Young Titan: The Making Of Winston Churchill

By Michael Shelden

Most people today think of Winston Churchill as simply the wartime British bulldog - a jowly, cigar-chomping old fighter demanding blood, sweat and tears from his nation. But the well-known story of the elder statesman has overshadowed an earlier part of his life that is no less fascinating, and that has never before been fully told. It is a tale of romance, ambition, intrigue and glamour in Edwardian London, when the city was the centre of the world, and when its best and brightest were dazzled by the meteoric rise to power of a young politician with a famous name and a long aristocratic background.

Winston Churchill gave his maiden speech in Parliament at the very beginning of King Edward VII's reign in 1901 when he was only 26. By the time the guns of August 1914 swept away the Edwardian idyll, he was First Lord of the Admiralty - the civilian head of the largest navy in the world. In the intervening years, he often cut a dashing figure, romancing several society beauties, tangling with some of the most powerful political figures of his time, championing major social reforms, becoming one of the leading orators of the day, publishing six books, supervising an armed assault on anarchists, and working harder perhaps than anyone else to prepare his nation for war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Mar 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781471113246

Michael Shelden

Michael Shelden is the author of four previous biographies. For twelve years he was a features writer for The Daily Telegraph (London) and a fiction critic for The Baltimore Sun. He is currently a professor at Indiana State University.

Reviews for Young Titan

[twp77 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When many think of Winston Churchill, it is undoubtedly as the elder statesman with the jowly, bulldog face and steely determination to stand alone against the Nazis. In Shelden's Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill we see instead an overly confident, young, aristocratic talk of the town who romances a number of women, most of which turn down his proposals for marriage, before finding and marrying Clementine Hozier who will remain his lifelong companion.

One of the most interesting contributions of the books to Churchill studies is Shelden's look at the complicated relationship between the politically astute and active Prime Minister's daughter Violet Asquith and the young Churchill. It is a sad tale of Violet's unrequited love and leaves the reader to wonder what might have happened had Churchill decided on Violet instead of Clemmie. Given Violet's interest and actual participation in politics in contrast to Clementine, one is left wondering if she could have been the UK's Eleanor Roosevelt.

As Shelden correctly points out, many at the time and since have seen Churchill as a man undeserving of his fame having little to do with actual achievement and instead a reliance on his family's name and wealth. In reality the Churchills were not well off compared to other in the aristocracy and particularly after his defection to the Liberals, the Tory Party elite very firmly looked down upon the younger man. Churchill was always his own man with, as Asquith is quoted as saying, the "streak of lightning in the brain" that showed a true genius underneath. He worked incredibly hard at writing and speaking, practicing for hours and committing great swathes of writing to memory. Shelden points to his trials in politics and in love as the building blocks of the later man he would become.

The end of the book perhaps shows Churchill's greatest political failure in his decision as First Lord of the Admiralty; to attack the Dardanelles resulting in the utter disaster at Gallipoli in 1915 during the First World War. Shelden does give Churchill more leeway than he deserves in this regard, trying to point the finger at the mentally unstable "Jacky" Fisher as the responsible party as well and Prime Minister Asquith and cabinet member Lloyd George. While undoubtedly Churchill was the better war leader, this was his single worst decision as a military leader and even at the time he was well aware he was responsible having said to a visitor while in the midst of painting "There is more blood than paint on these hands".

While it is remarkable that Churchill recovered from this disaster, albeit some 20 years later, it was nonetheless still an epic military blunder. However, Shelden does show that Churchill essentially sent himself into exile in the trenches rather than remain in a do-nothing government post and it is hard not to admire a man for voluntarily going to face death himself after having consigned others to the same fate.

Overall this was an informative and enjoyable read and Shelden is currently working on a second volume which will hopefully be as informative as this one.