Jonathan Thomas (00:21)
Welcome to the Anglotopia podcast where we explore British history, culture and travel. I'm a host Jonathan Thomas and today we've got a Winston Churchill episode. Haven't had one of these in awhile, so I'm excited about this one. Winston Churchill is one of the most written about human beings who has ever lived. There's more. I've heard quoted that there's more than 1000 books that have been published about him and yet.

There is one aspect of Churchill that hasn't received the deep focus attention it deserves, Churchill as a writer. Not Churchill the statesman, the soldier or the orator, but Churchill, the craftsman of the English language, sitting at a desk or pacing a room, dictating shaping sentences with the same deliberation that he brought to everything else.

Today's guest has spent 40 years thinking about exactly that. Gary L. Stiles is a physician, medical researcher, and former distinguished professor of cardiovascular research at Duke University and a Churchill scholar whose new book, A Prelude to Immortality, has been published by Unicorn Publishing Group and examines Churchill's most beloved book, My Early Life. Also, here's my dog-eared copy.

Published in 1930 when Churchill was in his mid fifties, My Early Life is his only autobiography and Gary's book tells the remarkable story of why he wrote it, how he wrote it and why it has never been out of print in nearly a century. Gary, welcome to the Anglotopia podcast.

Gary L. Stiles (01:41)
Jonathan, thank you very much. It's great to be here. I love talking about Churchill, so we'll have fun.

Jonathan Thomas (01:47)
Gary, let's start with you. You're a physician and medical researcher, and how does a cardiologist end up writing about Churchill and art? Where does this passion come from?

Gary L. Stiles (01:57)
Sure. ⁓ So I've always been interested in literature, art, and history my whole life. So my reading outside of medicine and science has always been in that area. ⁓ I first read Churchill when I was probably around 12, 13 years old. And I read My Early Life. And it really resonated with me. ⁓

Jonathan Thomas (01:58)
So I've always been interested in.

history my whole life so my reading outside of medicine and science is always good.

Gary L. Stiles (02:25)
It made me think about what made some people successful, other people not successful, and how ⁓ you could become successful because I think Churchill in his book talks about what traits are important for success and how do you design your life to be successful. So I've had a passion for Churchill and his resilience in particular for more than 40 years. And also I've been a collector my whole life. So it worked out well that

Jonathan Thomas (02:25)
made me think about what made some people successful, other people not successful, and how you could become successful because I think Churchill, in his book, talks about what traits are important for success.

Gary L. Stiles (02:54)
I had a topic I could really dig my teeth into to do collecting.

Jonathan Thomas (02:59)
So you write in the acknowledgments that Churchill's My Early Life captured your imagination more than 40 years ago. What is it about that book specifically that grabbed you? What did you read as a young man that kind of stayed with you all this time?

Gary L. Stiles (03:13)
Well, what I read was the resilience. As I read through his book, it was clear to me that he had a number of very significant up and downs in his life. He was not always successful in what he did, ⁓ and he always wanted to be successful. He always took charge of his life. He always found ways to work around the difficulties. ⁓ And that resonated with me as something I should do in my life if I wanted to be.

successful. So I saw him as a role model, a model that I could never attain, ⁓ but it was worth trying. And so that has stuck with me my whole life.

Jonathan Thomas (03:53)
Yeah, we don't have many World Wars to make our name in anymore. it's, I mean, it's a good thing, but you know. So the least we could do is take his example and his advice to excel in the things that we are.

Gary L. Stiles (03:56)
Yes, indeed it is.

Jonathan Thomas (04:06)
So you've been working on a prelude to immortality for many years. You describe the research journey as taking you from politics to philosophy, military strategy to horsemanship, biography to bibliography, creative writing to learning disabilities, finance to publishing. That's an extraordinary range of topics. So what has surprised you most along the way?

Gary L. Stiles (04:28)
Well, I think the very fact that he was so multi-talented and was so interested in everything in the world around him, all those topics were of interest to him. ⁓ I think the things that resonated most with me, ⁓ again, was his resilience. ⁓ But the most surprising aspect of his life that I really wasn't aware of until I started digging into this and getting into the Churchill archives and finding

all these letters that he wrote to his family and to friends throughout his life, many of which have not been published or only mentioned in my book for the very first time, ⁓ was his humanity. I think most of us recognize him as a great orator, as ⁓ a great writer, and certainly a great leader. In my mind, he's the most impressive ⁓ politician slash leader. And those don't always go together, I'm afraid. ⁓

in the 20th century. And I was just amazed that there's this other side to him, which I think was brought out by his nanny more than anything else. It was her interaction with him that completely surprised me. She was his nanny from age one month till age 18. She actually interacted with him regularly for 18 years and changed his life. She taught him ⁓

humanity, she taught him to care for people. ⁓ And I don't think most people recognize that he was a vulnerable man. He could easily be hurt. He always overcame it, but he was very hurt. He would frequently cry. And I was surprised at how many things made him cry. ⁓ And so that really surprised me. It was the human side of him.

and that he wasn't this marble man or impenetrable, couldn't be hurt. In fact, he could be hurt very badly, but he found ways to work around it and that also impressed me.

Jonathan Thomas (06:33)
Yeah, Churchill had notoriously terrible, neglectful parents, and his nanny, he probably spent more time with his nanny than he spent with his own mother. At least until he was an adult.

Gary L. Stiles (06:44)
That's absolutely true. One of the characteristics of Churchill was he never got it. He felt he never got enough time from his parents. He never thought he got enough praise for what he did. He was never complimented, which is why he created the great stories about ⁓ how dumb he was in school. Now, not many people when they write about themselves, try to make themselves look like a dunce, but he did that quite on purpose. And it wasn't in fact.

