'Young Titan' - Review

(First published in ‘Fighting Times’)

Winston Churchill in 1911.

It can be dangerous letting loose a biographer on a man like Winston Churchill. Shelden’s acute eye for piquant details of the intimate succeed here in driving out the real Churchill. For the first 192 pages of ‘Young Titan’ we are presented with Churchill the Lethario. Gone is the soldier. Gone is the politician. Gone is the writer. All that is left is a man who, apparently, devoted his every waking hour to chasing women. The minutest details of his relationships with Pamela Plowden, Ethel Barrymore, Muriel Wilson and Violet Asquith are all here. One reviewer has described the result as reading like a novel. Perhaps more accurately, much of the book reads like a gossip column.

‘Young Titan’ covers Churchill’s life from 1901 (just after he had become an MP) to 1915 (when he was sacked on the formation of a coalition government). The first sixteen of twenty-six chapters take us up to Lloyd George’s 1909 budget. In these pages we get a sound chapter on Churchill’s work at the Colonial Office and seven excellent pages on his relationship with his father. But, too often, Shelden strays from his subject. After introducing Beatrice Webb (by any measure a minor character in this story) we are told of her relationship with Joseph Chamberlain in the 1880s. And surely we can be told that Muriel Wilson’s father was wealthy without having to mention the Tranby Croft affair of the 1890s?

The straying can be interesting, as in the fascinating ten pages on Violet Asquith, but the more that Shelden includes walk-on parts, the less we learn of Churchill. He becomes an adjunct to the lives of others rather than vice versa. Other irrelevant material is an (interesting) piece on Jenny Churchill’s disastrous Shakespeare Fair and a long passage on the Marconi shares scandal.

Where the politics does come in, the emphasis is, at times, odd. We have three pages on Lloyd George’s Limehouse speech in defence of his budget. (Indeed, there is a great deal of material on Lloyd George, most of it rather derogatory.) But the passages on the people versus peers battle of 1909-11 are misleading to anyone who does not know the background since Shelden nowhere mentions the endless Liberal bills that the Lords had wrecked between January 1906 and the famous budget.

When Shelden does pay attention to Churchill he does a magnificent job. What a joy it is to find an author who gets the stories of Tonypandy, Antwerp and Borkum right. What a welcome change to find a writer who so thoroughly condemns Asquith’s running of the war and the scapegoating of Churchill over the Dardanelles. There is also an excellent chapter ‘Storm Signals’ on the crisis over the House of Lords.

But these strengths are undermined by chapters such as ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, in which Churchill hardly features at all. Much of that chapter is devoted to a character assassination of Admiral Lord Fisher, where Shelden makes the frequent mistake of taking Fisher at his word. He is thus able to paint Fisher as a war-monger. (Fisher’s acts belie his words. In 1904, when the Russians shelled Hull trawlers at Dogger Bank, it was Fisher who persuaded the Cabinet not to go to war. Quite the reverse of the popular view of the man.)

‘Young Titan’ is an easy read. You will learn a great deal about Joseph Chamberlain, Beatrice Webb, Margot Asquith, Lloyd George and many others. You will learn even more about the often rather distant relationships that Churchill had with various women who caught his eye. But all this comes at a price: you don’t get much Churchill. Churchill is 41 years old at the book’s close, with a clutch of fine books to his name, hundreds of important speeches to his credit and experience in four government departments. All this great work is mentioned, but almost in passing. Churchill, apparently, was not so much a Titan as a trifler.

Young Titan by Michael Shelden, 324 pages (Simon and Schuster, £25).

Richard Freeman’s ‘Unsinkable’: Churchill and the First World War is published by History Press.