Churchill's Menagerie by Piers Brendon

Author:Piers Brendon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Pegasus Books

F rom the lion rampant on the Marlborough coat of arms, via the lion’s roar emanating from Downing Street during the Second World War, to The Last Lion of William Manchester’s bestselling biography, Winston Churchill was always associated with the king of beasts. Of course that animal was ubiquitous in heraldry and many historical figures were identified, or sought identification, with this majestic embodiment of strength and valour. But no twentieth-century leader has been more lionized or has attracted more leonine imagery than Churchill.

The lion was chiefly distinguished by courage and this, in Churchill’s view, was the cardinal virtue since it guaranteed all the other virtues. From an early age he himself earned a justified reputation for fearlessness. At prep school he was flogged by a sadistic headmaster and at Harrow he was caned more than any other boy, yet he put up an indomitable resistance. As a young soldier he took conspicuous risks, among them helping an intelligence officer to overawe Pathan villagers who refused to stand up and salute them: ‘really things looked very black. But somehow they do recognize superiority of race – and at last they got up. It was like lion taming.’1 The nerve he displayed on the battlefield was equally conspicuous in the political arena. As early as 1900 he declared that leaders must always be prepared to brave disaster: ‘You must put your head in the lion’s mouth if the performance is to be a success.’2

As his admirers proclaimed, Churchill did meet disaster, notably at Gallipoli, with lionhearted courage. Indeed, he was so often likened to the jungle monarch that, as he told Clementine in 1927, he proposed to subscribe himself as a Lion rather than a Pig in his letters to her. She replied from Venice, city of St Mark and his emblematic Lion, saying that this was the very place for his transfiguration. Consequently he depicted himself as a winged lion, like the ancient bronze beast in St Mark’s Square. Ranging through the wilderness during the 1930s, a prey to thorns and barbs, Churchill needed all the fortitude he could muster. Back at the Admiralty in 1939 he was seen ‘padding up and down his room like a caged lion’.3

Once free to direct the war against Hitler as he wanted, Churchill was frequently hailed as Britain’s ‘lionhearted premier’.4 In fact the lion rivalled the bulldog as his animal avatar, not least in the minds of both Joseph Stalin and Harry Truman. But although Churchill kept a black, 3-foot-high iron lion at the top of the first-floor stairs at Chartwell, he did not boast about his leonine identity. On the contrary, after addressing troops in a ruined Roman amphitheatre near Carthage on 1 June 1943, he uttered this droll disclaimer: ‘Yes, I was speaking from where the cries of Christian virgins rent the air whilst roaring lions devoured them, and yet I am no lion and certainly not a virgin!’5 And after the war he modestly attributed the lion’s heart to the nation and the race, claiming only to have given the roar.

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