The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 5

NO ACT TOO DARING OR TOO NOBLE

It was a glorious evening in Croydon, on 18 July 1919. The war was over, and Churchill was back in government—long since restored after the disgrace of Gallipoli. He had put in a hard day as Secretary of State for War and Air, and now he hankered for excitement. It was time for one of his flying lessons.

With several hours of daylight left, he had driven down to the aerodrome south of London. Together with his instructor, Captain Jack Scott, he clambered into the biplane—a De Havilland Airco DH4, with its brass fittings and fine wooden propeller. Scott sat in the front seat of the dual-control machine, Churchill behind him. Though he had no formal pilot’s licence, Churchill was experienced enough to perform the take-off himself.

For a while, things seemed to go according to the book. They chuntered down the field; the engine pulled well; they ascended to 70 or 80 feet above the upturned faces of the ground crew. They must have made a fine sight—one of Britain’s most famous statesmen, his big head sheathed in leather flying cap and goggles, soaring heavenward in what was then a cutting-edge piece of British technology—one of the very first people since Icarus to master the skies, to defy gravity in a machine that was heavier than air.

Just as they reached a fatal distance from the ground, things started to go wrong.

In those days Croydon Aerodrome was bordered by clumps of tall elm trees. In order to avoid these trees the ascending pilot was obliged to make two banked turns, first to the right and then to the left. Churchill made his first turn—no problems. The wind sang through the struts. The speedometer registered 60 knots, healthy enough to avoid a stall.

He turned left, and the delicate fins and ailerons obeyed his touch. Slowly and gently he now centred the joystick—as he had been taught—to bring the machine back on an even keel. He brought it all the way back; he moved the head of the joystick about a foot. He noticed something funny.

The plane remained banked, at 45 degrees. The machine showed no sign of responding to his commands. In fact, it started to list even more to the left. The speedo was falling fast. It was instantly obvious to Winston Churchill that he and Captain Scott were in trouble.

‘She is out of control,’ said Churchill to Scott—a highly experienced and capable man, who had already endured one bad crash, and had the injuries to show for it. In that moment Churchill felt Scott overriding him, taking control of the joystick and pedals—yanking and pushing to perform the only manoeuvre that you can, in such situations: pointing the nose downwards so as to pick up enough speed to get out of the side-slip. Any higher, and it might have worked. They were only 90 feet off the ground. Disaster was at hand.

As they descended, out of control, Churchill saw the sunlit aerodrome beneath him, and had the impression that it was bathed in a baleful yellowish glare. In a flash—and he didn’t have much longer than a flash—the thought formed in his head: ‘This is very likely death.’ And so, very likely, it was.

Let us leave our hero there for a second or two, hurtling headlong towards the packed earth of Croydon. Let us look back at the risks he had already run. Consider the way he had loaded the statistical dice against himself—not just in his career as an aviator, but in his exhibitionist lust for glory of all kinds.

Churchill had begun his obsession with flying before the First War, when he was still First Lord of the Admiralty. At the beginning of 1913 he went to visit the naval air station at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey. He was captivated by the atmosphere: young Biggles-like characters nervelessly hurling themselves about the ether as they tested the world’s first seaplane (a word that Churchill was credited with coining). Apart from the moustaches, it must have been like the early days of the US space programme: the Right Stuff exuding from every pore.

Churchill immediately saw the potential of what they were doing. He wanted a proper division, with its own identity and esprit de corps: and so began what was to become the Royal Air Force. ‘We are in the Stephenson age of flying,’ he proclaimed, referring to the inventor of the steam locomotive. ‘Now our machines are frail. One day they will be robust, and of value to our country.’ He was so excited, in fact, that he wanted to take off himself—and to learn how to fly.

To see how bonkers this was, remember that it was then just ten years since the very dawn of flight. It was only in 1903 that Orville and Wilbur Wright had finally taken off at Kitty Hawk, in their bizarre contraption. Here was Churchill, a not-especially-fit thirty-nine-year-old, asking for tuition in flying these objects that—to modern eyes—are barely recognisable as planes. They look like weird giant canvas box kites mounted on pram wheels with a lawn-mower engine shoved on one end, and the whole thing lashed together with ropes or leather straps.

They look lethal. They were. It has been calculated that in 1912 one flight in five thousand ended in death. By modern standards, that is insanely dangerous. Compare another mode of transport that is sometimes—irrationally—held to be dangerous, such as cycling in London, where one journey in about 14 million ends in a fatality; and you see the risk that Churchill was running.

These days no one would be allowed aloft in one of those planes, let alone a senior government minister. One of Churchill’s first instructors was a twenty-three-year-old sprig of the aristocracy called Spenser Grey—until Spenser had to bow out, after having a serious prang and suffering life-changing injuries.

