H.G. Wells - Churchill's Connections

1866-1946
UK writer

Introduction
Stories
Biographical summary
See also
Further reading
References

1. Introduction

‘H.G.’ (Herbert George) was a science fiction novelist and social commentator whose writings include The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898). He grew up in difficult financial circumstances and became committed to a mixture of socialism and liberalism. He anticipated many of the technological and social developments of the twentieth century and helped to develop the United Nations’ formulation of human rights. He co-founded Diabetes UK and was President of PEN International, a writer’s association. Churchill was an avid reader of his writings and was influenced by his ideas. The two became friends for 45 years, despite also at times being vociferous ideological opponents.

2. Stories

Wells’s early employment included being a chemist’s assistant, an apprentice draper and a science teacher.
Wells initiated his first meeting with Churchill, who was already an enthusiastic reader of Wells’s works.
Wells and Churchill were both futurists, with Wells being a long-term idealist and Churchill a medium-term pragmatist.
Wells’s concept of ‘land ironclads’ and Churchill’s influence while First Lord of the Admiralty helped to develop the tank during World War I.
Wells and Churchill had public spats about Russia and the British Empire but remained friends.
Wells and Churchill were both influenced in their early careers by eugenics, seen by many at the time as a promising new area of science.
Wells was a notorious womaniser, a ‘Don Juan among the intelligentsia’.

Wells’s early employment included being a chemist’s assistant, an apprentice draper and a science teacher.

‘H.G.’, or ‘Bertie’ to his family, was the son of a Kent professional cricketer, Joe Wells, who was the first player to take four wickets in four balls in a first-class match.* Joe had previously been a gardener at Uppark, a country house in West Sussex, where he met H.G.’s mother, a housemaid.

H.G. often visited his mother there, with its grand library giving him exposure to many writers. The household’s class divisions was also a formative influence, stimulating his antipathy towards inequalities. He would later join the Fabian Society, which adheres to a gradualist rather than revolutionary approach to socialism.

His father’s cricket income ended after a broken thigh bone, as did H.G.’s schooling at age 13. The young Wells became a chemist’s assistant, then an apprentice draper, working 13-hour days in poor light and sleeping in a cramped dormitory.

Gaining a scholarship, he studied biology at the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science and now part of Imperial College London) under Thomas Huxley, known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ for his promotion of Charles Darwin’s ideas. He suffered lung illnesses (possibly tuberculosis), with his first convalescence lasting a few months at Uppark, giving him more time to read. After further science studies, he became a teacher and freelance journalist.

He started writing ‘scientific romances’, an early precursor to today’s science fiction, involving technological dystopia, world war, social transformation, aliens and time travel. He also ventured into semi-autobiographical social satire, political diatribes and encyclopaedic works, and wrote a film script for Alexander Korda, Things to Come (1936). His later book The Rights of Man (1940) contributed significantly towards the formulation of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). He was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature but was not awarded it.

He was also an enthusiastic organiser. He co-founded and was first president of the Royal College of Science Association (science alumni of Imperial College London); was a founder member of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty); and was twice president of PEN International (a writers’ association). Having developed diabetes, he co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association in 1934, now known as Diabetes UK.

* Joe Wells’s uncle was Timothy Duke (1762-1825), a cricket ball manufacturer in Penshurst, Kent. The Duke family began its business in around 1760 which was merged with John Wisden & Co in 1920 and is now owned by British Cricket Balls Limited. The Duke cricket ball is still used in the UK for international and first class cricket matches. See Robert Howard, ‘The Duke Cricket Ball’, Penshurst Living Archive.

Wells initiated his first meeting with Churchill, who was already an enthusiastic reader of Wells’s works.

Churchill came across some of Wells’s writings in the late 1890s and promptly set about reading all his works. He was particularly entranced by The Time Machine, later saying that it is ‘one of the books I would like to take with me to Purgatory’.¹ His fascination would endure for decades. In 1931, he wrote that he could pass an examination on Wells’s books, and that ‘One whole long shelf in my small library is filled with a complete edition’.²

When Churchill was a newly elected 26-year-old member of parliament, Wells’s publisher sent Churchill a copy of his new book, Anticipations (1901). Churchill followed up by writing to the author, saying, ‘I read everything you write’.³ Wells replied that ‘It will interest me tremendously to make your acquaintance. To me you are a particularly interesting & rather amiable figure.’⁴

They met in early 1902 in the House of Commons, beginning a long though sometimes turbulent friendship. Wells had a significant influence on some of Churchill’s thoughts and writings, particularly during Churchill’s early days as a Liberal. In a major speech in Glasgow in 1906, for example, Churchill adopted a number of Wells’s ideas for social reform, including state support for the vulnerable in society. He had read A Modern Utopia (1906) shortly beforehand, and wrote to Wells, saying, ‘I owe you a great debt’.⁵

Wells supported Churchill in his by-election campaign for Manchester North-West in 1908. In their first correspondence, Wells had said to Churchill, ‘I really do not think that you people who gather in great country houses realize the pace of things’,⁶ but he believed that Churchill could help bring about some social and economic change to reduce inequality, which indeed he did (see Budget Protest League).