Very true. He was very smart in English and history, and he was very not good in things he didn't like. It wasn't that he wasn't smart. He was what I call stubborn. If he didn't want to study math or he didn't want to study Greek or Latin, he just didn't. Even when he's like 12 years old, he just told ⁓ the professors or the teachers, ⁓ I can't do this. I'm not interested in doing this, which drove them absolutely crazy.

I would say the nanny and his humanity really struck me and I write a lot about that and I don't know if you want to talk about that later but we can talk about in fact how dedicated he was to his nanny that I never knew.

Jonathan Thomas (07:58)
Yeah, until the end of her life, he made sure she was taken care of.

Gary L. Stiles (08:03)
That's exactly right. In fact, ⁓ he and his brother Jack paid for her funeral, paid for her headstone. And a very little known facts about Churchill was Churchill kept fresh flowers on her grave until the day he died in 1965. So for 90 years, he kept fresh flowers there. And he kept a picture of her at his bedside. In fact, if you go to Chartwell now, you can still see the picture of Nanny Everest.

at his bedside. That's how close and important she was to him.

Jonathan Thomas (08:36)
So moving on to the book itself, My Early Life. So this is my dog eared copy. And he wrote this in his mid 50s. And so for listeners who may not have read this book or maybe they wanna read it, but they haven't bought it yet, can you sort of describe it? What kind of book is it? And what does Churchill actually cover in it? Because he's got to, he lived to be almost 90, he's got...

a wide variety of life experiences. Why did he focus so much on his first 25 years?

Gary L. Stiles (09:07)
Okay, so as you say, the book is a autobiography. It was written for a number of reasons, which we'll get to in a minute. But it's written in a very lyric poetry style. It's written in a wonderful style that he wanted you to listen to, to actually read out loud, because he actually created a sound of the words, a sound of the sentences that he wanted you to.

to know about. So the writing is quite endearing. ⁓ He wrote it also because he wanted to tell his story in the way he wanted it told and how he would be remembered, which is why I gave the title of the book that I did, A Prelude to Immortality. When he wrote that book, My Early Life, that was how he wanted to be remembered forever. The characteristics that made him great. ⁓

So what does it cover? It covers his from birth and his childhood. So many people don't know he spent his early childhood actually in Ireland. ⁓ His grandfather had been made the British administrator there. Remember, at that time, Ireland was not a separate country. And so he tells the stories of how he learned to ride a pony there. He talked about how terrible it was to be forced to learn to read. So he covers his childhood.

And it's very informative about what molded him as a kid and as a man. He also covers his schooling, primarily at Harrow and Sandhurst, the Military Academy. And he goes into great detail about that. And he talks about learning and how people thought he had a learning disability, which I don't believe he had. ⁓ He talks about which of the ⁓ teachers, the professors, the...

People there were good to him, who was not good to him, and why he became who he became. He also covers his military correspondent ⁓ time. So he was one of the very few, and you certainly can't do it anymore, that he was not only an active soldier, but he was an active reporter and reporting on what he was doing. And he certainly wrote a lot about the leadership of the army and politicians.

frequently criticized him. So you can imagine sort of the text as he's writing this about how he says the general did this and did that and it was bad way of carrying it out. So here's a second lieutenant, no experience, is telling the major generals of the British army what they did wrong and doing it in the newspapers ⁓ that did not endear him to it. And I cover that in the book in detail about

how he worked around that. So he covers his military time and he was in India, he was in Cuba, he was in the Sudan and in South Africa. And then finally he ends the book probably around 1903 after he's elected to parliament for the first time in the khaki election of 1900. And so he only covers up to the time when he's about 27 or 28 years old and that's it.

Jonathan Thomas (12:29)
So then why did he stop there? Because he wrote this in 19, around 1930, which so he was already in his mid fifties. He had already had a successful, highly successful parliamentary career. Why did he stop there when he had so much more to write about? And, you know, when we think of Churchill, didn't do, he didn't do his most famous thing until he was in his mid sixties. you know, why did he not write an autobiography about that?

history of World War II series, I mean, why did he stop?

Gary L. Stiles (13:00)
Okay,

so there are several reasons why he stopped and he stopped at that time frame very specifically. One is he always considered that he was going to write another volume of his autobiography. He actually had talked to publishers about it, but he never did it. So we don't have anything past age about 28. The other thing he wanted to do was he recognized that he was just coming into parliament.

He was a new member and he was a little bit disgruntled with the conservatives very quickly. And so, I know how many people know this, but he crossed the floor in 1904. So he jumped from being a conservative to a liberal, which is not usually conducive to a long-term career.

And then in fact, he actually, what he called reratted, he went back to the conservatist, but that wasn't until 1922. So I think he stopped there because he didn't want to get into all the issues about why he was going to cross the floor to become a liberal. So he was going to, he was planning on writing later anyway. He got to that time and I think he felt it was time to just move on and not write anymore.

Jonathan Thomas (14:19)
So one of the things that you argue is that what makes my early life so extraordinary is that Churchill writes in the voice of himself at the age he was during each event, not as a man in his 50s looking back, but as a frightened schoolboy, a cavalry officer, an escaped prisoner of war. That's a remarkable sort of literary device. How did he do it and how conscious was he that he was doing it?

Gary L. Stiles (14:45)
Yes, so he was certainly conscious that he was doing it. He took great pains to make sure he could do it because he felt that in telling his own story and also telling it, as we'll get to later, I think, to inspire the next generation, he wanted to show how he went through his thought processes of making the decision of anything from, you know, how he played games with his cousins and his brother.

how he handled going to school, how he handled ⁓ adversity. So he wanted to do it in the voice of somebody who was actually experiencing it. What's it like to be age eight, go away from home and live at a boarding school? ⁓ We could as adults intellectualize that and say, it's a good idea, it leads to development. But he wanted to tell the story of how frightening it was.

to a young boy, how disconcerting it was to not have your parents come visit you, how awful it was to not get compliments. So he did it on purpose to ⁓ tell his story and let people understand. It's his only book that he lets his guard down essentially and tells you what he's thinking and how he's feeling. And so he set out to do it on purpose. Now, how did he do it?

