Two captured officers were supposed to follow, but the guards returned and they were unable to join him. Churchill remained there until 1900, when he jumped a fence while the guards were distracted. The captured men were taken to a school the Boers had converted into a prison camp. One British crew member managed to escape and make it back to safety, but Churchill and the other survivors were taken prisoner.
#Winston churchhill driver#
As the British returned fire, the train driver steamed ahead at full speed-and ran right into the rocks the Boers had placed on the tracks, causing one of the cars to derail on a curve. That turned out to be a mistake.Īs the train was returning to the British lines, it was ambushed by a Boer commando (similar to the one pictured above), which opened fire from a nearby hill. Although correspondents for the Times and the Manchester Guardian declined the invitation, describing the train as a “ death trap,” Churchill was all too eager to go along. While there, he was offered a chance to accompany an expedition on an improvised armored train. In 1899, Churchill traveled to South Africa to cover the ongoing Boer War for the Morning Post. Perhaps the story that best illustrates his love of cigars occurred during World War II, when he had a special oxygen mask designed so that he could still smoke his cigar on an unpressurized, high-altitude flight. (One of his servants observed that “in two days his cigar consumption was the equivalent of my weekly salary.”) On one occasion, the president of Cuba presented Churchill with 2,400 top-quality cigars, although his paranoid security team insisted that one cigar from each box be sent off and tested for poison. The cigars were kept in boxes labeled “large” or “small” and “wrapped” or “naked.” They were mostly gifts, which helped keep expenses down. To prevent the cigar from becoming soggy, Churchill invented the “bellybando,” a strip of brown paper which could be glued around the end.Īt any given time, Churchill had 3,000 to 4,000 cigars in his house, mostly his favorite Romeo y Julieta brand. However, he almost never took a puff, preferring to chew on the end until it went out, then relight it and start again. For the rest of his life, he smoked eight or nine cigars every day.
Churchill developed his love of cigars as a young man, when he traveled to Cuba to report on an ongoing rebellion against the colonial Spanish government. The classic image of Winston Churchill includes a giant cigar stuck between his lips.
0 kommentar(er)
