In April 1995 Johnson, then a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, deplored the £12.5 million purchase of Churchill Papers for the nation. The lottery-supported National Heritage Memorial Fund, said Johnson, was frittering away money on pointless projects and benefiting Tory grandees. Johnson added: “…seldom in the field of human avarice was so much spent by so many on so little …”

The Memorial Fund replied the Churchill Papers were a national heirloom under threat of being sold outside the country. Johnson snorted that they had simply “run out of sporting and artistic projects to endow.” His “unsentimental approach to Churchill’s records may seem surprising given that in 2014 he published a eulogistic biography of the former Conservative premier,” wrote The Guardian. 

I remember the Great Churchill Papers Flap very well, having published articles about it back then. It is the same tempest in a teapot today that it was in 1995. Except that nowadays, Churchill and his memory are fair game to grunting mobs and virtue-signaling nannies. So the whole business is again somehow newsworthy.

A threat to Britain’s heritage

Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s foremost biographer, called the Churchill Papers “the largest single private repository of recent British history.” Their acquisition, he said, was “an imaginative stroke of national policy.” Among other triumphs, the Papers inform thirty-one volumes of Winston S. Churchill, the longest biography on the planet.

Scholars have long mined these fifteen tons of documents. Many individual items have been reproduced. It was the possibility that they might be sold to an overseas buyer, Gilbert explained, that focused concern on their physical future:

The first alarm involved certain specific documents, such as Churchill’s wartime speeches, which clearly constitute part of the national heritage. Photocopies and reproductions are all very well, but the actual pieces of paper are what matters. The originals alone convey the full sense of historical drama.

The idea that Churchill’s final draft of “we will fight on the beaches” would end up in a library overlooking a beach in the Pacific, or some other distant shore, was not attractive. As a result of the decision to use National Lottery money to secure the Churchill Papers, it is not only letters written by Churchill that are to be preserved in this country and guarded, as hitherto, in the specially designed archives of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Sir Martin explained that “Churchill’s Papers” are very much more than his own notes and monographs. Of course they include handwritten or typed manuscripts of books and speeches, if not copies of his own letters. He also kept every letter that he received. “These letters, written to him, constitute the real historical value of this collection.”

A great glory saved

Churchill’s original letters reside in 500 libraries and archives around the world. The Churchill Papers, however, represent the whole range British history. Sir Martin offered examples:

Here we have letters from David Lloyd George, setting out the most radical proposals for social reform before the First World War. Here we have Lord Kitchener’s letters during the early months of the First World War, including the ill-fated Gallipoli expedition. We see here the Irish leaders on both sides struggling for a compromise to end the civil war. Here, too are Labour leaders negotiating with Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to resolve the 1926 coal strike. Secretly, they visited him at a house in London to work out a compromise.

Throughout the 1930s the Churchill Papers abound in letters from civil servants, airmen and members of the intelligence community. They sent secret information, much of it from Nazi Germany, enabling Churchill to wage his campaign for greater rearmament. While his own letters consist in the main of carbon copies, it is the originals from other people that are the great glory of the papers saved for the nation.

A letter from his good friend Val Fleming (father of Ian) describes the slaughter on the Western Front. There is a letter from his brother Jack describing the first awful moments of the Dardanelles campaign. Letters from his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, are full of the political gossip of 1916. There are letters from Admiral “Jackie” Fisher urging Churchill to return from the trenches and break the government. Churchill did return, but his efforts to harm the government in debate were a dismal failure.

A rich seam of historical gold

“The Papers represent every twist and turn of British political debate,” Sir Martin continued. Every file contains gems. “Having read and edited them all, I can only conclude that the Churchill archive will provide in the future, as it is already doing, a rich seam of historical gold.”  It is the richest seam outside the Government’s own National Archives, which house Churchill’s voluminous war papers, and those of his four-year peacetime premiership.

Every VE-Day, the Churchill Papers are there to prompt remembrance of heroic times. A letter on VE-Day itself was sent to WSC from Anthony Eden: “All my thoughts are with you on this day which is so essentially your day. It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us through the worst days. Without you this day could not have been.”

