Winston Churchill: An Informal Study Of Greatness – Robert Lewis Taylor, 1952 ★★½

Winston Triumphant

Can greatness actually inhibit one’s appreciation of a fellow human being? If you are a biographer, oh yes, indeed!

Robert Lewis Taylor’s enthusiasm for Winston Churchill is boundless, from first page to last. His Churchill divides his time between running governments, fighting wars, and writing best-sellers, then for an encore goes on to save the world from the horror known as Adolf Hitler.

Meanwhile, whatever exists of an inner man slips away unnoticed. For such a public figure with so much written by and about him, Taylor’s Churchill feels a bit thin.

Make no mistake, Taylor is very impressed with Churchill, and thinks you should be, too. “It is wholly possible that he is the liveliest personality yet produced by the upper vertebrates,” is one of the first statements Taylor makes in this lively but star-struck biography.

At book’s end, Taylor celebrates Churchill’s return in 1951 to leadership of Great Britain as a victory lap: England continues to cry hail to her man of heroic size, the last of the great statesmen, a giant among pygmies.

Churchill in his element, 1941. Taylor notes that while Churchill was not a gifted extemporaneous speaker, he was a master of preparation and seizing the moment. In debates he often dominated even when on the losing side. Image from https://www.junobeach.org/canada-in-wwii/articles/winston-churchill/.

You might be forgiven in thinking from its tone that Taylor is one of Churchill’s loyal backbenchers in Parliament. In fact, he was an American writer, like many fellow Americans very impressed by and grateful for what Churchill accomplished.

Taylor went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Travels Of Jaimie McPheeters. The man could definitely write, even if he comes off starry-eyed here:

It is a curious truth that, all his life, something about him, his mood of truculence, an excess of vigor, his defiant scowl, have aroused antagonism in people almost automatically. They rally around happily to bait him, as the townsfolk of Pamplona appear annually in the streets to bait the season’s bulls…Actually, the public’s unseemly attentions to Churchill are a compliment of very rare quality: weaklings are tormented but never baited, only championship class attracts the best opposition.

For all the note Taylor makes of Churchill as noble flak-catcher, there is a flippancy in the way Churchill: An Informal Study Of Greatness handles the struggles of its title character that makes whatever Winston overcome seem not quite all that. Snark was not a standard feature of a writer’s arsenal the 1950s, but Taylor employs a precursor of that here.

Churchill is caricatured in a 1921 Punch cartoon. Taylor quotes him saying: “If it had only been a hundred years earlier, what splendid times we should have had! Fancy being nineteen in 1793 with more than twenty years of war with Napoleon in front of one!” Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/115194888@N06/12673411003/. 

Churchill had been the subject of biographies for sixty years when Churchill himself died in 1965. Taylor catches Churchill just as he was beginning his second run as Prime Minister, at perhaps the apogee of his career. He was both an acknowledged victor of the Second World War and a leading opponent of socialism. Taylor’s admiration for Churchill in both departments manages to be both amusing and shrill:

In the last year of the war Churchill committed himself to an “anti-liberal” action that gave him his envied start toward becoming the premier target of the left-wingers, or plotters against society. Despite his history of fifty years of humanitarian endeavors, he stands today as a sort of free-enterprise lightning rod, drawing off the furies of ideological conspiracy.

An Informal Study Of Greatness is a better read when it leaves off current-day partisan flashpoints to examine Churchill’s early life. Even before the world wars, Churchill kept very busy.

He grew up wanting to be a soldier, eventually attending Sandhurst, the British military academy, to that end. Before that, he was a brilliant but indifferent student at Harrow, the renown public school. “He was known as ‘Carrot Top’ to the boys of Harrow, who quickly learned that he had the explosive qualities thought to accompany red hair,” Taylor writes.

Winston Churchill at ages seven, twelve, and as a young man. Taylor quotes H. G. Welles: “There are times when the evil spirit comes upon him, and then I can only think of him as an intractable little boy, a mischievous, dangerous little boy, a knee-worthy little boy. Only by thinking of him in that way can I go on liking him.” Image from https://www.vintag.es/2019/05/young-winston-churchill.html

Playing tag with his brother Jack and a cousin, Churchill was corralled by his opponents in the middle of a bridge stretching over a forest. He jumped for the tops of the fir trees, planning to slide down. He fell instead, knocking himself unconscious and rupturing a kidney.

“The argument was correct, the data was absolutely wrong,” was how Churchill would explain it later.

Something of the same approach applied to his political life. He failed in his first bid for Parliament, but he was nothing if not dogged, winning seats in three different districts under two different parties by 1924. He was alternately a radical Conservative and a jingoist Liberal:

“Churchill’s views were formless and shifting, pulled along as a sort of kite tail to his central motive force of ambition,” Taylor writes. “He had Liberal stirrings, but he was still a technical Tory.”

It helped he enjoyed some celebrity from his overseas exploits, protecting British imperial interests as a fighting correspondent in India and Egypt, then being briefly captured by the enemy during the Boer War and making a headline-grabbing escape.

