#544： The Audacious Life of Winston Churchill
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Summary
When we seek examples of great leadership, one man who often comes to mind is Winston Churchill. The iconic visionary prime minister who guided his country through war and stood firmly for his beliefs and impervious to his critics. But how did Churchill become the legendary british bulldog? My guest today seeks to answer that question in his biography, Churchill, Walking with Destiny.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast when we seek an
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example of great leadership one man who often comes to mind is winston churchill the iconic
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visionary prime minister who guided his country through war and stood firmly for his beliefs and
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impervious to his critics but how did winston become the legendary british bulldog my guest
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today seeks to answer that question in his biography churchill walking with destiny his
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name is andrew roberts he's a journalist and historian and we begin our conversation discussing
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why he thought another churchill biography was needed we then shift to the life of churchill
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beginning with a childhood in which young winston often felt neglected andrew then discusses
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churchill's military career why winston was so eager to see action on the front lines and how
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he parlayed those experiences into becoming the world's highest paid journalist by his mid-twenties
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andrew then explains how churchill also became one of the 20th century's great historians and how his
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appreciation for history and sentimental outlook colored his worldview and shaped his leadership
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we also discuss why churchill is one of the few leaders to foresee the threat that hither posed
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and we end our conversation discussing whether some of the current criticisms of churchill such as
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the allegation that he masterminded genocide in india really hold weight after the show's over check
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out our show notes at aom.is slash churchill andrew joins me now by phone
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okay andrew roberts welcome to the show thank you very much indeed so you have a new biography out
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about winston churchill churchill walking with destiny now churchill is probably one of the most
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written about individuals of the 20th century why why do you think the time was right for a new
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biography about him you're right there are no fewer than 1009 biographies of winston churchill
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um so it's a uh it's perfectly reasonable to ask why on earth the public needs a new one the answer
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is that in the last decade there have been an avalanche of new sources on winston churchill that
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have become available i was the first churchill biographer ever to be allowed to see the queen's
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father's diaries king george vi met churchill every week of the war on a tuesday at lunchtime
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and and wrote down everything that the prime minister told them also there have been 41 sets
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of papers from different people that have been deposited at the churchill archives in cambridge
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over the last 10 years and they've also been various very important diaries for example ivan
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my ski the russian ambassador that's been published and uh and other things like that
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the batum accounts of the war cabinet so all in all actually there is easily enough to write a book
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like this one does it has something on every page that has appeared in no churchill biography before
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so new information new insights gives greater context that's right so let's start with about
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churchill because i think most of us know him as the the scowling bald guy during world war ii
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but he's his his whole entire life was incredible let's start with his his childhood what was that
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like and how did that influence the leader that he would become during world war ii well he had a
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pretty unhappy childhood really his father and mother were very busy people and father was chancellor
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of the exchequer in the british government and his mother was a hugely popular high society socialite
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and although they were successful in their own fields they had no time really for their son
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winston or winston's younger brother jack who as a result were very badly neglected and you can see
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in their letters the uh the desire for love and attention that really didn't get given to to either of
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them and in winston's case where his father was actually unpleasant to him actively disdainful and
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aloof and unpleasant his response was actually the counterintuitive one which was to adore his
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father worship him and especially after his death in 1895 when churchill was 20 years old and he sought
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to emulate his his father and it was the major reason for him to go into politics yeah the letters were
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heartbreaking that he would write when he's at boarding school i think there was one letter his father
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was just like two miles away and winston was like please come visit me i want to see you and his dad
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didn't re didn't even respond to him i know again and again and then and worse than that they actually
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complained that churchill was you know being needy and and not writing when in fact it was them who
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didn't write and churchill who wrote letter after letter begging them to show him some some interest
