During Churchill’s brief tenure as a junior officer stationed in India, he occupied his time in four main activities. (1) playing as much polo as possible; (2) taking long vacations – far more than were normally permitted to a young officer in India; (3) systematically reading through classics, to attempt to remedy his deficient formal education. The reading program was in service to ambition, not knowledge for its own sake. Macaulay, Gibbon, Plato and others, he wrote to his mother, “must train the muscles to wield the sword to the greatest effect” (Gilbert 70). The fourth activity may have required the least amount of actual time, but was probably the most important for understanding his future course: namely, there was scarcely an armed conflict anywhere in the world which he failed to inveigle himself to the front lines of. Continue reading…
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Winston Churchill was educated in four schools. First, was St George’s near Ascot, where he attended from age 7 to 9. The main thing of note here is that the physical discipline was quite harsh, in the manner that has been made famous by English “public schools” of that period; only more so. Delicate health led to transfer to Brighton, where the family doctor resided. Next was prep-school Eton-competitor Harrow, aged 13-17. Winnie was not a particularly good student, and at some point Lord Randolph decided on a military trajectory for his career (but noting that, if worse came to worst, he could tap his connections with the Rothschild family to get Winny started in a business career [Gilbert 32]). Continue reading…
It is traditional in biography to begin with some notes on genealogy: a bit of background on members upward on the family tree.
Little Winston Spencer Churchill was born into partial British nobility on the father’s side, and American wealth Continue reading…