He did it in a very interesting way. He did not write the text out of any of my early life. It was all dictated. It's what I call ambulatory dictation. Another surprising fact about this book is he used a lot of researchers for it and people to help him. And you'd wonder why would somebody do that for their own book? I mean, their own life since they know it better than anybody else. But he wanted people's feedback and he wanted to give...

have them give him a sense of how he was doing. Make no mistake, he always made the final decision about what went into the book and what didn't go into the book, but he listened to people. So here's how he would do it. He would have either him doing the research and he kept a voluminous archive of all of his materials.

He would then look at an episode of what he wanted to say, look at what he had written before, and then he would get up and walk around his library at Chartwell. And he would mumble. And there's actually accounts that are published in the book about people sitting there watching him do this. And was like he went into a fugue state. He would mumble, he would say words, he would say bits of sentences, then he'd stop and say, no, no, no, that's not it.

and then he'd start again and he'd listen to the cadence, the word play, the story he was telling and the whole time secretaries and he kept secretaries about 16 hours a day for his whole life after the time he was about 25 because he was always dictating everything and he wanted to take it down. He would then dictate it and then he would read it after he got a proof back and then had galley proofs made. So he consciously worked

to tell the story in the voice that he wanted told using the mental facilities of a person at that age. And it's all beautiful to read and most of the books should be read out loud. So that's how he actually did it.

Jonathan Thomas (18:13)
Interesting. Next time I read it, I'll have to try and read it out loud and see how it works.

Gary L. Stiles (18:18)
Yeah,

read particularly the parts like cavalry charges or the escape ⁓ or his going into battle in Cuba and the first time bullets whizzed by his head. And you can just hear it's marvelous.

Jonathan Thomas (18:32)
So your book makes clear that Churchill had very specific reasons for writing My Early Life, then they weren't purely literary or sentimental. So what were those five motivations? Can you kind of walk us through them?

Gary L. Stiles (18:44)
Sure, I'd love to. Yes, so again, he started writing the book in 1927. ⁓ And he had voluminous archives, as I've mentioned, and he had a lot, the four books that came out of his experiences and about 12 articles. So he sat down and here's why he wanted to do it. One is he wanted to reinvigorate his persona. That is, he wanted to tell the story.

of himself, what his characteristics were, what people could expect of him, and what qualities he valued, such as being ⁓ heroic, such as being honest, willing to take risks. ⁓ And those were the things. He was a pusher, ⁓ somebody who never let anything take its own course. He wanted to drive everything. He just was a nooch. ⁓

And so he wanted to reinvigorate his persona by telling his story. And the reason he did it at that time was he recognized that by the late 1920s, he and the conservatives were going out of favor and he knew that they would not be reelected and would be turned out of the leaders of the government, such as prime minister, chancellor of the exchequer, which is what Churchill was at this time.

And so he was actually anticipating what has been called the wilderness years of 1930 through 1939 when he was completely out of favor, thought to be a failure because of what had happened at Gallipoli, a failure because he had gone to the gold standard when people didn't think you should do that. And so he wanted to give the new reinvigorated Winston Churchill. Here's the new Winston Churchill that you can really like and trust.

And so part of the reason for writing this book was, here I am, here's what I stand for, you can trust me. And I think he was very successful in that. So another reason he wrote it was, and we've covered this a little bit, he wanted to describe a bygone era, that is the Victorian era when he grew up and what formed him. He was unequivocally clear that he knew the whole idea of the ethos, the morals of the Victorian.

age would not come back, but he thought that what he learned was transferable to any age and that you could translate what he did to the 1930s and 1940s as they came about. So he really wanted to describe how he became who he was and he also wanted to describe what makes one successful, which he had been, but now wanted to be even more successful, which he was going to do.

We've covered in depth and I won't go through it, but another reason he wanted to do it is to tell his story in this contemporaneous voice of how ⁓ you should remember him as a kid. A huge reason that he wrote this, and it may be actually the most important, was he had to generate income. Churchill knew from the time he was a young lad that the only way he was going to make money was to be a writer.

His dad had beat into his head that he was stupid, that he was lazy, and that he did not want him to go to Oxford or Cambridge because he didn't think he was smart enough. And so he realized that what he could do would be to write because he was very good at it early on. So he had to earn income. Why did he have to earn income? Well, because he liked to spend money. At this time, he was chancellor of the Exchequer.

He actually delivered five really good budgets to the House of Commons, which were all accepted and carried through. At the same time, he was managing the whole country's budget. He was a disaster with his personal budget. He almost had to file bankruptcy three times, at least during the 1920s. Why? One is he didn't get a large inheritance. His father was the second son of a Duke, and obviously the second son of a Duke.

doesn't get the land, doesn't get most of the resources. And so his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, didn't have money to give him and Churchill liked to buy. And one of the things he did in the early twenties was to buy Chartwell, his country estate in Kent. Well, it turned out that it was a very old building, which is why he loved it. Beautiful land and the whole building was rotten. And so he had to renovate it and it cost him about four to five times

the amount that he thought he was going to need. So he went into huge debt. He never liked anything but the best. So he bought the best clothes, the best wine, the best cigars, the best everything he could get and it drove Clementine crazy. And if you remember in the scene in the darkest hour when he's prime minister and she says to him, but she's sitting at the table, she says, I can't pay any of the bills. I cannot write another check.

