Kudos to Don Jakeway for going to the standard work, Doug Russell's
Winston Churchill Soldier
, for Churchill's graduating level at Sandhurst.
I think a little too much is being made over detail inaccuracies in a book
WSC wrote largely from memory
, which tends to miss the forest for the trees.
F
rom my Connoisseur's Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill
(Brasseys, 1998, rep 2001).
Richard
Langworth
Senior Fellow, Hillsdale Colleg
e Churchlll Project
_winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/_ (http://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/)
Modern historians have soundly established that Winston Churchill took
certain liberties with episodes in this autobiography, which covers the years
from his birth in 1874 to his first few years in Parliament. Jim Golland
(Not Winston, Just William?, Harrow: 1988) showed that young Winston was
scarcely the school dunce he suggests he was; some researchers believe he was
not nearly so ignored and abandoned by his parents as he implies. His
nephew, Peregrine Churchill, aided by Lady Randolph Churchill's archives,
concluded that Winston's mother spent a surprising amount of time with him and
his
brother Jack before they left for school—and that Winston "was a very
naughty boy; his parents were very concerned about him." On the other hand,
biographers have shown that Churchill's entry into Sandhurst, and in due
course into the cavalry, were rather less than personal achievements, and a
letter has recently surfaced stating that his famous escape from the Boer
Prison camp in Pretoria was the act of a "bounder"—although Churchill himself,
through libel suits, and his official biographer, have long since proved
that he acted honorably.
None of this affects the wonderful treat provided by this most
approachable and readable of Churchill's books. Harold Nicolson had it right
in his
1930 review when he likened My Early Life to "a beaker of Champagne." If the
reader was drawn to Churchill by The Second World War, his autobiography
will come as a revelation; the war memoirs chronicle a very public struggle
against national extinction; the autobiography charts a young man's private
struggle to be heard. But the same style and pace is there, the same sense
of adventure, the piquant humour, the ability to let the reader to peer
over the author's shoulder as events unfold.
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