The Works of WSC
A guide to the Churchill canon
The CanonIn early 1901, in the aftermath of the Boer War, the Secretary of State for War, St. John Brodrick, was pursuing Army reform and increased Army expenditure. Churchill fiercely opposed both of these measures, and on May 13th he delivered his first major set piece speech in the House of Commons, in the course of which he publicly assumed his inheritance of the cause for which his father had committed political suicide in 1886.
"The Government of the day threw their weight on the side of the great spending Departments, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer resigned. The controversy was bitter, the struggle uncertain, but in the end the Government triumphed, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer went down for ever, and with him, as it now seems, there also fell the cause of retrenchment and economy, so that the very memory thereof seems to have perished, and the words themselves have a curiously old-fashioned ring about them".
After quoting his father at length Churchill then continued.
"Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time, and I am very glad the House has allowed me, after an interval of fifteen years, to lift again the tattered flag of retrenchment and economy".
Churchill's view prevailed, and in 1903 he published what was to be the first of his political works - a slim volume of six speeches entitled Mr. Brodrick's Army. It was the first of eighteen volumes of speeches that he would publish in the course of his life. As Frederick Woods said - "From early days, therefore, Churchill preserved his hothouse plants like a nineteenth century maiden - by pressing them between the covers of a book".
Mr. Brodrick's Army exists in two editions. The first, which is known in only three copies, is set in tiny type over 44 pages, and is generally described as a relatively unattractive offering, although I have yet to meet a collector who would decline a copy on those grounds. The second edition was expanded to a much more readable 102 pages and bound in bright red card covers. Several explanations have been put forward for the existence of two editions. Most recently Ron Cohen has argued a compelling case that the earlier format was determined by the publisher, Arthur Humphreys, until he decided that demand for the volume justified a more expensive format.
While the second edition is commoner than the first, everything is relative. It appears probable that less than a dozen copies remain extant. The work was almost entirely unavailable until it was included in the Collected Works edition of 1974 - itself far beyond the reach of most collectors. Finally, in 1977, Dalton Newfield and The Churchilliana Company issued a facsimile edition, encased in hard covers and including a new preface by Manfred Weidhorn.
Mr. Brodrick's Army has never been issued in translation.
