May 15, 2013

Finest Hour 149, Winter 2010-11

Page 54

Cohen Corner – “Uganda Is Defended by Its Insects”: Churchill’s African Travelogue

By Ronald I. Cohen

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

Mr. Cohen ([email protected]) is author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, 3 vols. (Continuum, 2006) and a longtime Finest Hour contributor. Photographs from the author’s collection. Numbers are from the Cohen Bibliography.

In December 1905, Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman appointed Winston Churchill Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. A year and a half later, on 5 June 1907, Churchill proposed visiting British East Africa. His superior, Colonial Secretary Lord Elgin, wrote: “…if it is convenient & appeals to you to undertake that expedition, it will I am sure be of the greatest advantage that you should have seen the country—where we have so many difficult problems to deal with.” Elgin added that he hoped “it will be a pleasant as well as an interesting trip.”

Plans advanced and Lady Randolph wrote Winston on August 22nd that she “hate[d] to think of your going off for so long—and that I shall not see you again before your departure.” Winston’s soon-to-be sister-in-law, Lady Gwendeline Bertie (“Goonie”), wrote him several letters before his departure, including one in which she expressed the hope he would not be visiting Uganda: “It is a country of fevers, man killing country, full of pestilentious insects and poisonous marshes….” He did plan to go there and, in a very unusual inscription in a copy of My African Journey, he later wrote: “Uganda is defended by its insects. p. 94″—and on page 94 of the first edition we read these same words, followed by a typically Churchillian passage:

The dreaded Spirillum tick has begun to infest the roads like a tiny footpad, and scarcely any precautions avail with certainty against him….When he bites an infected person he does not contract the Spirillum fever himself, nor does he transmit it directly to other persons. By a peculiarly malevolent provision of nature this power is exercised not by him but by his descendants, who are numbered in hundreds. So the poison spreads in an incalculable progression. Although this fever is not fatal, it is exceptionally painful in its course and distressing in its consequences.

Churchill set out on September 10th, passing through France, Italy, Austria, Malta, Cyprus and Aden before arriving in Mombasa in early November. Already a much-in-demand author, he had begun his negotiations (with The Strand Magazine) for the publication of a series of articles and photographs on his East African trip before departing, although it was only after he arrived there that those negotiations were concluded. As originally contemplated, Churchill was to be paid £150 per article for a five-part serialisation in The Strand plus £30 for the photographs.

On November 17th Churchill wrote his brother Jack: “I have received a fine offer from the Strand Magazine for five articles for £750, which I propose to accept, as it will definitely liquidate all possible expenses in this journey. There will be another £500 in book form.”

The excitement of Churchill’s travels can only be appreciated from the text of the work, which he described as “a continuous narrative of the lighter side of what was to me a very delightful and inspiring journey.” By the 27th of December, however, our author was back on the Nile, and 3 January 1908 found him relaxing in Cairo. Only ten days later Churchill stopped at the elegant Hotel Bristol in Paris, and was dining with his brother at the Ritz Hotel in London on the 17th. Churchill earned considerably more from his articles than had been anticipated. His agent of the day, Alexander Pollock Watt, succeeded in convincing Greenhough Smith, editor of The Strand Magazine, to pay an additional £150 each for two more articles. Ultimately, nine were published, and Churchill was paid a total of £1050 for what had been contracted as “35,000 words of matter divided into eight articles.” The first part was published in the March 1908 issue of the British Strand, priced at 6d., and in the April 1908 issue of the American Strand, priced at 15¢.

The book rights to My African Journey were not shopped around to the publishing trade in the way Lord Randolph Churchill had been. In fact, the publisher of The Strand Magazine had a loose first-refusal arrangement with Hodder & Stoughton, which agreed to an important Churchillian condition, namely, that “the whole of the amount of the advance is paid to you on the delivery of the ‘copy,’ as you wish it.” The publisher did, however, require that Churchill provide an additional 10,000 words to differentiate the book from the magazine serialisation. In the end, the volume was published in December 1908, a month later than Hodder & Stoughton had hoped, but timed with the appearance of the last monthly installment in the British Strand. While the Hodder & Stoughton archives have not yielded a copy of the publishing contract, it is clear that Churchill secured an advance of close to £1000 for the volume rights.

