How Winston Churchill Learned English

When Sir Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, the Swedish Academy heralded both his "mastery of historical and biographical description" and his "brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values." In the first volume of his autobiography, My Early Life, Churchill explained where and how he developed this talent for language--at Harrow School in London, where he was compelled to study English because he wasn't considered bright enough to learn Latin and Greek.

[B]y being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell--a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great--was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing--namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. Mr. Somervell had a system of his own. He took a fairly long sentence and broke it up into its components by means of black, red, blue, and green inks. Subject, verb, object: Relative Clauses, Conditional Clauses, Conjunctive and Disjunctive Clauses! Each had its colour and its bracket. It was a kind of drill. We did it almost daily. As I remained in the Third Form three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence--which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage. Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for is not knowing English, I would whip them hard for that.
(My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Thornton Butterworth [UK] and Charles Scribner's Sons [US], 1930)

You won't find many sentences being parsed in English classes today. That sort of grammatical analysis was discredited decades ago as a dreary and pointless exercise in taxonomy. And when conducted by teachers far less gifted than Robert Somervell, often it was.

Yet I confess to sharing Churchill's bias. Convinced that understanding the essential structure of a sentence is still a noble thing, I too would like to "make them all learn English."

Image: Winston Churchill in 1884 (from The Life and Times of Winston Churchill, Odhams Press, 1946)