Winnipeg lecture helped launch titan
A new biography chronicling the early years of Winston Churchill’s political career has turned a spotlight on the future British prime minister’s 1901 speaking tour across Canada, where the man who would become a pivotal figure of 20th-century history was grappling with personal heartbreak and bracing — like all of her subjects in Canada and around the world — for the imminent death of Queen Victoria.
Author Michael Shelden’s striking new portrait of the budding statesman, Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill, begins with a lovelorn Churchill on a Winnipeg-bound train penning a letter to the woman of his dreams — the glamorous but elusive British aristocrat Pamela Plowden — before the Boer War hero arrives to a thunderous, confidence-boosting welcome in the Manitoba capital.
The letter to Plowden only came to light in 2008, when it was auctioned by Christie’s in London for more than $20,000. “I write no more, but this brief note,” he had written in the letter, which included the notation “In the train to Winnipeg” and was dated Jan. 20, 1901. “There is that between us, which if it should grow no stronger, will last forever. God bless you.”
But what Shelden’s narrative makes clear for the first time is how the 26-year-old Churchill’s North American tour — which came after his dramatic escape as a prisoner-of-war in South Africa, and with two of his earliest books on sale throughout the British Empire — was chiefly aimed at demonstrating to Plowden that he could become a wealthy man and finally win her hand in marriage.
The socialite had turned down his proposal in October, the month he first won a seat as an MP in the British House of Commons. But Churchill’s plan to use the overseas speaking tour to prove he could get rich as a writer, Shelden explained in an interview on Friday, was unravelling because of what Churchill deemed unfair arrangements with his U.S.-based tour agent, James Pond.
In December, when Churchill arrived in Ottawa to deliver a lecture and visit with Plowden at Rideau Hall — home of her friend Lady Minto, the wife of Canada’s then governor general — he clashed with Pond and cancelled a planned appearance that month in Brantford, Ont.
Among the documents Shelden has brought to light is Pond’s detailed description of his confrontation with Churchill backstage at the old Russell Theatre in downtown Ottawa.
“He was trying desperately to come to Ottawa to impress (Plowden) with all of the money he was making in North America off of this tour,” said Shelden, an English professor at Indiana State University and author of a Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of British writer George Orwell. “Then he shows up this beleaguered man, trying to save a tour that seems to be going right down the tubes.”
The two had met in India in 1896, when Churchill — who had an aristocratic pedigree but little personal wealth — was an aspiring journalist who became enamoured with the well-to-do Plowden, daughter of a highranking British official.
The contract dispute with Pond cast a shadow over what could have been a romantically fortuitous visit with Plowden in Ottawa. But then, after coming to new terms with Pond and speaking at several U.S. cities on the western leg of his tour, Churchill’s spirits were buoyed by the huge throng gathered to attend his Winnipeg appearance.
“When he arrived in the snowy darkness to give his lecture at the Winnipeg Theatre, he was encouraged by the sight of 500 people waiting outside for standing-room tickets,” Shelden writes. “It was the largest crowd in the theatre’s history.”
Churchill, Shelden told Postmedia News, “got the best reception of the tour in Winnipeg. By that time, the (Pond) dust-up of December had settled. In Winnipeg, he was really welcomed as a stalwart figure of the empire.”
Churchill had written in his letter to Plowden that “the Queen is dying, is perhaps already dead” and remarked that Victoria’s passing was bound to scuttle the remainder of the lecture tour: “See how this complicates and clouds all my plans, disturbing not only nations but Winstons.”
The morning after his Winnipeg lecture, when Churchill awoke at the home of Manitoba’s lieutenantgovernor, he learned that Victoria had died overnight.
“It’s a momentous occasion, and Churchill and the people of Winnipeg — everyone — realizes it,” said Shelden.
The author explained that he launched his narrative with Churchill in the Canadian city because “that’s the point at which he is beginning to make his career. It was a huge sellout in Winnipeg. He not only felt that this was a triumph, but it coincided with the death of Queen Victoria. And he suddenly realizes the whole empire is going to change.
“Within a few weeks, he’s standing in Parliament giving his maiden speech” in a political career that would soon see him elevated to cabinet. “It was a meteoric rise. And it began, really, at that moment in Winnipeg, when he realized, ‘ My God, the Queen is dead, the whole world has changed, and I need to get back.’”