The Churchill Series – May 3, 2006

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

In February 1902, twenty-seven year old Winston Churchill took his seat for the first time in the House of Commons. He was extremely ambitious and eager to advance in Parliament, so what he did a few months later is really extraordinary. He challenged the British political and military establishments over what for Churchill were matters of principle. What’s even more extraordinary, he prevailed.

According to Richard Hough:

At Winston’s old college, Sandhurst, there had occurred a series of mysterious fires. Accusations of [arson] were made against three cadets, but no evidence of guilt was discovered.

When the fires continued, an order was issued by the War Office and read out to an assembly. Unless the guilty were found within forty-eight hours, all cadets of C Company (where the fires had broken out) would be rusticated and all their servants (mostly old soldiers) discharged unless they could prove they were elsewhere when the fires broke out. Among them were the three cadets who had already been found not guilty.

Churchill took up the cadets’ cause. In a letter to the editor of The Times of London he said the War Offices action’s violated “three cardinal principles of equity.”

His biographer Martin Gilbert continues the narrative:

These principles were “that suspicion in not evidence; that accused should be heard in their own defense; and that it is for the accuser to prove his charge, not for the defendant to prove his innocence.”

All twenty-nine cadets had been sent down from the college. None had been charged with any offence. “Nothing having the remotest semblance to a judicial enquiry has been held.”

Even poor parents had to pay for a term in which their sons were not allowed to be in college, and which would not count towards their time there. “All the cadets I have seen strenuously deny and complicity with the “offence,” [Churchill wrote].

Churchill’s letter was answered by the headmaster of Sherborne School, the Reverend Frederick Westcott. Soldiers had to learn the lessons of corporate punishment, he wrote. “The innocent, doubtless, suffer with the guilty; but then they always do. The world has been so arranged.”

“Has it indeed?” Churchill asked in his reply on July 8. No doubt Westcott had taken care “that the little world over which he presides in arranged on that admirable plan, but it is necessary to tell him that elsewhere the punishment of innocent people is regarded as a crime, or as a calamity to be prevented by unstinting exertion.”

So long as the “delinquencies of a schoolmaster” were within the law, Churchill added, “the House of Commons has no right to intervene, but when a Commander-in-Chief and a Secretary of State are encouraged to imitate him, it is time to take notice” ….

Churchill wanted to discuss the Sandhurst punishments in the Commons. But [Prime Minister] Balfour…refused to allow time for any such debate [so] Churchill [arranged to have the matter] raised in the Lords.

During the debate there, the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts, agreed that each individual case would be investigated and that no innocent cadet would lose a term of study. Commenting on this outcome, The Times praised Churchill’s efforts, calling him “an effective advocate.”

All but two of the cadets were reinstated as were the servants. The arsonist(s) were never identified. The commandant at Sandhurst was soon replaced because of the general state of disorder there.

The parallels to the Duke lacrosse case are striking. They enable us to make some very informed judgments about what Churchill would be saying and doing now if he lived in Durham. For one thing, I’m sure he wouldn’t have voted yesterday for DA Mike Nifong.

If in 1902 you had watched Churchill place his ambition second to his principles and challenge his country’s political and military establishments, during the 1930s you could have told a visitor listening to him in the Commons: “He’s done this sort of thing before.”
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In haste. Sources added this evening.