Churchill’s friends begged him to stop. His cousin Sunny, the Duke of Marlborough, said: ‘I do not suppose I shall get the chance of writing you many more letters if you continue your journeys in the Air. Really, I consider you owe it to your wife, family and friends to desist from a practice or pastime—whichever you call it—which is fraught with so much danger to life. It really is wrong of you.’ F. E. Smith told him he was being ‘foolish’ and ‘unfair to his family’.

His cousin Lady Londonderry said he was ‘evil’. His wife, Clementine, was distraught—and sometimes Churchill would steal away without even telling her. ‘I have been very naughty today about flying,’ he confessed on 29 November 1913, as though he had been to the larder and eaten the children’s pudding.

His next instructor was another dashing young captain, Gilbert Wildman-Lushington. On 30 November—his birthday—Churchill spent the whole day with Lushington, much of it in the air. The captain wrote to his fiancée, Miss Airlie Hynes, about his exuberant pupil. ‘I started Winston off on his instruction about 12.15, and he got so bitten with it I could hardly get him out of the machine, in fact except for about ¾ of an hour for lunch we were in the machine till 3.30. He showed great promise, and is coming down again for further instruction and practice.’

The brief lunch had taken place in Lushington’s cabin, where Churchill spotted a photo of the young woman. When was the wedding? he asked. Captain Lushington replied that he was saving up for it—and you can imagine that teaching Churchill was a useful freelance income. Alas, the wedding never took place. Three days later Lushington himself was killed, side-slipping in the very plane he had used for the lesson.

There is an eerie letter from Churchill to Lushington, presumably written on the evening of the day they had spent together. He asks why he couldn’t seem to make the rudder work, and why it seemed so stiff. ‘Probably the explanation is that I was pushing against myself,’ he says, cryptically. Lushington writes back, confirming that this is indeed probably the case. He has tried the rudder and it seems fine: ‘You were pushing against yourself,’ says Lushington, before taking off again for his last doomed flight.

We might ask: how can you push against yourself? What does that mean? Did Churchill really understand what was happening with these primitive flaps and levers? Did anyone?

He swore to Clementine that he would give up, after the death of Lushington. Then in 1914 he swore again that he would do so, after he invited French air ace Gustav Hamel to come over the Channel from Paris, and give a display to the Royal Flying Corps.

Hamel took off from Paris and was never seen again. And yet on Churchill went with his flying. He was constantly nipping over to France, glorying lark-like in the high places, boasting about the speed and the convenience of the air. By 1919 he was back at the controls, and in the immediate run-up to this fateful episode at Croydon he had been given all sorts of presentiments of doom.

On one occasion he had got completely lost in a storm over northern France, and had to descend until he could see a railway line by which to steer his course. Only the previous month he had sustained a serious smash at the Buc aerodrome near Paris. The long grass had slowed his take-off, so that the plane’s skis hit the edge of a concealed road at the end of the runway.

The plane did a somersault—like a shot rabbit, he said—and he ended up hanging upside down by his harness. Now he was about to be violently and involuntarily reunited with the soil of Croydon, and if his life had flashed before him he might have reflected that he had behaved recklessly for years.

When we look at the prodigious bravery of his early military career, we are driven to the conclusion that he actively courted danger. It is as though he hungered—like Achilles or some Arthurian knight—for the prestige that goes not just with being in the thick of battle, but above all for being seen in the thick of battle.

His exploits began in Cuba at the age of twenty, when he first found himself in that ambiguous role that was to serve him so well: at once an officer of the British army, and yet also a front-line reporter. Sandhurst had ended satisfactorily, in the sense that he became a bold and skilful horseman and graduated twentieth out of a class of 130, before enlisting as a cornet in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars. The army was expensive, however, and he saw journalism as an ingenious way of supplementing his income and personally burnishing his own reputation.

When the Cubans rebelled against their Spanish colonial masters, Churchill wangled himself into the Spanish forces. Ostensibly he was there to report for the Daily Graphic; in reality he hoped to get as close as possible to a live bullet without actually being hit.

He got lucky quickly. On his twenty-first birthday he was in the jungle, when shots rang out. The horse behind him copped it; a red stain spread over his chestnut coat, and he died. Churchill’s account quivered with excitement, as he described how the bullet had come ‘within a foot of my head’. The next day he was bathing in a river and more shots were heard. ‘The bullets whizzed over our heads,’ he said with pride.

All this was glorious in its way, but it could hardly be described as a full-scale battle. He wanted active service in the British army. He wanted to do some shooting himself—and preferably against Her Majesty’s enemies. Thanks to some nifty lobbying by his mother (who is said to have used all her resources of feminine charm to bend the generals to her will) he got himself a billet, two years later, with the Malakand Field Force, commanded by Sir Bindon Blood.

