Churchill's Headmaster

Winston Churchill is Britain’s national hero. His prep school headmaster was a sadist who almost ruined Churchill’s life. This first ever biography of Churchill’s headmaster pulls these myths apart. Churchill emerges as an intelligent and inspiring Narcissist who took Britain into a needless war, bankrupted it, lost its Empire and set off a process culminating in traditional British freedoms being lost and the country being Balkanized.

Churchill’s headmaster fought for the traditional Britain which Churchill’s war was central to destroying. And as this book painstakingly documents, almost everything we think we know about Churchill’s prep school headmaster is wrong. Herbert Sneyd-Kynnersley was less sadistic and severe than many headmasters. His arrested development made him no different from a large minority of such men. His beatings did not exceed anything at Eton or at reform schools. Churchill was not taken out of his school because of these beatings. The sources providing the worst accounts of the headmaster are the least reliable. The collapse of the school was not due to rumours of Sneyd-Kynnersley’s brutality. Sneyd-Kynnersley was highly educated, contagiously enthusiastic, and intent on preserving a traditionalist Britain and making Churchill into a responsible leader of the Empire built on these traditions. If Churchill hadn’t been withdrawn from his school, then Britain would never have gone to war, may never have lost the Empire, and may never have descended into the nihilism and Balkanization we see today. This ‘sadistic’ headmaster came very close to saving the British Empire and Britain itself.