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and visit them and what's also interesting even as a young man as a teenager churchill felt he was
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destined you know the book's called walking with destiny he felt he was destined for greatness why did
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why did he think he was destined for greatness yes i think in in what would be almost a psychological
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disorder in other people was certainly a very powerful influence on him this idea that he would
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as he told a 16 year old when he was a 16 year old school boy told another 16 year old school boy his
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friend at harrow merlin devons said to him that there will be a great upheaval and a terrible struggle
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in my life and i will be called upon to save london and save britain and of course i mean that's a
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that's an extraordinary thing to say age 16 but half a century later precisely that happened
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so he went to boarding schools as a young man or as a as a boy after that he went to military school
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and he had a military career what was his military career like as a young man well as you say he went to
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the royal military academy at sandhurst so that was his university really and then he went off to
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fight on the northwest frontier of india against the various tribes that that attacked the british
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empire up in the north there attempting to attack the punjab and he went off to cuba to watch the
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spanish put down the upright or attempt to put down the uprising of the cuban rebels
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in 1895 he went to south africa and to the sudan and in fact he fought in five campaigns on four
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continents before he entered politics and one thing about him is like not only did he go to these
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places but he wanted to see action like he wanted to be where the danger is at why was he so eager for
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that i think not so much that he wants to be where the danger was but where whatever it was that was
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important was happening he wanted to see for himself whatever was going on and that of course in the
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military career did mean where the danger was but also in his political career he tended to uh to want
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to be wherever it was that the most important thing was happening so it wasn't that he was as some people
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have charged a sort of danger junkie who wanted to who got excitement from the um from bullets flying
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he just wanted to make sure that he was actually on the spot of uh whatever was most important that
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was going on which um eventually made him actually the world's best paid war correspondent yeah even
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as a 20 year old that's he went to south africa for the boer wars not to fight but to report on it
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that's right yes and it was extraordinary really the way in which he was able to do both in a sense he was
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an officer in the british army there was no doubt which side he was on when uh his train was ambushed
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by commandos he uh of course took the command of the men there on the ambush train and managed to get
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part of it back through enemy lines and so there was no doubt that he was first and foremost a soldier
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but but one who would then write about everything that um that was going on it was an interesting thing
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that was even then fairly unusual and today totally unknown but when he also wrote about war he also
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intended i mean some people would say he romanticized it and that he was kind of a war mogger do you think
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that claim or that criticism holds true or has any water i don't think it does at all he actually did
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come to the sharp end of war he saw men uh just like uh the end of the battle of omderman where he took
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past in the last great cavalry charge of the british empire with the with the dead and wounded strewn over
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thousands upon thousands of them strewn over the battlefield and so he uh he knew the the horrors of
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war and knew them up close but there's no denying that he found it much more exciting than peacetime
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and so it wasn't as i said earlier about uh about his his general attitude that he was a a sort of um
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attention-seeking junkie he was somebody who really appreciated that in war if you're going to write
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about it you need to be up close and personal so yeah by the time he was 25 he had fought in various
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campaigns around the world became one of the highest paid war correspondents in the world all
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before 25 so that can make you feel really bad about yourself because like when i was 25 i think
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i was in law school that was it that was no it's worse for me i was working in the city i was a i was
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a merchant banker investment banker and uh yeah absolutely i mean this guy the things that he had
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achieved already by the time of 25 and he would say and he said that in his wonderful autobiography
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my early life he said 20 to 25 those are the years those are the years that you can can really get
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down to uh to taking risks and no one will blame you for mistakes and it's a wonderful um series of
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phrases that he comes out with in his book so another thing people don't know about churchill
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besides his political career is that he was actually one of the most notable historians of
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the 20th century like he was a prolific writer where did he learn his craft was he formally educated in
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history no he wasn't actually he i mean he he wasn't that he went to harrow school which was good and
