August 6, 2013

Finest Hour 120, Autumn 2003

Page 20

BY CAROL BRECKENRIDGE MA, ATR-BC, LSW

“If it weren’t for painting I couldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the strain of things.”


As an artist and art therapist, I first . began to study Churchill through his painting. After hearing Edwina Sandys discuss her grandfather’s artwork at the Fulton, Missouri conference in 1996, I was inspired to cover the same subject at our Northern Ohio Churchill Centre group. But it was a poster over the door of a room at the mental health center where I practice art therapy that interested me in exploring the psyche of Churchill.

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The poster, put up by the National Association for the Mentally Ill to inspire mental patients to imagine and create useful lives, listed Churchill among illustrious deceased individuals said to have suffered mental illness. There certainly couldn’t be a better “poster child” than Churchill—but what illness were we talking about?

The poster seemed to credit a commonly held belief that Churchill suffered from what is now called Bi-Polar Disorder or more commonly “manic-depression.” This bothered me a bit, because the periodic episodes of depression I had read about in Churchill’s biographies were all connected to sad or tragic life events and we are not classifying people who are grieving as mentally ill. Although not particularly a follower of the Freudian tradition, I decided to read about Churchill’s childhood to find the roots of his supposed illness. There I was presented dramatically with a very different diagnosis than manic-depression.

Young Winston’s childhood behavior was described in the following manner by his parents, schoolmaster and by Churchill himself: He failed to pay close attention to details, made careless mistakes in schoolwork, and had difficulty sustaining attention to tasks. He did not follow through on instructions, often did not finish school work, lost books and assignments (not to mention his father’s watch). He was forgetful, restless; he engaged in impulsive activities such as running and climbing, and had difficulty playing quietly. He was constantly “on the go.”

If Lady Randolph had brought young Winston into my office and described the behavior above, I would have suggested a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder, Combined Type (i.e., Hyperactivity and Attention Deficit), and referred him to a psychiatrist for evaluation. Each of the behaviors mentioned is taken almost verbatim from the diagnostic criteria for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder contained in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Illness (DSM), the bible of the mental health profession.

As a parent of a bright ADD child, I was very interested in understanding what had morphed the young impulsive, inattentive, careless, hyperactive, easily distracted, perpetually tardy, and disorganized young man into the person who saved the West. What formed the man who gave Great Britain the courage to hold on in the face of overwhelming odds until allies entered the war? And how could someone who galvanized his imperiled nation and worked indefatigably at an age when most men retire—a man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and held almost every major office in the British Cabinet —also be a man who has been described as suffering from Manic-Depression? Or could the behavior that has been labeled manic be the adult remnant of childhood Attention-Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD)?

Churchill’s behaviors, symptoms, strength and triumphs may have been the result of the development of brilliant coping skills to manage ADD. For example, I believe that Churchill first used art as a therapeutic coping skill when events threatened to slow his active life. Tossed out of the Admiralty in 1915 at the age of 40, Churchill wrote, “The Muse of Painting came to my rescue.” He had found the perfect activity to absorb his total attention and provide relief from a sense of depression which resulted from inactivity. Just as hyperactive children are driven to run around a room, an adult ADD might be driven to bungee jumping or ceaseless activity to stave off the uncomfortable feeling of listlessness. Churchill may have found in the “Muse of Painting” a healthier coping mechanism.

The evidence I found of ADD in Churchill’s childhood derives from his own writings and early family letters. Churchill was born to an aristocratic family in the later days of the Victorian Era. Perhaps born prematurely, in childhood he seemed to possess a weak constitution. His Nanny, Mrs. Everest, whom he called “Woomany” and adored, raised him like most children of his class. Of his early relationship to his mother, Churchill stated, “I loved her dearly—but at a distance. My nurse was my confidant.”

As was customary in those days, Winston was torn from the loving attentions of his nanny and mother and sent to boarding school when he was seven. It’s hard to imagine this little boy being thrust into cold institutional hands, especially a child that “grown up people in their offhand way called a ‘troublesome boy.'” St. Georges School at Ascot was a place where flogging until the blood flowed was considered discipline. He writes:

How I hated this school—I made very little progress at my lessons….My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form…. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.

This is a complaint I have heard in my office many times by parents of children later diagnosed with ADD. His mother wrote to him at school, “…Your work is an insult to your intelligence. If you would only trace out a plan of action for yourself & carry it out & be determined to do so—I am sure you could accomplish anything you wished. It is that thoughtlessness of yours which is your greatest enemy.”

Apparently Winston was just as unruly at home as at school, for Jenny wrote to her husband, Lord Randolph, that she felt she could not manage Winston by herself when he came home from school, and sometimes doubted that his Nanny could control his behavior.

