The Young Churchill's History

Anniversary History of the young Churchill: "His bravery, his impudence and his impact were remarkable. At the age of 25 he was already world famous"

The life of Winston Churchill, born 150 years ago, continues to fascinate a growing legion of followers. His years at the head of the United Kingdom during World War II are well known; in his youth he participated in several wars in defense of the interests of the British Empire.

"On that morning of November 15, 1899, I carried with me, despite my position as correspondent, my Mauser pistol," Winston Churchill would later write in My Early Life, the autobiographical account of his prolific years of youth, in which he dedicated several chapters on his experiences in South Africa during the Second Boer War. "I thought I could kill that man, and after the treatment I had received I ardently wanted to do it. I put my hand on my belt, but the pistol was not there. When I was busy clearing the track, getting on and off the locomotive, etc. , I had dropped it (...) The Boer continued to look at me and I believed that he had absolutely no chance of escaping; if he fired he would hit me, without a doubt, so I raised my hands and surrendered as a prisoner of war".

Along with a group of companions also detained while traveling on an armored train from Estcourt, the young Churchill was imprisoned in a Pretoria camp. The heroic story of his escape made him a very popular and beloved legendary character in his country and marked the beginning of his long political career, while putting an end to an epic period of his life in which he served the British Empire as a military man and journalism as a correspondent on different war fronts. In South Africa it was no different. "As on previous occasions, this dual status as journalist and officer did not mean that Churchill did not fight," explains the British politician and historian Roy Jenkins in his now classic biography of the character published in 2001, shortly before his death. "If he had not always done this," he concludes, "he would not have been able to claim that he had killed five and perhaps seven dervishes in Sudan."

AT BLENHEIM PALACE

The following year, in 1900, at only 25 years old, he managed to enter Parliament and begin a political career that would keep him in the Chamber until shortly before his death in 1965 and in which he would occupy almost all possible ministries in different governments. until reaching the head of the Council of Ministers during the difficult years of the Second World War. His solid training, his temperance, his ambition and his tough character had been forged, however, in that first quarter of a century of vital explosion, which had taken him to the confines of the British Empire. And wherever he went, since he was a teenager and almost self-taught, writing became for him an essential and complementary activity, regardless of his position, which would lead him, in 1953, to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. What began as a necessity to supplement his meager military salary would become a habit over the years thanks to an inalienable drive to leave testimony of his privileged life. His texts on the two world wars are well known, but much less is what he wrote about his military adventures as a youth, collected in 1930 in the volume My Early Life.