Authors: Winston Churchill
Never Give In! (5 page)
In this century of storm and tragedy I contemplate with high satisfaction the constant factor of the interwoven and upward progress of our peoples. Our comradeship and our brotherhood in war were unexampled. We stood together, and because of that fact the free world now stands.
Winston S. Churchill
30 November 2002
When his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, died in 1895 at the early age of 46, Winston determined to quit the Army at the earliest opportunity in favour of a career in politics. He burned to vindicate the memory of his father, whom he hero-worshipped, despite the fact that he had treated him with so much coldness and disdain. Churchill’s capture by the Boers in South Africa in November 1899, during the Anglo-Boer War, and his dramatic escape from captivity, catapulted him into the headlines and provided him with the basis, impecunious as he was, to launch his career in politics. Thus in October 1900, at the age of 25, he was elected Member of Parliament for Oldham in Lancashire and – with one brief interruption – was to serve in Parliament, under six sovereigns, until October 1964.
It was not long before Churchill found himself out of sympathy with the Conservative Party, most especially on the issue of Protection, to which he was strongly opposed and, in May 1904, he ‘crossed the floor’ to join the Opposition Liberals. Fortuitously the move was well timed: within two years the Conservatives had gone down to a landslide defeat and, soon afterwards, he was offered ministerial office as Under-Secretary for the Colonies in the Liberal Government of Herbert Asquith. Thereafter he enjoyed a meteoric rise to the front ranks of politics, becoming in quick succession President of the Board of Trade in 1908, Home Secretary in 1910 and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, where it fell to him to prepare the British fleet for war with Germany.
‘FIRST POLITICAL SPEECH: ‘THE DRIED UP DRAIN-PIPE OF RADICALISM’
26 July 1897
Claverton Down, Bath
Twenty-two years old and still a serving officer, on leave from his regiment in India, the young Winston addressed his first public meeting, a summer fête of the Primrose League
(
founded in memory of Benjamin Disraeli
)
, at the house which is today the American Museum in Britain, His speech – well prepared, rehearsed and memorised – already demonstrates his keen social conscience about the harsh conditions of life, and work, of the great mass of the people, which was to be a foremost feature of his early career. In
My Early Life
he sets the scene:
We repaired to our tent, and mounted the platform, which consisted of about four boards laid across some small barrels. There was neither
table, nor chair; but as soon as about a hundred persons had rather reluctantly, as I thought, quitted their childish amusements in the park, the Chairman rose and in a brief speech introduced me to the audience.
Though Parliament is dull, it is by no means idle. (
Hear, hear.
) A measure is before them of the greatest importance to the working men of this country, (
Cheers.
) I venture to hope that, if you think it presumptuous in one so young to speak on such a subject, you will put it down to the headstrong enthusiasm of youth. (
Hear, hear and laughter.
) This measure is designed to protect workingmen in dangerous trades from poverty if they become injured in the service of their employers. (
Hear, hear.
) When the Radicals brought in their Bill and failed, they called it an Employers’ Liability Bill. Observe how much better the Tories do these things. (
Hear, hear.
) We call the Bill the Workmen’s Compensation Bill, and that is a much nicer name. (
Laughter and hear, hear.
) This Bill is a great measure of reform. It grapples with evils that are so great that only those who are intimately connected with them are able to form any idea of them. (
Cheers.
) Every year it is calculated that 6,000 people are killed and 250,000 injured in trades in this country. That is a terrible total, larger than the greatest battle ever fought can show, (
Hear, hear.
) I do not say that workmen have not been treated well in the past by the kindness and consideration of their employers, but this measure removes the question from the shifting sands of charity and places it on the firm bedrock of law. (
Cheers.
) So far it is only applied to dangerous trades. Radicals, who are never satisfied with Liberals, always liberal with other people’s money (
laughter
), ask why it is not applied to all. That is like a Radical – just the slap-dash, wholesale, harum-scarum policy of the Radical. It reminds me of the man who, on being told that ventilation is an excellent thing, went and smashed every window in his house, and died of rheumatic fever. (
Laughter and cheers.
) That is not Conservative policy. Conservative policy is essentially a tentative policy – a look-before-you-leap policy; and it is a policy of don’t leap at all if there is a ladder. (
Laughter.
) It is because our progress is slow that it is sure and constant. (
Hear, hear.
) But this Bill might be taken as indicating the forward tendency of Tory legislation, and as showing to thousands of our countrymen engaged in industrial pursuits that the Tories are willing to help them, and besides having the inclination, that they also have the power (
hear, hear
), and that the British workman has more to hope for from the rising tide of Tory democracy than from the dried-up drain-pipe of Radicalism. (
Laughter and cheers.
)
. . .
There are not wanting those who say that in this Jubilee year our Empire has reached the height of its glory and power, and that now we shall begin to decline, as Babylon, Carthage, Rome declined. Do not believe these croakers but give the lie to their dismal croaking by showing by our actions that the vigour and vitality of our race is unimpaired and that our determination is to uphold the Empire that we have inherited from our fathers as Englishmen (
cheers
), that our flag shall fly high upon the sea, our voice be heard in the councils of Europe, our Sovereign supported by the love of her subjects, then shall we continue to pursue that course marked out for us by an all-wise hand and carry out our mission of bearing peace, civilisation and good government to the uttermost ends of the earth. (
Loud cheers.