We are broke. What are you going to do about it? And he always would say things like, well, I'll buy less cigars this week. So he had to generate income and he always was writing, we should say this now, I think also is he never wrote one thing at a time. When he was writing my early life in 1927 through 1930, he was writing four other books and 12 articles. He had

separate teams of researchers working on all of them. So he was like the conductor of a symphony. All these groups would come in and he'd conduct them and then he'd put it together. So a long-winded answer to your question, but he became very efficient at writing and that's how he generated his money. The last thing that I'll mention about why he wrote the book was

The episode that gave him international acclaim for the first time was his escape from the Boers in 1899. So he was a correspondent with a newspaper. And by the way, at that time, ⁓ at age 24, he was the highest paid British correspondent in any newspaper in the country when he went to South Africa to cover it. That's how good he was. Well, anyway. ⁓

When he escaped, there were actually three guys who were gonna escape together from the prisoner of war camp. He and Captain Haldane and another fellow. Well, it turns out when they started the escape, Churchill went over the wall first, jumped over, landed in a bush and was hiding. The guards heard something and went over there. And so he had to hide. The other two guys had to hide.

sneak back to the barracks so they wouldn't get caught. And then Churchill was left on the side of the outside of the fence. And this is another part that the writing is really quite superb. And I talk about a lot in the book. ⁓ And then he decided after three hours, they couldn't come. And so he left on his own. And Captain Haldane never forgave him. In fact, called him a cad, said he had abandoned them. He wasn't to be trusted.

And this bugged Churchill and Haldane for almost the rest of their lives until Haldane died. And I tell that whole story. We may get into some of that later. But anyway, we want to tell the story. so that part of the book, there's two full chapters on his escape and they are beautifully written and they're written as a defense of why he was not a cad, why he did the honorable thing. showing the side of him he wanted shown.

Jonathan Thomas (26:54)
So, and forgive me, this isn't a question on my list, but ⁓ let's talk about the POW escape because this was a formative experience, not just for Churchill's life, but for his career and not, as you say, for the book. So can you kind of give us an overview of why was he a prisoner of war? and kind of tell us the narrative of the escape, because I think to understand,

Churchill, you really need to understand this story.

Gary L. Stiles (27:27)
I agree with you completely. And I would go a little bit further to say, if you really want to understand Churchill and his personality, you have to read his book, My Early Life, and then read mine to see what he was saying. But so how to come about? There it is. So Churchill went to South Africa as a correspondent, not in the army. He went to cover the war as a correspondent. He was paid a huge amount of money to do it.

Jonathan Thomas (27:37)
Yeah. Yes. For sale. I'll go booksellers.

Gary L. Stiles (27:56)
When he got there, he obviously wanted to report, but Churchill being Churchill, he always wanted to be in the front lines. He wanted to get where the action was. He didn't want to sit in the city and have people report to him. So one of the things that happened early on when he was down there, Captain Holden, who had been his friend, he knew him. He knew him from the Sandhurst days and he knew him from the India days. Invited Churchill as a non-combatant.

to come on a train ⁓ exploration of where the Boers were and what their activities were. So Churchill immediately agrees to do this. So they go out on the train, it's an armored train, about four cars. And after they're out for a couple of hours, the Boers attack them and derailed the train. The train, half of it falls off the track, the engine and

one or two cars, I can't remember which, stayed on the tracks. Well, actually, Churchill took charge. He had actually brought his ⁓ C96 Mauser pistol with him, ⁓ which is what he used. It was his privately bought weapon ⁓ and took charge of the train and the soldiers and the engineer and convinced the engineer who had been shot to ⁓ actually stay at his station

and help him get the train backed up so they could get away. So they loaded some of the wounded soldiers on it. In meantime, they're firing all over, shots are going around everybody. The engineer had been shot in the arm. So anyway, Churchill actually helps the train escape. It's backing up and he's still in front of the train directing it. And the general rides up to him, the board general.

puts a rifle down in his face and he's caught. So he gets captured. The Boers consider him to be a combatant because he's there doing all this directing, even though he doesn't have a uniform on. They take him off to the person of war and there's a whole story about the bounty on his head, wanted dead or alive. ⁓ And the Boers are trying to decide whether to release him or not release him.

But the whole time, the three of the gentlemen I mentioned, Haldane, Churchill and another chap, ⁓ create a plan to escape. So they get together, they set this plan, and then what happened was what I told you. They go to leave, Churchill jumps over, they can't leave, Churchill waits there, and then Churchill goes on and goes.

a four or 500 mile journey by himself. He found a ⁓ coal miner who was actually a Brit that he could hide with. He's hiding the whole time from the Boers. He then rides a train, ⁓ which was a ⁓ coal dust ⁓ bag train and gets out. As he gets out and he gets ⁓ noticed, he goes to the embassy ⁓ and says, I'm Winston Churchill.

There's this big hoopla, international press coverage. Everybody loves him. ⁓ And he then actually goes back to the UK for a while, then comes back to ⁓ the South Africa and joins the South African Light Cavalry. And so he then participates as a soldier. The whole time, he's being praised in the newspapers for his help in the escape of the... ⁓

arm a car, train back, call him a hero, all the newspapers cover it, and then they really blow up with coverage internationally when he escapes and gets out. All of this makes Haldane sick at his stomach, essentially, and says, you know, he's a liar, he was a cad, and when you read it, you see that he wasn't a cad, and in fact, the other gentlemen

in the 1940s and 50s wrote several letters to editors who saying Churchill did not abandon them, they had to stay and then things kind of quiet down. And that's all in the book, all the things that have not been published before as far as I know are in the book about that episode.

Jonathan Thomas (32:24)
Yeah, in the meantime, Churchill got world famous for that escape and

successful commissions for writing and like it really launched his political career and it's just amazing how he went to go do one thing and it turned into this whole other thing.