Churchill’s interests soon moved on from social reform to military and other matters, and he reverted to being a Conservative in 1924, whereas Wells supported the Bolshevists in Russia and stood (unsuccessfully) to be a Labour MP in 1922 and 1923. Nevertheless, they retained shared interests in writing, technology and the future.

Wells and Churchill were both futurists, with Wells being a long-term idealist and Churchill a medium-term pragmatist.

Wells tended to start from the distant future and work backwards, whereas Churchill started from the past and worked forwards. Wells’s biology and particularly geology studies gave him an awareness of extremely long-term timescales (‘geologic time’), while Churchill’s reading of history provided him with a perspective covering thousands rather than millions of years. Wells’s imaginings were more theoretical than Churchill’s pragmatic approach. Both realised that scientific developments could result in huge discontinuities between the present and the future.

Wells set out his vision in various fiction and non-fiction works. He anticipated, amongst many other developments, aerial warfare, world war, the tank, the nuclear bomb, space travel, biological engineering, the internet and mass surveillance. He also anticipated major social changes including universal human rights. However, his utopian idea of a federal world government (see also Emery Reves) has not come to pass; nor has a time machine or alien invasion. By 1941, however, enough of his predictions had become reality for him to write that he wanted his epitaph to be ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’⁷

Churchill’s outlooks were described mainly in the forms of non-fiction and speeches. Some of his foresights have been collated at the instigation of Kay Halle. He did not write any science fiction but once wrote an article about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.

As with some of his early political views, some of Churchill’s technological anticipations were prompted by Wells, particularly his speculation in 1924 of ‘a bomb no bigger than an orange’ being able to ‘blast a township at a stroke’.⁸ Wells had described this ten years earlier and had coined the term ‘atomic bomb’⁹ in The World Set Free (1914). Despite their foresight, neither anticipated that Churchill would play a significant role in the early development of nuclear weapons and policy.

One of Churchill’s main prediction errors was in 1924 when he wrote, ‘But why should there be a war with Japan? I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime.’¹⁰ Another was his 1932 opinion that ‘I do not believe that we shall see another great war in our time’.¹¹

Wells’s concept of ‘land ironclads’ and Churchill’s influence while First Lord of the Admiralty helped to develop the tank during World War I.

The Land Ironclads (1903) was a short story by Wells about large, armoured vehicles on eight pairs of all-terrain wheels with semi-automatic weapons. An ironclad was a metal-plated warship; Wells envisioned a land equivalent.

In his first stint as First Lord of the Admiralty (1911-15), Churchill’s responsibilities extended beyond ships to land-based naval air squadrons and armoured cars to protect the aircraft. In late 1914, he began to consider whether an armoured vehicle could be developed that would cross trenches and crush barbed wire. In February 1915, he formed the Landships Committee which experimented with various wheeled and tracked vehicles. Its name and premise were partially prompted by his recollection of The Land Ironclads, and its existence was kept low profile for fear of being opposed.

Although Churchill left the Admiralty in May 1915, he continued to take an active interest in the venture. In June he attended a demonstration of a tracked vehicle, taking David Lloyd George, minister of munitions, with him. Lloyd George was impressed and soon took over the project, giving it official sanction.

As a secret new weapon, the landships were referred to deliberately misleadingly as ‘water tanks’ and the development group became the Tank Supply Committee. The first active ‘tank’ was used in the Battle of Flers-Courcelette in the Somme department in France in September 1916.

In 1919, twelve different people claimed the invention of the tank, but not Churchill. A Royal Commission decided that the inventors were Sir William Tritton and Major Walter Gordon Wilson, but noted that ‘it was primarily due to the receptivity, courage and driving force of the Rt. Hon. Winston Spencer Churchill that the general idea of the use of such an instrument of warfare as the ‘Tank’ was converted into a practical shape’.¹²

Churchill wrote, ‘There never was a moment when it was possible to say that a tank had been “invented”. There never was a person about whom it could be said “this man invented the tank”.’¹³ Nevertheless, he wrote to Wells in October 1916, saying, ‘You will have been interested to see the success with wh[ich] y[ou]r land battleship idea was at last – after many weary efforts – put into practice.’¹⁴

Wells and Churchill had public spats about Russia and the British Empire but remained friends.