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and there were good history teachers there but he didn't take that beyond school age and yet he
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wrote 37 books many of which were history books and biographies it was his passion he he after
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making his living uh by his pen as a war correspondent as we mentioned earlier because his father didn't leave
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him very much money and he had to take care of his brother and his mother he he wrote and one of the
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things that he is always interested in and driving emotional force in his life was his sense of
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history and so he wrote history books and he won the nobel prize for literature for them and how do you
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think his appreciation for history shaped his outlook on his life i mean did it make him like this sort of
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staunch reactionary traditionalist or was it something else that happened well no he i mean first of all he
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wasn't a staunch reactionary traditionist until later on his career he crossed the floor of the house of
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commons in 1904 became a liberal and was one of the founders of the british welfare state with david lloyd
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george but what it did do was to allow him to see various threats to britain in their overall historical
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contexts and so that was why he was one of the reasons why he was one of the only people certainly
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the first person in british politics to warn against the threat posed by hitler and the nazis
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because he saw the attempted hegemonization of europe as something that was in the long continuum of
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british history going back to the spanish armada and louis the 14th and napoleon and so on and so
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this was an essential prerequisite really for his being able to place the nazi threat in the correct
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historical context and it also seemed like the way you described it throughout the book is that his
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is a love of history in the past allowed him to be very forward thinking at the same time
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that's right yes he he was another example will come of course after the second world war when he was
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the first person in the west of any note to warn against the soviet threat the um the danger
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posed by stalinism to eastern europe and indeed to the whole of europe and that speech that he made
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in fulton missouri in march 1946 was deeply unpopular and he was accused of being a warmonger and denounced
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in the press and in both congress and parliament and so on but uh actually showed tremendous foresight
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another thing his appreciation for history and his knowledge his thorough knowledge of british history
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that came to be very helpful during world war ii because it seemed like he'd fall back on that
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as he was trying to mobilize and keep the british people together during you know all the bombings
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and the sort of the threat of nazism coming to them yes very true he certainly did he would talk
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about the spanish armada and about drake and about admiral nelson and the dangers to britain back in the
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napoleonic wars and and he would therefore use history as a way of basically telling the british
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people that you've been here before there've been threats of invasion in the past this is how we dealt
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with it this is what we do and we came through and we will win and so he used history very powerfully
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as a way of bolstering morale and fighting demoralization we're gonna take a quick break for
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word from our sponsors and now back to the show was churchill a religious man like did he have that
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sort of a bedrock for you know because he seems so steadfast was religion that that sort of bedrock
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for him was it something else he um it wasn't really religion no he um was he believed in an almighty
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but when you look theologically at it the sole duty of the almighty seems to have been
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to look after winston churchill uh churchill had many many brushes with death in his life
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had many accidents where he nearly died and he believed in what he called invisible wings that
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were beating over him and protecting him but he was was not a conventionally religious man in any way
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in fact he uh described his relationship to the church of england as being like that of the flying
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buttress in that he supported the church but from the outside some have described churchill as sort
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of spiritual but not religious in the sense that as you said he didn't go to church but he still had
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a real capacity for wonder and a sense of the transcendent and he believed in absolute good and evil and the
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heroic clash between those forces and he had a firm moral code a bedrock of principles like honor
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loyalty and courage and he would take time to contemplate he would sit by his fireplace with
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chart will reflecting he also seemed to have a different kind of faith as well sort of faith
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in the british empire yes he had a secular faith in the in the british empire in a sense of also the
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sort of whiggish progression of history he believed that people were were moving forward i'm not sure he
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felt that way after auschwitz and the death camps were revealed i'm not sure that he had this sense that
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mankind was getting better very much after after that but nonetheless for most of his life he tended
