Churchill: A Biography Part 1

"As a veteran politician and administrator, Jenkins is well placed to evaluate Churchill's strengths and weaknesses as a cabinet-level official." -- Library Journal Roy Jenkins is the author of 18 books, including Gladstone (1997), which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Active in British politics for half a century, he entered the House of Commons in 1948 and subsequently served as Minister of Aviation, Home Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer; he has also been the President of the European Commission and Chancellor of Oxford University. In 1987 he took his seat in the House of Lords Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Churchill Part I By Roy Jenkins Blackstone Audiobooks Copyright © 2002 Roy JenkinsAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780786122431 Chapter One A Doubtful Provenance * * * Churchill's provenance was aristocratic, indeed ducal, and somehave seen this as the most important key to his whole career. That isunconvincing. Churchill was far too many faceted, idiosyncratic andunpredictable a character to allow himself to be imprisoned by thecircumstances of his birth. His devotion to his career and his convictionthat he was a man of destiny were far stronger than any class or triballoyalty. There have been politicians of high duty and honour ? EdwardHalifax and Alec Douglas-Home immediately spring to mind ? who didsee life through spectacles much bounded by their landed background.But Churchill was emphatically not among them. Apart from anythingelse, he never had any land beyond his shaky ownership (and later onlyoccupation) of the 300 acres surrounding Chartwell, the West Kenthouse only twenty-four miles from London which he bought in 1922and just managed, with financial subventions from friends, to cling onto for the remaining four decades of his life. The second reason was that the Marlborough heritage was not onewhich stood very high in esteem, record of public service or secureaffluence. The family had a memorable swashbuckling founder in JohnChurchill, the victor in the first decade of the eighteenth century of thebattles of Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenaarde and Malplaquet, whoacquired a fine mansion among other rewards. But even this first Duke,although he inspired Winston Churchill to write four resonant volumesof praise (and of refutation of the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay'scriticism) just over 200 years after his death, was as famous forruthless self-advancement as he was for martial prowess; and the house,as its name of Blenheim Palace implies and as its size-enhancingVanburgh architecture was dedicated to achieving, was showy even bythe standards of the time. Subsequent holders of the dukedom contributed little distinction andmuch profligacy. In 1882, when the seventh in the line had beenreached, Gladstone, who in general had an excessive respect for dukes,claimed that none of the Marlboroughs had shown either morals orprinciples. Certainly no lustre to the family name was added by thesecond, third or fourth Dukes. The fifth was a talented gardener, but heseriously dissipated the Marlborough fortune and had to abandon thefine subsidiary estate (now the site of Reading University) where he hadexercised his botanical skills. The sixth was almost equally extravagant.The seventh, who was the father of Lord Randolph and hence thegrandfather of Winston Churchill, made the nearest approach torespectability and a record of public service. He was an MP for tenyears, Lord President of the Council under both Derby and Disraeli in1867-8, and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for the last four years ofDisraeli's second government. As a father this seventh Duke's record was at once more dramatic andmore mixed. On the one hand he produced a two-generation dynastywhich made the name of Churchill resound throughout Britain'snational life in a way that it had not done since the death of the firstDuke in 1722. On the other, the resonance, in the case of LordRandolph, had a distinctly meretricious note to it. And Lord Randolph'selder brother was, in the words of an eminent modern historian, ?one ofthe most disreputable men ever to have debased the highest rank in theBritish peerage?. He appropriately bore the name of Blandford, the titleof the Marlborough heir, for most of his relatively short life, duringwhich he was expelled from Eton, got caught up in two sexual scandals,one of which involved him in a violent quarrel with the Prince of Wales(in which quarrel the fault may not have been unilateral), and sold off,as a short-term staunching operation, the formidable Marlboroughpicture collection. About his only constructive act was to install electriclight and a rudimentary form of central heating at Blenheim. That waspaid for by his second wife, who as a rich American provided sustainingdollars and began a strong Churchill family tradition of looking matrimoniallywestward. This example was followed by both his son, theninth Duke, Winston Churchill's cousin and near contemporary, whomarried two transatlantic heiresses, and by his younger brother (LordRandolph Churchill), who married one (Winston Churchill's mother).The fortune of the father of Lady Randolph was however a littleprecarious. Furthermore he was unwilling to contribute much of it tothe sustenance of the Churchill family. Since the eighth Duke there have been another three Marlboroughs.Of these subsequent three, while