Wells made three visits to Russia in 1914, 1920 and 1934, meeting Vladimir Lenin on the second occasion and conducting a three-hour interview with Joseph Stalin on the third. In 1920, he despaired about the social and economic collapse in Russia in the wake of the 1917 revolution. He wrote of the Bolshevists, ‘I disbelieve in their faith, I ridicule Marx, their prophet, but I understand and respect their spirit. They are – with all their faults – the only possible backbone now to a renascent Russia.’¹⁵ He appealed for aid to help them rebuild Russia in a new social order.

Churchill was quick to respond, calling Bolshevism a cancer and mocking Wells for supporting it. ‘Mr. Wells attributes Russia’s downfall to the inherent rottenness of Capitalism, Imperialism, and the war. What arrant nonsense! The Bolshevists did it’.¹⁶ He advocated and provided military support for the White Russians against them (see Leon Trotsky).

Wells fired back that although Churchill ‘has been rushing about vehemently from one superficial excitement to another, he has the impudence to twit me with superficiality […] He believes quite naively that he belongs to a particularly gifted and privileged class’.¹⁷

Both were experts at complimenting while criticising. In Men Like Gods (1923), Wells’s character Rupert Catskill, based on Churchill, ‘has lived most romantically. He has fought bravely in wars. He has been a prisoner and escaped wonderfully from prison. His violent imaginations have caused the deaths of thousands of people.’¹⁸

In 1931, Churchill published H.G. Wells: Who Nurses a Grievance but for Which He Might Be of Great Help to Britain. He described Wells as ‘an unquestionably great writer’¹⁹ but someone whose talents were regrettably distracted by a constantly querulous baby, that is, Wells’s grievance against Britain’s empire and against British social and economic structures.

Yet in 1934 Churchill invited Wells to Chartwell and to join The Other Club (see Lord Birkenhead), a high honour. Wells’s last scientific romance, Star Begotten (1937), was dedicated ‘On a Sudden Impulse | To My Friend | Winston Spencer Churchill’.²⁰ In 1938, Churchill referred to Wells as ‘an old friend of mine’.²¹ They remained in touch until Wells’s death in 1946.

Wells and Churchill were both influenced in their early careers by eugenics, seen by many at the time as a promising new area of science.

Eugenics is selective breeding to improve the genetics of the human race. Its theoretical basis sometimes distinguishes between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ approaches, with the former encouraging reproduction between those who are deemed to improve society, and the latter preventing reproduction between those who are deemed to harm or detract from society. In the early 1900s it was a somewhat fashionable ‘science’, with different strands drawing on evolution theory, genetics, sociology and other disciplines. Supporters included economist John Maynard Keynes, writer George Bernard Shaw, philosopher Bertrand Russell and birth control activist Marie Stopes.

In Anticipations, Wells expected that in the New Republic those ‘afflicted with indisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mental disorders, with such hideous incurable habits of mind as the craving for intoxication’²² would not be permitted to procreate. Indeed, he anticipated that they and the ‘incurably melancholy, or diseased or helpless persons’²³ would be put to death, with the help of opiates to prevent pain. If ‘inferior races’ do not meet the social efficiency standards of the New Republic, ‘I take it they will have to go’,²⁴ although he does not suggest how.

Churchill was concerned about the fitness of the British race as an agent of civilisation of the world. Being a keen observer of trends and statistics, he became alarmed about projections of growing numbers of mentally unwell people (the forecasts turned out to be exaggerated). He produced an early draft of what would become the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, allowing for detention to prevent self-harm and crime. He supported sterilisation rather than isolation to prevent propagation of severe genetic deficiencies, but this was not introduced. Sterilisation without consent was, however, permitted in the USA, Canada, Sweden and numerous other countries.

As understanding of mental health improved, eugenics became discredited, particularly after its association with Nazism. Churchill lost interest in it despite the pro-eugenics stance of his scientific advisor Frederick Lindemann. Meanwhile, Wells’s position shifted considerably in favour of anti-racism and he included the prohibition of sterilisation and bodily punishment in his 1940 list of human rights in The Rights of Man.

Wells was a notorious womaniser, a ‘Don Juan among the intelligentsia’.²⁵

His first marriage was to Isabel Wells, his second cousin, but just over two years later he moved in with one of his biology students, Catherine Robbins. He and Isabel divorced the following year and Wells married Catherine, also known as ‘Jane’. He was a keen sketcher and his drawings show the couple’s initial passion evolving into regular domesticity including gardening, cycling, games and travel. They then start to suggest marital boredom and other liaisons on H.G.’s part.

