Cuckoo In the Nest

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 670, 23 May 1929, Page 8

Cuckoo In the Nest

Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill

PARTIES cannot break him. He is superior to parties. ITe is a cuckoo in the Tory nest, although the Tories themselves scarcely suspect it. One of these days, he may head a government of national union (that government of which the ageing Lloyd George dreams), and have all the die-hards wondering why they didn’t down the man when they had the chance.”

S° observes a candid writer in ' Time and Tide,” who describes the Right Hon. Winston Churchill as an adventurer, but a responsible adventurer. “That is to say, he calculates. Also, he takes a pride in achieving success. Northeliffe was like that. So was Napoleon. So is Mussolini. Some people are in politics because it is the right thing to do. Winston Churchill is not one of them. He is in politics because he finds politics exciting, and because he loves power. His astonishing career has been full of romance and drama. Life has found in hiffi a magnificent instrument upon which to play the most dazzling impromptus. He has held more Ministerial posts than any other living Englishman. He has, indeed, always been ready to tackle any Ministerial job, provided it was big enough. He does everything with boldness, and an air. A MAN OF COURAGE “He rides courageously—those who saw how he behaved when he put his shoulder out in the hunting field had to concede him physical courage of a very high order —and he writes brilliantly, getting his effect with great sweeping strokes, intensifying light and shadow to heighten the drama of his subject. He shoots well, he hunts boars, he paints (Lavery taught him), he makes splendid orations, which he writes out beforehand, and learns off by heart. He is a terrific worker, and a full-hearted player. See him at polo, striking arm leashed, laced up in a riding corset, mounted on a pony like a young cart horse. (He rides all of 15st, and lost his figure early in life, and has never been keen enough on regular exercise to regain it since.) He pauses, poises, seems to be resting in mid-play, and then suddenly he sees an opening, an opportunity, and in he rushes like a cavalry brigade charging, neither deft nor graceful, but straight and driving, and full of tremendous zest and energy—and skilful with it, too. His life has been like that. HE “TOUCHES WOOD” “Luck plays a larger part in shaping the careers of men than most of them are usually prepared to admit. Luck does not, of course, entirely explain the phenomenon of this volatile and dynamic individual, with his full eyes, oddly shaped shoulders, hair thinning back from a round high forehead. There is immense ability

there, too, and tenacious industry, enormous powers of work, great physical energy, and a certain disdainful confidence W’hich enables him to jump into all sorts of enterprises w’ith the sure feeling that he can handle the job better than anyone else. But still, his luck has been fantastic. it has been so fantastic that he has got into the habit of half-humorously, halfseriously, ‘touching wood.’ “He went to the Cuban war as a correspondent. One day, bending to bite a tough chicken wing, he had his hair clipped by a bullet. A second before, that bullet would have taken him in the centre of the forehead. In the Soudan campaign he was lost in the desert. Suddenly the clouds parted long enough to show him Orion, and give him his direction. What incredible luck! Escaping from prison during the Boer War, he found himself in wild, unknown country. How is he to find his way now? Again, Orion points a twinkling fairy finger from the heavens. The star, and his luck, bring him to the only English house for 20 miles around. Then, in Prance, he is summoned from his front-line dugout by a general who wants to have a look at him. But the great man cannot, after all, fit the meeting in. So, cursing, Churchill ploughs back through three miles of mud —-to perceive on arrival, with one of his rare flashes of awe, that in his absence his dugout lias been wrecked by a shell, and the officer in it killed. THE CHURCHILL LUCK “On another occasion in that war he steps from the room in which he has been writing, and a minute later a shell bursts outside, and hurls a razor-edged metal fragment across the table at 'which he had been sitting. Anon, he thinks he will learn to fly. But he is a bad pilot. His machine crashes. His pilot is injured. Churchill —need one say it? —sits up amid the wreck and finds himself unhurL It is not a patch of luck. It is the regular Churchill luck. You can trace it all through his life—from the day when, as a boy, he jumped from a bridge to catch the branches of a tree, fell 20 feet as they snapped, and (instead of breaking his neck or at least a limb) landed uninjured on a soft patch In a ditch—to that phase of his mature post-war career when he fell out of the Coalition tree, lost a couple of election battles on his way down, but landed after all, smiling and intact, on the soft patch of the Treasury, in the Conservative ditch.”