Gary L. Stiles (32:31)
Yes.

Yeah, that I think was the pivotal point in his life when he got a claim.

Jonathan Thomas (32:44)
Yeah.

And if anybody wants to.

Jonathan Thomas (32:49)
of it. The movie Young Winston does a great job of showing that whole story, which I believe is based on his on the book. So

Gary L. Stiles (32:56)
Yes.

Yeah, it's actually

interesting that that that movie took 50 years to come about. Churchill signed the original contract to do a movie about my early life early in the 1930s. And it went had to go through several different contracts before it actually finally happened. So Churchill actually never got to see the movie. And another funny thing, but not funny, important part of it was ⁓

During the whole time he was in the army, I don't know if you saw this, but he rode this gray polo pony, which he brought with him and kept with him the whole time, including in the cavalry charge at Omdurban. And he did this purely for Churchillian reasons. He wanted to be seen and noticed. he believed that if he got killed, it was okay.

if he was trying to get himself known. So he took great risks and there in my book again, wonderful letters between he and his mother where his mother's begging him to stop doing this outrageously daring stuff like riding a gray pony. Why is it dangerous? Well, everybody else is on black or brown horses. And so here's this guy on a bright white gray horse. The enemy can see him. And in fact, if you remember the movie, the opening scene.

⁓ where he's riding the pony and there's this great quote ⁓ that I have where somebody sees him doing that. One of his soldiers, a friend, it and he says, who's the bloody fool on the gray? And then another guy says, someone who wants to be noticed, I imagine. And then you guys says, he'll be noticed, he'll get his head blown off. And that's in the movie as an introduction to the gray pony.

Jonathan Thomas (34:50)
the book is dedicated to a new generation and that's central to your analysis. Churchill was going to was writing to young people who had grown up in the shadow of the first world war, urging them not to be paralyzed by it. That feels remarkable, really relevant even now. So what did he want the new generation to take from his story?

Gary L. Stiles (35:09)
Yeah, it's interesting that he dedicated it to a new generation. ⁓ And he felt it very deeply that that's what he had to do. He recognized that the young people who were growing up post-World War I were completely paralyzed by ⁓ fear of war, fear of interaction, a disregard for government, a disregard for

helping people be better. They just wanted to be left alone to do their own thing. And he thought that was completely wrong. He wanted them to get involved and deeply involved. What he said was he wanted them to grab life by the throat and live it. He wanted them to be involved in politics. He wanted them to be involved in social issues. And he flatly states that if you do not make a difference in the world to make it a better place,

Your life is absolutely wasted ⁓ and you've got to change the world. ⁓ Part of that is also part of the characteristics of Churchill's trait that I talk about in the book a lot is Churchill always saw himself as St. George fighting the ultimate battle. He was the underdog fighting the dragon and he felt that whether he was playing polo

whether he was in a fencing tournament at Harrow, ⁓ whether he was ⁓ fighting Hitler, he always felt himself to be the underdog and had to overcome huge issues. He wanted the young generation to adopt that sort of approach, that you had to fight for what was needed, you had to extend yourself, ⁓ and that if you want to be successful, you must make a change, a change in the world for the better.

and to sit around at parties and do nothing but socialize is a waste of your time. So he really wanted to invigorate them to make a difference. It's sort of like the cry that ⁓ John Kennedy made when ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. That's essentially where Kennedy got this from was actually from looking at what Churchill had said about

growing up.

Jonathan Thomas (37:31)
that's another historical figure whose political career was kick-started by writing a best-selling book. So these things rhyme, right?

Gary L. Stiles (37:38)
Yes.

They do.

Jonathan Thomas (37:43)
So one of the most fascinating things in your book reveals how Churchill wove his book from a large body material he'd already published. Four earlier books, 13 major articles, hundreds of newspaper dispatches. He wasn't starting from scratch, he was kind of weaving. How did he decide what to use, what to transform, and what to just leave out? Because there's a lot of detail.

Gary L. Stiles (38:04)
Yes, yes, yeah. And that's

unusual. The other unusual thing about this book is, as you point out, he had written articles, books, hundreds of newspaper articles. ⁓ And so there are a couple of things you have to recognize about Churchill to understand how he did this. One is he had probably the most prodigious memory of any politician, maybe anybody. ⁓ It was astounding.

People as diverse as FDR, Stalin, ⁓ political leaders, scientific leaders, his friend from ⁓ Cambridge called the Prof, who did all of his scientific things, were in awe of Churchill's memory. He could remember everything.

word for word, once he's read it once or heard it. And so it gives him a great advantage that he knew what he'd said in each of those. And it gets down to individual sentences that you can see, which I document in my book, how he picked one sentence here and another sentence from another source. So it was his prodigious memory that allowed him to do it. The other thing that he did that allowed him to do this was he knew how he wanted the story to sound.

how it sounds in a newspaper article is quite different from how it sounded in the book to how it sounded in the article because the audiences were different. He knew that none of those were exactly the way he wanted to tell the story. And a great example of that is the escape. He couldn't tell the full story of the escape at the time or even 10 years later because there would have been consequences for people who helped him.

and he wanted to portray it as a news article or he wanted to portray it as an academic book like he did in the two books that came out of the South African campaign. So what he did was he would go section by section, he would see what he had, take input from other people, and then he would begin to create it in his mind of how he wanted to tell the story. And again, was walking around

the Chartwell Library, his library at Chartwell, and making the story came out. And he would do it over and over again until he got the sound of the words, the pacing, the tone, the rhythm, and the message all clear. And so as I show in my book in great detail is how he took different parts from each of the previous publications or.

dictated something new to create his ultimate story. And it's the most amazing saga of somebody telling a story that I've ever seen.