One of these was with Amber Reeves, a recent Cambridge graduate mentioned by Churchill in a letter to Clementine: ‘Wells is behaving very badly with a young Girton girl of the new emancipated school […] ‘v[er]y serious consequences have followed. […] These literary gents!!’²⁶ The ‘consequences’ were pregnancy and Reeves’s rapid marriage to another man. Wells’s paternity was not acknowledged until nearly twenty years later. His book, Ann Veronica (1909), was his controversial novel based on the affair.

Another liaison was with feminist writer Rebecca West, resulting in a son, Anthony. West initially told Anthony that she and Wells were his aunt and uncle but the truth eventually emerged.

Wells had two sons with his wife Catherine. She was somewhat accepting of his many affairs, although the marriage became increasingly strained, but she remained committed to it until her death from cancer in 1927, aged 55.

Wells tried cohabiting with Odette Keun, a Dutch socialist and writer with whom he had had an affair since 1924, but they split up acrimoniously. He then renewed his relationship with Moura Budberg, formerly Countess Benckendorff and mistress of Russian writer Maxim Gorky. He first met Budberg at Gorky’s house in Moscow in 1920; she emigrated to the UK in 1929. She refused his request for marriage and is believed to have been both a Russian and British intelligence agent.

Wells died as a bachelor at his home in Regent’s Park, London, in 1946 of unspecified causes, possibly liver failure or a heart attack, aged 79. His ashes were scattered at Old Harry Rocks on the Dorset coast in southern England.

3. Biographical summary

Occupation	Writer, futurist, social commentator
Country	UK
Career	Apprentice draper (incomplete) (1879, 1880-83). Science teacher (1879, 1883). Apprentice chemist (incomplete) (1880). Writer (1887-1945). Co-founder and President, Royal College of Science Association (1909-10). President, PEN International (writers’ association) (1933-36). Founder member, National Council for Civil Liberties, now Liberty (1934). Co-founder, The Diabetic Association, now Diabetes UK (1934).
Born	1866 at Atlas House, 47 High Street, Bromley, Kent (eight years older than Churchill); Herbert George Wells
Father	Joseph ‘Joe’ Wells (1827/8-1910), gardener at Uppark country house, West Sussex; professional cricketer for Kent; shopkeeper
Mother	Sarah Neal (1822-1905), innkeeper’s daughter; domestic servant at Uppark
Siblings	Youngest of four children: 1. Frances Sarah (1885-64); died age nine 2. Francis Charles (1857-1933) 3. Frederick Joseph (1862-1954) 4. Herbert George, ‘H.G.’ (1866-1946)
Education	Normal School of Science (later Royal College of Science, now part of Imperial College London) (sciences) (incomplete); London University (zoology and geology)
Spouse	1. Isabel Wells (1865-1931), m. 1891, div. 1895; cousin 2. Catherine Robbins, ‘Jane’, ‘Bits’ (1872-1927); m. 1895 until her death aged 54 from cancer in 1927; one of Wells’s students
Relationships	Numerous, including Jane Robbins, student (during first marriage; later his wife); Dorothy Richardson, author; Elizabeth von Arnim, novelist; Amber Reeves, writer; Rebecca West, novelist; Margaret Sanger, birth control activist; Odette Keun, traveller and writer; Maria ‘Moura’ Budberg, Maxim Gorky’s mistress and Russian/UK spy
Children	By Catherine Robbins: 1. George Phillip, ‘G.P.’ or ‘Gip’ (1901-85), zoologist and author 2. Frank (1903-82), film producer and art director By Amber Reeves, ‘Dusa’ (1887-1981), writer: 3. Anna-Jane (1909-2010), author By Rebecca West (pseudonym; née Cicily Fairfield) (1892-1983), writer: 4. Anthony (1914-87), author
Died	1946 at home, 13 Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, London, aged 79 (19 years before Churchill); unspecified causes (possibly liver cancer or heart attack)
Buried	Cremated at Golders Green Crematorium; ashes scattered at Old Harry Rocks, Dorset
Chartwell
Other Club	1934
Nickname	H.G. (general); Bertie (family); Bins or Mr Binder, short for ‘Husbinder’, an alternative term for ‘husband’ used by one of Wells’s characters (Catherine Robbins, second wife)
Height	5’5″ (1.65 m)

4. See also

Churchill and predictions

Halle, Kay

Churchill and radical liberalism

Churchill and nuclear weapons

Miscellaneous

Reves, Emery (world federalism)