Winston seems to have been an unhappy little boy, as are most children who suffer from an inability to focus on things which do not interest them and must listen to a daily litany from their elders who scold them for their failure to try to do their best. Churchill later described his experience at St. George’s as a process of being “broken down.” He was remembered by his contemporaries as badly behaved and must have experienced more than his share of St. George’s special discipline. Winston’s health soon began to suffer. Churchill always suspected that it was Mrs. Everest who had come to his rescue and had influenced his mother to remove him from St. George’s after two years.

Winston was then placed in a small school in Brighton near his family doctor, where he found an element of kindness and sympathy and the individualized attention that he needed. But still he wrote constantly, and usually vainly, to his parents, begging them to come and visit him. He came down with double pneumonia, and nearly died (the era was well before the invention of antibiotics). Returning to classes after months of bed rest, he continued to be a poor student, even though he was able to memorize and recite long poems without a mistake. Churchill’s memorization skills made this easy for him, and therefore engaged his interest.

At twelve years of age he performed poorly on his entrance exam to Harrow School but was nonetheless admitted. He was humiliated daily by the Harrow custom of marching to class in order of class standing. He was made to march last in row. Mr. Davidson, his housemaster and tutor, wrote a report to Lady Randolph, which is perfectly congruent with the DSM description of a bright ADD child:

Winston, I am sorry to say, has if anything, got worse as the term passed. Constantly late for school, losing his books, he is so regular in his irregularity that I really don’t know what to do; and [here Mr. Davidson shows insight unusual for that era] sometimes think he cannot help it. But if he is unable to conquer this slovenliness, he will never make a success in public school.. .As far as his ability goes, he ought to be at the top of his form, whereas he is at the bottom.

At home on holiday, Winston’s father observed him playing with toy soldiers, something that did absorb Winston’s attention, and asked him if he wanted to be a soldier. Lord Randolph had already judged his son as not clever enough to go to the Bar, so when Winston said yes, his fate was set. This was one of the three or four substantive conversations that Winston later claimed to have had with his father in his lifetime. Winston wrote that his school years were “an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition: a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony.”

I think any boy suffering with ADD would say the same. The perception of “purposeless monotony” is common among those who have ADD. In my practice, I once had a nine-year-old boy who had recently been diagnosed with ADD and put on Ritalin. He reported to me that despite the medication, he continued to feel just the same. But miraculously, he claimed, “my mother has stopped yelling at me, my teacher is being nice, and the kids at school have stopped picking on me.”

The same impulsivity that is seen in hyperactive children can be seen in young Churchill through an incident that happened in his eighteenth year. Playing tag with his younger brother Jack and a cousin, he found himself on a bridge over a 30-foot ravine with his cousin at one end of the bridge and his brother at the other end. He hurled himself off the bridge in a vain attempt to grab a treetop and avoid capture. The resulting fall left him comatose for several days with a broken back (something not discovered until an x-ray taken in 1962 when he was 87) and a ruptured kidney. This pattern of risky behavior and sheer pleasure in dangerous situations can often be seen in ADD children and is one of the DSM descriptions of hyperactivity.

Winston further disappointed his father when he twice failed the exam for the Royal Military College at Sandhurst before slimly passing on his third attempt. Shortly before his death, Lord Randolph wrote this “encouraging” note to his son, in words that accurately reflect the deficits cited in the DSM criteria for ADD:

For in ‘your’ failure is demonstrated beyond refutation your slovenly happy-go-lucky harum scarum style of work for which you have always been distinguished at your different schools….With all the advantages you had, with all the abilities which you foolishly think yourself to possess & which some of your relations [presumably his mother] claim for you, with all the efforts that have been made to make your life easy and agreeable, and your work neither oppressive or distasteful, this is the grand result that you come up among the 2nd rate and 3rd rate class who are only good for commissions in a cavalry regiment….I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy
& futile existence. If that is so, you will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes yourself.

No doubt these words prodded Winston unconsciously to prove his father wrong. That is to Churchill’s credit, as there are just as many young men with judgmental fathers who unconsciously set out to prove their fathers were right! Moreover, Winston was in now in the perfect place for him—Sandhurst. He was interested inall his classes and spent hours each day in physical activity, riding and marching and doing gymnastics, so that military life provided a rigid structure that helped him to organize. ADD children often thrive in schools that provide similar opportunities and structure.

Still, Churchill showed symptoms of hyperactivity and attention deficit after his schooling, as a story about an evening with the Prince of Wales illustrates. He was highly honored as a second lieutenant to be invited to a weekend party given for the Prince. “I realized that I must be upon my best behavior: punctual, subdued, reserved,” he wrote: “in short, display all the qualities with which I am least endowed.” Sure enough, Winston arrived late, to find the entire dinner party standing silently and waiting for a half hour because he was the fourteenth guest, and the superstitious Prince would not sit at a table with thirteen people. Winston considered unpunctuality to be a vile habit, but it was one he carried with him throughout his life.

