The first time John Walton and I met was at his old flat in Covent Garden. He auditioned me for one his first productions as a director, an adaptation of Mishima’s Yoroboshi. I didn’t get the part, but – and actors can take solace from this next bit – he kept me in mind for a future project. Yes, that overused and frequently hollow promise that underlines every rejection letter does sometimes actually come true.

Within a few months we were thrust together again at Gifford’s Circus, touring in their summer production of War and Peace. During the rehearsal process I had my first play produced in London. Chicken premiered at Southwark Playhouse, earning me the nickname ‘Shakespeare’ with our circus director. A moniker I tried endlessly to re-ignite with my peers in London but alas it was not to be. Not least because I wasn’t really a writer yet. My only experience of the writing process had been sitting in my bedroom, living on crisps and banging my head against a wall. That’s how I wrote Chicken.

But that’s not strictly true, the catalyst which converted me from actor to actor-writer came before that, on a collaborative writing project at Action Transport Theatre. Under the guidance of super-mentor and professional playwright Kevin Dyer, myself and three other emerging writers researched and wrote a play which we toured back to the young people who had inspired it.

I found this collaborative writing process completely different to that of writing Chicken. Much of our early work at Action Transport was done in a rehearsal room, either leading workshops with the young people we met or discussing our memories of our own childhoods and our ideas as a writing team. This led into a more traditional solo writing period but it was characterised initially by vocalising ideas rather than the silent solitude of my garret in London.

Working with John on Winston… was in some respects a combination of the two and another equally steep learning curve for me, chiefly because I had never researched my main character before. I had based characters on people close to me, people I had read about in the newspaper and people I had met but never someone that everybody in the world was already well acquainted with.

So the first thing we did was spend a week in a rehearsal room with My Early Life – Churchill’s autobiography covering the period – and enthusing over what was great about the book – the imperial cast list, the numerous trysts with death, our lead character’s insistence on silk underpants. A focus for our story quickly presented itself to us – bookended by an Oldham by-election failure and an Oldham general election success – was an impossible tale of escape and endurance in South Africa.

Every writer I have ever sought advice from has told me that the dialogue always comes last. The majority of your work, particularly in the early stages, will be spent structuring and re-structuring the piece and discovering who your character is. Once you have these two things down, the dialogue will write itself.

John often says that one of the reasons we worked so successfully together on this project was because he has that meticulous, scientist’s eye for construction and I have a natural bent for character and dialogue.

And true to form, the first thing I wanted to do was the fun bit – write the words. My initial interests in the script lay in the tone and getting Churchill’s voice right – an uncommon mixture of Victorian era imperial entitlement and naïve, youthful ambition.

Because that’s the bit you spent your life overhearing at bus stops, scratching down in notebooks and what lingers from a great production – that is what makes you want to be a writer and that is what will engage the audience when the piece is performed. But it’s also the bit that must be deferred.

So we painstakingly beat out a structure, moment by moment and gradually, inadvertently, through studying the facts of the real life story, a character began to emerge. Tiptoeing towards dialogue we experimented by giving him some of Churchill’s actual words to speak. We transposed as much of the young war correspondent’s dispatches into our script as possible and read it aloud.

It was a complete failure. Although Churchill is a great writer – his florid language and imagery so pleasurable and evocative for the reader – when spoken as dialogue, the text falls flat. Heavy, dense and far too wordy, it did not capture the essence of the man at all let alone the energetic spirit of youth captured in the story.

In relying too heavily on the facts of the story we had become too loyal, too reverent to the myth of Churchill. And so I was given the license to start create dialogue and being released from the bonds of verbatim text was hugely liberating.

John suggested we refer to him as Winston rather than Churchill to help alleviate us of the burden of history and in my sketches and early drafts I went one further – I called him Paul. Soon enough, whilst maintaining all of those essential character traits we had compiled and discarding his famous title, all the pomp began to dissipate. He became human for the first time – a young person, like you or I, facing his demons, contesting with his destiny and defining himself for the first time.

And that is the spirit with which we continued – drafting and redrafting, in cafés, in rehearsal rooms, at fringe festivals around the country, fine tuning this thing we had carved from science and art, structure and dialogue, the known and the unknown.