they rose somewhat above the level ofthe eighth Duke, it is difficult to find much that is positive to say.Winston Churchill's family background, while nominally of the highestaristocracy, was subtly inferior to that of a Cavendish, a Russell, a Cecilor a Stanley. He was born on 30 November 1874 and, mainly by accident, at thevery core of this slightly doubtful purple ? in Blenheim Palace, althoughin a singularly bleak-looking bedroom. The accident arose out of hisbeing two months premature. He should have been born in January inthe small but fashionable house in Charles Street, Mayfair which hisfather had rented to receive him, or more purposefully perhaps to useas a base for the somewhat rackety metropolitan life of which LordRandolph and his bride of only seven and a half months' standing wereequally fond. This house not being ready, they had taken autumn refugein Blenheim, and, as Lord Randolph put it in a letter to his mother-in-lawin Paris, ?She [Lady Randolph] had a fall on Tuesday walking withthe shooters, and a rather imprudent and rough drive in a pony carriagebrought on the pains on Saturday night. We tried to stop them, but itwas no use.? Neither the London obstetrician nor his Oxford auxiliarycould arrive in time, although it was over twenty-four hours to the birthfrom the onset of the labour pains, and the baby was born very early onthe Monday morning with the assistance only of the Woodstock countrydoctor. Both mother and baby survived this paucity of attention perfectlyhealthily ? as did the local doctor, who whether as a result or notwas able himself to migrate to a London practice a decade or so later. Everything to do with Winston Churchill's arrival in the world wasdone in a hurry. Perhaps Lord Randolph's most remembered phrase(and phrases were his strongest suit) was his description of Gladstone as?an old man in a hurry?. His own style was at least equally that of ayoung man in a hurry, almost in a constant frenzy of impatience, andperhaps rationally so, for, although thirty-nine years his junior, hepredeceased Gladstone by three years. The hurry was pre-eminentlytrue of his courtship of Miss Jennie Jerome. They first met at a Cowesregatta shipboard party on 12 August 1873 and became engaged to bemarried three days later. There then intervened the only period of semi-stasis in the saga. TheJerome family were in fact a very suitable American family for aMarlborough alliance. Leonard Jerome was a New York financialbuccaneer. Winston Churchill, in his still highly readable althoughhagiographic 1905 biography of his father, was to describe Jerome ashaving ?founded and edited the New York Times ?. This owed more tofamily piety than to truth. Jerome had briefly in the course of somefinancial deals been a part proprietor of the Times . But what he wasstrong in was not newspaper publishing but horse racing, havingfounded both the Jerome Park track and the Coney Island Jockey Club.There was a touch of Joseph P. Kennedy about him. There was even asuggestion that he named his second daughter after Jenny Lind, the?Swedish nightingale? (although the spelling was different), who was hiscurrent principal inamorata . He was pleased at the idea of this seconddaughter marrying an English duke's son (even if he was not the heir),but not to the extent of being willing, in the joke which John F.Kennedy was to make about his father's financing of the 1960 Presidentialcampaign, ?to pay for a landslide?. The seventh Duke was at firstopposed to the whole idea of the union, being unimpressed by theuncontrolled precipitateness of his son's passion, and believing moreoverthat ?this Mr J. seems to be a sporting, and I should think vulgar kindof man?, who was evidently ?of the class of speculators; he has beenbankrupt twice; and may be so again?. Over the autumn the Duke wasbrought reluctantly to overcome these objections of principle by hisson's determination. He was the first but by no means the last of theMarlboroughs to have to deal with the fathers of American heiressesand he set a pattern of believing that the least consuegros could do forthe honour of such a noble alliance was generously to finance it. There were however two difficulties. First, Leonard Jerome, true tothe Duke's descriptions of the hazards of his occupation, was in aspeculative downturn. He had been badly mauled by the plunge of theNew York stock exchange of that year (1873). Second, he claimed tohold advanced New World ideas about the financial rights of marriedwomen. (This was before the British Married Women's Property Actof I882 gave women any property rights against their husbands.)The Duke assumed that whatever settlement could be obtained wouldbe under the exclusive control of his son. Jerome thought it should besettled on his daughter. This led to a good deal of haggling which wenton into the spring of 1874. Eventually a compromise was reached, bywhich Jerome settled a sum of £50,000 (approximately £2.5 million atpresent values), producing an income of £2,000 a year, with a half ofboth capital and income belonging to the husband and a half to thewife. The Duke settled another £1,100 a year for life on Randolphwhich gave the couple the equivalent of a present-day income of a littlemore than £150,000 a year, a sum which guaranteed that they wouldlive constantly above their income and be always in debt. As soon as this settlement was reached they were married, on 15April 1874. It cannot be said that the wedding took place en beauté . Itwas not at Woodstock, or in a