Churchill: One Instrument, Two Readings

— Earning. Literally — money. And that's not a figure of speech or a joke: if you take his youth, the most accurate description of what he was doing is a production cycle. He went where the shooting was, because that's where the dispatches come from, and dispatches turn into books, and books into fees, and the fees bought a seat in Parliament, which paid nothing at all. There's no "talent found its own way" in there anywhere.

— Not literally, he wasn't bribing anyone. MPs in the Commons weren't paid at all back then — a salary of £400 only came in in 1911. Which means the people who went into Parliament were either people with a fortune or people who could earn outside it. He had no fortune. His capital was his own name, and he assembled that capital by hand, very methodically.

— In 1893 his father wrote him a letter you'd rather not quote. His son, who was 18, had passed his exams only for the cavalry class at Sandhurst — the worst possible result — and Lord Randolph went through his marks with him like a sentence being handed down. And predicted he would end up a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of failures produced by the public schools.

— He never got the chance. His father died a year and a half later. He had to prove it to everyone else instead of to one man — and to my mind that's the answer to where he got so much energy for something as trivial as other people's attention.

— Look at what the paperwork actually says. A junior officer's pay in the 4th Hussars — about £300 a year. His mother gave him another £400 or so. And he reckoned he was still roughly £500 short of living the way the rest of the officers in the regiment lived — there were horses, polo, mess expenses. And in October 1899 the *Morning Post* signed him as a war correspondent at £250 a month plus all expenses.

— One month of journalism was worth roughly 10 months of soldiering. Some sources call that the top rate for a war correspondent of the period — and that's how it has to be put, "of the period"; the line going round the internet about "the highest-paid in history" isn't backed by anything.

— He went to war the way you go to a job. Those are different things, and that's the whole point. And then comes the part no amount of calculation explains. On 15 November 1899 the armoured train he was riding near Estcourt as a civilian correspondent was ambushed by the Boers. He had no authority to command anything — he was a man with a notebook. Under fire, he directed the clearing of the line, got the engine away with the wounded on board, and walked back. That's where they took him.

— As a prisoner of war. The Boers reasoned exactly like this: if you got the engine out, you're a combatant, not an observer. And here's the single most revealing detail of his whole youth. On the evening of 11 December, before going over the prison wall, he sits down and writes a letter to the Secretary for War, Louis de Souza, dated the tenth.

— An official letter. That he does not concede their government has any right to hold him as a prisoner of war, and has therefore decided to escape. With thanks for the correct treatment he'd received, a promise to say so publicly once he was back with his own side, and signed "Your most obedient servant." The letter stays on the table.

— Because the letter will remain. He isn't writing to his gaoler. He's writing to the archive. A man of 25, in a foreign prison, already knows there'll be a book in six months, and puts the scene he needs into it in advance.

— Hold on to that feeling until the end of this conversation, it'll come in useful. He escaped on 12 December 1899 from the State Model Schools building in Pretoria. Alone. By his own account he had £75 and 4 slabs of chocolate on him; the map, the compass and the meat lozenges stayed with the companions who didn't come.

— Towards the Portuguese border, to Lourenço Marques. About 300 miles — and here I have to qualify it, there's no exact figure, the sources give close but differing estimates of the route. He hid in goods wagons, spent several days down a coal mine belonging to a British manager, John Howard, at Witbank. There was a reward out for him — £25, dead or alive. He reached his own side on 21 December.

— Don't. Calculation and risk get on perfectly well together, and that, if you like, is the central lesson of his biography. The bullets were real, the reward was real — and on 23 December he steps ashore at Durban, the crowd lifts him onto their shoulders and carries him to the town hall, and he speaks from the steps. What exactly he said there I won't reproduce for you: the quotation from that speech going round online, I never found in a verified form.

— All of the empire. It was one of the few pieces of good news against a run of lost battles. And then he sold the same story three times over. First as dispatches to the paper. Then he gathered those same dispatches into two books, both in 1900. Then he went out and told it from a lectern for money — the British appearances paid up to £275 a night, the American leg of the tour brought in about £1,600.

— By his own account, by the spring of 1901 he had about £10,000 in the bank. What matters here is that it's his figure and it's the total accumulated, not the takings from one tour. But the order of magnitude is clear.

— Exactly the same. He creates the event himself, he's the only witness, he writes the copy, he sells it — three times. The only difference is that instead of a camera there's a telegraph dispatch, and instead of views there's a print run. And notice where it gets him: in July 1899 he lost the by-election at Oldham with 11,477 votes and came third. In October 1900 he took the same seat with a margin of 222.

— Capture and escape. He admitted it himself: on the numbers, he wrote, it was purely his personal popularity after South Africa that put him into Parliament. And straight after being elected he left on a lecture tour — because there was nothing to live on in Parliament.

— There's no honest answer to that question, and I won't pretend there is. Both explanations cover his actions completely, with nothing left over. He walked back into fire towards the armoured train — is that courage, or material for tomorrow's dispatch? He escaped alone — decisiveness, or a dash for first place in the story he was going to tell? Haldane, who was in that same prison with him, insisted until his death in 1950 that the agreement was to escape together and later, and that Churchill went on his own.

— I don't know. Nobody knows. Both were interested witnesses, both had the same night, and each made his own story out of it. There's another detail of the same kind, incidentally: Ian Hamilton claimed much later that he had recommended Churchill for the Victoria Cross for the action at Diamond Hill, and that Roberts and Kitchener refused — he was only a correspondent, they said. There is no award file containing that recommendation. There is a general's recollection.

— Also a story. And that's where the real biography begins — at the point where the two versions stop agreeing.