October 17, 2008

From Winston with Love and Kisses:
The Young Churchill
by Celia Sandys

Reviewed in Finest Hour 85

    This delightful little volume, just published by Sinclair-Stevenson, is a must for the bookshelf of every collector of Churchill-related works. It is another in a distinguished line of books from the distaff side of the Churchill family. It comprehensively fills that remarkable gap in Churchill’s mother’s book, The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill (London: Edward Arnold; NY: Century 1908), in which she gave Winston only two very brief mentions covering the whole of the first twenty-five years of his life! One had wondered whether the young Winston had been such a trial that his mother had deliberately or subconsciously shut out all memories of that period. His son, Randolph, in the first few chapters of Volume 1 of the Official Biography, touched briefly upon a number of episodes from Winston’s early years but was clearly in-tent on pushing the narrative on towards his father’s greater achievements. Celia Sandys’s book benefits from the grand-filial touch she has been able to impart and provides us with a valuable insight into the formative years of Sir Winston Churchill.

    It is one of the million or so fascinating facts about Churchill that his clearly far from doting parents should have preserved every scrap of paper written by the child from the age of five onwards. And many of them were of such a slovenly quality that a severe reprimand and instant destruction would have been the only just reward in most households! But they didn’t and we have them, one hundred years on, filed, classified and stamped “The Chartwell Trust” in facsimile reproduction for our enjoyment.

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    Reading through the young Churchill’s letters, from both his prep schools and Harrow, one can readily detect those that were written under supervision in the classroom in the obligatory weekly English period, “Letters Home,” which was a feature of boarding school education in those days, and may still be at some establishments. His frequent heartfelt, and apparently unheeded, pleas to both his parents to visit him at school suggests some indifference on their part. Celia Sandys concludes that, neglectful though this may seem in the twentieth century, Victorian parents, having despatched their sons to school, did not feel obliged to spend their time going to see them. That may be so but Winston clearly thought that if the parents of other boys could visit, why not his? In his letters to his father, before he is ten years old, Winston is already showing a political awareness and not a little commercial acumen. There are repeated requests for bulk supplies of Lord Randolph’s autograph which could be traded to relieve his habitually impecunious state.

    The facsimile letters and some excellent illustrations, many in colour, are woven into a well-written and informative text. Many of the well-known Churchillian anecdotes are there but so is a wealth of previously unpublished material. A most worthy addition to the Churchill canon.