Jonathan Thomas (40:54)
So Churchill worked closely with publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, Thornton, Bunnerworth in London and Scribner's in New York. So two editions were published under different titles, My Early Life in Britain and A Roving Commission in America. What does this involvement in the commercial side of publishing tell what he thought about his work and his potential audiences?

Gary L. Stiles (41:16)
Yes. So again, it gets back to a couple of things. One, Churchill was a nooch. He didn't leave anything to chance. He believed that this story had to be presented in a certain way, that the audiences need to be diverse and large, and that the title was important in sending the first message about what is the book about. And so in my book,

I go through this correspondence between Churchill, Scribner, and Butterworth about the title, and Scribner and Butterworth absolutely, totally disagreed. They wrote the most amazing letters back and forth between each other, between Churchill and Butterworth, Butterworth to Scribner, Scribner to Churchill, Churchill to Butterworth. And it went on for several months.

about fighting about what the title would be because Scribner thought My Early Life would not sell in America. That they didn't know enough about Churchill to, ⁓ it wasn't exciting enough. It made it sound like it was an inconsequential publication. Anyway, it's really fun to read them going at each other. And so finally one day Churchill says, that's it. We're going to have two separate titles.

We can make it work through commercialization and advertising. And the title will be this, my early life in Britain, and it will be a roving commission in Scribner. And I won't hear any more arguments. And that was the day it got settled. ⁓ But Churchill was there helping them write the advertising, helping them ⁓ go out to bookstores. How would it be displayed in bookstores?

There was nothing too miniscule that Churchill didn't want to be involved in and it drove the publishers crazy.

Jonathan Thomas (43:13)
Well, at least he had a plan for marketing, right? So he also had a detailed, almost strategic process for gifting inscribed copies to carefully selected recipients, including Lawrence of Arabia, who wrote back to him in terms of extraordinary praise. Tell us about that process and what it reveals about Churchill's understanding of influence and reputation.

Gary L. Stiles (43:13)
Yes.

Yes. So again, it's the same thing. Churchill wanted to leave nothing to chance. He wanted to be sure that his books, and he did this not only for my early life, he started the process I'll describe in a minute with A World Christ, The World Crisis. And every volume after that, he actually put a plan in place. I actually found in the Churchill archives, three iterations of the lists of who would get

and inscribed copy and little notes by Churchill in Churchill's hands about each person if he wanted to put it in there. So what he did was he was the original, what we now call influencer himself. ⁓ He actually sat down and planned who should get the books for two main categories. One to get to people who could be influencers on their own. And a second group.

to thank people for helping him write the book. He went through these iterations of ⁓ making lists and the list included who did he want to influence? Obviously the Royals and the Royal Family, business leaders and influential people in society, his friends, politicians, and then the general public, i.e. the voters because he was

directly sending this to the voters for sure. What he did was created a list of about a hundred ⁓ people who would get what were called pre-publication inscribed copies. That is, the book was published October 20th of 1930 in Britain. And so any inscription dated before 1920 would be a pre-publication, a high priority.

And those then he divided into more formal ones where he would write sort of their full note, their full name, and then signed it from Winston Churchill. And I show pictures of all this in the book. And then there were the friendly ones ⁓ where he would write like to Archie, who was Archibald Sinclair, a good friend of his, know, fondly Winston.

As I mentioned, there's over 100 who were probably sent out. What I have found in research is over 70 of those copies and information about them. And it turns out many of the people, as you alluded to, wrote back to him. And it's really fun. I document all those letters and notes in my book. And it's clear that those people never thought these would be made public, but they're all in the Churchill archives because they wrote some of the most funny

sarcastic, interesting things to Churchill about what Churchill had said about these people in the book. And so you'll see there's ones to his former head ⁓ schoolmaster at Harrow. ⁓ I find one of the most poignant ones to Pamela Plowden. Now Pamela Plowden, who's later known as Lady Lighton. Pamela Plowden he met when he was a soldier in India. It's his first love

It's actually the first woman he asked to marry him. And she said, no, thank you. ⁓ And that was it. But they remained friends. So when she got married and Winston got married, the two couples got together until they died. So they stayed friends even though she turned him down. Well, she wrote back to him in the most beautiful words about what a marvel you are. This book should be read by everybody. It makes the old feel young.

It makes the unwise feel wise. ⁓ It should be in every library and university in the country. I just these wonderful letters. And it just, again, tells a different side of Churchill ⁓ and a different side of what he was trying to do. So yes, the inscribed copies are wonderful. I actually have some of those in my collection that he did.

Jonathan Thomas (47:36)
So your book traces the development of Churchill as a writer back to his school days at Harrow, where ⁓ he had a teacher named Mr. Somerville who taught him English composition using a color-coded system of parsing sentences. Churchill later credited this almost the only thing he praised about his education as the foundation of all his writing. So can you tell us about that and his love of the English language?

Gary L. Stiles (48:00)
Yes, so it was at Harrow ⁓ that he not only developed a love for the English language, but the professors, you said, this teacher made him map out sentence, doing sentence structure of participles and how things follow. It was there that he learned how to put together English words to have the most impact. He became very interested in literature and began to read literature, although

His most concentrated part of reading was actually siesta time when he was in the army in India. He had his mother send him all this books and he read, read, read. ⁓ But while at Harrow, he wrote some astounding ⁓ compositions about history and literature. And the words are well beyond, I quote some of those in my book.

well beyond something that a 12, 13, 14 eared old should be writing. So he was recognized. In fact, he became so good at the English language, both written and oral forms, that a number of his teachers threw him out of the classroom several times, because he would argue with them in this great language, and he would frustrate his teachers. And, you know, that was part of his problem was he didn't really know how to deal with people sometimes, you know,

sort of polite way. he learned the English language and he was actually very good in his language at school and he never forgot it. He said, you know, getting the English language into your bones is what will make you a great writer. And he always liked simple writing. He did not like big words. He liked good old fashioned English words.

