Churchill’s schoolboy failings have been greatly exaggerated, not least by Churchill himself. Early on, handed a primer called Reading Without Tears, he said he wept over the “menace” of education. While strongly supporting British “public” (private) schools, he added, “I do not want to go there again.”1
Go there for an education, that is. When Churchill wrote this he had already twice returned to speak at his old school, Harrow, joyfully and often in tears of remembrance. He would appear there frequently from 1938 to 1962. Yet half a century since he had left as a pupil, he was still declaiming on his failures. In 1946 he accepted an honorary degree from the University of Miami. He professed mock surprise that he should be receiving so many honorary degrees “when, as a schoolboy I was so bad at passing examinations.”2
Churchill, an otherwise admiring scholar wrote, “was a pretty tough proposition for an organized system of education.”3 Yet he was not nearly the dunce of popular mythology. If only subconsciously, he stressed his school failures to suggest how far he had come. Biographers have accepted his declarations too innocently.
From the start, young Winston was a problem learner. As a five-year-old in 1879, he started home schooling under an apparition called “The Governess.” Alarmed, he “took to the woods” (the garden of his residence). He was summarily extracted and made to toil daily, not simply at words but, more shockingly, at numbers. He thought it all “very tiresome.”
St. George’s and Sneyd-Kinnersley
The education process worsened in November 1882, when he was sent to St. George’s School, Ascot. The Head Master, a thirty-four-year-old tyrant named Herbert W. Sneyd-Kinnersley, boasted two coats of arms for each side of his double-barreled name. Described by one alumnus as “an unconscious sodomite,” he was accused of flogging boys till they bled.
Breaking bad, Winston was told on arrival to learn the first declension of “mensa,” Latin for “table.” He memorized it, gabbled it off, then asked the Head Master about the vocative case: “Why ‘O table?’” Sneyd-Kinnersley replied: “You would use that in addressing a table….in speaking to a table.” “But I never do!” the astonished Winston replied. “If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely.”4 And he was.
There is no doubt that Sneyd-Kinnersley administered severe beatings, but his cruelty may be exaggerated. His biographer argues that the beatings were less frequent than alleged: “The story “has been embroidered by Churchill’s worshipful biographers…. The glorification of Churchill as a national hero has involved the demonizing of his enemies.” Absent those beatings, he argues, Winston would not have developed the bulldog defiance of tyranny that saved Britain in 1940.5
Whatever the reality, the boy’s health broke down at St. George’s, and his mother and nurse saw evidence of the beatings. He was removed to a smaller school at Brighton, where it was thought the sea air would be healthier and his education gentler.
Brighton and The Misses Thomson
The school was run by two kindly sisters, Charlotte and Catherine Thomson. Here was education in a more palatable form. Winston swam, rode, and soon recovered his health. He also found subjects he liked: history, poetry, literature.
When he was nine his father presented him with Treasure Island, which he devoured. The Misses Thomson objected, Churchill remembered, to “reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form.”6 He was still hard to manage, and on 18 March 1888, when Charlotte Thomson escorted him to Harrow for the entrance exam, she did so with relief.
Examinations, Churchill wrote, were an “inhospitable region,” a “great trial.” He liked English and history; alas, the examiners favored Latin and math: “I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew.”7 (Was his experience very different from our own? This writer often had that feeling studying calculus and physics.)
Although the Churchill men usually attended Eton, his parents sent Winston to Harrow, north of London, perched on a hill where the air was better, and in those days still countryside.8 His autobiography famously recounts his dismal performance in the Latin entrance exam, which has been repeated ever since: all he produced on his sheet of paper was his name in block letters, the legend “[1],” an ink blot and several smudges.
He was admitted anyway, with “the consolatory thought that the offspring of so distinguished a father could not fail somehow to make good.”9 Harrow’s Head Master, Bishop James Welldon, was “very much in admiration of Lord Randolph [and was] assured by Winston’s teacher that he was capable of good work.”10 Indeed, he had spent a year at Brighton translating Caesar and Virgil.11
Harrow education
Significantly, Harrow historians have never found the offending Latin exam paper. Some say that in 1888, not even Lord Randolph’s son could have been admitted to Harrow knowing no Latin. Also, though Churchill never mentioned them, the entry exam included other subjects, on which he presumably did better.
It is true that Welldon favored the boy, personally tutoring him and eventually admitting him to the Head Master’s House. His esteem was reciprocated. Welldon, Churchill wrote, could see his potential: “I have always had the highest regard for him.”12James Welldon lived almost long enough to see Churchill as prime minister.
