The Churchill Series – Sept.13, 2006

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

In yesterday’s post, we read about the reasons why, in late 1943, Churchill appointed General Montgomery to serve as General Eisenhower’s ground forces commander for the Normandy invasion.

At the time he appointed Montgomery, Churchill was sixty-nine and one of the world’s most powerful men. Today, we’ll go back more than half a century earlier and learn something of the academic struggles of a school boy who would later lead his nation in its most challenging hour.

Churchill is about to tell us what he encountered as he prepared for the Mathematics portion of the Sandhurst entrance exam. At the time of his recollection he’s about 50 and makes sure to let us know of the terrible “frights” Mathematics gave him :

Of course what I call Mathematics is only what the Civil Service Commissioners expected you to know to pass a very rudimentary examination. I suppose that to those who enjoy this particular gift …the waters in which I swam must seem only a duck-puddle compared to the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, when I plunged in, I was soon out of my depth.

When I look back upon those care-laden months, their prominent features rise from the abyss of memory. Of course, I had progressed far beyond Vulgar Fractions and the Decimal System.

We were arrived in an “Alice-in-Wonderland” world, at the portals of which stood “A Quadratic Equation.” This with a strange grimace pointed the way to the Theory of Indices, which again handed on the intruder to the full rigours of the Binomial Theorem.

Further dim chambers lighted by sullen. sulphouous fires were reputed to contain a dragon called the “Differential Calculus.”

But this monster was beyond the bounds appointed by the Civil Service Commissioners who regulated this state of Pilgrim’s heavy journey.

We turned aside, not indeed to the uplands of the Delectable Mountians, but into a strange corridor of things like anagrams and acrostics called Sines, Cosines and Tangents.

I don’t know about you, folks, but this stuff is starting to scare me, just as it did when I was sixteen.

So I’ll go no further with Pilgrim Churchill. But if you wish to continue with him, go to Winston S. Churchill's My Early Life and start reading on pg. 26.