Jonathan Thomas (49:49)
So many people don't know either that it was his words that got him the Nobel Prize. He didn't win it for peace or anything else. He won it for literature. So can you tell us about that and how did he respond to getting the Nobel Prize in literature?

Gary L. Stiles (50:05)
Yeah, that's a fascinating story because he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. It ⁓ wasn't the first time he was nominated. He was nominated actually over 27 times in several different categories, including peace ⁓ and ⁓ in literature. And he was turned down several times. He

actually would have preferred, and he actually, I quote all this in the book, ⁓ would have preferred to have the Nobel Peace Prize. ⁓ Because I think he wanted to be shown that although he was considered bellicose and liked war, which he really didn't, that's a misnomer, ⁓ he wanted to be seen, particularly after World War II, as the person who

could create peace and could get the Soviets, the Americans and the Brits together and the French together to have peace and create a much calmer world. That obviously didn't happen and he didn't get it. Anyway, so he gets nominated and in 1953 he wins the Nobel literature prize and in second place was Ernest Hemingway. ⁓ That immediately sent out a carry on of ⁓

reporters and influencers, if you will, saying this was inappropriate, that Churchill did not deserve to get it in literature. He was not a writer. He did not go to college and get ⁓ literary background. He didn't have a degree in history. ⁓ He was just a hack newspaper guy. And it's interesting to read that. ⁓ The best rebuttal comes from a

history professor at Harvard, who actually writes the most marvelous article. And I put the whole article in the book about saying people who don't think he deserves it for his writing have clearly never read anything and don't know anything about writing. He deserves it and he goes beautiful writing about it. So he, he was very happy to have it. He was proud that he got it. He would have preferred the Peace Prize.

⁓ And I think it also shows how many, how interesting it was because how many countries ended up publishing his books in Nobel Prize literature in their own country. So, you know, most countries have sort of multi-volume editions about people who won the Nobel Prize and Churchill is covered in, I think, about 15 different languages for it.

And he won it primarily for both his written word and his spoken word during World War II. They only mentioned five books in it. People think that he got it for World War II, the sixth volume World War II. That wasn't even finished when he got the Nobel Prize. What was mentioned most prominently was My Early Life. There great quotes about it. ⁓ The World Crisis, his Marlboro ⁓ and his ⁓

Lord Randolph Churchill's biography. So he was very proud and I think it was well deserved. By the way, Ernest Hemingway got the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

Jonathan Thomas (53:35)
both men who deserved it. I'm letting my English major cred show there. mean, Hemingway's probably my favorite fiction author, so.

Gary L. Stiles (53:37)
You

Yes, and Hemingway actually came out and said Churchill deserved it. So it was interesting to see that even though he didn't get it, he did get it eventually.

Jonathan Thomas (53:53)
That's surprising. I, you know, it's, ⁓ this is completely off topic, but you you never really think that Churchill and Hemingway were contemporaries just on different sides of the ocean. And they both had very similar arcs in life. ⁓

Gary L. Stiles (54:12)
Yeah, in fact,

Hemingway, you know, Hemingway has put together in his lifetime two books about his favorite writers. And in both of those volumes, he includes Winston Churchill and Churchill's description of war in Hemingway's books. So Hemingway not only admired him, but used his Churchill's works in his books.

Jonathan Thomas (54:36)
Fascinating toy as we so Churchill let's let's fast forward to today and unfortunately have talked about today Because because I I could see your notes on the answer and I'm like I feel the same way I cannot I hate it when Churchill enters the discourse on social media right now because it's so misinformed but Churchill hasn't been invoked by pop politicians on the left on the right in Britain and America for decades

often selectively and sometimes misleadingly. mean, cause he's famously switched parties several times. So you can't really pin him down ideologically. And as someone who spent 40 years studying him closely, how do you respond when you see Churchill, Churchill's image deployed in a contemporary political debate?

Gary L. Stiles (55:11)
Thank

Yeah, well, I think, first of all, it usually nauseates me because it's usually written by somebody who knows nothing about Churchill and what he really stood for and don't have their facts right. ⁓ Churchill is a great ⁓ name to drop when you want somebody to support what you're trying to support. You you say, well,

it can't be bad because Winston Churchill liked it or it has to be good because Winston Churchill hated it. So it's usually that way. When it's done correctly, I think it's quite beautiful. I think Churchill has a lot to say. I think we haven't seen a politician ⁓ like Churchill in a long time. ⁓ I can't think of anybody today that I would say I look at as ⁓ a role model of what a politician should be. ⁓

And if you read what people write, Churchill did everything evil and mean he could possibly do to every variety of person, rich, poor, whatever ethnic group you want to pick, whatever religion you want to pick, is to say, he just hated everybody. And it's just not flat out true. So I try to ignore it. ⁓ But when they get it right, gives me some hope.

and reassurance that there is a future for mankind ⁓ because I think people like Churchill are needed in spite of what some people say.

Jonathan Thomas (56:50)
Well, and as somebody once said, the past is a foreign country. know, his life 100 years ago, we can't even conceive of how life was different 100 years ago. And to judge him through the lens of now for any thing going on in the world is just, it's, it's disingenuous because he wouldn't recognize the world we live in. We don't recognize the world he lived in and to just ascribe anything to him based on

modern thought and political discourse. It's just like, just don't do it. Like there are lessons we can learn from him, but we don't need to put it in through a lens of now to try and justify that. The lessons are there. We just need to read them.

Gary L. Stiles (57:37)
Yeah, but I do want to say and make sure that we have this said loud and clear. Churchill was not perfect. Churchill made mistakes. He learned from his mistakes. Sometimes his mistakes were devastating for people like the Gallipoli, which really wasn't his fault. don't have time to go into that, but ⁓ that was a big mistake. He should have backed off eventually and he didn't and he's not perfect.