Churchill controversies

Eugenics
Imperialism
Race

5. Further reading

H.G. Wells

Cole, Sarah, Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2019)
Handwerk, Brian, ‘The Many Futuristic Predictions of H.G. Wells That Came True’, Smithsonian Magazine, 2016
Lynn, Andrea, Shadow Lovers: The Last Affairs of H.G. Wells (Routledge, 2019)
Rinkel, Gene K., and Margaret E. Rinkel, The Picshuas of H.G. Wells: A Burlesque Diary (University of Illinois Press, 2006)
Roberts, Adam, H G Wells: A Literary Life (Springer International Publishing, 2019)
Tomalin, Claire, The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World (Penguin Books Limited, 2021)

Wells and Churchill

Churchill, Winston S., ‘H.G. Wells’, in Great Contemporaries (Putnam, 1937), pp. [000–000]
Glueckstein, Fred, ‘Great Contemporaries: Churchill and H. G. Wells, the Two Futurists’, The Churchill Project – Hillsdale College, 2018

Wells and Russia

Diment, Galiya, H.G. Wells and All Things Russian (Anthem Press, 2019)
McDonald, Deborah, and Jeremy Dronfield, A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia’s Most Seductive Spy (Oneworld Publications, 2015) (Wells’s lover Moura Budberg)
Schneer, Jonathan, The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin’s Russia (Oxford University Press, 2020) (Lockhart was Moura Budberg’s partner)

Eugenics

Freedland, Jonathan, ‘Eugenics and the Master Race of the Left’, The Guardian, 1997.

Churchill and eugenics

Gilbert, Martin, ‘Churchill and Eugenics’, The International Churchill Society, 2009 <>[12]
Levine, Philippa, Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Churchill and predictions

Humes, James C., Churchill: The Prophetic Statesman (Regnery History, 2012)

Churchill and nuclear weapons

Farmelo, Graham, Churchill’s Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race (Faber & Faber, 2013)
Ruane, Kevin, Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Miscellaneous

Cox, Gary, Cricket Ball (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
Cooper, Bryan, Tank Battles of World War I (Pen & Sword Books, 2015)
Langworth, Richard M., ‘“Are There Men on the Moon?”: Churchill on Alien Life’, The Churchill Project – Hillsdale College, 2017. Churchill wrote three versions: ‘Are We Alone in Space?’ (1939), ‘Are There Men on the Moon?’ (1942) and ‘Are We Alone in the Universe?’ (1950s)

6. References

1. Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965 (Sphere, 1968), p. 356.

2. Winston S. Churchill, ‘H.G. Wells’, in Great Contemporaries (Putnam, 1937), pp. [000–000 (p. 000)].

3. Winston S. Churchill, ‘Winston Churchill to H.G. Wells’, 1901.

4. David C. Smith, The Correspondence of H.G. Wells: Volume 1: 1880–1903 (Taylor & Francis, 2021), p. 458.

5. Winston S. Churchill, ‘Winston Churchill to H.G. Wells’, 1906.

6. Richard Toye, ‘H.G. Wells and Winston Churchill: A Reassessment’, in H.G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. by Steven McLean (Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 147–61 (p. 149).

7. Preface to the 1941 edition of The Time Machine (1895).

8. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume 5: The Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939 (Houghton Mifflin, 1966), p. 51.

9. H.G. Wells, The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind (E.P. Dutton, 1914), p. 104.

10. Gilbert, Prophet of Truth, p. 76.

11. Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 45.

12. David Fletcher, ‘Churchill and the Tank (1): Present at the Creation’, The International Churchill Society, 2007.

13. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918 (Free Press, 2005), p. 310.

14. Jonathan Rose, The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale University Press, 2014), p. 86.

15. Adam Roberts, H G Wells: A Literary Life (Springer International Publishing, 2019), p. 293.

16. Winston S. Churchill, ‘Bolshevism and Imperial Sedition’, National Churchill Museum, 1920.

17. Roberts, p. 292.

18. H.G. Wells, Men Like Gods (Macmillan, 1923), p. 125.

19. Winston S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries (Rosetta Books, 2016), p. [000].

20. H.G. Wells, Star Begotten: A Biological Fantasia (Wesleyan University Press, 2006).

21. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill. Companion Volume 5, Part 3. The Coming of War. 1936-1939 (Houghton Mifflin, 1983), p. 899.

22. H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (Harper & Brothers, 1901), p. 324.

23. Wells, Anticipations, p. 325.

24. Wells, Anticipations, p. 342.

25. H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866) (Victor Gollancz, 1934), p. 465.

26. Winston S. Churchill and Clementine Churchill, Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, ed. by Mary Soames (Black Swan, 1999), p. 32.