Roberts - Churchill

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First published 2018

Copyright Andrew Roberts, 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover photograph by Yousuf Karsh, Camera Press London

ISBN: 978-0-241-20564-8

For Henry and Cassia

From their proud father

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,

And treat those two impostors just the same

Rudyard Kipling, If

Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.

Churchill to an American student before a Coronation luncheon in Westminster Hall, 27 May 1953

. Churchill thought this portrait by Sir William Orpen to be the best likeness of the many made of him. It was painted in 1916, when he was out of office after the Dardanelles defeat.. The front faade of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, home of the dukes of Marlborough, where Churchill was born in 1874. We have nothing to equal this, said King George III when he visited.. Lord Randolph Churchill, Winstons aloof, distant, reproachful father, whom he spent a lifetime trying to impress.. Jennie Jerome, Winstons beautiful, headstrong and usually absent American socialite mother.. Elizabeth Everest, Churchills beloved nanny.. Aristocratic entitlement in a seven-year-olds pose.. The eight-year-old Winstons letters begging his mother to visit him at school went largely unheeded.. General Conduct: Very bad is a constant trouble to everybody, and is always in some scrape or other. Headmasters Remarks: He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere. He has very good abilities. Churchills school reports reveal him not to be the dunce he depicted himself to be in his autobiography, though he was consistently among the naughtiest pupils of every school he attended.. Dr Welldons house photo at Harrow in 1892; Churchill is leaning over the railings. Behind him is George Hoare, who died of wounds sustained in 1915. Eleven of the boys in this photograph were dead by the end of the First World War.. Churchills brother Jack was the first officer casualty on board the hospital ship Maine, which their mother Jennie fitted out and took to the Boer War.. Churchill in South Africa in 1899. He wore his Spanish Cross of the Order of Military Merit medal ribbon against Army regulations. He soon shaved off his moustache because it was too light coloured.. He returned to Durban a hero, after having escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria in November 1899.. With Kaiser Wilhelm II watching German Imperial Army manoeuvres in 1906.. Sitting on the cowcatcher of his train in East Africa are (left to right) Eddie Marsh, Churchills uncle Colonel Gordon Wilson, Sir James Hayes Sadler (Commissioner of Uganda), Churchill.