David Cannadine is one of Britain's premier academics, essayists and broadcasters, whose books have brought erudite and entertaining social history to a wide audience. As General Editor of the Penguin History of Britain series he embodies Penguin's commitment to quality, accessible history publishing. This piece from Cannadine's acclaimed Aspects of Aristocracy takes a wry look at Winston Churchill's upper-class origins.

Churchill's attitudes were as aristocratic as his pedigree. His arrogance, his self-confidence, his sublime indifference to consequences, his total lack of interest in the thoughts and feelings of others: all this was regarded - and regretted - by observers as emphatic signs of his upper-class origins. He considered servants and secretaries, gardeners and gamekeepers, horses and hounds, to be integral parts of the natural order of things. He had no understanding of the minds or mores of the middle classes, and it cannot be coincidence that so many of his political adversaries came from that social background: Joseph and Neville Chamberlain, Bonar Law, Stanley Baldwin and Clement Attlee. He knew virtually nothing of the lives of the ordinary men and women who made up the majority of Britain's population. He never went into a shop, or travelled on a bus, and on the one occasion when he journeyed on the underground, he got on the Circle Line and went helplessly round and round on it until, several hours later, a friend rescued him from the ordeal. Even as late as 1951, he still believed that most people in Britain lived in 'cottage homes': a phrase which revealingly mingles his paternal benevolence with his aristocratic ignorance.

In retrospect, Churchill liked to present himself as a deprived and disadvantaged child, further handicapped by a minimal education, who achieved renown in the world by his own unaided efforts. But while there can be no doubting his ambition and his application, it is also clear that in the early stages of his career, he shamelessly exploited his aristocratic connections with singleminded purpose and success. As a soldier hungry for action and glory, he secured postings to the Indian frontier and the Sudan, thanks not merely to his own tireless lobbying, but also to that of his mother, who, he later recalled, furthered his plans and guarded his interests 'with all her influence and boundless energy'. By the same means, he obtained the best prices for his reporting of the Boer War, and the most generous advances for his early books.

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