THE HIDDEN THC H HISTORY OF YOUNG WINSTON

A wave of Churchillian ballyhoo is swirling round Fleet Street in the wake of Richard Attenborough's film Young Winston. It is not just the work of the film industry's public relations machine, however. public scandal arminaton is Amid economic crisis and heard from to Finchley: where is the Leader, the strong man? Where is the man to put strikers in their place? Where is the Man on Horseback?

It is not surprising that the middle class, the little men, look back with longing on the writer of the words: If ever this country is defeated in war, I hope we may find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful place among the nations' (Winston Churchill, 'Great Contemporaries', 1936.)

Or on politician who visited Mussolini in 1927 and declared to the one fisti If I had been Italian, would have been with you from the beginning to the end of your glorious struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism.' Of course, none of this appears in the reverent presentation of Attenborough. After all, was not the script worked on by the ex-'left' Carl Foreman? Whatever "character defects' are depicted in the film Churchill's role as enemy of the working class remains decently hidden.

Who was the real Young Winston? He was grandson of the Duke of Marlborough, son of the discarded Tory leader Lord Randolph Churchill. A failure at Harrow, he found his way through the army to journalism and parliament. His aggressiveness, pugnacity and ruthless ambition were not merely personal characteristics. They sprang from the situation of British imperialism at the height of its brutal conquests, brash, thrusting, utterly self-confident in its drive for profits.

Churchill only became the supreme leader of imperialism when the proud British lion 'War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid... It is all the fault of democracy and science War has ceased to be a gentleman's game.

But when, in 1914, British imperialism had defend itself against its rivals, Churchill found no difficulty in sending hundreds of thousof the most horrible deaths "demo- cratic and scientific way.

entry diary of Lady Asquith for 1912 shows this aspect of the Churchillian make-up. 'W. in glorious form destruction instruments though slightly over-concendestruction. Blasting and shattering are now his idees fixes. leaned side side against the taffrail, gliding ast the lovely, smiling coastine of the Adriatic bathed I remarked: "How startled me by -visibility perfect-If we hạd some six-inch guns board how easily we could bombard... etc etc." and details followed showing how effectively we could lay waste the landscape and blow the nestling towns sky-high. He was enthralled by the technology of naval warfare and his sense of its results in human terms was for the time being in abeyance' schoolboy, but a 38-year-old Churchill was then not politician. Three years later, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he ordered the Gallipoli landing. 200,000 men died as a result.

But in 1895, when he joined the Fourth Hussars, he had still to cause a single death He sought eagerly to remedy this lack.

Young Winston was no ordinary guards officer. His family connections spread throughout the ruling class and he used them to move around the world and to advance his career at high speed. Thus he was able to see his first military action, not in the British army at all, but with the Spanish army struggling to suppress a revolt in Cuba. (The Ambassador in Madrid fiddled his papers.) Young Winston toyed with the idea of joining the Turkish armies then oppressing the Greeks, not as a soldier, but, as he put it, to 'merely see the admirable characteristics. people of our islands require to have the matter put 11 -fairly before them to arrive at sound, practical conclusions. If with the 4th Hussars.

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