My Early Life

Product Information

In numerous quotable passages from A Difficulty with Kitchener, to The Eve of Omdurman to The Sensations of a Cavalry Charge, a tour de force, Churchill excelled at extracting maximum literary value from his experience: My Early Life, also known in the USA as A Roving Commission: My Early Life, is a 1930 book by Winston Churchill. It is an autobiography from his birth in 1874 to around 1902. The book closes with mention of his marriage in 1908, stating that he lived happily ever after.

In 1895, within six months, first Winston's father, then Mrs. Everest, died. Winston now faced the world without his idolized father and without his primary emotional support and mother figure. As Churchill tried to forge an alliance with the United States, Hitler made him the gift of another powerful ally – the Soviet Union. Despite his intense hatred of the Communists, Churchill had no hesitation in sending aid to Russia and defending Stalin in public. “If Hitler invaded Hell,” he once remarked, “I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” Lord Randolph Churchill's political career was meteoric. In 1886, at age thirty-seven, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, the youngest to hold the office in over a hundred years. In less than six months, he resigned from the Cabinet over a matter of principle - his insistence on reducing defense spending. He never held high office again. "One could not grow up in my father's house... without understanding that there had been a great political disaster," said Winston.Senior editor Dalton Newfield says, “Whenever anyone says they really want to understand Churchill, I invariably recommend My Early Life (published in USA as A Roving Commission.) This reviewer would certainly second the motion, although I was predisposed to like it: I found Woods 37b in a New England flea market for one dollar!

For the first nine months of the conflict, Churchill proved that he was, as Admiral Fisher had once said, “a war man”. Chamberlain was not. Consequently the failures of the Norwegian Campaign were blamed on the pacific Prime Minister rather than the belligerent First Lord, and, when Chamberlain resigned after criticisms in the House of Commons, Churchill became leader of a coalition government. The date was May 10, 1940: it was Churchill’s, as well as Britain’s, finest hour. Winston's mother, American heiress Jennie Jerome, was by universal agreement a great beauty. She threw herself completely into the English upper-class social whirl. While fond of her children, her social role with her husband always came first - sometimes to the point of not permitting Winston to come home for holidays or going on extensive travels without him. Churchill hoped that this offensive would drive Turkey out of the war and encourage the Balkan states to join the Allies, but Turkish resistance was much stiffer than he had anticipated. After nine months and 250,000 casualties, the Allies withdrew in disgrace. A significant portion of the book covers his experiences in the Second Boer War of 1899-1902, which he had earlier described in London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900) and Ian Hamilton's March (1900). It also includes descriptions of other campaigns he had previously written about: The River War (1899), concerning the reconquest of Sudan, and The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) in today's Pakistan.

He wrote this autobiography in his mid 50s, after the Great War and before anyone knew there would be a Second World War. His perspective from his experience of war in the 20th century allowed him to see his early life as part of a vanished era in warfare, and in the social structure of life in England. But his letters at the time made no mention of this incident. In one message, sent just a few days after arriving in India, he wrote that ” . . . nearly 500 tons of luggage had to be moved we were busy from 4 in the morning till late at night.”[35] It was his habit to mention injuries — an injured knee in December 1896; being hit with splinters from a rifle target in April 1897. (“I managed to play polo with the reins fastened on to my wrist. . .”[36]) From the evidence of his letters we may conclude that Churchill’s shoulder dislocation stemmed from falling down stairs at Sir Pertab Singh’s home in Jodhpore in February 1898, rather than the (much more romantic) quayside ring episode he records in his autobiography. Quite a few photographs exist of the mature Churchill engaged in his favorite sport, always with his right arm strapped to his side.[47] He wipes his brow after a chukka at Roehampton (12 March 1921), takes a drink during a break in a Lords vs. Commons match (June 1922). A famous photo shows him playing with the Prince of Wales in 1924. A group picture taken on 18 June 1925 shows Churchill with fellow players Capt. G.R.G. Shaw, Capt. Euan Wallace and Capt. the Hon. F.E. Guest, after Churchill’s Commons team defeated the House of Lords. Winston and Clementine are seen arriving at Hurlingham the same year, to watch the British Army play polo against an American team.

A polo game lasts one hour and is divided into periods or chukkas of 7 Vi minutes each, with a short interval in between. Churchill played in every chukka he could get into, usually ten or twelve. His prodigious efforts soon came to the notice of the Aga Khan, who wrote in his memoirs: “It was at Poona in the late summer of 1896 that our paths first crossed. A group of officers of the Fourth Hussars, then stationed at Bangalore, called on me. I was ill at the time, but my cousin showed them my horses. He later told me that among them none had a keener, more discriminating eye, none was a better judge of a horse, than a young subaltern by the name of Winston Spencer Churchill. He was a little over twenty, eager, irrepressible, and already an enthusiastic, courageous, and promising polo player.”[20] The introduction notes that Churchill endeavoured to write the book from his point of view at the time of the events, but it contains different commentaries on the events described in the other books, many of which were originally written as contemporary newspaper columns. From his perspective of writing in 1930, he notes that he has 'drawn a picture of a vanished age'. The book also notes an observation by the French ambassador to Britain between 1900 and 1920, that during his time, a silent revolution had occurred, which totally replaced the ruling class of Britain. The early life of Winston Churchill covers the period from his birth on 30 November 1874 to 31 May 1904 when he formally crossed the floor of the House of Commons, defecting from the Conservative Party to sit as a member of the Liberal Party. Soon, however, Churchill re-entered the political arena, taking an active part in political life from the opposition benches and broadcasting again to the nation after the victory over Japan. In defeat Churchill had always been defiant, but in victory he favoured magnanimity. Within a couple of years he was calling for a partnership between a “spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany” as the basis for the re-creation of “the European family”. He was more equivocal about Britain’s role in his proposed “United States of Europe”, and, while the embers of the World War II were still warm, he announced the start of the Cold War. At Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, he pointed to the new threat posed by the Soviet Union and declared that an iron curtain had descended across Europe. Only by keeping the alliance between the English-speaking peoples strong, he maintained, could Communist tyranny be resisted.It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension. There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the First Declension.' Churchill was born at the family’s estate near Oxford on November 30, 1874. He was educated at the Harrow prep school, where he performed so poorly that he did not even bother to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, in 1893 young Winston Churchill headed off to military school at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Battles and Books Churchill rose swiftly within the Liberal ranks and became a Cabinet Minister in 1908 – President of the Board of Trade. In this capacity and as Home Secretary (1910-11) he helped to lay the foundations of the post-1945 welfare state.