his mother's home. Lady Randolph Churchill is absolutely crucial to Churchill's early political career. She is a fantastic networker, well-connected in royal circles, well-connected in political circles. She had used that network to support Randolph's career, so she transfers her support network to pushing and developing her son's political career. She may not have been a great asset to him as a child, but he made a very good relationship with his mother after his father died, and she helped him enormously, and he used her enormously. The search for a seat leads Churchill to Oldham, in Britain's industrial north-west. In the spring of 1899, there's a by-election here, because the Conservative MP is retiring. Largely thanks to Lady Randolph's networking, Churchill is selected as the replacement candidate. He thought it would be a good opportunity for him to enter politics and enter Parliament. This is a photo of the prospective new member for Oldham. What you see here is someone who doesn't look particularly substantial. He doesn't look as comfortable in his own skin as he does in other pictures to me. So he's not projecting the same sort of confident aura. Even the hat... Churchill was a great man for headwear. Even the hat doesn't really suit him here. The voters of Oldham agree that Churchill's hat doesn't quite fit. They do not elect him as their MP. Having lost at his first attempt to get into politics, he wasn't going to sit around and mope about it. He picked himself up. He wasn't someone who looked back, he was someone who looked forward. Churchill is the archetypal young man in a hurry. He knows what he wants to achieve. He believes in himself, he believes in his abilities. And he's impatient of all obstructions and frustrations in his path. Churchill's impatience is another legacy from his father, who was only 25 when he became an MP and was dead at 45. The fact that his father died at 45, I think, really, really unnerved him because he had so much he wanted to do in his life and he felt that he hadn't got much time. Churchill soon has a plan to change voters' minds about him and get himself elected. As usual in Churchill's early life, it's one he takes from his late father. Lord Randolph was very much a national figure. He was the rising star of the Tory party, dominating newspaper headlines. Lord Randolph was so famous, he became the subject of popular cartoons. Churchill, at school, was asked to obtain copies of his father's autograph. I mean, he was an incredibly famous and well-known figure. Churchill was very early aware that Lord Randolph Churchill was a celebrity as well as just a politician, and Churchill now wanted that too. Churchill quickly works out a scheme to get the celebrity he wants. He will become a famous war correspondent. All he needs is a war, and in late 1899, one breaks out. It's in South Africa, which is then part of the British Empire. Though many of the white settlers here don't come from Britain, but Holland. They call themselves Burghs. The Burghs are trying to resist British attempts to control the really valuable resources that exist in that region of South Africa, namely the gold and diamond mines. But from a British perspective, you cannot have this rival European settler colony taking over from you in terms of politics and prestige. Churchill doesn't waste a moment. Four days after war is declared, he joins a group of war correspondents heading for South Africa to cover Britain's fight against the Burghs. He headed out to South Africa with 60 bottles of alcohol in his luggage as well as a load of Rose's lime juice and a commission from the Morning Post. He also took a Mauser, even though correspondents are not supposed to carry arms. Churchill's plan is bold and simple. He'll get himself into the thick of the action and write reports about it that are absolutely sensational. He had one aim, and that was to make a name for himself and to become famous, because he wanted to go into politics and he knew to get into politics he needed to make a name for himself. So he set off for South Africa and was fretting all the way that peace would have been made by the time he got there. A remarkable find is this photograph of Churchill on the boat on his way to South Africa. All the people around him would have been other correspondents and almost all of them look considerably older and more experienced than he is. But there's already something about that determination peering through, what he called his natural pugnacity. He looks a little bit harder and more determined than the people around him and he doesn't seem quite at ease as some of the other gentlemen and doesn't seem quite as happy. He does look fairly focused on what's coming next. Churchill arrives in South Africa at the British colony's capital, Cape Town. From here, he travels inland, eventually boarding an armed troop train heading towards the front. But Churchill's train is ambushed by heavily armed birds. Two carriages are derailed. Amidst a hail of bullets, Churchill helps load 20 wounded men onto the remaining carriage. It steams away, but there is no room for Churchill. He