suitable London church, or a FifthAvenue equivalent. It was in the British Embassy in Paris. The Jeromesattended and were among the very few witnesses, but neither Marlboroughparent did; Blandford represented the family. However there wasno ostracism at home. The couple were welcomed at Blenheim and inMay were given a public reception in Woodstock, for which smallfamily borough Lord Randolph had been first and fairly narrowlyelected a member of Parliament at the general election of February1874. He was twenty-five years of age at the time both of his electionand of the birth of Winston Churchill. Jennie Churchill was twenty. She had passed most of her adolescence in Paris, which Mrs Jeromeappeared to prefer to New York, was considered a beauty and hadalready attracted much admiration before she met Lord Randolph. Herlooks were undoubtedly striking, but what emerges most clearly frommany photographs is that she quickly assumed an appearance which washard, imperious and increasingly self-indulgent. Her performance as awife, and indeed as a mother, was at least as mixed as that of the seventhDuke of Marlborough as a father. She and Randolph undoubtedly beganupon a basis of mutual passion. Although they both liked a fashionableLondon life she accepted with calmness and even contentment the threeyears of virtual exile to Dublin which followed from her husband's 1876quarrel (over a lady, but on his brother's, not his own, part) with thePrince of Wales. Her second son, Jack, was born in the Irish capital atthe beginning of 1880. There has long been a strong suggestion thatthis boy had a different father from Winston Churchill, although thisdid not prevent the two brothers being close at various periods of theirlives, notably in South Africa at the turn of the century and at the peakof Winston Churchill's career in the Second World War, when heaccommodated the widowered Jack in 10 Downing Street. The mostromantic candidate for alternative parenthood was Count Charles Kinsky,an Austrian diplomat of high aristocratic connection and of a proudelegance reminiscent of Sargent's portrait of Lord Ribblesdale. LadyRandolph was much taken up with him in the early and mid-1880s butthe dates are wrong for giving him a procreative role; he did not arrivein London until 1881. If the legitimacy of Jack Churchill is challenged,a more likely candidate seems to be the Dublin-based Colonel JohnStrange Jocelyn, who succeeded his nephew as the fifth Earl of Rodenlater in the year 1880. He was thirty years older than Lady Randolph,but that was no necessary bar. She looked after her husband rather well during a protracted illnesswhich effectively took him out of politics from the spring to the autumnof 1882, and very well during the last tragic three years or so ofdisintegration before his death at the beginning of 1895. But the couplewere effectively estranged over much of the 1880s, including the yearsof his short political apogee. She, like Queen Victoria, did not know ofhis disastrous 1886 resignation from the Chancellorship of theExchequer until she read it in The Times . During these years she hadmany suitors, more than a few of them probably lovers. They includedapart from those mentioned, the Marquis de Breteuil, Lord Dunraven,the French novelist Paul Bourget and King Milan of Serbia. GeorgeMoore, the Anglo-Irish novelist, said she had 200 lovers, but apart fromanything else the number is suspiciously round. She claimed to havefirmly rejected the overtures of Sir Charles Dilke, which however didnot prevent Lord Randolph, who appeared mostly to be more tolerant,from attempting to assault him. After Lord Randolph's death her choice of partners became morebizarre as well as more public. In 1900, at the age of forty-six, sheinsisted on marrying George Cornwallis-West, a Scots Guards subalternwho was twenty years her junior. The marriage lasted fourteen yearsbefore ending in divorce. Cornwallis-West clearly had considerabledrawing power, for he then married Mrs Patrick Campbell. Three yearslater Lady Randolph made a third marriage to Montague Porch, anhitherto quiet Somerset country gentleman who had been a ColonialService officer in Nigeria and who was even younger than Cornwallis-West.She died in 1921, aged sixty-seven. Porch survived until 1964. Was Jennie Churchill a better mother than a wife? Her elder son'smost famous comment on their early relationship sounds a note at onceadmiring and wistful. After citing an adulatory passage (in which themost striking phrase was nonetheless ?more of the panther than of thewoman in her look?) written by the future Lord D'Abernon after firstseeing her during the Irish period, Winston Churchill commented: ?Mymother made the same brilliant impression upon my childhood's eye.She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly ? but at adistance.? This was in My Early Life (that is up to 1906) which hepublished in 1930, and is probably the most engaging of all his books,using a light and sparkling note of detached irony. The fact that thesesentences were written and published nearly fifty years after the periodto which they refer gives them a greater not a lesser validity. They are moreover borne out by the correspondence of the period.Throughout his two years at his first preparatory school (St George's,Ascot, which appears from the disparately independent testimonies ofChurchill himself and of the art critic Roger Fry to have been a place ofappalling brutality even by the flogging standards of the age), hissubsequent three