The Last Lion

This is the first volume of William Manchester's biography of Winston Spencer Churchill, covering his life from birth in 1874 to his political exile in 1932.

Manchester opens not with Churchill's birth but with his finest hour: the crisis of May 1940, when France had fallen, the British army was trapped at Dunkirk, and England stood alone against Nazi Germany. In a vivid preamble, Manchester establishes Churchill as the singular figure who rallied the nation through oratory, personal courage, and an absolute refusal to negotiate with Hitler. Yet Manchester also introduces the contradictions that define his subject: a romantic Victorian who gloried in martial pageantry, a man who lived with depression he called "Black Dog," an aristocrat who championed the poor, and a figure whose career was marked by brilliant intuition alongside misjudgments that nearly destroyed him. Manchester argues that this portrait can only be understood by tracing Churchill's path from the imperial world of his birth to the political wilderness from which he would emerge to save Western civilization.

The prologue surveys the British Empire at its zenith. Manchester describes a realm covering a quarter of the world's landmass, governed from London by a small cadre of patricians educated at elite fee-paying schools and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He portrays Victorian London in rich detail: its class hierarchies, its slums and grandeur, and the rituals of country-house weekends where aristocrats conducted affairs behind a veil of discretion. Against this backdrop, Manchester introduces the Churchill family lineage, tracing it from the first Duke of Marlborough through a dynasty that alternated between glory and profligacy. Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston's father, was a brilliant but unstable politician who contracted syphilis as an Oxford student and married the beautiful American Jennie Jerome after a whirlwind courtship in 1873. Winston was born in November 1874 at Blenheim Palace, almost certainly a full-term baby despite the official announcement of a premature birth, his mother having gone into labor during a ball.

Churchill's childhood was marked by parental neglect. His mother was absorbed in London society; his father, increasingly erratic from advancing syphilis, regarded his son as stupid and told him so. The one constant source of affection was his nanny, Elizabeth Everest, whom Churchill called "Woom." Sent to a boarding school near Ascot, he was repeatedly flogged by a sadistic headmaster until Everest discovered the welts on his body and his mother removed him. At Harrow, his next school, he languished at the bottom of his class in Latin and Greek but displayed a gift for English composition under Robert Somervell and won the public-school fencing championship. He failed the entrance examination for Sandhurst, the British officer-training academy, twice before passing on his third attempt. His father sent him a devastating letter calling him a potential "social wastrel." Lord Randolph, whose political career had collapsed after a reckless resignation from the cabinet in 1886, died in January 1895, leaving Winston with an obsessive determination to vindicate his father's memory. Mrs. Everest died later that year. At twenty, Churchill was essentially alone.

Commissioned in the Fourth Hussars, a cavalry regiment, Churchill set about making himself famous through a calculated combination of military adventure and journalism. He covered the Cuban insurrection in 1895, pausing in New York to befriend Bourke Cockran, his mother's former lover, who taught him about oratory. Posted to India, he spent his afternoons in self-education, devouring Gibbon, Macaulay, Plato, and Darwin. He attached himself to a punitive expedition on the North-West Frontier, filed dispatches under fire, and published his first book. Through relentless lobbying by his mother, he secured a place with the Sudan expedition led by Lord Kitchener, the British commander there, and participated in the last great British cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898. He then ran for Parliament, lost, and departed for the Boer War, Britain's conflict against the Boer republics in South Africa. Captured after an armored-train ambush, he escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria, hid in a coal mine, and was smuggled across the border. He returned to England a national hero and won a seat in Parliament at age twenty-five.

Manchester traces Churchill's early parliamentary career as a series of dramatic reversals. Elected as a Conservative, Churchill broke with his party over Free Trade and crossed the floor to join the Liberals in 1904, earning lasting Tory hatred. As a Liberal minister he partnered with David Lloyd George, his reform-minded ally, to introduce sweeping social legislation, including minimum wages, labor exchanges, and unemployment insurance. He married Clementine Hozier in 1908, a union Manchester portrays as one of the great political marriages. As home secretary he handled the Tonypandy miners' strike with restraint that was misrepresented as brutality and confronted the crisis over Irish Home Rule, the contentious question of Irish self-government.

In October 1911, after the Agadir crisis with Germany over Morocco revealed Berlin's aggressive intentions, Churchill was appointed first lord of the Admiralty, the cabinet minister responsible for the Royal Navy. He threw himself into preparing the fleet for war, founded the Royal Naval Air Service, and took flying lessons over Clementine's anguished objections. When war broke out in August 1914, the fleet was ready. Yet the war also brought his greatest catastrophe. The Dardanelles campaign of 1915, conceived as a way to break the western front's deadlock by forcing a passage to Constantinople, came agonizingly close to success before being undone by timid admirals, delayed troop commitments, and the erratic resignation of Lord Fisher, the professional head of the Royal Navy. The resulting political upheaval forced Churchill from the Admiralty. He discovered painting as a therapeutic outlet at Hoe Farm before departing for the western front, where he spent six months commanding a battalion in the trenches near Ploegsteert, Belgium.

Manchester follows Churchill's long climb back to power: his appointment as minister of munitions in 1917, where he championed tank production; his postwar role as secretary of state for war and air; and his passionate but futile crusade against Bolshevism in Russia. As colonial secretary he redrew the map of the Middle East at the Cairo Conference of 1921, defended the Balfour Declaration's promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and negotiated the Irish Free State treaty with Michael Collins, the Irish nationalist leader. Personal losses accumulated during this period: his mother Jennie died in 1921, and his young daughter Marigold died that same year at age two. The fall of Lloyd George's coalition in 1922 left Churchill without a seat, a party, or an appendix, having just undergone emergency surgery.

Churchill returned to Parliament in 1924 as a Conservative and was appointed chancellor of the Exchequer, Britain's finance minister, by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Manchester describes Churchill's fateful decision to return Britain to the gold standard on the advice of financial experts, a move that crippled exports, triggered the coal miners' crisis, and led to the general strike of 1926, during which Churchill edited the combative government newspaper, the British Gazette. His enmity with the Labour movement hardened permanently. When the question of Indian self-government arose in 1929, Churchill broke with Baldwin, resigned from the shadow cabinet (the opposition's leadership team), and launched a fierce campaign against granting India dominion status, or self-governing status within the Empire.

The volume ends in early 1932. Churchill had been hit by a car on Fifth Avenue in New York, his finances had been devastated by the Wall Street crash, and he was excluded from Britain's coalition National Government. Lady Nancy Astor, a political contemporary, dismissed him to Stalin in Moscow as "finished." Yet Manchester has already shown his readers the qualities that would prove decisive: Churchill's stubborn courage, his mastery of the English language, and his capacity to see threats that others refused to acknowledge. He had read Hitler's Mein Kampf in its entirety and recognized in it a program for war.