When Churchill escaped from a Boer prisoner-of-war camp in 1899, wanted posters offered 25 pounds for the fugitive dead or alive. Included was a description: “...indifferent build, walks with a forward stoop, pale appearance, red-brownish hair, small and hardly noticeable mustache, talks through his nose and cannot pronounce the letter 'S' properly.” Image from https://espliego.wordpress.com/2014/11/29/sir-winston-churchill/.

Even before all that, Churchill made his future direction clear by getting a job with a newspaper to cover Cuba’s rebellion against Spain. Taylor’s description is typically tongue-in-cheek: “It was a strange and fashionable struggle and Churchill was among the first to recognize it as a competitive entertainment, a sort of World’s Fair with funerals.”

Churchill was a fine speaker despite a childhood handicap. Taylor explains:

From birth he has suffered from a slight lisp, a not unmelodic impediment in his speech. It made him whistle the letter s…In writing his speeches, Churchill continued to avoid beginning and terminal s’s and struck a rueful, boyish expression whenever one accidentally reared its hissing head.

In 1911 Home Secretary Churchill looked on (first on the left in tophat) while police fought radicals in London's Sidney Street. “He looked a little as though a professional dresser had made him up to play Auguste Dupin in a suburban presentation of The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Taylor notes. Image from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6759847/Colourised-footage-shows-Churchill-1911-Sidney-Street-siege.html.

The light and playful spirit of Taylor’s book skims the many controversies Churchill found himself mired in. His plan to attack Turkey in World War I would have worked, we are told, and not been repulsed with massive loss of life at Gallipoli, if only the military commanders pressed the attack.

Gallipoli finished him as a Liberal, but he was reborn as a Conservative and soon after being made Chancellor of the Exchequer, found himself the target of left-wing unrest. He took to the streets to plead his case.

“He would no sooner set up on a street corner than a flying wedge of share-the-wealth addicts would sweep over the stands like cattle, destroying his props and stampeding the crowd,” Taylor writes.

A Tory again in 1929, Churchill is accompanied by his family to the House of Commons where he would present the budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Image from https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/reference/churchills-political-offices-1906-1955/.

The left succeeded in shouting down Churchill then, and for a decade after he wrote books and partied dourly on the Continent. The rise of Hitler in Germany restored his vigor, as he became a lonely voice in Parliament, calling for preventative action and shouted down by the forces of peace. “In a nation afflicted by mass blindness, only Churchill could see,” Taylor notes.

Being proven right is one thing. Being the leader of your country when it beats back a totalitarian enemy that has engulfed Europe and left you to fight alone is what makes Churchill a legend, and Taylor is happy to add to its glow. He recalls Churchill after Dunkirk, having but barely averted a total disaster. “Well, gentlemen, we are alone. For myself, I find it extremely exhilarating.”

An Informal Study Of Greatness is not a scholarly book. There are no footnotes, no sources, not even an index. Colorful anecdotes are relayed without attribution. The fragrance of “print-the-legend” is palpable.

Churchill returned as Great Britain's prime minister in 1951, at age 76. Next to him is his wife, Lady Clementine Churchill. One highlight of this tenure was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, but Churchill was in poor health much of the time and resigned in 1955. Image from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/on-this-day-churchills-election-victory-g0psd3tbn3g.

At one point in the book, Taylor touches on Churchill’s famous tendency toward depression, what Churchill himself once called his “black dog,” but rather than play armchair psychologist, Taylor dismisses the whole matter:

A mysterious fact is that, once in a long while, Churchill will sit huddled in apparent deep dejection, neither speaking nor replying. It is a Hamlet-like brooding, not brought on by alcohol but rather the result, a few think, of getting one of his intuitive glimpses of the probable future and mourning the human follies to come.

More attention is given to Churchill’s lighter side: his love of Deanna Durbin movies, his enthusiasm for marching music, his avoidance of make-up when being photographed as he preferred a scowling visage. Told once while bathing naked in the ocean that he could be seen with a pair a binoculars, Churchill just shrugged: “If they are that much interested it is their own fault what they see.”

Churchill painted in his spare time. Above is one of his works, “Goldfish Pool At Chartwell.” Writes Taylor: “He is a bold colorist, a reflection of his character, which is one of bright and positive hues rather than shadowy grays and melancholy browns.” Image from https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/former-british-pm-winston-churchills-last-painting-to-go-up-for-auction.

The book has a lot of ground to cover in its 433 pages; but still takes time out for an appreciation of Churchill’s painting and his famous love of cigars. Churchill smoked on average 16 a day, though he seldom finished more than half of one.

He was also a hearty drinker, though Taylor claims not to excess. Churchill was the sort who could tipple with the best of them, but at heart Taylor’s version of him was one who did most of his drinking from the cup of life. “If I have been of any service to my fellow men, it has never been by self-repression, but always by self-expression,” Churchill is quoted as saying. It makes a fitting epitaph for Taylor’s version of the man, served without warts nor regrets.