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to believe in a in a general sense of of human progress so churchill after the boer war he got
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elected to parliament he had a political career and then uh he was put in place as the first lord of the
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admiralty but he made some blunders there he talked about what those blunders were and how it affected
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his political career yes well as first lord of the admiralty he was in charge of the royal navy and
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he came up with this uh this idea in many ways a genius concept which was to get the royal navy
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through the dardanelles straits between europe and asia and lure it off uh constantinople modern day
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istanbul and basically knock turkey knock the ottoman empire out of the central powers which would have
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been a brilliant scheme if it had come off one of the great coups of the of world war one but
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unfortunately as a result of some mine laying the night before the uh the attack we lost six ships
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in uh the allies lost six ships on the day of the 18th of march 1915 and it was catastrophic and
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instead of calling holding off churchill insisted on a land offensive on the european side on the
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gallipoli peninsula which ultimately led to the killing or wounding of no fewer than 147 000 allied
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troops and what happened to his career after that after that happened well he was forced to resign
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was the was the first thing that happened to it in uh november 1915 but thereafter even when he was
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brought back into the government again later in the first world war every time he gave a speech at
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public meeting someone would shout out what about the dardanelles and this would carry on for another
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15 longer uh years of his career was this the time that was known as churchill's wilderness years
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the wilderness years actually started in 1930 when he resigned from the shadow cabinet from the
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conservative shadow cabinet and then spent 10 years warning against hitler and the nazis but prior to
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that he had a long period in government when he was chancellor of the exchequer and minister of the
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colonies and various other important posts like that up to the conservatives defeat in the 1929 general
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election well how did those mistakes he made that happened in world war one the dardanelles how did that
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set him up for success during world war two did he learn from that experience he did learn yes no
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exactly he made terrible mistakes in his life you know i don't want for a moment to think anybody to
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think that churchill was not a deeply flawed individual he certainly was and he made a serious
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mistake he made a mistake as chancellor of the exchequer in uh going on to the gold standard at the
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wrong time at the wrong price in 1925 he got within suffrage wrong he got the abdication wrong he got the
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dardanelles as i mentioned earlier very badly wrong you know this is not a man who got everything right in his
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career by any means however he was a politician who learned from his mistakes and to pick up the one
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that you mentioned the dardanelles he never once overruled the british chiefs of staff during the
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second world war so even though constitutionally he could as minister of defense he actually never once
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did that and that was the great message that he he took the great lesson that he learned from that
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catastrophe so we mentioned that churchill was one of the few people who saw the dangers of
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nazism when it started coming to rise and his his appreciation for history his knowledge of
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history allowed him to do that but what did he have like any personal experience where he
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you gave an almost unshakable belief that hitler had ambitions to conquer europe yes churchill as well
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as being a historian and seeing nazism as it's uh as an historical threat in terms of the past
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churchill also was a philocemite he liked jews he got on with jews personally grown up with them
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his father had liked jews he uh represented jewish constituents he was a zionist uh support of the
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balfour declaration and so of course he had an early warning system for the evils of the nazis and
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and adult itler far earlier on than a lot of the other people sitting on the benches with him of his age
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and class and background in britain at that time many of whom were anti-semitic and so that was
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another of the ways that his sort of personal beliefs and background allowed him to be the first
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major british politician to warn against what was happening and he was also one of the few leaders
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who actually read hitler's mein Kampf and he tried to tell people okay look he says right here in the book
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what he plans on doing and i think another thing you mentioned too was when he was working in india
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like he saw like jihadis like he saw jihadist extremists yes yes well not just india also of course
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the sudanese campaign uh where he was fighting against the forces of the caliphate all of the
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drive really of the caliphate army what came down to islamic fundamentalist fanaticism and so you had
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this sense that he um both in in india and africa came up very close and personal to the fanaticism