and a half years at a much gentler Brighton establishment,and then his nearly five years at Harrow, there is a constanthoping for visits which did not take place, of wishing for more attentionin the future, and of being shunted around rather than of beingautomatically welcomed at home for short or long holidays. The forms of letter address are also interesting. Churchill mostfrequently began his ?My darling Mummy? and ended more variously.A fairly typical second-year Harrow example was ?Good Bye, my own,with love I remain, Your son Winston S Churchill?. She habituallywrote to him, not too infrequently but mostly shortly, ?Dearest Winston?and ended ?Yr loving Mother JSC?. There were two competitors for writing to him at least equally ormore affectionate letters. The first was the Countess of Wilton, in therelevant years a lady in her mid- to late forties, who wrote often, mostlystarting ?Dearest Winston? and ending, more significantly ?With bestlove, Yr ever affecte, deputy mother, Laura Wilton?. The other wasChurchill's nurse, Mrs Everest, who was engaged to look after him (andlater his brother Jack) within a month or so of his birth. ElizabethEverest was from the Medway Towns, and one of her lasting influenceswas to make Churchill feel that Kent was the best county in England.She would have approved (more than Clementine Churchill did) of hisacquiring Chartwell twenty-seven years after her death. Before comingto the Churchills she had looked after the small daughter of a Cumberlandclergyman, whom Winston retrieved after twenty years to join himat her graveside. Mrs Everest obviously possessed among other attributes greatdescriptive power, for she made life in that northern parsonage sovivid to Churchill that, although vicarious, it was one of his mostpermanent early memories. There is no evidence that a spousely MrEverest had ever existed, so that her ?Mrs? was purely honorary, likethat of many a housekeeper of the period. Although she had a sister(who was married to a prison warder in the Isle of Wight), to whosehouse she once took Winston to stay, thus giving him, it has beensuggested, his only experience of humble life, she was able to concentratealmost all her affection upon the two Churchill boys. She was thecentral emotional prop of Winston's childhood, and mutual dependencecontinued throughout his adolescence. The Randolph Churchills hadnot kept her on after the end of Jack's childhood, but Winston at leastmaintained strong contact and visited her several times in her finalillness. Mrs Everest's letters to Churchill typically began (21 January 1891,when he was sixteen) ?My darling Winny? and ended ?Lots of love andkisses Fm your loving old woom?. A typical topping and tailing fromhim to her (from Harrow, July 1890) was ?My darling Old Woom? and?Good Bye darling, I hope you will enjoy yourself, with love fromWinny?. One other person who used ?Winny? (or ?Winnie?) was CountKinsky. On 5 February 1891 he wrote a letter from the Austro-HungarianEmbassy in Belgrave Square of which the content, as well asthe salutations, was not without interest: ?I am sending you all thestamps I could scrape together for the moment. Do you want somemore later on? If so say so. How is your old head? I hope all right again.I am off to Sandringham tomorrow until Monday. If I have a goodthing racing you shall be on. I am going to lunch with Mama now somust be off. Be a good boy and write if you have nothing better to do... Yours ever, CK?. Winston Churchill's non-relationship with his father was even morewistful than was his semi-relationship with his mother. Lord Randolphwas too exhilarated by politics during his period of success and toodepressed by them (and by his health) during his decline to have muchtime for parenthood. It is one of the supreme ironies that now, morethan a century after his death, he should be best known as a father. Inlife it was always an intensely personal fame, sought and achieved, whichwas his forte, just as parenthood or any other form of domestic activitycertainly was not. The most poignant comment on Winston Churchill'srelations with his father is that which he is reported to have made to hisown son, another and by no means wholly satisfactory Randolph, in thelate 1930s, when that Randolph was twenty-six or twenty-seven. Theyhad a long and maybe fairly alcoholic dinner together, alone at Chartwell.Towards the end Churchill said: ?We have this evening had alonger period of continuous conversation together than the total whichI ever had with my father in the whole course of his life.? Continues... Excerpted from Churchill by Roy Jenkins Copyright © 2002 by Roy Jenkins. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. From AudioFile From his early days in the British military in the late nineteenth century to his compelling role in global politics during both World Wars, Winston Churchill was a master at self-promotion and political intrigue. Written by one of his later contemporaries, this exhaustively researched biography covers the minutiae of the statesman's life in excruciating detail. Robert Whitfield survives the 39 hours necessary to commit the tome to tape, courageously soldiering through the dusty text. He offers a few characterizations, namely in East Indian and French dialects, and performs a credible imitation of Churchill as heard in his later recorded speeches. This portrayal, however, changes not a whit from Churchill's teens until his death. R.P.L. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine Read more