CHURCHILL’S CAREER

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 214, 29 November 1927, Page 15

CHURCHILL’S CAREER

SOLDIER, JOURNALIST, STATESMAN AN EVENTFUL RECORD Here we have an epic of adventure. Mr. Churchill has been a soldier and strategist; a politician and a painter, an historian and a journalist. He has written as many books as Moses, and held more Ministerial posts than any living statesman, says a writer in reviewing “Winston Churchill,’’ by “Ephesian,” in the London “Daily Chronicle.” His life is a record of amazing vicissitudes. When he succeeds, he succeeds brilliantly: when he fails, he fails splendidly. He is the Lycidas of politics, sunk beneath the “watery floor” at one moment, and the next, like the Daystar, he “repairs his drooping head” and “flames in the forehead of the morning sky.’’ Fortune has often knocked Mr. Churchill down. It has never counted him out. ‘‘.Ephesian’’ tells, in his racy style, the Odyssey of his early life. Born into a splendid tradition, boasting great generals and statesmen as his forbears, he is himself a young man in a hurry. A far-seeing journalist wrote of Mr. Churchill, then in his early twenties: “There will hardly be room for him in politics at 30, or in England when he is 40.” Apology by Epigram At school he showed little promise. He starts at Harrow inauspiciously and with a typical act of impudence and precosity. Finding a small boy on the side of the bath, he pushes him into the water. The victim turns out to be a monitor, one Amery, now his colleague in the Cabinet. Churchill shows the germ of a great Parliamentarian. He apologises with an epigram. “My father,” he says, “is also a great man—but small.” School taught him little. It was the world of adventure that claimed and educated him. He joins the Army, and by the age of 25 he has fought in five campaigns in three continents. In all these campaigns he gets himself appointed as war correspondent as well. He returns to England and writes a history of the Malidi revolt in the “River War,” which is well received. Now he has his first taste of politics. He is adopted as Tory candidate for Oldham, but is defeated by Mr. Runciman. The Boer War gave him further scope as a war correspondent. After a score of adventures, including his now notorious escape from Pretoria, he returns to England a romantic figure. He lectures on the Boer War and earns the princely sum of £IO,OOO. At his second venture Oldham elects him member of Parliament in January, 1901. In two years his reputation as a trenchant debater is established. His maiden speech is in reply to Mr. Lloyd George, then the rising hope of the Liberal Party. Strangely enough, it is as the champion of economy that Churchill wins his spurs. In three years he has left his party on the Tariff issue, and in five he is in the great Liberal Government of 1906 as Under-Secretary to the Colonies. Natural Fencer

In those Homeric fights on the Bud- } get, the House of Lords, and Irish Home Rule, Churchill is in his element. He takes his place as one of the best debaters and public speakers among contemporaries of more than usual gifts. At school he was an expert fencer, surprising his opponents by dashing attacks. This and the rapier thrust of humour are still his methods. He becomes President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary and the war finds him not yet 40 but 'ln charge of the Admiralty at the Empire’s most critical hour. “Ephesian" challenges Mrs. Asquith’s version of the Cabinet meeting on August 4. It is not true to say that “with a happy face he strode toward the double doors of the Cabinet room. He entered through the other door. Mrs. Asquith cannot see him. But it is true that a tear rolls down his face when the Prime Minister announces to Parliament that we are at war.” Mr. Churchill’s war record is within too recent memory to need elaboration. He is over-blamed for the splendid failures of Antwerp and Gallipoli, and under-praised for his mobilisation of the Fleet without Cabinet sanction, his contribution as Minister of Munitions, and, above all, for his prescience in fathering the tank. His own part in these momentous events Mr. Churchill has given to the world in a war history that for descriptive writing and cogent reasoning places him in the front rank of historians. Re- Emergence With the break-up of the Coalition, Mr. Churchill is almost submerged in the trough of the waves. Dundee and West Leicester reject him. He learns to paint and writes his war history. In February, 1924, he fights the Westminster by-election as an Independent Constitutionalist, and is beaten by 43 votes. This is surely the end. He has left the Liberal Party and fought the adopted and successful Conservative candidate at Westminster. His star must now have set. That is in February. In November lie is Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Baldwin Government, wearing the very Chancellor’s robes worn by his father, 48 years before. “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.” “Ephesian" aptly describes Mr. Churchill “as half a Pitt and half a Puck.” But who will be bold enough to predict that Winston Churchill will not end his Odyssey in 10 Downing Street? Certainly “Ephesian” has provided an exhilarating tonic to all those buffeted by the vicissitudes of political life.