)
23 December 1899
Durban Town Hall, Natal, South Africa
In South Africa to report the Anglo-Boer War for the London
Morning Post,
Churchill had been taken prisoner of war by the Boers
(
Dutch settlers in South Africa
)
on 15 November 1899 in what came to be known as ‘The Armoured Train Incident’. He spent his 25th birthday behind barbed wire in a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria, plotting his escape. On the night of 12/13 December he escaped and, after ten days on the run – including several nights concealed in a rat-infested coal mine by an English mine-manager – he reached Portuguese East Africa and freedom.
(
For a fuller account of his capture and escape the reader should consult Winston Churchill’s
My Early
life
).
He then made his way by ship to Durban, where British settlers gave him a rapturous welcome. As he relates in
My Early Life:
I reached Durban to find myself a popular hero. I was received as if I had won a great victory. The harbour was decorated with flags. Bands and crowds thronged the quays . . . . Whirled along on the shoulders of the crowd, I was carried to the steps of the town hall, where
nothing would content them but a speech, which after a becoming reluctance I was induced to deliver.
By his capture and escape, Churchill had become the hero of the hour and had made a name for himself sufficient to launch forth on a political career, which was his ambition.
‘Escape!’ Durban Town Hall, South Africa, 23 December 1899.
This is not the time for a long speech. We have got outside the region of words: we have to go to the region of action. We are now in the region of war, and in this war we have not yet arrived at the half-way house. But with the determination of a great Empire, surrounded by Colonies of unprecedented loyalty, we shall carry our policy to a successful conclusion, and under the old Union Flag there will be an era of peace, liberty, equality and good government in South Africa. I thank you once again for your great kindness. I am sure I feel within myself a personal measure of that gratitude which every Englishman who loves his country must feel towards the loyal and devoted Colonists of Natal.
‘THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY ESCAPE’
13 December 1900
Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York City
Elected Member of Parliament for Oldham, Lancashire, in the election of October 1900, Winston Churchill, who urgently needed to repair his finances, embarked on a six-week lecture tour of the USA and Canada on the subject of the Anglo-Boer War and his dramatic escape. He was disconcerted to discover the extent of American sentiment in favour of the Boers, Mark Twain, who chaired his inaugural meeting, introduced him to his New York audience with the elegant accolade: ‘Mr Churchill by his father is an Englishman, by his mother he is an American, no doubt a blend that makes the perfect man.’
This is the anniversary of my escape, many accounts of which have been related here and in England, but none of which is true. I escaped by climbing over the iron paling of my prison while the sentry was lighting his pipe. I passed through the streets of Pretoria unobserved and managed to board a coal train on which I hid among the sacks of coal.
When I found the train was not going in the direction I wanted, I jumped off. I wandered about aimlessly for a long time, suffering from hunger, and at last I decided that I must seek aid at all risks. I knocked at the door of a kraal, expecting to find a Boer, and, to my joy, found it occupied by an Englishman named John Howard, who ultimately helped me to reach the British lines.
MAIDEN SPEECH: ‘A CERTAIN SPLENDID MEMORY’
18 February 1901
House of Commons
The 26-year-old MP took his seat as a Tory in the new Parliament, which was opened by King Edward VII, following the death a month earlier of Queen Victoria. Just four days later he made his maiden speech, which he concluded with a becoming reference to his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who had died six years earlier after a meteoric but doomed political career. The sketch-writer of the Tory
Daily Telegraph
recorded the next day: ‘He had a great opportunity, and he satisfied the highest expectations.’ The
Daily Express
reported: ‘He held a crowded House spellbound.’
I understood that the hon. Member, to whose speech the House has just listened, had intended to move an Amendment to the Address. The text of the Amendment, which had appeared in the papers, was singularly mild and moderate in tone; but mild and moderate as it was, neither the hon. Member nor his political friends had cared to expose it to criticism or to challenge a division upon it, and, indeed, when we compare the moderation of the Amendment with the very bitter speech which the hon. Member has just delivered, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the moderation of the Amendment was the moderation of the hon. Member’s political friends and leaders, and that the bitterness of his speech is all his own. It has been suggested to me that it might perhaps have been better, upon the whole, if the hon. Member, instead of making his speech without moving his Amendment, had moved his Amendment without making his speech. I would not complain of any remarks of the hon. Member were I called upon to do so. In my opinion, based upon the experience of the most famous men whose names have adorned the records of the House, no national emergency short, let us say, of the actual invasion of this country itself ought in any way to restrict or prevent the entire freedom of Parliamentary discussion. Moreover, I do not believe that the Boers would attach particular importance to the utterances of the hon. Member. No people in the world received so much verbal sympathy and so little practical support as the Boers. If I were a Boer fighting in the field – and if I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field – I would not allow myself to be taken in by any message of sympathy, not even if it were signed by a hundred hon. Members. . . .
