Young Soldier

Winston spent the term with Captain James preparing for his third attempt to get into Sandhurst. As always, mathematics was a struggle for him. ‘I am assured [that mathematical skills] are most helpful in engineering, astronomy and things like that,’ he wrote, ‘…and I am glad there are quite a number of people born with a gift and a liking for all this.’ He was not one of those people.

Lord and Lady Randolph embark on an ill-advised world tour

Lord Randolph becomes gravely ill

Commissioned as a first lieutenant in Queen’s Own 4th Hussars

Winston rushes to the bedside of his beloved Mrs Everest

Young Winston makes his first political speech

On his first visit to the US, he is introduced to Bourke Cockran who was to become a mentor, teaching him the art of public speaking

Later in life Churchill reflected on his years in the 4th Hussars. He recalled that the young officers envied the decorations and experiences of their senior colleagues and wondered whether their own chance to win glory would ever come

Winston later called this period ‘among the most agreeable six months I have ever spent.’ He had just come through a particularly trying situation in which he successfully sued and received an apology from a father of a fellow cadet who resented Churchill’s role in an unseemly attempt to exclude the cadet from the 4th Hussars as ‘unsuitable.’

Churchill’s regiment, the 4th Hussars, arrived at Bombay Harbour and then travelled by train to Bangalore in southern India. In My Early Life, he wrote, “If you like to be waited on and relieved of home worries, India thirty years ago was perfection. All you had to do was to hand over all your uniform and clothes to the dressing boy, your ponies to the syce, and your money to the butler, and you need never trouble any more…’

Churchill always regretted that he did not have a university education but he covered this disappointment with his famous wit. He once noted that he had received many more degrees than he had passed examinations. Nevertheless, he was extremely well-read. That process began while he was in India, a period which he called ‘the university of my life.’

On 26 July Churchill made his maiden political speech. He was pleased with the press reports on his efforts.

Begins writing his only novel, Savrola

“Everybody is reading it…”

Winston thought that his brother Jack would follow him into the Army but his mother knew that he would not pass the medical examination because of his eyesight, and she could not provide him with the necessary allowance.

The First Political Campaign

In late March 1899, on his way home from Egypt, Churchill wrote to his grandmother explaining his decision to leave the Army for a writing career: ‘Had the army been a source of income to me instead of a channel of expenditure I might have felt compelled to stick to it. But I can live cheaper & earn more as a writer, special correspondent or journalist; and this work is moreover more congenial and more likely to assist me in pursuing the larger ends of life.’

Publishes The River War

Escapes from prison in Pretoria

World-Famous Overnight

Autumn 1899 began with Churchill the war correspondent travelling by ship to South Africa to report on the Anglo-Boer War. It ended with Churchill the escaped prisoner travelling by train surreptitiously out of South Africa into Portuguese East Africa. In between these two journeys, Churchill became famous throughout the world.

‘[A war] is not a long line of continuous successes’

Churchill returned home on 20 July 1900 on the Dunottar Castle, the same ship on which he had arrived in South Africa eight months earlier. On the very next day he began inscribing copies of his latest book, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, beginning with an inscription to Oliver Borthwick, The Morning Post editor who had sent him there (see Finest Hour 105, p. 45). An election was in the offing so Churchill next set out for Oldham, for his second try at elective office.

Returns to England

Publishes Ian Hamilton’s March

Lecture tour of North America begins

Lecture in Philadelphia