![]() As a cavalryman and war reporter in five wars on four continents between 18 he learned to rely on the horse under the most extreme conditions. ©IWM (5426F).Ĭhurchill learned to ride in his childhood and his love of horses went deep into his nature. HorsesĢnd Lieutenant Winston Churchill of the 4th Queen's Own Hussars in 1895. And when, during the war, a ladybird landed on his sleeve he asked an American general to get it into safety and let it fly off from the window. During a round of golf he saved an earthworm from being trampled on. Image: ©IWM (H 31391).īut in general no creature was too lowly to wake his sympathies. Here he is inspecting Billy, the regimental goat of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, during his visit to a garrison on 17 July 1943. Always ready for a joke, he trained the goldfish with a Pavlovian reflex: when he stood at the edge of the pond with a visitor and made a clicking noise with his tongue, all the fish would rise up to the surface.Ĭhurchill seemed to be at ease with any animal. He took particular pleasure in the goldfish he kept in a separate pond, which he fed with particularly fine maggots he obtained specially from Yorkshire. Where he once as a small boy hunted butterflies and pinned them into his collection, now he bred them. Here he built almost immediately three lakes in which not only native ducks and geese made their homes but also black swans from Australia. His love for animals developed fully after he – by then a successful author, member of parliament and government minister – bought in 1922 a large and beautiful estate: Chartwell, in the county of Kent. It went so far that at boarding school he sold his bike in order to buy a bulldog. As much as he liked to go after hares and rabbits with his shotgun, he also loved his various pets – rabbits, cats and dogs. The goldfish trickĬhurchill, as child and youth, also loved animals. To shoot a good specimen of the white rhinoceros is an event sufficiently important in the life of a sportsman to make the day on which it happens bright and memorable in his calendar. I hit him hard with both barrels, and down he went, to rise again in hideous struggles-head, ears, horn flourished agonizingly above the grass, as if he strove to advance, while I loaded and fired twice more. At such a moment as this one is almost unconscious alike of report and recoil. ![]() When you fire a heavy rifle in cold blood it makes your teeth clatter and your head ache. The photograph of Winston standing by the black rhino was used as the frontispiece of the book.Ī white rhino Winston killed near 'Hippo Camp' in Uganda, a few miles upstream from Nimule on the White Nile, close to the present-day Otze Forest White Rhino Sanctuary: These and the next texts and images are taken from his work My African Journey, 1909. ![]() The large rhinoceros started, stumbled, turned directly towards the sound and the blow, and then bore straight down upon us in a peculiar trot, nearly as fast as a horse's gallop, with an activity surprising in so huge a beast, and instinct with unmistakable purpose. The thud of a bullet which strikes with an impact of a ton and a quarter, tearing through hide and muscle and bone with the hideous energy of cordite, came back distinctly. Two photographs of one of the black rhinos Winston killed in Simba, Kenya (about 200 miles / 300 km inland from Mombasa):Īt such a range it is easy to hit so great a target but the bull's-eye is small. ![]() In Africa, the young adventurer not only killed crocodiles and ostriches but also – one shouldn't really say it these days – three rhinoceroses. But not only the pheasants and partridges in Scotland but also the stags, hares, deer and boars in England lived dangerously when Churchill went hunting. As a member of an aristocratic family – one of his ancestors was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), the victorious commander in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) – it was expected that the young Winston learn to hunt and to fish, and not just with shotgun and fishing rod.Īs was also usual in his circles he went fox hunting with hounds (which has been banned in Britain since 2005, such pursuits being known as 'blood sports'). Pan (1894-1983) was a Hungarian, a refugee from the Nazis, who painted a number of portraits of Churchill. The painting was reproduced in the London Illustrated News at Christmas 1943. Winston Churchill in a portrait by Arthur Pan, painted possibly in 1943. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) loved his pets – his dogs, cats and birds – but also the animals in his grounds – the swans, geese and goldfish – and above all – as rider, cavalryman and polo player – his horses.
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