and the other Brits left behind are surrounded. They surrender. This photo shows Churchill shortly after he's been captured by the Burrs. What I think is interesting about this picture is that Churchill is standing slightly apart from his fellow captives. He looks very introspective, very unhappy. He wrote later that it was both painful and humiliating to be a prisoner. Churchill is taken to the Burr stronghold of Pretoria. He's kept under armed guard in a school that's been turned into a POW camp. He's told he'll be kept here until the war is over. He was very frustrated to be captured. He couldn't get on with his main object in life, which was to make a name for himself. And he called it Endurance Vial. He hated it because he was having to mark time. On 30th November 1899, Churchill writes from captivity, saying... He doesn't decide just to sort of sit out his time and bemoan his fate. He concentrates on getting out of the prison, even though, of course, there's huge personal risk involved in that. Churchill joins two other prisoners in an escape attempt. Crucially, one of them speaks Afrikaans, the Burr language. Under cover of darkness, the three men head for a section of low wall beside the camp toilet. The other two hesitate, but Churchill scrambles over and hides in a bush. Then a camp guard arrives to patrol the section of low wall so the other two can't follow him. He was greatly criticised afterwards for not going back to collect them. Well, I mean, once you've got out, you're not likely to climb back in and get caught doing that. British territory is 300 miles away. Churchill doesn't speak the language. The others also have all the supplies. Churchill doesn't even have a map or a compass. But he had the stars to guide him and he had a bar of chocolate. And he set off. That night, Churchill gets out of Pretoria, hidden between the wagons of a freight train. Really, the escape wasn't that well planned. He didn't have that many supplies. He was entirely conspicuous. Fearing he'll be spotted in daylight, he gets off the train before dawn. He's still 200 miles from safety, and by now, his escape has been discovered. The Burrs post a reward of £25 for Churchill. Who is wanted, dead or alive. He could have been facing the risk of being shot while trying to escape. From the railway, Churchill makes it on foot to an isolated coal mine. He had no knowledge of whether anyone was going to be friendly there, but he decided to knock on the first house he came to. He knocks on the door, against all the odds, the man who opens it turns out to be British-born. The Brit agrees to help Churchill, first hiding him in a disused mineshaft, then giving him a gun and stowing him aboard a train carrying wool. Lying beneath the bales, Churchill crosses enemy territory. I think the escape shows incredible reserves of self-confidence and trust that if he pursues this course, that it will come right. After nine days on the run, he gets out of Burr-held territory. He reaches safety at the town of Lurenco Marques, in what is now Mozambique. Once here, he sends a telegram to British headquarters with the news that he is free. That escapade, if that's the word you want to use, could have gone wrong at so many stages, but it didn't. And maybe that's the secret of Winston Churchill. I think it does give Churchill probably a sense that he was born under a lucky star. Still not wanting to waste a minute, Churchill gets on a ship heading down the coast to British territory. This is a photo of him on board. It's just days after his escape. You can definitely see the look in his eyes. This is someone who is looking towards the future and someone who is raring to go for the next great moment in his life. Then he was already probably considering the fact that this escape is going to be a really good story. Aboard the ship, Churchill is already writing an account of his escape. He describes it as an exciting adventure. When published back in Britain, it will become front-page news and give Churchill exactly what he came to South Africa for, fame. The war was not going well for Britain, so this kind of individual exploit, this act of daring do, and successful daring do, was absolutely seized upon. Churchill realises he's famous when he arrives in the South African port of Durban, which is in British hands. Huge crowds surround him, eager to hear his story. The escape itself was a major psychological boost for the Brits during a really increasingly horrible, messy, protracted conflict. You've got this James Bond-like character who manages to bust out of this prisoner of war camp against all the odds, and it gives people a bit of a boost during what was quite a depressing conflict. This is what makes him a national celebrity. Before then, sure, he'd published a few articles, a few books. He was really not that well-known, and this was one of the turning points of his early life. He may have just carried on being a correspondent and might not have then become a national celebrity. So this escape from a prisoner of war camp is the kind of making of the early Churchill. A few months later, Churchill leaves South