Winston Churchill ‘probably’ sexually abused as boy

Biographer Lord Dobbs says former PM
suffered ‘appalling treatment’ at school

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The Conservative peer “has researched the life of Churchill and
written numerous fictional novels about the politician’s time in
office”, says The Daily Telegraph.

Dobbs made the abuse allegation during a public talk in which he
argued that the violence Churchill faced during his school years
was critical in the making of Britain’s greatest wartime
leader.

“In order to understand the man, I felt it necessary to
understand the young child,” Dobbs said.

“He didn’t have a difficult childhood, he had an impossible
childhood. He was neglected, he was abused physically, emotionally
and probably sexually too.”

Speaking at the Chalke Valley History Festival,
near Salisbury,
Wiltshire, Dobbs described how the then-future prime
minister was brutally beaten by his headmaster after stealing some
sugar.

The eight-year-old Churchill was allegedly “stripped” and
“thrashed until the blood was coming from the wounds” by Reverend
Herbert William Sneyd-Kynnersley.

Dobbs “did not say whether Sneyd-Kynnersley may have sexually
assaulted” Churchill during his time at St George’s school, in
Ascot, Berkshire, reports the Daily Mail.

Following the thrashing over the stolen sugar, the young
Churchill “found an opportunity to sneak back into that
headmaster’s study and stole his straw boater that he used for
official occasions”, said Dobbs.

“He took that straw boater – the sign of authority – to the
woods and for one glorious afternoon kicked the crap out of it. Not
bad for an eight-year-old boy who had just been so cruelly abused,”
he added.

“In that eight-year-old boy I could see some of the origins of
the 65-year-old man.”

Churchill attended St George’s between 1882 and 1884. According
to the school’s website, its headmaster was notorious for his
belief in “cruel floggings, some of which were inflicted on young
Winston”.

In his autobiography, My Early Life, Churchill
recalled: “Flogging with the birch in accordance with the Eton
fashion was a great feature of the curriculum.”