Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

“Only a man who knew what it was to discern a gleam of hope in a hopeless situation, whose courage was beyond reason, and whose aggressive spirit burned at its fiercest when he was hemmed in and surrounded by enemies, could have given emotional reality to the words of defiance which rallied and sustained us in the menacing summer of 1940” (Anthony Storr)

Winston Churchill was born prematurely and looked after by a wet-nurse, as was the aristocratic way in 1874. Throughout his childhood, he endured a continuing lack of unconditional love and affection from both his parents which, according to the psychiatrist Anthony Storr, left Churchill psychologically ill-equipped. His salvation was his nanny, Mrs Everest, on whose death he described as “my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived”. However, it seems likely that Churchill also had an underlying genetic disposition towards depression which, interacting with inadequate parenting, resulted in his mental health vulnerabilities. Indeed, his great ancestor the Duke of Marlborough shared his depressive tendencies, as did his own father, Randolph Churchill.

As a child, Churchill was not very impressive: small, thin and with a slight speech impediment, he was bullied at school. In 1893, he wrote from Sandhurst “I am cursed with so feeble a body that I can scarcely support the fatigues of the day; but I suppose I shall get stronger during my stay here.” However, he was determined to be tough, and had no lack of physical courage, having exerted willpower to overcome his fears. He was positively reckless in combat during the Boer War and the First World War.

Churchill was also hugely ambitious: writing from India in 1899, he said “What an awful thing it will be if I don’t come off. It will break my heart for I have nothing else but ambition to cling to…” Storr suggests that he sought recognition as a way of staving off despair. As Churchill said later “We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow worm”. He had a strong sense that he was being kept for some higher purpose, the cause that finally presented itself when he was sixty-five and his country and the world was in such danger from fascism.

Churchill's energy and stamina are legendary.  When Churchill came back into Government at the outbreak of World War Two, it was my grandfather, then Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, who welcomed him as First Lord of the Admiralty and made the introductions to colleagues on Sunday 3 September 1939.  In his memoirs, he wrote about the gruelling hours which Churchill kept:

"After a gruelling day's work Churchill became more light-hearted as midnight approached.  He threw off fatigue like a garment and relaxed.  I can see him now in my mind's eye dictating a speech, wearing an old pair of bedroom slippers and padding up and down his room like a caged lion, hands behind his back, head bent forward. A cigar always protruded from his mouth and through thick clouds of smoke he hissed scintillating sentences at the silent typewriter.  He had no prepared notes; he had not even jotted down headlines on the order of his speech.  All those distinguished phrases which characterise his speeches came out fashioned spontaneously in the furnace of his imagination...for two or three hours he dictated thus without a break.  If he finished by two a.m. he was more wide awake than ever.  We vainly suggested it was time for bed.  He usually had other ideas.  "What about a visit to the war room?"  He loved looking at the flags denoting the position of our warships on the oceans of the world."

CP Snow described Churchill as having a strong sense of insight, or intuition, rather than relying on insight. This approach sometimes led him astray, as with the disastrous Dardenelles campaign in the First World War (in which my grandfather fought, and nearly died). But his instincts about Hitler and about Stalin eventually proved to be correct. His brilliance was not that of a thorough or rigorous thinker. Famously, he preferred to have ideas presented to him on half a side of paper, because that was how he himself worked. He could also be very insensitive to the feelings of others, such as the assistants who had to keep him company through the night, and who were not able to take an hour's sleep after lunch or before dinner, as he usually did.

Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, records the Prime Minister in 1944, talking about his depressive tendencies: “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything. A few drops of desperation.” Yet after the Dardenelles, and in his wilderness years, he may have been deeply depressed, but he was not suicidal. He devised ways of keeping himself going – writing, painting, even bricklaying at his country house at Chartwell.

In his final years, Churchill suffered a recurrence of despair and a sense of his life having been futility, despite all he had achieved for himself and for his country. Hardening of the arteries and possibly Alzheimer’s disease may have contributed. His daughter records him as saying late in life “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end”. Storr suggests that, as a result of a lack of parental affection, “he had a void at the heart of his being which no achievement or honour could ever completely fill”.

I am not sure how much I like, as opposed to admire, Churchill. His achievements in diverse fields were extraordinary, even though he hardly deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature: I have an early memory of my grandfather reading to me out of his History of the English Speaking Peoples.  Churchill started his career as a Liberal, but was more right wing than this might imply. He was a vigorous advocate of eugenics in the first decades of the twentieth century; he was a supporter of Edward VIII (and Mussolini, at the beginning); he opposed Indian Home Rule and should be assigned some of the blame for the Bengal famine of 1943; he was ultimately responsible for the saturation bombing of German cities in the first half of 1945; his post war term as Prime Minister was not distinguished. Yet despite this and other failures, he was a larger than life man, of ferocious appetites, powerful personality and immense inner drive. Small wonder that he topped a BBC Poll of “One Hundred Greatest Britons” in 2002: to many people, he was not only correct in describing the Second World War as “our finest hour”, he was also the architect of Allied victory. With his recurrent depression, his speech impediment, not to mention the physical and mental decline of his last years, Winston Churchill can also be counted, unquestionably, as a person with disability.