And among the hundreds of letters from Churchill’s children is one from his daughter Mary, written when he was an old man long parted from power or influence: “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving generous father, I owe you what every Englishman, woman and child does, Liberty itself.” For this reason alone, Sir Martin concluded, “the assurance that the Churchill Papers are to remain in Britain is to be welcomed.”

Controversy and rebuttal

Remarkably in view their importance, some historians and media were outraged that one-fourth of the Churchill Papers’ value inured to private parties. They should have been donated, they said. On which, a few observations:

1) In later years, Churchill considered how he could provide for his family. Almost his only property of significant value was his papers. A typical Victorian, he willed them to his male heirs. However, as his daughter Mary told me, “all his dependents were provided for, and all were appreciative of what he did for them.”

2) Appraisals of the papers were £40 and £32.5 million respectively. The government took the lower estimate, subtracted £10 million for anything official and £10 million for tax. That left £12.5 million. J. Paul Getty II generously put up £1 million and the Heritage Lottery Fund £11.5 million—a fraction of their value on the open market.

3) Taxpayers did not provide the £11.5 million. Lottery profits go to various sports, arts, charities and Heritage materials. Almost always, Heritage items are in private hands, so their acquisition often benefits private parties.

4) Comparisons to the post-1945 papers left to Churchill College are irrelevant. Lady Churchill bequeathed them late in life, knowing her children had been provided for. Had she been younger she could have sold them, and would have had every right to do so.

5) While the copyright was retained (to documents originated by WSC), this should be kept in perspective. Until Hillsdale College took them on, no publisher would underwrite the final document volumes. Academic publications, non-profit institutions, even hostile biographers, have used the material without charge.

Why the uproar?

The reason for the flap has nothing to do with the rights of ownership, and everything to do with making political hay and sowing scorn. Such activities have vastly multiplied in the last quarter century. The biographer William Manchester was well aware of this when he memorably wrote The Times in 1995:

The controversy over the sale of the Churchill Papers to the British nation, with proceeds going to members of his family, is bewildering. One British historian in a U.S. newspaper labeled the transaction “just tacky.” One wonders why it is even newsworthy.

When out of office, Churchill, a professional writer, supported his household with his pen. His literary estate was his property. He had every reason, both moral and legal, to expect that title to it would pass on to his survivors through the trust fund which he established before his death. The sum of £12.5 million, however raised, seems hardly excessive. The collection would sell for far more than that in the United States. But that would have raised a genuine storm, which would have been justifiable.

Some critics believe that the Papers should have been donated to the country. That has a familiar ring. Authors are forever being told that they should give their work to society—that to expect money in return is, well, tacky. The origin of this presumption lies in a misapprehension of the word “gifted.” Many believe that talent is literally a gift, which the writer should pass along. The fact is that writing is very hard work, and that here, as elsewhere, the laborer is worthy of his hire. Surely any working person should be able to understand that.

Barbara F. Langworth: The Right Parent Survived

Jennie Churchill: Winston’s American Mother, by Anne Sebba (London, Murray, 2007).  American Jennie: The Remarkable Life of Lady Randolph Churchill), (New York: Norton, 2007). 

It may seem a new story to many readers, since the previous biographies of Lady Randolph Churchill date back up to eight decades. Jennie published her own memoirs in 1908. Readers familiar with the Churchill saga wish to know if this latest book offers anything new. To some extent it does. Sebba writes well, accesses the latest sources, and punctures some myths.

Jennie’s influence in Winston’s life was considerable. She educated him, spent more time with him than most realize, and advanced his career as a writer and war correspondent. Much beloved, she died at 67.

In the 1990s we twice visited Sir Winston’s nephew, Peregrine Churchill, and his wife Yvonne, at their home in Hampshire. There we discussed the current raft of Jennie gossip. A lot of “neglected Winston” chatter was going round. Peregrine snorted at all that. He pulled out a box of Jennie’s diaries and letters to Winston, and began reading aloud. “Played all afternoon with Winston…” It was touching to hear her own words—hardly those of an uncaring, distant mother.

Anne Sebba’s book pulls together facts, discussions and controversy from previous books, adds new letters, and discusses recent Jennie historiography, producing informed conclusions about this ethereal, alluring being.

A fabled persona

There is a rounded mural of Jennie and her sisters, American girls in search of titles, who met British aristocrats in search of money. She was one of the most stunning women of her time, a “professional beauty.” (Victorians would collect photographs of lovely women.) Educated in France, she regaled London society.