It is late November, and three weeks after I hung up my wig and frock coat for the final time I’m back on the road again. The weather is still mild but Christmas is firmly within our sights and I’m on my way to give a presentation about how the tour went. I almost never thought this moment would come. So much time and focus went into preparing for the eight weeks of touring with Winston that I hadn’t even contemplated what would come after.

The evaluation process with Fol Espoir and the preparation for the presentation I am giving today has given me the opportunity to reflect on it however. In conversation with friends and colleagues I tend to play it down. I frame my experience within the narrative that I think people expect to hear from someone who has just returned from a two-month tour. I say “it was exhausting” but I never really felt exhausted at the time, I say “it was a hard slog” but I don’t think it really was, I sometimes even say “never again” which is not quite the same as actually feeling that it was a once in a lifetime experience.

“What was particularly difficult – and be honest” John keeps pushing the stage manager Matt and I to dish the dirt. But in all honesty there is none, apart from a cracked windscreen and the power being blown mid-performance – both on the same night incidentally – Winston passed off without a hitch.

One of the frequent questions I was asked during the tour was “don’t you get tired of saying the same lines every night?” Although it is true that I have found long tours of other people’s work hard in the past this one was entirely different. Saying the words that I researched, drafted and re-drafted every night was a pleasure. I believed in the story of this incredible character and I was very proud of the rigorous work John and I had done to craft it into a piece of theatre. Consequently performing it every night was a privilege, sharing our take on an already rollicking yarn with a new group of people was a joy.

And the audiences were invariably supportive and enthusiastic. Sharing their own tales of, and connections to Winston over the years. One woman told us that her great-grandfather had been a prisoner of war with Winston in South Africa. Churchill had apparently made an agreement with the guards that if they let him walk around the grounds of the camp he promised he wouldn’t escape. A foolish mistake on the Boers’ part from what we know now but in retaliation the remaining troops were duly punished. Her relative never liked Churchill from that day on she told us.

In Margate we heard the story of a woman’s grandfather who was head chef in the most expensive restaurant in town and had served Winston when he paid a visit on official business after the First World War. We even performed to a village hall where a genuine Victoria Cross was hanging on the wall. The much coveted prize that Winston so desired for his efforts was literally within reach! Upon closer inspection it was in fact given to a soldier for bravery during the Boer War and the text beneath suggested that the soldier was on the Dunottar Castle – the very ship which took Churchill and Colonel Buller to the Cape in 1899.

I discovered the history of the medal itself at the Lancashire Fusiliers museum in Bury after being encouraged to go by a father and son who had just seen the show for dad’s birthday. Created in 1856 the VC remains the highest order for valour a British soldier can be awarded. The medals themselves are made from a finite source – the bronze knobs from a set of Chinese cannon taken from the Russians at Sebastopol during the Napoleonic wars.

Matt and I were becoming oral historians, threading this ever accumulating story up and down the country, compiling what we learnt on the road and sharing it with a new audience every night.

And not only Churchill made it into our Winston on the Run almanac, we shortlisted our favourite Travelodge experiences and completed our highly publicised top ten list. Three cheers for Crewe and the Dean Clough Mill Halifax in the top two spots. In fact some of my fondest memories of the tour were spent waiting in the countless take-aways Matt and I frequented around the UK. Watching Father Ted on the little TV on the counter awaiting prawn crackers and chow mein to sate our hunger after the show. The satisfaction of another venue successfully under our belts.

Like John’s excellent tour road map on our website we threaded a journey – a six and a half thousand mile journey, connecting people and places, sharing stories and laughter and a thousand Churchillian quotations: “If you’re going through hell, keep going” “History will be kind to me, because I intend to write it”

And we did what he said – we kept going, through it all and we made history. 6,500 miles, 43 nights, 30-odd venues, a dozen Travelodges and eleven cigars worth of brandy-swilling, death-defying, restless, relentless, persistent Churchillian history.

We might even do it again sometime.

         Winston Churchill Aged 4

1. Winston celebrated his 21st birthday being shot at by anti-Spanish guerrillas in Cuba. 

2. His father Randolph was a superstar of Victorian politics who believed Winston would amount to nothing and become ‘a social wastrel’. He promptly died before he could be proved wrong.

