My Early Life

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Despite his departure from the home of polo, Churchill continued to love and play the game. An appointment book for 1901, his first year in Parliament, showed notations for polo seven times in May, (mostly Thursday and Saturday at 3:30), including Crystal Palace on the 30th. In June polo was scheduled for three days; the 20th had the notation “Windsor.” Listed for Saturday July 6th was “House of Commons versus Guards” and Monday-Wednesday August 5th-7th were again marked “Windsor.” Winston informed his mother that he had “decided definitely to play polo this year [1901] in a team which is being formed by some of my young military friends, and I think if I get two days a week at Hurlingham or Ranelagh, it will provide me with the physical exercise and mental countercurrent which these late hours and continual sitting of the house absolutely require.”[38] Born in 1874, the son of a Chancellor of the Exchequer contemporary with Gladstone and Disraeli, he made his name as a journalist covering the Boer War, became an MP at 26, President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, and the scapegoat of the catastrophe at Gallipoli in 1915. He was rehabilitated in his father Lord Randolph’s old post in 1924, but by 1930 – with the Conservatives in Opposition – he was in the wilderness. After he left Sandhurst, Churchill traveled all around the British Empire as a soldier and as a journalist. In 1896, he went to India; his first book, published in 1898, was an account of his experiences in India’s Northwest Frontier Province.

In addition to his own life story, he is concerned to paint “a picture of a vanished age”, the fin-de-siècle world that would morph into Edwardian England. Additionally, as a man of action, Churchill knows how to tell a story, and make it live. My Early Life has countless minor pleasures, and two great set-piece narratives, the Battle of Omdurman (1898) and, in another theatre of imperial conflict, Churchill’s capture by the Boers (The Armoured Train) in 1899. Churchill hoped that this offensive would drive Turkey out of the war and encourage the Balkan states to join the Allies, but Turkish resistance was much stiffer than he had anticipated. After nine months and 250,000 casualties, the Allies withdrew in disgrace. Winston’s last game had the longest gestation of them all. Plans for it began in the autumn of 1926, when Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes invited Churchill, who was planning a holiday cruise in the Mediterranean, to inspect the fleet. They were old friends, having met during polo around 1904, according to Keyes’ biographer: in those days young Keyes and his colleagues “would drive down to Wembley and play polo on hired ponies from 8 to 9 am. Often, before they finished, a party of young Members of Parliament would arrive to play from 9 to 10 am and it was at Wembley that [Keyes] first made the acquaintance of Winston Churchill.”[48]

Even with his arm immobilized, Winston managed to play well enough that his team beat the 5th Dragoon Guards by 16 to 2, and the 9th Lancers 2 to 1, in the first round on 23 February. In their final match with the 4th Dragoon Guards on the 24th, the Hussars won 4 to 3, making them Inter-Regimental Champions! On this occasion his mother helped, and Churchill added to his stable which, owing to the vigor of the game, required more than one pony. “I had five quite good ponies, and was considered to show promise,” he recalled in My Early Life.[17] For six months he lived at home in London and played polo at Hurlingham in Essex and Ranelagh. The first English edition published by Thornton Butterworth in October 1930 sold 11,200 copies, and the American edition published by Charles Scribner's Sons sold 6,600. Scribner's titled the book by the name of its UK subtitle, A Roving Commission. After losing another election in 1950, Churchill gained victory at the polls the following year. Publicly he called for “several years of quiet steady administration”. Privately he declared that his policy was “houses, red meat and not getting scuppered”. This he achieved. But after suffering a stroke and the failure of his last hope of arranging a Summit with the Russians, he resigned from the premiership in April 1955. Churchill began his political career as a member of the Conservative Party and was first elected as a Member of Parliament (MP), representing the Oldham constituency, on 24 October 1900. Dissatisfaction with Conservative government policy caused him to resign his party membership and join the Liberals in 1904.

In one of these years we paid a visit to Emo Park, the seat of Lord Portarlington, who was explained to me as a sort of uncle. Of this place I can give very clear descriptions, though I have never been there since I was four or four and a half. The central point in my memory is a tall white stone tower which we reached after a considerable drive. I was told it had been blown up by Oliver Cromwell. I understood definitely that he had blown up all sorts of things and was therefore a very great man.Again, the young hero’s account of his charmed life in the frontline is never vainglorious. When he asked a fellow officer what the battle had looked like from afar, Churchill reports that his contemporary replied, dismissively, “It looked like plum duff: brown currants scattered about in a great deal of suet.” At Hyderabad, the 4th Hussars strategy of buying a seasoned stud on arrival in Bombay was vindicated. “This performance is a record,” Churchill continued, “no English regiment ever having won a first-class tournament within a month of their arrival in India. The Indian papers express surprise and admiration. I will send you by the next mail some interesting instantaneous photographs of the match — in which you will remark me — fiercely struggling with turbaned warriors.”[21] This is an interesting contradiction to what Churchill himself wrote in My Early Life 30 years later. Here he said he had dislocated his shoulder when he first arrived in India. He described how he had grabbed an iron hand-hold ring at the quayside when the boat fell with a surge and he wrenched his shoulder. Thereafter, he wrote, he had to play polo with his arm strapped to his side. The book includes an observation made upon the death of his nanny. He wrote, "She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived." [2] Book [ edit ]