Churchill’s risk-taking continued as he began his military career, frantic to find active duty. Stationed in India, he chanced everything on a trip to Peshawar, which would have made him AWOL if he failed to persuade the officer there to take him on. He was successful in being taken on and thrown into action against warring mountain tribes. He felt he was not much different from other young men in that he did not think he could be killed; yet he’d seen men killed in action at his side.

He then used every influence he could muster through his mother and late father’s political and social circles to be posted to Africa under Lord Kitchener, where more warfare and excitement could be found. “Talk of fun!” he wrote. “Where will you beat this! On horseback at daybreak, within shot of an advancing army, seeing everything ” At Omdurman against the Dervish army, he felt lucky to take part in what proved the last significant cavalry charge in British history. He was, in fact, lucky to survive.

Winston then left the army, took a fling at politics, began his career as a journalist, and went off to the Boer War in the unusual role of journalist/soldier. He was captured when his armored train was ambushed, but quickly escaped in a most daring and highly publicized fashion. Later in life he enjoyed being a member of the elite club of heads of government who once had a price on their heads. A reward of £25 was offered for his capture, dead or alive. Of that time, he wrote that he was “eager for trouble.” Parents of hyperactive children often make that complaint.

As with most young men, Churchill’s dangerous experiences tapered off after his twenties; however, we still see him pushing the envelope well into his forties and fifties. In 1911 as Home Secretary at age thirty-seven, he received criticism from the press for placing himself needlessly in danger on a police action. His itch for excitement had not ended in childhood.

Upon becoming First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, he took up the then dangerous pursuit of flying. He walked away from more than one crash landing in the rickety aircraft of that early era. He gave up flying only when his pregnant wife, Clementine, pleaded with him to quit. After he lost his office in 1915, he volunteered for active service in World War I and insisted on an assignment that would put him at the front. In a letter to Clementine in which he describes the muck and horror of trench warfare, he states, “Amid these surroundings, aided by wet & cold, & every minor discomfort, I have found happiness & content such as I have not known for many months.”

Churchill’s stamina and energy continued to be prodigious throughout his life. What seemed hyperactivity in his youth may have been the wellspring of the energy that left younger persons panting in his wake. Since Churchill was not a man of inherited wealth, he supported his family as a writer and journalist, often keeping two secretaries employed working round the clock to transpose his dictation. One secretary was usually employed for the after dinner shift, when Churchill would rise from a hearty dinner accompanied by wines and brandy to work past midnight.

There is no dispute that Churchill experienced periods of depression, but his “black dog” appeared to come either at times of inactivity or severe loss. I once asked his daughter, Lady Soames, if she had ever observed her father struggling with depressive moods when there was no external stimulus. She answered that her father’s periods of depression only occurred at times when “one would have to be a monster of insensitivity not to be depressed.”

In fact, Churchill first turned to art as therapy while experiencing feelings of great sadness and despair at his darkest hour in the spring of 1915 that brought a disaster for the Allied armies on the Gallipoli peninsula during World War I. The year before, life had been very good for Churchill. He was First Lord of the Admiralty, forty years old; he had been married to Clementine for six years with three children. During the controversy over the disaster at Gallipoli, Churchill was forced to resign from his powerful position as First Lord and was given as a consolation the backwater post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Until this point, Churchill’s life and career had suited his need to keep active. Now with his career presumably in shambles, we might expect some deep feelings of loss. Later he wrote:

The change from the intense executive activities of each day’s work at the admiralty to the narrowly measured duties of a Chancellorship left me gasping. Like a sea beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the pressure. . .Then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue.

From his early twenties to the age of forty, Winston Churchill was a political comet, succeeding at everything he tried—until the Dardanelles and the failure of the Gallipoli campaign. During this period of his life he also suffered personal losses. In 1921, his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, died from a series of complications after a minor fall. That same year, his three-year-old daughter Marigold died of what was probably septicemia. The family went to Loch More in Sutherland to recover. When Clementine finally took the children back to London and school, Winston stayed on at Dunrobin Castle. Once more he took solace in his painting.

In 1922, when Churchill found himself, in the space of one month, “without an office, without a seat, and without an appendix,” he rented a home in Cannes for six months and painted daily as he worked on the second volume of his history of the Great War. Clementine seldom accompanied her husband to the south of France, which she found “suffocated with luxury and ennui,” but Churchill was drawn to the colors and sunlight of the region. He may in fact have been coping with a Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). This depressive disorder responds well to sunlight. Individuals who are sensitive to a lack of sunlight find themselves feeling depressed during the short dark days of winter in northern latitudes.