Jonathan Thomas (57:44)
No.

No, that's the ⁓

discourse prefers that our historical figures and the people we look up to be perfect, but unfortunately we're all human, nobody can be perfect.

Gary L. Stiles (58:16)
Yes.

Jonathan Thomas (58:17)
Excuse me. All right, so we're gonna end on my lightning round I like to have with my Churchill guests. So what's your favorite Churchill quote?

Gary L. Stiles (58:27)
So it's actually one that probably will surprise people and not be well known, but it was just a concept he used over and over again. And that is the price of greatness is responsibility. I'll say it again, the price of greatness is responsibility. He first used it, I believe, in a speech at Harvard in 1943. And what he was saying was,

essentially, America is coming at will come out of this war as the most powerful nation in the world. And that comes with responsibility to continue to do good and to make sure the world is safe. He used it over and over again in the the Fulton speech and in his negotiations to try to bring peace in the 50s. And I think it's telling about Churchill that he says, you know, if you're great.

you've got to be very responsible. And he turned that on himself. And I think that's important.

Jonathan Thomas (59:25)
Well, that says a lot about our modern leadership that there is no responsibility whatsoever. or accountability. So ⁓ what's your favorite Churchill anecdote?

Gary L. Stiles (59:32)
Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so this one is, to me, a really fun one that I don't think most people will know. And it relates to an episode in 1953. It involves Richard Burton, the famous actor. It also sheds light on what I talked about before about Churchill's prodigious memory and also his love of literature because he loved Shakespeare.

Read Shakespeare all the time, was quite a Shakespeare expert. So this is in 1953. Richard Burton is doing Hamlet at the Old Vic in London. Burton had been in the hospital, had been quite sick and came back for the first performance and was kind of woozy and not very clear headed. So he's going through Hamlet and there are wonderful soliloquies in Hamlet.

And he starts into the famous soliloquy and he begins to hear some kind of rumbling and sound. And so he's going and going and he's still hearing this. He describes later how he sped up and the sound sped up. He slowed down and the sound slowed down and he keeps going. And what he finally realizes is Winston Churchill is in the audience and Winston Churchill

is doing the speech from memory out loud.

And Burton is so disconcerted, he just can't believe it. And he can't shake him. And Churchill, being Churchill, doesn't even realize that everybody can hear this. And he goes through the whole soliloquy with him, word for word, 100 % correctly. And then afterwards, Churchill came back backstage and apologized to him ⁓ for doing it. And it's like...

just amazing who in the world would do something like that and could get away with it.

Jonathan Thomas (1:01:35)
Mrs. Anglotopia can probably confirm that I start, you know, repeating Churchill quotes back to him when we're watching movies about Churchill. I mean, so clearly, clearly I take after somebody great. ⁓ What's your favorite Churchill book other than yours, of course?

Gary L. Stiles (1:01:42)
Hahaha!

Thank

Well, obviously my early life is ⁓ Churchill's book. If I had to pick one that's about Churchill, ⁓ there are two that I'd probably pick. One would be Martin Gilbert's book called Churchill, a life. It's the one volume. And for anybody who knows Churchill, Gilbert wrote the definitive biography in 27 volumes or whatever it is. But he has a one volume one that's really quite good. I also enjoy

reading the only fiction that Churchill wrote, which was Savrola, which is a mildly disguised autobiography of Churchill also. If you read it, it's the lead character ⁓ who tries to have a revolt and overthrow the bad powers that be is actually Winston Churchill ⁓ himself. ⁓ And in fact, it's fun because in Savrola,

He lists the library that Savrola is developing for himself. And it's exactly the library that Churchill built for himself. Book by book, you can read it and see he had every one of those books in his library. So anyway, there's lots of good things to read about Churchill.

Jonathan Thomas (1:03:11)
And finally,

what's your favorite Churchill film?

Gary L. Stiles (1:03:13)
That's a tough one. My favorite actor is Robert Hardy, who played him and played him in a number of things. But the movie I enjoy the most right now is Darkest Hour. I think that is such a great portrayal of who Churchill was and how he was treated and mistreated. And also the humanity side, the other part of ⁓ the Darkest Hour that I find really compelling.

is a scene that's not true, but it shows Churchill who he was. It was a scene in the underground when he's describing to the Londoners asking whether he should fight Hitler or compromise with Hitler. And he begins to cry. And the little girl looks up to him and says, are you crying? And he said, yes, I'm a blubberer. I always cry. And that's so true about Churchill. That is such a good portrayal of him.

The other movie is Young Winston, I think ⁓ is a good movie.

Jonathan Thomas (1:04:13)
which is hard to find, it's not easy to find. But I agree with you, highly recommend both of them.

Gary L. Stiles (1:04:16)
It is hard to find.

Jonathan Thomas (1:04:20)
What a wonderful and illuminating conversation this has been. Thank you so much for joining us on the Anglotopia podcast, Gary. A Prelude to Immortality is published by Unicorn and is available now. We'll link to it in the show notes. And if you've never read.

Churchill's My Early Life. This episode might be the nudge you needed. You can get it from booksellers everywhere. We'll also link to it in the show notes. ⁓ It's been in print for nearly a century for a good reason. And if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, or comment. And if you like the Anglotopia podcast, please consider joining the Friends of Anglotopia Club, where you can get early access to new episodes and connect with other Britain enthusiasts and support the work that we do. Join us next time as we continue exploring.

people, places, and stories that make Britain's cultural heritage so endlessly fascinating to discover. Thank you, Gary.

Gary L. Stiles (1:05:08)
Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed this.

Jonathan Thomas (1:05:11)
Thank you so much.