3. Winston served under his nemesis Kitchener in the Sudan. While there he was part of one of the last ever cavalry charges in British military history.

4. In 1899 Winston was captured by the Boers and incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp. He escaped and made his way across hundreds of miles of Savanna to rejoin the British lines.

5. Winston’s mother Jennie Jerome was a famous American socialite and reported invented of the Manhattan cocktail. 

6. In 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He earned more in his life from writing than anything else.

7. Winston was a sickly child and convinced he would die young (and therefore needed to make his name quickly). In fact he lived to ninety! 

8. Winston had a lisp and originally was a terrible public speaker.

9. In 1908 Winston introduced the Trade Boards Bill setting up the first minimum wages in Britain.

10. In 1909, Winston set up Labour Exchanges to help unemployed people find work. He helped draft the first unemployment pension legislation, the National Insurance Act of 1911. Churchill also assisted in passing the ‘People’s Budget’, which included the introduction of new taxes on the wealthy to allow for the creation of new social welfare programmes.  

By Freddie Machin

We opened the autumn tour of Winston on the Run at the Chipping Norton Theatre, a stone’s throw from Winston’s birthplace and the seat of the dukedom he never inherited, Blenheim Palace. Merely by dint of dates and programming the show opened to an Oxfordshire audience, many of whom, we discovered during the post-show presentation knew a great deal already about Winston. I am delighted to say that we have in fact been invited for tea at Ditchley, Churchill’s hideout half a century after he hid out down our mineshaft, during the Second World War.

The theatre at Chipping Norton was built in 1878 as a Salvation Army citadel. ‘These stones were laid by one hundred of those who through great persecution boldly and conscientiously served their God’ reads the foundation stone inside the auditorium. It is a beautiful space with a very intimate feel despite the depth of the raised stage. The theatre is much the envy of the theatrical community and has become one of the highlights of the touring circuit. Catherine and William Booth, founders of the Salvation Army are buried not far from where I live in London, their mission when they began in 1865 was to bring salvation to the poor, destitute and hungry by meeting both their physical and spiritual needs.

These stones were laid by one hundred of those who through great persecution boldly and conscientiously served their God

This was not an uncommon assignment during the Victorian era, 1878 is the same year as my football team, Everton, was established. Begun as a Catholic team to give the local boys somewhere to focus their energies, St. Domingo FC began playing on what is now Anfield – the home of Everton’s closest rivals (just a few hundred yards today). Shelter, the housing charity still operating today, was also founded in the 19^th century, contributing to a whole culture of philanthropy, alms giving and helping those in need.

This evangelism spread along with British imperial ambitions, colonialism aiming to elevate and ennoble what were presumed to be sinful and barbaric societies. Colonial administrators and Christian missionaries around the world were preaching about an ordered and sophisticated society, to nations lacking the development seen in Britain under Christianity.

In Winston on the Run, we suggest that the war in South Africa might indeed be the catalyst that makes Churchill question how right and good British implementation of that mission actually was. Winston’s attitude was that winning the war would ultimately be for the good of the defeated as well as the victors. But what the Empire found itself up against in South Africa was a capable and fierce adversary determined to protect its own identity and independence, whatever the cost.

British forces found the Boer communities so resilient that they resorted to rounding up the women and children and detaining them in camps in an attempt to break their spirits and the back of the war. These were not the first camps of their kind, but helped to set a precedent that would have an even graver outcome half a century later.

It turned out not to be the just and righteous walkover that Great Britain was accustomed to (and was expecting). In fact, it would be an embarrassment; our first war fought in Khaki instead of the red coats of the Zulu wars just a few years before and a blot on the apparently flawless history of Britain.

Warfare was changing and the British Empire’s unquestioned primacy had received a knock to its confidence and credibility. Queen Victoria had reigned over an incredible fifth of the earth’s surface and almost a quarter of the world’s population owed her allegiance during the 1800s but the turn of the century would usher in a new epoch. Born in 1874, Winston was resolutely a Victorian but following Victoria’s death in 1901 would come a new Edwardian period, characterised less by peace and goodwill but by war.