Winston Churchill in Somerset

The enormous reputation of Sir Winston Churchill rests not just on his achievements over a political career spanning more than 60 years, culminating in his wartime and post-war premierships, but also on the power of his oratory, which was so vital to his success and worldwide fame. Somerset, therefore, can be justly proud of being the cradle of his career, as he made his first public political speech at a rally of the Bath Primrose League at Claverton Manor, Bath on 26 July 1897.

The Primrose League was a Tory campaigning group, founded in 1883 by, among others, Lord Randolph Churchill, a leading Tory politician and Winston’s father. Its name came from the primrose being the favourite flower of the recently deceased Tory leader, Benjamin Disraeli. Young Winston, then only 22 in July 1897, was still a serving cavalry officer, but temporarily home in Britain, and at that time he was a Conservative in search of a parliamentary seat, so speaking engagements could only enhance his prospects with party activists. Through connections at Conservative Central Office, he was invited to speak at the Primrose League rally at Claverton, where his Churchill name would especially resonate.

Churchill began his ‘maiden speech’ very modestly: “If it were pardonable in any speaker to begin with the well-worn and time honoured apology, ‘unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,’ it would be pardonable in my case, for the honour I am enjoying at this moment of addressing an audience of my fellow-countrymen and women is the first honour of the kind I have ever received.” As he recorded in his autobiography, he was indeed very apprehensive about this first foray into public speaking and he “spent many hours preparing my discourse and learning it so thoroughly by heart that I could almost have said it backwards in my sleep.”

An editorial in the Bath Chronicle 3 days later was prophetic: “The occasion was noteworthy for the political debut of a young gentleman, who in the years that are to come may take rank among the statesmen of our country. We refer to Mr Winston Churchill… [He] has evidently inherited some of his father’s gifts as well as his grace of oratory. May they be consecrated to the same noble and high purpose, and may his career thus auspiciously opened be not less distinguished, advantageous alike to his party and the country.”

When Churchill reached his political zenith in the 1940s, there was much recollection in the West Country press of his ‘maiden speech’ in the county, with examples of correspondents who claimed to have attended the 1897 event. One wrote to the Bath Chronicle in July 1940: “I still recall vividly that slight lisp and twist of the lip which gave such an edge, even then, to Mr Churchill’s remarks about the ‘other party.’”

The speech was, as Churchill had hoped and planned, well-received, both locally and, importantly, in the national press. It helped promote his Conservative political credentials, and within two years he was standing, albeit unsuccessfully, in a by-election in Oldham, and won that same seat in the 1900 general election.

The event is commemorated by a plaque at the doorway of the Grade 1 listed Claverton Manor, now the American Museum in Britain, stating “Here Winston Spencer Churchill on July 26^th 1897, made his first political speech”. It was erected in the 1940s by its then owner Major Stuart Black, and Black received a letter from Churchill in October 1941 stating his great pleasure at hearing of the Major’s wish to erect such a memorial. The American Museum itself, no doubt wishing to mark Churchill’s speech and the fact that his mother, Jennie Jerome, Lady Randolph Churchill, was American-born, has, since 2013, organised an annual Sir Winston Churchill Lecture.

During a political career spanning more than 60 years, Churchill visited Somerset on a number of occasions.

In 1900, Churchill, recently elected MP for Oldham and still only 25, returned to Bath to give a lecture at the Assembly Rooms on 29 November on his experiences as a soldier and war correspondent during the Boer War. They were certainly exciting, including his capture by the Boers and subsequent escape.

When Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative Government in July 1928, Churchill made a speech at a local Tory summer fête at Watts House, Bishops Lydeard. Imaginatively entitled “Kaleidoscopic Contortions of Lloyd George Cliques”, the speech focussed on the Government’s record and especially on its agricultural policy, attacking the Liberal leader, David Lloyd George’s proposals for agriculture and rating relief.

In the 1940s, Churchill was a frequent visitor at Stowey Court, Nether Stowey, a Somerset home of the press baron, government minister and crony, Lord Beaverbrook. He was reputed to have stubbed out his cigars in the drawing room fireplace, leaving distinct burn marks.

Churchill was granted the Freedom of Bath on 20 July 1950. In his acceptance speech at the Pavilion, he concentrated on foreign affairs, in those early, tense days of the Cold War, but also reminisced about his maiden speech in 1897 “here on the hills of Claverton … It was by no means the last speech I was to make in the 50-odd years that have passed since then”. Typically, he waxed lyrical about the history and beauty of Bath, and promised to treasure the silver casket presented to him containing the scroll marking him as an honorary freeman of the city: “I shall always be proud of being a citizen of Bath.”

Earlier that same year, during the general election, Churchill, as Conservative party leader, made an impromptu visit to Taunton to support the Tory candidate, Henry Hopkinson, who was recovering from a mild attack of pneumonia. Breaking a train journey from Cardiff to Plymouth on 8 February, he was mobbed by crowds in the town before making a campaign speech at the Empire Hall. His intervention seemed to do the trick, as Hopkinson regained the hitherto safe Tory seat which had been lost to Labour in 1945.

Anyone passing through the little North Somerset village of Churchill cannot fail to notice the various allusions to Winston Churchill. Not surprisingly, after Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, there was much public speculation, especially in the Somerset press, about his family connections with the Somerset village, which were, at best, rather remote and tenuous.

When a US Navy destroyer was transferred to the Royal Navy and renamed HMS Churchill in September 1940, the villagers of Churchill, Somerset cabled the people of Churchill, Nevada, claiming that, as it is “historically linked with the ancestry of Britain’s Prime Minister” its parishioners were “delighted that the leader of the fleet of destroyers from America is to bear our common name.”

This ‘connection’ reached its transatlantic peak later that year when the 18 November issue of the US magazine, Life, had a major feature on the village, including many Cecil Beaton photographs. Entitled “Churchill, England: what we fight for” it also reproduced a draft of a note from Churchill himself, commending the feature, especially its pictures, “for they may give a better idea of what Britain is fighting for and how she is meeting the challenge than words can say”. Tellingly, he crossed out a phrase in the original draft which stated that Churchill was “the village from which my family came.”

Whatever the truth about Churchill village, the great statesman certainly had many connections with Somerset over the years.