Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill

By Michael SheldenSimon & Schuster, 2013It's been nearly thirty years since the publication of Ted Morgan’s Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry, 1874-1915 , and apparently the story needs generational retelling. Morgan, a transplanted scion of French nobility (le Comte changed his name when he became a U. S. citizen) was a biographer of considerable narrative verve, and his book did well for Simon & Schuster – well enough, at any rate, that the house's institutional memory must have felt it was time to trot out the idea again. In Morgan's place this time around there is Indiana State University professor Michael Shelden, and his book, Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill, which will introduce a whole new audience of readers to a Churchill who's in many ways very different from the legend they readily know.The legend was in huge part the self-conscious creation of Churchill himself, whose own life was always his favorite subject in the incredibly copious stream of writing that issued either from his own pen during his lifetime or from a well-trained stable of ghostwriters whose work he could then polish. “I like things to happen,” he once said, “and if they don't happen I like to make them happen.” But once things were done happening, he also liked – compulsively – to write about them. As a result, any biography of Churchill must deal with a vast corpus of first-hand material that dares its reader to call it unreliable.Churchill, the grandson of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, was born at the family's sprawling Blenheim Palace in 1874 and came of age in the full noon of the Edwardian era. His cousin Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, known as “Sunny” to his family, would become the 9th Duke; since the main family line was secure, Winston had to seek a career. Like a good many of his aristocratic contemporaries, he chose the military, and he supplemented that career by constantly writing for publication about his own exploits. He eagerly sought out action in Cuba, India, and Africa, and he wrote voluminously about all of it.For the biographer, it raises the danger of an odd kind of guilt by association. If your Bibliography and End Notes rely too heavily on Churchill's own writing, critics will call you an apparatchik, and they won't be wrong. And yet Churchill's writings must necessarily form a large part of your research, since they represent a combination of history-maker and historian not seen in the world since Cicero. Churchill worked hard to fix the shape of his own narrative for posterity, but even if he hadn't, the shape would still be almost overwhelmingly tempting to chroniclers.“If he had died when he was forty,” Shelden writes, “when his fortunes were low, and his youth behind him – his story would still be one of the best of the century, in part a riveting drama of ambition, in part a sobering tragedy.”That story is the one Shelden sets himself to write, and the resulting book, although somewhat predictably uncritical, is a thoroughly readable and remarkably humanizing account of the long first act of Churchill's life. The much older, monumental figure who led his country through the narrowest national peril it had ever experienced (with only the Channel separating England's virtually nonexistent defenses from an entire Europe bristling with Nazi aggression) has no place in these pages and only shows up like a jowly emcee, to open and close the proceedings. All the rest of it is bustled through by a very different creature – younger, slimmer, faster, hungrier. Here is a Churchill largely unfamiliar to the more casual readers of history (unless they read Morgan's book a short lifetime ago); only the seed-similarities of that far more famous figure can be glimpsed here and there.The most noticeable difference, oddly enough, is ambition. The more famous Churchill, the fat, bald Prime Minister whose radio broadcasts and Parliamentary addresses thundered so memorably against Hitler's Germany, was vain, pompous, short-tempered, and sentimental – but he was no longer ambitious. Where could ambition go, after all, from where he had been? AJP Taylor referred to him during the WWII years as quite simply “the saviour of his country.” That’s a tough act to follow (and it can leave great cravings in its wake, hence Churchill's run for a postwar premiership, something even he couldn't avoid describing in tones of anticlimax). The later Churchill was many invidious things, but he was no longer a striver for pinnacles.Not so the earlier years, when he was practically phosphorescent with a hunger for renown (and unlike most young men possessed of such a hunger, he could also act as his own press corps). He went early into national politics, holding a number of high-ranking positions even before the start of the First World War, and Shelden takes his readers through them all -- President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty -- at a wonderfully brisk pace, covering in a hundred pages events on which other biographers have expended a thousand (Young Titan wears a public face of expected deference for the late William Manchester's gigantic Churchill volumes but keeps up a delightfully steady sniper-fire in the End Notes). We get Churchill campaigning, Churchill in the ranks with famous figures such as his colleague, leader, and later rival Prime Minister Lloyd George (who often noted Churchill's "affectionate quality and good temper" but also could exclaim "He's such a child!") and Churchill serving Prime Minster H. H. Asquith, whose daughter Violet felt a romantic interest for the young man that was largely one-sided (Asquith once commented that Churchill suffered from "a dangerous endowment of an interesting personality," and Churchill never contradicted him). We listen in on Parliamentary debates so heated they could broil over into physical violence. Much of this is well-trod ground, but Shelden's tour through it all is unfailingly interesting reading.He balances it out with, improbably enough, romance. Young Titan does more than any recent book on Churchill to flesh out the nature and extent of his pre-marriage dalliances, including especially the relationship he had with Pamela Plowden, revealed here in unprecedented detail. It's picturesque stuff involving great country houses and passionate exchanges of letters, but it can't help feeling a bit perfunctory, since once Churchill became reacquainted with young Clementine Hozier in 1908 (Shelden rather distractingly calls her "Clemmie" throughout the book, as though he himself were a stubborn though defeated suitor for her hand), all such previous dalliances fell away and the two entered into what would be a long and happy marriage.Probably any such digressions on Shelden's part were doomed to be background chatter in any case; almost from the moment he entered adulthood, Churchill's was overwhelmingly a political life. He was constantly embroiled in public affairs, often at the cabinet level (in both Liberal and Conservative governments), and although he characterized himself as someone who liked to rush loudly about, Shelden paints a different picture:

Embracing the new reforming spirit of the Edwardian age, he learned to question the easy assumptions of his own aristocratic upbringing and to explore fresh approaches to old problems. Professional and personal disappointments schooled him in the virtue of patience and the dangers of overconfidence.