The boy was placed in the third (lowest) division of the fourth (bottom) form, where he remained for a year, when he transferred to the Army class, but never rose very high. Since the roster printed names alphabetically, “Spencer-Churchill” was only two from the last. The other two dropped out, and visitors looking for Lord Randolph’s son would exclaim, “Why, he’s last of all!” Biographers have given this more attention than it deserves. It does explain why, as a published author, he always used “Churchill,” an alphabetically higher byline.
Ups and downs
Harrow master A.W. Simmons remembered: “Some people have thought that at that time he was stupid; but that is entirely a mistaken idea…. He had always a brilliant brain, but he would only work when he chose to and for the masters he approved of… I formed the highest opinion of his abilities….”13
Winston had no education disability, but he did have an “attitude.” His first house master was H.O.D. Davidson, who took him, wrote Robert Lewis Taylor, “much as one might pick up a snake with a pair of tongs. What was Davidson’s astonishment, as they proceeded to the boy’s quarters, to hear Winston ask chattily, ‘And what did you think of the House of Commons vote on the last military bill?’” The boy was then fourteen. Taylor continued:
He took exception to everything…. The boys looked upon masters as their natural enemies….. Every sort of classism was encouraged: the boys in the upper forms detested the boys in the lower forms [and] merry warfare reigned. The accommodations at both Harrow and Eton, and at most public schools, offered the usual comforts of the average Trappist monastery.14
His rule-breaking is not much mentioned in Churchill’s autobiography, but it is part of the true picture. He was “quite incorrigible,” a close observer wrote, “and had an unlimited vocabulary of ‘back-chat,’ which he produced with dauntless courage.”
Recorded but not confirmed was this exchange with a master: “Spencer-Churchill, I have very grave reason to be displeased with you.” Winston: “And I, sir, have very grave reason to be displeased with you!” After a beating by a privileged upperclassman, he retorted, “I shall be a greater man than you!” He was given two extra whacks, but was proven right.15
“Full of high spirits”
Against this negative testimony stands that of Wright Cooper, who ran a confectionary, the education establishment’s “tuck shop.” Churchill, Cooper said, was
an extraordinarily good boy…honest and generous in a day when robust appetites were not always accompanied by well-lined pockets. My family lived over the shop, and when Churchill was downstairs we all knew it. Boys always crowded round his table. He talked loudly and usually led the conversation. He knew, too, what he was talking about, and nothing came amiss to him…. [WSC] was well behaved and had the ear of everyone. When his father or his mother came to see him, he used to book a table in the tuck shop, and that was a great occasion for him. He was extremely happy at Harrow and full of high spirits.16
Cooper’s remarks are an interesting counter-opinion. Winston Churchill always did have a sympathy for the working classes, and Cooper probably saw him at his best—especially when his parents visited.
Concluded in Part 2.
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 53, 15.
2 Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2015), 526. E.D.W. Chaplin, Churchill at Harrow (Harrow, Middlesex: The Harrow Bookshop, 1941), 45. Churchill returned to Harrow to lecture on his Boer War experiences in 1900; as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1928; to judge the Bourchier Reading Prize in 1938; as Prime Minister in 1940-41, and on many occasions after the Second World War. His last visit was in 1962. He always praised his Harrow education.
3 Sir Cyril Norwood, former president of St. John’s College, Oxford, in Chaplin, Winston Churchill at Harrow, 3.
4 Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 1, Youth 1874-1900 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2006), 47, 55-56.
5 F. Roger Devin, “Setting the Record Straight,” a review of Edward Dutton, Churchill’s Headmaster: The “Sadist” Who Nearly Saved the British Empire (Auckland: Manticore Press, 2019. In Occidental Observer, 13 June 2019, accessed 6 October 2024.
6 Churchill, My Early Life, 26-27.
7 Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 451.
8 Robert Lewis Taylor, Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952), 60.
9 Sir Gerald Woods Wollaston, “Churchill at Harrow,” in Charles Eade, Churchill by His Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1953), 1-6.
10 Celia and John Lee, Winston & Jack: The Churchill Brothers (London: Privately published, 2007), 77. Critics have asserted that Welldon did not dare to deny a distinguished politician like Lord Randolph Churchill—which is quite wide of the mark.
11 Geoffrey J. Fletcher, “Spencer-Churchill (p) at Harrow School 1888-1892,” Part 1, Finest Hour 133, Winter 2006-07, 31-35.
12 Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 377.
13 A.W. Simmons, “Spencer Churchill, W.L.,” in Chaplin, Churchill at Harrow, 11-12.
14 Taylor, Informal Study, 60-62.
15 Wollaston, “Churchill at Harrow,” 3.
16 Wright Cooper in Chaplin, Churchill at Harrow,” 84.
Related reading
David Lough, “Great Contemporaries: Lady Randolph Churchill,” 2019.
The Churchill Project, “Churchill’s Pride in His Father,” 2016.
Video
James W. Muller, “Young Winston and My Early Life,” 2019.
