2 – He learned his trade as part of the brutal British occupation of India

“We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.”

By the time Winston Churchill got to India, the British rule there – the Raj, as it was known – had been in effect for almost 40 years. The British East India Company had set up shop on the southern tip of the subcontinent in 1757 and had gradually expanded across the whole region before being absorbed into the Empire proper in 1858. At the time, it encompassed all of modern India, as well as what is now Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar (Burma).

India was the jewel in the crown of the empire, providing untold wealth to the British crown. Naturally, very little of these riches were ever seen by any Indians, who lived in perpetual fear of both soldiers and famine. It is estimated that 10 million people died in the Great Famine of 1876-78 and a further 6 million between 1896 and 1900, the years that Churchill was there. On top of that, there was a series of severe disease outbreaks, with malaria, leprosy and cholera rife.

The Indian into which Churchill arrived was one which was finally tiring of British rule. The Viceroy at the time, Lord Curzon, had angered many through the mismanagement of the famine of 1899 – “any government which imperiled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism; but any government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralized the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime” wrote Curzon – and uprisings were beginning to spring up.

Winston, whom called India a “godless land of snobs and bores” and had no time for the natives, was sent to quash one such rebellion in Malakand, close to the border with Afghanistan. “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” said Churchill of his experiences fighting in Malakand. He later wrote an account of the war entitled “The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War”, which included such choice phrases as “The forces of progress clash with those of reaction,” with the Pashtun Muslims cast as the religion of backwardness and war. “The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed,” it continued.

Churchill seemed to see his time in India as a great time of colonial derring do, taking on natives and spreading the good word of British “civilisation” to every corner of the earth, later calling them “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”. Only briefly did he consider that perhaps the locals in India did not think that much of the men from the other side of the world who had arrived in their country to subjugate them, writing that the natives seemed angered by “the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own.”

Churchill left India for Africa, but his interest in the colony – although, clearly, not in the vast majority of the people who lived there – was far from over. When the poll was published that named Churchill as the greatest ever Briton, a similar one was published in India, one man was so popular that he was not even included in the list. That man was Mahatma Gandhi, and he was a man that Winston Churchill reviled…