The mission of this well-moustachioed imperialist was to make life tough for some Afridi rebels—Muslim tribesmen on India’s North-West Frontier, the borderland between what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan. They had risen against the British Empire, in a region that still shelters some of the world’s most hardened fanatics and terrorists. Then as now, the operation was no picnic.

The Afridis fought back ferociously. Churchill’s hankering for action was answered—and how. It is pretty hair-raising to read his accounts of the engagements: men cut to pieces next to him; tribesmen charging towards him until he shoots them; British infantry scattering in panic, leaving a wounded officer to be carved up on his stretcher by the fanatical Afridis. He was under fire for hour after hour.

On one occasion he blazed away with his pistol, then dropped it and picked up a rifle. He later reported, ‘I fired 40 rounds with some effect at close quarters. I cannot be certain, but I think I hit four men. At any rate, they fell.’ Sometimes he seemed to be positively swanking about the way he exposed himself to fire. ‘I rode my grey pony all along the skirmish line when everyone else was lying down in cover. Foolish perhaps, but I play for high stakes and given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble.’

He behaved, all in, with the kind of suicidal daring displayed by those 1980s millennialist tribesmen of northern Kenya, who believed that they could ward off bullets by smearing themselves with nut oil. His exploits in Malakand would earn a modern soldier the Victoria Cross, or at least some pretty serious gong. And then he repeated and excelled them.

In 1898, at Omdurman in the Sudan, he took part in the last full cavalry charge by the British army. Once again, Churchill was in the role of colonial suppressor, helping to put down a revolt by Sudanese Muslims who resented British rule and, among other grievances, the attempt by London to abolish the slavery of black Africans. Once again, Jennie had been instrumental in getting him the position as a hybrid soldier-cum-reporter—much to the disgust of the army top brass. This time he was a more important player—a scout who at one point actually told the even more lushly moustachioed General Kitchener the whereabouts of the Sudanese Islamic army.

The objective of the mission was to defeat the Muslim leader, and to avenge the killing of General Charles Gordon—whose frenzied skewering at Khartoum, thirteen years earlier, had shocked the Victorian world. At 8.40 a.m. on 2 September 1898 Churchill found himself riding towards the 60,000-strong Dervish army, admittedly after they had been pounded for an hour or more by British guns. Churchill and his men thought they were taking on a bunch of 150 native spearmen—only to find they were riflemen.

The Dervishes suddenly knelt and started shooting at the detachment of lancers. What could they do? Beat it, or charge? They charged. Churchill had covered about a hundred yards in the direction of the Dervishes when he realised that he was about to rush into a ravine full of ‘closely packed spearmen’, twelve deep.

What did he do? He kept charging. There was a terrific melee; many of the Dervishes were knocked over like skittles. Churchill fired the ten shots of his Mauser pistol’s magazine and came through without a scratch, either to himself or his horse. Having broken through the ravine, he then trotted around the scene, where Dervishes and British were hacking away at each other.

He ‘rode up to individuals, firing my pistol in their faces and killing several—three for certain—two doubtful—one very doubtful’. When it is put like this, you might get the impression that these battles were a bit one-sided. After all, we had got the Maxim gun, and they had not.

That is totally to underestimate the risk. Of the 310 men in the charge, 21 had been killed and 49 wounded. As Churchill put it later, it was ‘the most dangerous two minutes I shall live to see’.

Or was it? He then fought in the Boer War, and came under fire on many occasions from these tough Dutch farmers—who were better shots, and had better weapons, than either the Afridis or the Dervishes. We have no space here to repeat the whole drama of Churchill and the Boers; there have been books on it, not least two of them by Churchill himself.

In summary, he went out as a twenty-four-year-old reporter to this unfortunate war, in which the might of the British Empire was all but humiliated by bearded and glottally challenged characters from the pages of a veld novel by Wilbur Smith. In 1900 he managed to get himself into a colossal scrape that launched him finally on to the front page.

He was taking a train to a place called Colenso, in Natal, when it was ambushed by the enemy and derailed. He then showed great coolness under fire, and disregard for his own safety, in organising resistance. As usual, he was shot at, and as usual he survived as if by a miracle. He was captured and escaped from prison; he jumped on a goods train; he hid in a wood; he was spooked by a vulture; he hid in a coal mine; he emerged to a hero’s welcome at Lourenço Marques in what is now Mozambique.

He later cycled through Pretoria with a price on his head; he was shot at again and very nearly killed at a place called Dewetsdorp; he showed ‘conspicuous gallantry’ at a battle called Diamond Hill . . . I hope I am beginning to make my point.