In the “wilderness years” from 1929 to 1939, Churchill was out of office, out of favor, and almost the only voice warning against the rise and rearmament of Nazi Germany. Contrary to what has been commonly thought to be a time when Churchill sat and brooded through personal depression, this was an extremely productive period for him. Although discouraged by what he thought was likely the premature end of his promising career in public office, in those ten years he produced 233 paintings, twelve books, 242 articles, and 475 speeches. He was one of the most highly paid journalists in the world.

It is very hard to conceive of a clinically depressed or manic individual being able to produce so much at such a high level of accomplishment. Moreover, Churchill was still a member of Parliament, which was intrinsic to his daily life, as Mary Soames wrote: “Politics always came first—there lay Churchill’s destiny; yet he found time, or made it, to enjoy himself; to be brilliant and convivial company; to reorganize the landscape at Chartwell; and to paint.”

In 1932 he developed typhoid while visiting Blenheim in Bavaria, the battleground which won his ancestor Blenheim Palace. Later he also developed a severe chill. However, during all this time, he kept a staff working on three books and fired off numerous magazine and newspaper articles. This was reminiscent of the young soldier who played polo in the Regimental Tournament of 1899 with a dislocated shoulder. He scored two goals with his arm strapped to his side, and in fact continued to play polo into his fifties. Here again we are reminded of the well-channeled energies of a hyperactive mind.

His speed and endurance while he painted were phenomenal. On one trip to Maxine Elliot’s Chateau de l’Horizon in the south of France, he painted six pictures in eleven days while suffering indigestion that required him to stand the whole time he painted. In the forty years he painted, he completed over 500 paintings. In his essay, Painting as a Pastime, he wrote:

Painting is a companion with whom one may hope to walk a great part of life’s journey….one by one the more vigorous sports and exacting fames fall away but painting is a friend who makes no undue demands….

Churchill was very conscious in channeling his prodigious energy into activities that his body could tolerate. However, Churchill typically pushed his body far beyond what the average person would tolerate. Perhaps it was his hyperactivity that provided Churchill with the energy to push forward with his career and kept him painting until the age of 86.

In 1939, his Wilderness Years ended with the invasion of Poland and his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty for a second time. After the fall of France in May 1940, and the King’s invitation to form a government, Churchill took on the enormous job of wartime Prime Minister. He painted just one picture during five years of war. This alone is instructive of the huge workload he wielded in his mid- to late-sixties.

At times during this period of stress and failing health, including a probable heart attack unreported in the press, Churchill’s phenomenal coping skills may have failed him. Lord Moran, Churchill’s personal physician, wrote in his diary that an aide was “worried by [Churchill’s] inability to finish one subject before taking up another, by the darting process of his mind.” But Moran himself, who ministered to him with a plethora of medications, stated:

You cannot measure [his] inspiration….the Americans call it obstinacy….the Prime Minister set out to inspire the country with his will to win Gradually I have come to think of him as invincible.

Marrakesh was the site of his lone wartime painting, in 1943. At Casablanca, Churchill convinced Roosevelt that he could not come all the way to Africa without seeing Marrakesh, 150 miles away. To the dismay of their security staff, this incredible entourage of thirty people drove four hours and picnicked on the open desert with tommy guns at ready and aircraft circling overhead. In Marrakesh, Roosevelt was carried up a tower to watch the sun set over the Atlas Mountains. The next morning Churchill, still in his dressing gown complete with embroidered dragons, said good-bye to Roosevelt. Impulsive as ever, he hopped into the car and drove to the airfield in his pyjamas to prolong their visit. Then he went back up the tower, painted the scene they had shared, and later presented the painting to FDR. As he wrote, “I have never found anything like painting to take one’s mind for a spell off grave matters.”

After the war Churchill returned to the Muse of Painting. She served as therapy, first to decompress from the pressures of the war, then to recover from the body blow of his election defeat in July 1945, and finally to distract him from stress in his second term as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1955. From the age of forty into his eighties, he looked to painting to provide fun, channel his energies, relieve his stress, and moderate his sorrows. In the life of this extraordinary man, the body of his artwork can be seen as a tribute to his spontaneous use of art as therapy. Art was but one of the many coping skills which Churchill used to harness the driving energies of his nature and focus the “darting process of his mind” to forge a creative and heroic life. But it was certainly one of the most important.


Ms. Breckenridge is an art therapist and social worker practicing at a mental health center in Ohio. This paper was originally presented at the Buckeye Art Therapy Symposium and the American Art Therapy Conference in 1998.

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