Some 130 years ago this month, a 20-year-old Leftanant Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, seen in the uniform of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars.
National Army Museum. NAM. 1992-10-143-1547
Churchill, having grown up surrounded by toy soldiers (he would ultimately amass a collection of more than 1,500), flags, and castles, cut his teeth in the Harrow School’s Rifle Corps as a 14-year-old lad.
Winston Churchill as a schoolboy at Harrow showing him in the uniform of the Harrow Rifle Corps
He then passed the Sandhurst “further” entrance exam on his third attempt in June 1893, 95th out of 389, and entered the Royal Military Academy that September, graduating 20th out of a class of 130 in December 1894.
Newly-minted Lieutenant Churchill, standing 5’ 6″ in his boots, received his commission from Queen Victoria with an effective date of 20 February 1895 and promptly took up a subaltern’s position in the fine old 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, a unit that dated back to 1685.
Lieutenant Winston Churchill joined the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars in Feb 1895
Even though not one of the more fashionable Guards units, the price of uniforms and equipment cost £653, a fleshed-out charger fit for a young officer of his standing another £200. Plus there was the inevitable “death of a thousand cuts” that came from officers club membership dues, canteen charges, retaining his batman to keep said uniforms clean and ready, retaining an enlisted groom to keep his charger shod and fit, polo outfits (he was on the regimental team) and other myriad expenses of a dashing young horseman. This was against a yearly salary of £120.
His active military service included shipping out with the 4th to India, where he “saw the elephant” on campaign with the Malakand Field Force, earning an India Medal with a Punjab Frontier clasp.
He would then go on to be a supernumerary lieutenant attached to the pith-helmeted 21st Lancers for the Sudan campaign, where, in what could be described as the “most dangerous two minutes of Winston Churchill’s life,” he rode in the 21st’s famous charge at Omdurman outside of Khartoum in 1898, earning the Queen’s Sudan Medal and the Khedive’s Sudan Medal.
Omdurman, Charge of the 21st Lancers by Stanley Berkeley
Churchill resigned from the 4th Hussars on 5 May 1899, capping his Victorian military career.
Lieutenant Winston Churchill, 1899.
He would go on to be a war correspondent, author, and politician of some sort, seeing active service again in the Great War as lieutenant colonel of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers, in a more muddy khaki uniform on the Western Front.
Winston Churchill, Colonel of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, at Armentières, 11 February 1916 note French Adrian helmet
Perhaps dating back to his time with the Hussars, Churchill did notably still harbor a reputation as a clothes horse. As noted by Rick Atkinson in his “An Army at Dawn. The War in North Africa 1942-43” of Winston’s risky 10-hour flight to Morocco for the Casablanca conference via bomber, “As was his custom on long plane trips, the prime minister wore a silk vest and nothing else” under his RAF uniform and parachute.