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but in this case religious fanaticism of course but a fanaticism that he was to spot again 30 years
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later in hitler and the nazis so one thing that that happened throughout churchill's life is that
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he always got pushback he was always getting criticized he was described as a pusher something
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you didn't do right you didn't you you weren't supposed to be publicly ambitious right but yeah
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and then but also he got criticized for all the things he did but it didn't seem to phase him all
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that much what was it about churchill's character or past you know experience in life that allowed
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him just to be so stoic in the face of so much criticism thrown at him well i i'm i've got a rather
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politically incorrect response to that really which is that i know it's tremendously bad to the
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have a sense of entitlement in public life today but he was tremendously entitled he was the son
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well the grandson of the duke he'd been born in a palace at the very apex of victorian society
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and which he considered to be the greatest society up until that point in the history of the world so
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he really didn't care terribly much what other people thought of him which of course is not always
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very good in democratic politics but boy did he need that in the decade of the wilderness years
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in the 1930s when he was shouted down in the house of commons decried nearly he nearly had his seat
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taken away from him by the conservatives he was attacked in the press constantly he had a thick skin
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partly down to his extremely in sort of grand backgrounds that allowed him not to care what other
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people thought of him there's a picture in the book of him when he was seven and he looks like
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like an aristocrat even at seven years old i know that way that is he's got a he's got his hand on his
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hip and uh and his uh nose pointed up yes exactly and he's he's seven years old and he and he might as well
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be a duke himself so yeah he didn't have that middle class you know status anxiety he wasn't worried
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about his place he just he knew what his place was and he just just kept on boogering on precisely
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that yes there wasn't a there wasn't a middle class bone in his body and he knew it but here's
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the interesting thing like he was an aristocrat but he wasn't a snob but no no he uh he didn't have
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any snobbishness that i was able to spot in four years of reading his papers and his letters and uh
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and all that he and actually when you look at his friends although although two of them admittedly
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were dukes the next sort of seven or eight of his closest friends were lower middle class came
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from from very humble background some of them and he treated them absolutely precisely the same as uh
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as people who were born to the purple so an important person in churchill's life was his wife
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clementine what role did his wife play in his career throughout his life she was very important
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actually uh he didn't take political advice very well from uh from most people but he would take
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it from clementine he had this sense that she was only interested in his best interests unlike some
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other uh politicians and other advisors and um and so that gave her a special imprimatur and her
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advice was usually very good in fact he was somebody who loved his wife very dearly and was and was
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faithful to her and and they had a very happy marriage but he also respected her um political
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opinions although he did not ask her about grand strategy or or uh you know take her advice on or
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even ask her advice and she certainly never gave her advice on on sort of military matters or anything
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like that but speaking of churchill's family life he did have four children how what was his
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relationship like with them like was it did he replicate the what happened with him and his father
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or was it did he try to do something different sadly he did he did to an extent replicate what
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happened with his father um he had a terrible relationship with his son randolph he nonetheless
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called after his father who was a heavy drinker and was not had none of the charm of his father
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some of the brilliant intellect of his father but uh they had endless rows he loved he loved him but
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very soon after they got together on every occasion pretty much there would be a a bad tempered spat
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so it wasn't it wasn't very happy one of his daughters died um very young and that was a tragedy for the both
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of the parents and then there were two other daughters who sorry three other daughters two of whom
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died early one as a result of suicide and the other as a result of drinking so it was not a uh it was
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not uniformly happy the other daughter mary soames lived to a lovely happy old age and was personally
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completely delightful but uh but no overall it's very difficult to be the the son or daughter of a
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great man and although he himself pulled it off his children didn't yeah i've seen that in other the
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lives of other great men like theodore roosevelt who is very much like winston churchill as i was
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reading this had very similar lives but his family life his kids had a lot of problems as well that's
