The eclectic dandy of great policy

There is a big dilemma in the history of men that made History. Maybe none will ever know if Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill of the Dukes of Marlborough from Blenheim Palace was the last big eclectic, extraordinary, bizarre, politically active dandy of XX century. Or if he was a great, Machiavellian politician who turned into a myth, a protagonist in dandy history. Without doubt, it is certain that the Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Sir Winston Churchill, was first of all a great and loyal military, soldier and warlord like Lord Horatio Nelson or a Roman consul were, who made his own life an incessant series of non-stop battles, without pause, both on battlefields and palaces of power. Chapeau.

He could wear the most serious and strict military uniforms with the same natural nonchalance of the high representative suits, his typical British aplomb “three-piece”, always a little bit old dress, with his Homburg hat and bow ties, his flannel, pin-striped, red-purple velvet siren-suits, overalls with big pockets on the front, worn with nonchalance at the presence of generals and commanders in military uniform and medals.

The red-purple one, a pale wine colour, was his favoured siren-suit on battlefields when he came to visit the troops with the helmet on his head and shoulder field glasses. In his mouth or hands, his all-present cigar. The last half smoked part, 9.5 cm, was found by Nellie Goble in an ashtray at the time she worked at 10 Downing St, on August 1941, when German troops occupied Leningrad, has been sold at auction in London recently for about € 6.000.

How describing Churchill as a man who could talk for hours from the benches of the Parlia ment of England, with Ciceronian ardour, King’s counselor and I, at the same time, able to become the perfect bricklayer – it was one of his favoured hobbies – in his historic country house-book fac-tory, Chartwell House, two miles south of West-erham, Kent, today under the administration of the National Trust, the conservation organisation in England. Here, in his garden-park, he built little walls and shacks, grew his roses as a perfect gar-dener, took care of his butterfly collection, fishes and paint brushes. Sir Churchill was also a great painter, another hobby he had, so much so that one of his paintings portraying Marrakesh, was given as a gift to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943, in memory of their first meeting that took place in the Moroccan city, it was sold at auction by Sotheby’s for about $ 3million. Winston Churchill was a Nineteenth century gen-tleman, dutiful to his role, who lived in a century whose ideology he felt foreign.

One and only the meaning of his life: the defence of the British Empire. His morning dresses, white ties, greatcoats with astrakhan cuffs or his old torn and loose fitting clothes worn in the garden or for the works in the park. His great art was eclecticism, wether in battlefields, since he was 20, when after having attended the Royal Military College in Sandhurst, he stood out in many battles for many years: in Cuba, India, Sudan, South Africa, in the Second Boer War, receiv-ling dozens of decorations for bravery.

Or living every moment of ins life as a politician, soldier, journalist, writer, strategist, economist, mediator, speaker, good liver.

As if it was an eternal sporting challenge, he did everything with a little bit of irrational generosity and spontaneity that sometimes his fiercest opponents appreciated and commented kindly. As a war correspond-ent, he soon became the author of bestsellers; in 1953, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Sir Winston – half-English from father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance), the madcap squanderer second-born of the Duke of Marlborough, and half-American from mother, Jennie Jerome, squanderer too that, according to many people, had an affair with King Edward VII, daughter of a lucky hedge fund speculator from New York City, then owner of New York Times, with Cherokee origins – was a self-made man that never forgot the good doors to knock thanks to his right of caste. According to some historians, for example, before entering politics using his connections with the English ambassador in Madrid, his father’s friend, the mayor of New York City, and close to her divorced mother, and the connections with his maternal grandfather in New York Times, the 20-years old Winston was war correspondent for the prestigious New Yorker newspaper London Graphic during the Spanish-American war. He was 21 and he was wounded for the first time.

He wrote a book that had a great success, a bestseller that touched also Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders in Cuban occupation. Few people embodied the English aristocratic spirit with a piel of British tradition and attitude like Mr. Churchill did: pride, national identity, faculties on focusing every aspect of life in a new quiet dimension, a firm belief in style and rules that can turn life into a noble art.

He was deeply English and deeply concentrated in the traditional values and ideals of an English way of life. As the French historian and diplomat Jacques Chastenet said, Winston Churchill’s big loves were «grandeur», «power», «honour», and «supremacy», all of which he considered in one figure, the only «female-servant-mistress» of his life: England.