He won a school prize for reciting by heart 400 lines from Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome”. Now, Churchill was not a dunce at school. This would, however, ladies and gentlemen, be a conclusion unedifying in the academic atmosphere in which I now preen myself, and I therefore hasten to draw another moral with which I am sure we shall all be in accord, namely, that no boy or girl should ever be disheartened by lack of success in their youth but should diligently and faithfully continue to persevere and make up for lost time.” From this, a superficial thinker might argue that the way to get the most degrees is to fail in the most examinations. In fact, one might almost say that no one ever passed so few examinations and received so many degrees. In 1946, he was given an honorary degree at the University of Miami and he said: “I am surprised that in my later I should have become so experienced in taking degrees when, as a schoolboy, I was so bad at passing examinations. Lord Randolph Churchill then was a brilliant failure, and his son was haunted throughout his life with the thought that his career might imitate that of his father, and that he too might be written off as a glorious failure.Ĭhurchill was educated at Harrow School and there was a general belief, which he did nothing to discourage, that he was something of a dunce at school, and indeed Churchill played on that for effect. He died at the age of 46, on the 24th of January 1895, curiously on the same date as his son 70 years later. By 1886, at the age of 37, he was the second man in his party, Leader of the House of Commons, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, the youngest Chancellor since Pitt, but after less than five months in the Cabinet, he resigned on an issue of economy and government and was never to hold office again. He was first elected to the House of Commons in 1874 as a Conservative at the age of 25, and proved himself a great parliamentarian and popular orator. Someone was later to describe Churchill as half-American and all-British.Ĭhurchill’s father had a meteoric political career. His mother was an American, Jennie Jerome. His father was the youngest son of the Duke of Marlborough and as such had a courtesy title, Lord Randolph Churchill. Now, Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough, in November 1874. What I propose to do is to draw up a balance sheet of Churchill’s achievements but also of his misjudgements, and then to show why it is a futile exercise in the case of a man who was the saviour of his country. It seems to me, paradoxically, that many of his achievements, apart from his Wartime leadership, are less well-known than they should be, and I confess, when I began preparing this lecture, I thought I should find his achievements had been too much celebrated, but, somewhat to my surprise, I found that his political legacy is actually greater than I had previously thought. Indeed, almost any account of his career is bound to be incomplete. Indeed, Churchill’s career in politics was so various that it is virtually impossible to summarise in 60 minutes. This vast span is unparalleled in British history, except by Gladstone and perhaps by Balfour. He is, of course, best remembered for his leadership during the Second World War, but he had in fact been a member of various Cabinets for nearly 30 years: two Liberal Cabinets, three Coalition Cabinets, and four Conservative Cabinets. He had left the House of Commons three months earlier, in October 1964, having first become an MP in 1900, in the last Parliament of Queen Victoria’s reign. Ladies and gentlemen, this lecture is intended to commemorate Winston Churchill, who died just 50 years ago on the 24th of January 1965.
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