Further reading

Anthony Storr, Churchill’s Black Dog

Claudius (10 BC - AD 54)

Claudius came from a dysfunctional family, was born with a physical impairment, and grew up somewhat unstable. He overcame his early disadvantages to make a surprisingly successful Emperor, and was arguably one of the most important disabled people in British history.

Tiberius Claudius Drusus was born in Lugdunum (now Lyon), son of a noted Roman military leader and grandson of Mark Anthony. He was the first Roman emperor to be born outside Italy. Sources suggest he was born prematurely: his mother Antonia described him as a “monster of a man, not completed by Dame Nature, but only begun”. His disability has been identified, convincingly to me, as cerebral palsy, although polio and Tourette syndrome have also been suggested. At any rate, his family found him shameful, he was hidden from popular view for much of his youth, and had a guardian even after attaining manhood. In The Problem of Claudius, a dissertation which I first encountered when I was writing my own thesis, Thomas De Coursey Ruth wrote that

“Misunderstood, treated by his own family with cruelty and contempt, constantly made conscious of his imperfections, unable because of his physical weakness and disabilities to assert himself, left a great part of the time to the care of freedmen, or servants, he must have acquired in childhood a feeling of inferiority and of inability to adapt himself to his proper environment.” (1916, 136).

Claudius is described as having problems walking and was therefore carried everywhere in a sedan chair; he had tremor of the hands and head and dribbled; and he had a speech impediment. Initially despising him, his forebear Emperor Augustus later revised his opinion when he heard him giving a formal oration, writing in a letter: “for how anyone who speaks so confusedly in conversation can speak so clearly what he has to say when he declaims I do not see”. He also noted “in matters of importance, when his mind does not get off the subject, the really fine quality of his intellect is apparent”.

Barred from a public career under the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, Claudius retired to a private life of scholarship and over indulgence. A dry and pedantic writer, he produced a number of historical works, and was the last man known to have been able to read Etruscan.

Claudius was the only male member of the royal family to survive the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula, who made him the butt of cruel jokes. Later, Claudius explained that he had pretended to be stupid in order to avoid being assassinated as a potential political rival. After the cruel, probably insane, Caligula was killed by his bodyguard, Claudius was made emperor by the Army, and from henceforth all Roman emperors depended on the army for their power. He took the name Caesar, which now became an official title rather than a surname (Tsar, Kaiser and probably Shah all being later derivations).

But this violent start did not stop Claudius having many successes as emperor. He was an able administrator, reforming the senate and the courts, and building roads, aqueducts and canals, as well as the port of Ostia. He issued up to 20 edicts a day, some of which are evidence of his whimsical and sometimes undignified sense of humour, for example the one on how to cure snake bites and another advocating public flatulence to promote good health. He also wrote a treatise on dice playing.

Liable to make jokes at inappropriate moments, Roman sources claim that Claudius lacked tact and dignity and was too fond of slang. In this, he seems to anticipate Silvio Berlusconi or perhaps Nicholas Sarkozy. Suetonius notes that “in hearing and deciding cases Claudius showed strange inconsistency of temper, for he was now careful and shrewd, sometimes inconsiderate and hasty, and occasionally silly and like a crazy man.” From contemporary accounts, it sounds as if he tended to get over excited, and could be rather naïve in his public pronouncements.

According to the inscription on his triumphal arch, Claudius “was the first to bring barbarian peoples from across the Ocean under the sway of the Roman people”, in other words he led the Roman conquest of Britain in AD43, seizing the capital, Colchester, with the aid of the first elephants to be seen in England.

Claudius was less successful in his private life. Unusual among Roman emperors in being resolutely heterosexual, he was married four times. He was unlucky enough to chose as his third wife the notoriously unfaithful Messalina, and to follow her by marrying his niece Agrippina, who is said to have poisoned him. Timid and trusting, he was vulnerable to the lures of manipulative women as well as to the freedmen who made up his inner circle. Both groups exploited his fears of assassination to get rid of people they did not like.

While Claudius was not vicious like Tiberius or Nero, whom he disastrously chose to succeed him, he did take a morbid delight in witnessing suffering, for example torture, executions and in particular the gladiatorial games. During his reign, 35 senators and 300 knights were executed, although admittedly many of them had conspired against him.

However, Claudius was also generous, loyal and considerate to his friends, and open to people of all classes. Caratacus, the leader of the British resistance to the Romans, was brought to Rome in chains in 51 AD and paraded through the streets. Giving a dignified speech, Caratacus told Claudius that if he was to pardon him, it would be an everlasting memorial to his clemency: which he did, and it was.

To conclude, I find Claudius a complex and interesting character, and not just because he was so successfully ventriloquized by Robert Graves. He was one of the most powerful disabled people in history. His cruelty was typical of ancient Rome, and at least he was not as mad or bad as most other leaders of the time. Intelligent, absent minded and extremely fond of good food and drink, he would probably have fitted in well at an Oxbridge High Table, where he would no doubt have bored his companions with his unsuccessful plan to add three new letters to the Roman alphabet.

Further reading

Robert Graves, I Claudius, Penguin, 1941.

Thomas De Coursey Ruth, The Problem of Claudius: some aspects of a character study, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1916