Like Disraeli, he had to fight every mile in all his marches.
1906. (LRC, xii.)
In his speeches he revealed a range of thought, an authority of manner, and a wealth of knowledge, which neither friends nor foes attempted to dispute.
1906. (LRC, 145.)
WSC's father (1849-95) was Leader of the House of Commons and rose to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, but resigned over a trivial matter at the end of 1886 and did not rise again. He died aged only forty-six, most likely of a brain tumour.
My father died on January 24 [1895] in the early morning. Summoned from a neighbouring house where I was sleeping, I ran in the darkness across Grosvenor Square, then lapped in snow. His end was quite painless. Indeed he had long been in stupor. All my dreams of comradeship with him, of entering Parliament at his side and in his support, were ended. There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.
1930. (MEL, 76.)
Although I had talked with him so seldom and never for a moment on equal terms, I conceived an intense admiration and affection for him and, after his early death, for his memory. I read industriously almost every word he had ever spoken and learnt by heart large portions of his speeches. I took my politics almost unquestioningly from him. He seemed to me to have possessed in the days of his prime the key alike to popular oratory and political action. Although Lord Randolph Churchill lived and died a loyal Tory, he was in fact during the whole of his political life, and especially during its finest phase after he had left office for ever, a liberal-minded man. He saw no reason why the old glories of Church and State, or King and Country, should not be reconciled with modern democracy; or why the masses of working people should not become the chief defenders of those ancient institutions by which their liberties and progress had been achieved.
1931, February. (“Personal Contacts,” Strand Magazine; Thoughts, 31-2.)
But for a year I looked at life round a comer. They made a joke about it in those days at the Carlton Club. “I hear Randolph’s son met with a serious accident.” “Yes? Playing a game of ‘Follow my Leader.’” “Well, Randolph is not likely to come to grief in that way!”
1930. (MEL, 44-5.)
In 1888, after he had fallen from a tree at Bournemouth and ruptured his kidney, his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, brought a surgeon to Winston’s side.
I remember [that my father said] a man who can’t take a knockdown blow isn’t worth a damn.
1949, 25 March, New York. (Balance, 33.)
World History