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right it's not easy is it you see it again and again in in history that uh so much is expected
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and if the child can't live up to that then it's often um uh in in some form of self-destruction that
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the whole um sort of process pans out yeah i'm speaking of theodore roosevelt i'm a big fan of
00:26:07.520
him and as i was reading this i was like their lives were very similar both were sort of aristocratic
00:26:12.120
you know churchill was obviously an aristocrat roosevelt was sort of a scion of new york but they
00:26:17.360
both had that same temperament of wanting to be in the you know seeing the action wanted to be where
00:26:20.760
everything's at both uh literary men as well both became great leaders of their country uh did these
00:26:26.640
two ever cross paths when uh yes they met once and they didn't get on and um and when uh and when
00:26:34.140
um theodore roosevelt sort of alice was asked why he said oh they're far too alike and uh i think
00:26:41.960
there's something in that i think that might well have been the reason i think they spotted uh that
00:26:46.620
uh that they were very alike and and as a result that they clashed rather than uh became firm friends
00:26:52.500
so the popular image of churchill is a sort of scowling no-nonsense man wearing a bowler chomping
00:26:58.780
on a cigar but the churchill that emerges in your book is very emotional he's funny he's full of life
00:27:05.240
he's also imaginative sometimes had premonitions about things and allowed intuition to guide his
00:27:11.280
decisions so i mean he seemed to really feel things deeply how do you think churchill's
00:27:17.120
sentimentalism and romantic outlook helped him as a leader well he was precisely you're right
00:27:22.480
he was driven by his passions um to an extraordinary degree and he burst into tears 50 times during the
00:27:29.060
second world war for example um which must have been quite off-putting to see the prime minister in
00:27:33.660
the house of commons starting to cry but nonetheless people recognized that he wasn't the buttoned up
00:27:39.080
victorian aristocrat he was actually a sort of throwback from it to an earlier era the romantic
00:27:44.920
regency figure where people did wear their hearts on their sleeves they didn't mind showing their
00:27:50.640
emotions in public so in recent years there's been a lot of criticisms lobbed at churchill
00:27:56.160
like he was a racist that he tried to commit genocide in india during world war ii that he was the
00:28:02.080
mastermind behind the dresden bombings are there i mean based on this new information you've gotten
00:28:06.820
are there is there much validity to these criticisms i don't think there is really no not when it's seen
00:28:12.320
in its proper historical context churchill was uh at school while charl darwin was still alive and
00:28:19.140
people did believe that there were hierarchies of races in those days and however absurd and indeed
00:28:25.800
obscene we might think that today at the time it was considered an actual scientific fact and um what
00:28:32.840
he took from that was actually the exact opposite of what hitler and the nazis took from it which was
00:28:38.960
that he believed that the british had a profound responsibility and duty to the people the native
00:28:45.220
peoples of the empire um and that's what he dedicated his life to so uh i see this criticism of the him
00:28:52.960
in some way encouraging uh genocide at the time of the bengal famine as being absolutely uh well as well
00:28:59.820
as factually incorrect also completely the opposite of what winston churchill was trying to do in fact when
00:29:05.980
you look at his letters to president roosevelt asking for for wheat and and grain to be sent to
00:29:11.720
india not just roosevelt as well the prime ministers of australia and canada as well he wouldn't be doing
00:29:17.240
that if he was a genocidal maniac he did everything that was possible at the time to save the bengali
00:29:24.260
the starving bengalis but of course with the normal places that one buys grain in these circumstances
00:29:31.940
such as burma and thailand and malaya under japanese occupation it was next to impossible to
00:29:38.380
get grain in overseas these are perfectly reasonable um responses i think to a totally unreasonable
00:29:46.440
ahistorical series of attacks on him with regard to the the bombing of dresden which i go into in some
00:29:54.120
detail in my book the fact is that the railway nodal points from east to west went through dresden and
00:30:01.300
dresden the russians begged us to uh to destroy these and we did the best we possibly could on the
00:30:07.520
night of the 13th of february 1945 um the reason that so many people died in dresden and by the way
00:30:14.180
it was about 20 000 not the 120 that the nazis claimed and which unfortunately some ex-historians
00:30:21.260
like david irving also propound the reason nevertheless that 20 000 people died was that the local gauleiter
00:30:29.180
of dresden didn't provide proper air raid precautions in the city not thinking that it was
00:30:35.420
ever going to be hit but but it was hit and it was a perfectly reasonable legitimate military target
00:30:41.440
so you know churchill became a great leader during world war ii do you think he was born a great leader
00:30:48.700
did he fashion himself into one he very much fashions himself into one he went out very deliberately
00:30:55.180
as a young man to become a great man and and you see this again and again in the early chapters i
00:31:02.700
think of of my book he he felt that he was walking with destiny but it was very much a destiny that he
00:31:08.860
was going to fashion himself what do you think are the leadership lessons people could take today from
00:31:15.020
the life of churchill oh there are so many there are some on pretty much every page his foresight
00:31:20.860
which we've gone into his personal courage and both physical and moral his ability to learn from
00:31:29.180
lessons his sheer resilience coming back from disaster after disaster really well andrew this
00:31:36.540
has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book well the first place
00:31:40.020
i'd like them to go to obviously is their local independent bookshop or amazon but there are the reviews
00:31:46.220
are on my website www.andrew-roberts.net um but uh but really the best thing if you want to know
00:31:57.100
more about winston churchill is to uh is to get the book well andrew roberts thank you so much for
00:32:01.500
time it's been a pleasure it's been a delight thank you very much indeed my guest today was andrew
00:32:05.900
roberts he's the author of the book churchill walking with destiny it's available on amazon.com
00:32:10.220
and bookstores everywhere you can find out more information about his work at his website andrew-roberts.net
00:32:15.340
or check out our show notes at aom.is slash churchill where you find links to resources
00:32:20.700
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at
00:32:31.460
artofmanlius.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles we've
00:32:35.740
written over the years including an in-depth series about life lessons from winston churchill
00:32:39.600
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00:33:09.200
reminding you not only to listen to the aom podcast but put what you've heard into action