September 25, 2024

Finest Hour 201, First Quarter 2023

Page 46

Review by Michael McMenamin

Michael McMenamin and Curt Zoller, Becoming Winston Churchill: The Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor, First Edition Design Publishing, 2022, 354 pages, $18.95. ISBN 978–1506910529

The first edition of Becoming Winston Churchill, which I co-authored with the late Curt Zoller, appeared in 2007. After I published a revised and expanded edition in December 2022, the editor of Finest Hour invited me to explain to readers what this new edition is about.

The immediate incentive for the new version came when the paperback and e-book editions of the first version ceased to be available. I especially wanted an e-book edition to be continuously available. I then recalled that the original contract that Curt and I had with Greenwood World Publishing in Oxford included a limit of 85,000 words. Since we had committed to including the complete text of the existing correspondence between Churchill and his mentor Bourke Cockran, we had to make a large number of deletions from our own text to meet this obligation.

With that in mind, I decided that Curt would have agreed with me that any new edition of Becoming Winston Churchill should restore those deletions. This has now been done, and the restorations offer a more complete portrayal of Churchill’s coming of age between 1895 and 1908. The restored text primarily includes excerpts from letters between Winston and each of his parents, as well as excerpts from contemporary newspaper accounts about the dramatic impact Cockran’s speeches had on his audiences. The following paragraphs explain the details.

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Letters between young Winston and his parents have been condensed, but I have restored large portions that I believe more vividly show what a spoiled and headstrong teenager Churchill was. This comes through especially in his letters to his mother, where he rarely restrains himself. This is in contrast to letters to his father, Lord Randolph, with which he took great care despite receiving strong paternal criticism. In one letter, Lord Randolph was extremely critical of what he termed his son’s carelessness in losing a valuable watch. A long letter from Winston in reply has been restored.

Whether it was in Congress, at Democratic conventions, or on the stump, Cockran’s speeches had a dramatic impact on supporters and opponents alike. Many contemporary newspaper accounts deleted from the first edition have now been restored. These help illustrate further why Cockran, in office or out, was acclaimed from the late 1880s to his death in 1923 as America’s greatest orator.

Appendix A now contains new material that provides a more complete demonstration of Cockran’s influence on Churchill’s early speeches. The three speeches are: 1) Cockran speaking on 15 July 1903 at the Liberal Club in London about “The Essential Conditions of National Prosperity,” 2) Churchill speaking about “Free Trade” at the Birmingham Town Hall on 11 November 1903, and 3) Churchill speaking about “Retaliation and Dumping” at Midland Hall on 15 June 1904.

Appendix B also has new material. Although a Democrat, Cockran was good friends with his Long Island neighbor Theodore Roosevelt. In 1907, President Roosevelt sought Cockran’s advice, because he “always opened up new avenues of thought for me.” They met in November at the White House and, at Roosevelt’s request, Cockran sent the President a thirteen-page letter, now included in the book, that summarized his advice. The letter helps illustrate why Churchill said in 1906 that Cockran had “the biggest and most original mind I have ever met.”

Finally, Appendix C also includes new material. Christine Lewis, a young American girl to whom Churchill wrote eight letters between 1889 and 1904, and a ninth letter in 1943, met Churchill on the steamship Carthage in March 1899 en route from Bombay to Cairo. A previously unknown shipboard romance ensued. In August 1940, the now married Christine Lewis Conover prepared a recollection of her time with Churchill onboard the ship in Cairo and later in London titled Retrospective: Bombay 1899. The memoir, included here, offers an illuminating insight into the impressions the young Churchill made on a worldly American girl. It is a delightful memoir that deserves to be read, especially the episode about the couple’s unchaperoned visit to the Pyramids, where, to impress Miss Lewis, Winston impulsively attempted to liberate a lemon from a nearby orchard, only for the two of them to be chased off at gunpoint by the irate owner.