I could go on: I could add that when he joined the army in 1915, after Gallipoli, he went and served with the troops on the Western Front, and went out into no man’s land thirty-six times, sometimes going so close to the German lines that he could hear them talking. I could tell you about his disregard for the shells and the bullets—but I believe that the reader may be getting the message.

As a young man, and indeed throughout his life, Churchill showed the courage of a lion. How many bullets and other missiles were fired in his general direction? A thousand? How many men did he kill, with his own hand? A dozen? Maybe more. No prime minister since Wellington had seen so much active service, or been so personally homicidal to any inhabitants of the developing world who offered him violence, and to some, no doubt, who did not.

He has the unique distinction, as a prime minister, of having been shot at on four continents. By this stage the sensitive reader may be willing to accept this overwhelming evidence of Churchill’s bravery—but want to know more about the psychology behind it. Why was he like this?

What wound his spring so tight? One of the great joys of Churchill’s character—and one of the reasons for his mental robustness—is that he is capable of great honesty about his motives. He knows that he is playing to the gallery, he tells his mother, as he explains his conduct in Malakand. He needs the audience for the daring and the noble acts—because he has something to prove.

As he admits. ‘Being in many ways a coward—particularly at school—there is no ambition I cherish so keenly as to gain a reputation for personal courage.’ The child is father to the man, and gingery young Churchill was a pretty runty sort of kid.

He was not in the team for Harrow football, the violent and hearty game that is a peculiarity of the school. He didn’t even play much cricket, and on one occasion the other boys threw cricket balls at him—and he scarpered and hid in the woods. The memory stuck with him; he felt judged and found wanting by his peers, just as he felt judged and found wanting by Randolph.

As it happens, I think he erred in this self-criticism. He wasn’t a coward as a young schoolboy. He was hellish brave. He was first sent away to school at the age of seven, to the care of a sadistic whacker called Herbert Sneyd-Kynnersley. This man was a High Anglican old perv who used to give the boys twenty strokes of the cane—drawing blood after the third—for the slightest infraction.

Though he was miserably unhappy at the school, Churchill never complained about this barbarism, and indeed it wouldn’t have been exposed had not the family doctor noticed the weals. But you know what young Churchill did?

One day Sneyd-Kynnersley had given him a thrashing for taking some sugar, and Churchill went and got the old boy’s straw hat—and kicked it to pieces. I love him for that. He wasn’t really anything like a coward at school: he may not have been much good at muddy team games, but he was the inter-schools fencing champion. He famously pushed older boys into the swimming pool, and if you want a final proof of his sheer raw courage, as a teenager, I give you the famous occasion when he was playing hare and hounds with his brother and cousin in Dorset.

They trapped him on a bridge, one at either end, and beneath the bridge was a chasm. Then Churchill noticed a fir tree whose top came up to the level of the bridge, and in a second his ingenious mind had conceived a project.

He would leap on to the tree, and slide down, using the branches to slow his descent. Nice idea in theory, disastrous in execution. It was three days before he regained consciousness and three months before he was out of bed.

In that episode we see so many elements of his character—the imagination, the bravado, and the ability to take a decision in a flash. Churchill’s bravery wasn’t something he just put on. It wasn’t a mask he struggled with. He was made like that. The spirit of derring-do just pumped through his veins, like some higher-octane fuel than the one the rest of us run on.

Nothing could stop him, not even that accident in Croydon, where we have rejoined the plane as it fell fast towards the ground. Now it went smack into the runway at 50 mph. The left wing went in first, smashed to pieces, while the propeller was buried in the earth.

Churchill was whacked forward. He was crushed. The pressure seemed unendurable. Streams of petrol shot past him and he thought—again—that he was going to die. But it turned out that the good Captain Scott had turned off the electric current, shortly before he was knocked out.

Churchill got out and vowed that he would never pilot himself in the air again—a vow he kept, more or less, until the middle of the Second World War, when he needed, again, to show what he was made of; and when his general willingness to take the risk of getting in a plane became vital to British resistance.

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OF COURSE he enjoyed showing off—not just to his mother, or to the press, or to the public, but above all to the person who chronicled his deeds most lovingly and faithfully: himself. Whatever Churchill said or did, he had an eye, like Julius Caesar, to the way he would report it.

But that didn’t make him any less lion hearted. And it was precisely because he was so unambiguously and irrefutably brave that he was able, from 1940, to demand so much bravery from others. Others—Attlee, Eden—had certainly fought in the war; but their reputations were not quite the same.

There was one thing the public could say for certain about Churchill: that there was nothing that he was going to ask the British armed forces to do that he would not have done himself.

And then Churchill had one further advantage over the others. He not only inspired by his personal example and career. He had the gift of language to put heart into people, and to breathe some of his own courage into others.