The Churchill Series - Mar. 7, 2007

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

I’m now safe and sound in Australia, and glad to be back in touch with you.

Churchill’s early difficulties with reading are legend. Not so well known are the difficulties he had with arithmetic. He tells us something about it in My Early Life, his account of his first thirty years. Churchill was almost five when, as he put it, “I was first menaced with Education.” And as between letters and numbers, he leaves no doubt as to which he found more menacing:

Letters after all had only got to be known, and when they stood together in a certain way one recognized their formation and that it meant a certain sound or word which one uttered when pressed sufficiently.

But the figures were tied into all sorts of tangles and did things to one another which it was extremely difficult to forecast with complete accuracy. You had to say what they did each time they were tied up together, and the Governess apparently attached enormous importance to the answer being exact.

If it was not right, it was wrong. It was not any use being “nearly right.”

In some cases these figures got into debt with one another: you had to borrow one or carry one, and afterwards you had to pay back the one you had borrowed.

These complications cast a steadily gathering shadow over my daily life. They took away from all the interesting things one wanted to do in the nursery or in the garden. They made increasing inroads upon one’s leisure. One could hardly get time to do any of the things one wanted to do. They became a general worry and preoccupation.

More especially was this true when we descended into a dismal bog called “sums.” There appeared to be no limit to these. When one sum was done, there was always another. Just as soon as I managed to tackle a particular class of these afflictions, some other much more variegated type was thrust upon me.

My mother took no part in these impositions, but she gave me to understand that she approved of them and she sided with the Governess almost always.

While Churchill was a very good reader by age nine, he struggled with math throughout his school days. He failed his first two admissions tests to Sandhurst primarily because of them; and had to take a math tutorial with a “crammer” before he passed on his third try.

BTW – The “Governess” Churchill refers to is not his beloved nanny, Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Everest.