Young Winston

The Churchill Years #2.1

Released: 15 February 2022

Listened: 1/2/23

This rather unusual story relies on the coincidence that Churchill was a young man in the late Victorian Era, meaning that he was alive while the Paternoster Gang were active. Stranger yet, the story takes place in 1899, with flashbacks to Churchill’s time in Cuba in 1895, when he was an “observer” of the war going on at the time. This means that Ian McNeice does the narration, but Iain Batchelor plays Churchill as a young man. Neve McIntosh also has a share of the narration, for the parts of the story from Vastra’s point of view.The Doctor is in his post-”Snowmen” period, in both costume and demeanor, but Clara is nowhere to be seen. Which is kind of a shame, as I think she’d like Winston. As for Winston himself, his verbosity and arrogance are both evident even at this younger age, but at least the older narrator admits when he’s making mistakes. He’s also met the Doctor several times before this point, presumably a reference to the various meetings in prose stories. Writer Paul Morris has definitely done his homework on the Cuban portions of the story, as the events and people depicted, and the La Huerfana pearl, are all historically factual, although there was no alien influence in actual history. The split narrative, and the inclusion of other actors, make this different from most of the Churchill stories, and probably the most memorable of them. However, that’s the last of them for this project.