Pictured is Winston Churchill.
He stood at the top of the world; a hero of the empire. The twenty-seven-year-old young man had just published his fourth book and was recently elected to his first term as a member of the British Parliament. He got off the train and adjusted his “huge fur coat.” It was January 15, 1901. Winston Churchill was about to start his first visit to Cincinnati.
Churchill was born on November 30, 1874. His father, Randolph, was a brilliant but erratic British politician. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy American businessman. The young tyro was an indifferent student who dazzled listeners with his eidetic memory. Because of his mediocre academic record, Winston had to settle for attending Sandhurst, England’s West Point.
Lt. Churchill’s first overseas assignment was to India. He found that he had plenty of time to expand his education and play championship-level polo. He finagled a leave to cover a tribal insurrection on the Indian frontier for a British newspaper. His realistic portrayal of the conflict was well-received by the public. He published his dispatches in a book known as The Story of the Malakand Police Force.
A year later Churchill released his second book, The River War. It is based upon the efforts of the British Army to retake Sudan from an Islamic mystic known as the Mahdi. The book featured Churchill’s thrilling eyewitness description of the Battle of Omdurman, the last mass cavalry charge in history.
His third book, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, chronicled Churchill’s exploits during the Second Boer War. (The Boers were the descendants of a Dutch group who settled in South Africa.) The young journalist, who had resigned his commission from the British Army, was captured. After a month of incarceration, he escaped and slipped through hundreds of miles of enemy territory to gain his freedom. (His fourth book, Savrola, was a novel set in a mythical European country.)
The author’s appearance in Cincinnati was part of a multi-city tour of the United States and Canada. He was paid $250 for the lecture and received royalties from the books he sold. Strained relations between Churchill and his American booking agent were resolved when his agent agreed to pay for a bottle of champagne at breakfast.
The title of the lecture was “The War as I Saw It,” a recounting of the Boer War and his experiences in the hotly contested conflict. The pro-Boer Cincinnati audience was initially hostile towards Churchill. He quickly charmed them with praise for the Boer, calling them “the most formidable fighting man in the world.” Churchill impressed a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter with his “winning way.” He left the Queen City for Indianapolis with many new friends.
Churchill returned to Cincinnati thirty-one years later. His visit was postponed for several weeks while he recovered from being hit by a car as he crossed a New York City street. At fifty-seven years old, he was no longer “a young man in a hurry.” Although he had served in a number of important positions within the British government, it would be nearly a decade before he became prime minister.
Tickets for his February 29, 1932, lecture at the Taft Theater sold for $1 to $3. His talk about the Great Depression and “The Destiny of the English-Speaking Peoples” was “truly brilliant” and was well received according to Cincinnati Mayor Russell Wilson. Churchill avoided a citation for violating Prohibition laws by presenting a doctor’s note. Churchill planned to return to Cincinnati in 1938, but had to cancel because of the growing Nazi threat. Churchill liked Cincinnati, calling it “the most beautiful of the inland cities of the Union.”
Winston Churchill served as prime minister of Great Britain during World War 2. He continued his prolific writing career, publishing an estimated eight to ten million words. In 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his four-volume history of the Second World War.
Winston Spencer Churchill became the first honorary American citizen on April 9, 1963, upon a special act of Congress. He died January 15, 1965, at the age of ninety.