Old Woom’s Winnie

Old Woom’s Winnie

Great things were expected of this firstborn son of a British lord. But the person who was perhaps the greatest influence on his life was not someone with prestige and power; it was his nanny. That woman became the love of this lonely boy’s life. As an adult, he often shed tears when he remembered the substitute mother he affectionately called Old Woom. She gave him the nickname Winnie.

When little Winnie wasn’t frolicking in the park with Old Woom, he sat alone at his bedroom window watching soldiers drill across the boulevard. He imagined that if he could come back from war as a hero, he might earn his parents’ love.

At age seven he began his odyssey through prep schools. He hardly ever saw his folks, except for fleeting moments during holidays. But that didn’t keep him from driving himself to make them proud. Not even a speech impediment could stop him once he set his mind on something. This earned him another nickname: pigheaded. He wore that unkind epithet as a badge of honor.

He applied to his nation’s leading military college, only to fail the entrance exam three times. Once he got in, he barely made the grades to stay in. As a young officer his career was undistinguished. He came home to run for parliament and was defeated. He headed off to South Africa to fight in the Boer War, but was captured.

When Winnie got back home again, he rose in the ranks of government with the help of family connections. He was finally elected to parliament, but was condemned when he ordered troops to fire on striking miners. During World War I, as first lord of the Admiralty, he committed the greatest blunder of his career when he insisted that British troops seize Gallipoli in Turkey. Over a million soldiers were drawn into that unnecessary battle. Military brass warned Winnie that an advance into the teeth of Turkish artillery was suicidal. But he wouldn’t back down. One admiral resigned, calling Winnie pigheaded. Before this debacle ended in defeat, there were 250,000 casualties on both sides. Winnie was sacked.

But with his trademark pigheadedness, he bounced back to become chancellor of the exchequer. Against all advice, he pigheadedly made monetary changes that plunged England into a depression. Again he was fired. When he stood pigheaded against his party’s unwillingness to take a stand against Communism and Nazism, Winnie spent his next decade in political isolation. No one would have guessed then that his nation would soon need his pigheadedness. The world remembers Winnie as Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose refusal to back down saved the world from totalitarianism.

Later, he went on to win the Nobel Prize. In 2002, a BBC poll named him the greatest Briton of all time. When asked the secret to his success, Churchill replied, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” If you are discouraged today, you might want to recall a line in a speech that pigheaded Winnie gave at Harrow during the worst days of World War II:

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never give in!

As for you, be strong and courageous, for your work will be rewarded.

2 Chronicles 15:7