ABSTRACT
No one can read Winston Churchill’s autobiography, My Early Life, published in 1930 during a lull in his political fortunes, without marvelling at the adventures of his youth. He recounts several near brushes with death: his first encounters were in Ireland. In 1895, in a world so peaceable that British officers were hard put to find any war to fight, Churchill arranged “a private rehearsal, a secluded trial trip, in order to make sure that the ordeal was one not unsuited to temperament”. The Spaniards were trying to hold onto their North American colony of Cuba, and he pulled a few diplomatic strings to accompany the general charged with suppressing an insurrection by nationalist guerrillas. In India, the most important part of the British Empire after the loss of American colonies in their Revolutionary War, informal rule by the royally chartered British East India Company had given way to British imperium several decades earlier.