Hodder & Stoughton printed 12,500 copies, of which 8161 were sold or distributed gratis. The front cover was an artist’s rendition of WSC standing over the white rhino he had bagged. The print run included 1976 Colonial cloth copies, which are distinguished only by the presence of an “asterisk” below the publisher’s name on the spine. Among these was the Canadian issue by William Briggs, which I estimate speculatively as being about 250 copies. It is worth noting that technically, Briggs was not the Canadian publisher: that was the Methodist Book and Publishing House, of which Briggs was the Steward. But it was undeniably Briggs’s name that appeared on the title page and spine.

There were also 903 copies of the fragile card wrappers Colonial issue. This is without doubt the rarest edition/issue of My African Journey and one of the very rarest of all volumes in the Churchill canon, much scarcer in my experience than The People’s Rights (Cohen A31), For Free Trade (Cohen A18) or even the second edition of Mr. Brodrick’s Army (Cohen A10.2). As would be expected, it is distinguished by the presence of the asterisk below the publisher’s imprint on the spine.

Of the first run of Hodder & Stoughton sheets, 1400 copies were shipped to the United States, where the publisher was the Canadian-trained George H. Doran, whose offices were in a publisher-dominated building on West 32nd Street in New York City (where Appleton, Henry Holt and the Oxford University Press were also located). The American publication date was 27 February 1909.

There were three separate sub-issues of the American issue, distinguished only by the title pages. The binding was, in each case, a uniformly uninteresting dark reddish-brown embossed calico-texture cloth. I have discovered no information that would enable me to allocate quantities among these three issues.

Collectors always set great store by dust jackets, and the assumption in the absence of evidence is that most books had them, even in those years. But I have never seen or heard mention of a jacket for My African Journey. It may be that the illustrated top board was in lieu of a jacket, at least on the English first edition.

In my view the most attractive edition of My African Journey was Hodder & Stoughton’s March 1910 publication of the work in its Sixpenny Novels list. Reset in two columns, the front cover of this extremely fragile edition is striking. Of the 20,009 copies printed, 16,365 had been sold domestically and 3644 shipped for export by the end of the company’s 1916-17 fiscal year. I am unaware of any feature distinguishing export from domestic copies. While the newsprint-quality paper and thin wrappers (0.18 mm, half the thickness of the 0.36 mm Colonial card wrappers) rendered these copies much more perishable than the card-wrappers Colonials, more than twenty times as many were printed and—as would be expected—many more of the 1910 “paperback” survived. They remain uncommon and quite scarce in near-perfect condition.

It was more than half a century before My African Journey was again publicly available. In November 1962, Neville Spearman and the Holland Press republished it in London, and then on Churchill’s 80th birthday, Icon Books published the first modern paperback edition of the work. Heron Books then republished the volume in Geneva, possibly in 1965. Additional appearances over the next twenty-five years were the New English Library (London, 1972); Leo Cooper (London, 1989); Norton (New York, 1990); Mandarin Books (paperback, London, 1990); and, last of all, Easton Press (leatherbound, Norwalk, Connecticut, 1992).

My African Journey is unique among Churchill works: his only travel book, probably the most colorfully bound among first editions, and a text that offers a glimpse of East Africa as young Winston saw it.

Print Runs

A27.1-7 First edition, only printing (1908). Total print run, 12,500, distributed as follows:
UK cased (cloth-bound): 8,161
Colonial cased: 1,726
Canadian cased: 250 (estimate)
Colonial card-wrapped: 903
USA cased (3 states): 1,400
Unaccounted for: 60

A27.8 Second (paper wrappers) edition,
only printing (1910). Total run: 20,009.