Africa. He plans to take advantage of his fame and try to get himself elected to Parliament. But his father's ghost is about to come back to haunt him. Winston Churchill returns home from the war in South Africa as one of the most famous men in Britain. The reason that Churchill comes back from the Boer War is to launch his political career and to realise the political capital that he's now gained through his adventures in South Africa. But Churchill still has a huge mountain to climb. He doesn't waste a second. Just five days after reaching Britain, he is in Oldham. Less than six months ago, the voters here rejected him in a by-election. But now a general election looms and he persuades the local Conservatives to let him try again. He chose Oldham. There were much safer options that he could have taken, but he no doubt thinks he has unfinished business in Oldham. Voting begins on the first general election of the 20th century and the last of Queen Victoria's reign. It might be a watershed moment for prospective MP Winston Churchill too, if only he can unseat the man who beat him last time. His own profile is very high, but the election is also being conducted against the backdrop of the Boer War and there's felt to be a greater chance of him being elected as a Conservative as a result of that. This time, the voters of Oldham do elect Churchill as their Member of Parliament. He looks very recognisably like him, which, of course, is exactly how he was from the first day of entering Parliament. You do get the sense of resolve there that you hadn't and he just seems entirely more confident in his own skin and this is a man who knows that he is now heading in the right direction. In the five and a half years since his father died, Churchill has fought in numerous wars, given up soldiering for journalism, been a prisoner of war and escaped, become famous. Now, aged just 26, with his mother watching from the viewers' gallery, Churchill makes his maiden speech in Parliament. Generously, he uses his experience of the Boer War to argue it should end soon and the Boers treat it with respect. But the way he finishes his speech is very telling. He takes time to thank the House for its welcome, saying he understands it has been extended to me not on my account, but because of a certain splendid memory. So, in his maiden speech, what Churchill is doing is harking back to his father's memory. The worst, obviously, is people in Parliament. Who remembered his father in his heyday when he'd been a hugely powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer and he'd been a very prominent politician and very charismatic? So, I think he was referring to that and he was determined to try to bring that memory back, the memory of his father, in his powerful days. As a young MP, Churchill does everything he can to remind his fellow MPs that he's Lord Randolph's son. In early cartoons of Winston Churchill, for example, the whole way in which Churchill is bearing himself, the way in which he's dressed, is, I think, very consciously modelled on his father. But I don't think Churchill would have seen his election to the House of Commons as reconciling himself with his father's ghost. He does believe, I think, that he has a mission to fulfil, to finish what his father had started. His record... ..on several occasions is saying, one day, I'm going to do something in the world. One day, I'll be Prime Minister of England. But Churchill will never be able to do enough. He'll become Prime Minister and will lead his country to victory in the Second World War. Even then, he'll still be trapped in that moment when his father died. He never spoke to me about his father's death, but what he did do, which was interesting, he wrote an essay which was called The Dream. Churchill writes The Dream in 1947. It describes how, while painting a portrait of his father, he's visited by his father's ghost. And then he recites in this short story the conversation that he has with his father about all the things that have happened since his father's death. Just before Churchill has had the chance to explain what he's done in the 20th century, the father's ghost disappears in a puff of tobacco smoke. That short story tells you an enormous amount about the relationship between father and son, or the lack of relationship between father and son. Because these are the conversations that Churchill was never able to have with his father. And his father was never able to see that he became more than this clumsy, hairy, that he became more than this clumsy, harem, scarum youth. The moment his father died, everything changed for Churchill. At this critical turning point of his early life, he stopped being a clumsy youth and became utterly focused and driven. A man on a mission. Next time, it's the rollercoaster ride of Churchill's early career. As a young MP, his rise is meteoric, but then he's blamed for one of the biggest disasters in British history. When he says, I am finished, he is not being melodramatic. Churchill fights back and hope returns. This is the moment where he starts to think, you know what, my dream isn't dead.