The political Churchill in these pages is as often as not that most unlikely of things: a victim -- of bad press, of double standards, of less dynamic men intent on besmirching his reputation. It takes some getting used to, and it doesn't entirely convince; previous biographers have avoided talking about a Churchill who 'avoided the easy assumptions of his own aristocratic background' because there's virtually no sign of such a Churchill in the historical record. Far more common are characterizations like those of Lord Beresford, who referred to Churchill as a "Lilliput Napoleon ... a man with an unbalanced mind ... an egomaniac ..."It was in Asquith's government that he rose to First Lord of the Admiralty, and although while in that office he effected some much-needed reforms (and first began to lock horns with Admiral John Fisher, a personality as abrasive as his own), the defining crisis of his tenure would come in the trials of the First World War and the disaster with which his name has forever after been linked. Given Shelden's chosen time frame, the climax of his story could only be Gallipoli.In the spring of 1915, with the armies of the Central and Allied Powers immovably deadlocked in Europe, the allure of opening up a second front was obvious. When the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in 1914, the move deprived Russia of its Mediterranean supply-route; the idea formulated in Asquith's administration that an attempt to send British and French warships up the Dardanelles straits would not only help re-supply Russia but also thereby alleviate pressure on the Western front. The British warships in the proposed contingent were (with the exception of the state-of-the-art battleship Queen Elizabeth) mostly too antiquated for service on the high seas against the well-equipped German fleet, but the typical colonial condescension of the day held that they'd be good enough against the Turks, who were judged unlikely to fight very hard to protect their capital of Constantinople in any case. Churchill had earlier agonized, "Are there no other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?” Gallipoli seemed to present him with one such alternative.Shelden pulls no punches about how wrong this all was:

It was a disaster from start to finish. The Queen Elizabeth's guns performed well in February, but when the older battleships moved into the strait on March 18 to attack additional forts they ran into mines, and three were lost in a matter of a few hours. As the situation went from bad to worse in the next few months, mistake after mistake was made, by both the navy and especially the army, which tried to clear Gallipoli of Turkish troops who proved to be far more disciplined and determined than the British had been willing to believe.

The operation dragged on until January of 1916 with huge casualties on both sides, until finally the decision was made to withdraw and evacuate Allied forces. It was a debacle on an epic scale, and it had been from first to last Churchill's passionate inspiration (the German press afterwards mockingly dubbed him "The Earl of Gallipoli"). His biographers have been inconvenienced by this fact ever since, although they really shouldn't have been. Even seasoned generals can make horrific mistakes involving logistics and strategy, and Churchill wasn't a seasoned general but rather an impulsive amateur. That he should make a blunder like Gallipoli -- involving as it did not only bombastic overconfidence, but also a very British overestimation of the decisiveness of sea power and a very Edwardian disparagement of the courage and determination of 'lesser peoples' -- is in retrospect so understandable as to seem almost inevitable. It racked Churchill with guilt for the rest of his life, but he at least acknowledged his key role in it all. Biographers who've taken the tack of minimizing his responsibility would probably find him their sternest critic.

By the time Shelden gets his hero to Gallipoli, he's become well-versed in defending Churchill against pretty much any serious accusation. "To his critics throughout his career, Churchill always presented a tempting half-finished portrait that they could touch up as desired," he writes, seemingly unaware that the same could be said of the man's defenders. "With the right brushstrokes and shading they could turn him into a snarling demon capable of any crime." He correctly states that most of heavyweight figures in Asquith's government -- from Admiral Fisher to Lord Kitchener to Asquith himself -- at one point or another signed off on the Dardanelles offensive, and he asserts that when the offensive failed, a political sacrifice was needed:

The young titan had pushed his luck too far. So, too, had others, but this setback was so big that a suitably big scapegoat was needed, and Winston was it. As soon as things began to go wrong, little time was wasted in pointing the finger of blame in his direction.

"Churchill must go," Lloyd George said; it was the universal reaction, with only Churchill himself dissenting, hoping Asquith would stand by him. It didn't happen: Asquith's government entered into an uneasy coalition with the Tories and Churchill was sacked as First Lord of the Admiralty (he was given a minor post as a sop, but he only kept it briefly before resigning from all government service).The experience aged him virtually overnight. Gone was the fire-eating political impresario, and gone were the dreams of glory. Churchill was only forty, but he suddenly acquired a stoop, a shuffle, and dark circles around his eyes. He entered into the decade he would refer to as "the wilderness" a changed man, as Shelden admits with refreshing frankness:

At forty, youth begins to slip away from most people, but what Winston lost was not merely a matter of looks or energy. It was a spark that had once seemed so vital and inexhaustible, a lively spark that had served him well from crisis to crisis. But it flickered and went out in 1915 and Churchill was never the same.

As this broken figure leaves the spotlight of history -- surely believing he would never enter it again - the reader feels if not alarm then certainly suspense, and this is the highest tribute to Shelden's storytelling. It's a worshipful portrait, true, but it's hero-worship, not idol-worship -- and it does more to reinforce a certain charity toward the Lilliput Napoleon than many much larger and more remote biographies have done. This Churchill is a nervous striver, a passionate friend, a voracious learner, and when necessary a dutiful apprentice. The ruin of Gallipoli changed all that, and the stouter, surer Churchill who next stepped on the national stage would have none of those qualities and no use for them. Shelden has given us an affectingly human look at the loud and tempestuous first act of a drama whose second act, long delayed, would change the world.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Washington Post, The National, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.