Anne Sebba portrays Jennie as sexy, innovative and literate, her flirting persona irresistible to men. She was a concert pianist, artist, playwright, interior decorator. editor and author. (I had erroneously supposed that a famous sketch of Jennie by Singer Sargent was for a later portrait. Apparently it was done for the cover of a piano concert program she gave for charity.) Her rich life is the stuff of an outstanding seven-hour biography (see below).

The book mentions Jennie’s controversies, skirting conclusions when there are none to make. It is a near-certainty that Lord Randolph Churchill died of something besides syphilis—a brain tumor is the leading possibility. (See John Mather, “In Search of Lord Randolph Churchill’s Purported Syphilis.”) Indisputably, he was diagnosed with syphilis. So Sebba’s take is practical: He was told he had it. He believed he had it. His wife and son thought he had it. All their actions were based on the supposition that he did have it. Ergo, he might as well have had it.

This avoids a conclusion but does not challenge the truth in the way that vindictive or ignorant writers do, by referring, say, to “Winston’s syphilitic father” and moving on. As Dr. Mather has shown, Randolph’s malady was misdiagnosed from the start. Sebba’s thesis is not daring and her medical evidence inconclusive, but it is a safe position to take.

Is this fun for you?

Imagine what young Jennie must have felt. You meet this fantastic fellow. The sparks are potent, marriage is certain. Both sets of parents resist, but give in. Your first-born comes quickly. You then learn that your politician-husband is a flawed genius. At first brilliant and respected, Randolph excels in baiting the opposition. Self-willed and vindictive, he is withal not a very nice man. He quarrels with the Prince of Wales, “a great personage” in his son’s biography. That is not wise. A few years into your marriage, you find yourself ostracized from polite society. You end up in Ireland, in a kind of luxurious exile.

Another son, Jack, is born in Dublin, and speculation is rife. Is he Randolph’s son? Arguing strongly in favor of Jack’s legitimacy is his close resemblance to his grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough. Arguing against is that he looks and acts nothing like his brother Winston. Why is this important? Surely what matters is that Winston and Jack were devoted to each other, enjoying a fond and close-knit family life.

Back in England, you’re told that Randolph has a sexually transmitted disease. You do much of his political campaigning, since he is perpetually ill. A few years pass and (diseased or not) he reaches one of the highest offices in the land, a step below prime minister—only to cast himself from the ladder in an ill-considered resignation, never to rise again, and to spend the rest of his life “dying by inches in public.” Not only that, he is hardly ever home, and when he is has a violent temper. Is this fun for you?

Jennie revelations

Unsurprisingly Jennie had numerous admirers—and lovers, whose number is hotly disputed by historians and seekers of the prurient. The author discusses Jennie’s one serious romance, with Karl, Count Kinsky, while she was still married. As Randolph neared death in 1894, she learned that Kinsky had become engaged—he needed the finances and progeny. She had hoped he would wait until Randolph had died (though there had been talk of divorce). Anne Sebba asks: what would have been the consequences for Winston? Suppose Jennie had married Kinsky, and put her energies into that relationship, instead of devoting herself to her son? Her efforts to advance his youthful career are well documented.

Given extant literature, it is encouraging to find new material in this book. One revelation was that Jennie had a serious illness and almost died in 1892. She had severe abdominal pains and was diagnosed with peritonitis and perhaps a tumor or cyst. Miraculously, it healed on its own. Think of the aftermath if Jennie had not been there to launch Winston on his career.

At the time of publication there was an intriguing publicity-rumor that Jennie had a snake tattoo on her wrist. There is a well-known photo of Jennie holding Peregrine. Her arms are bare, no sign of a tattoo. Nor is there on any other photo I have examined. The author duly displayed a snake on her arm in at least one of her book signings. I’m sure she meant it as a tribute, but it’s like Martin Gilbert at  a book signing wearing a siren suit and homburg.

Salacious speculation

It is a shame that the publicity surrounding this biography focused so hard on the salacious. How many men did Jennie sleep with? Did Lord Randolph die of syphilis? Who was Jack Churchill’s father? Flyspeck issues obscuring what really matters is a feature of our age. What matters is that Jennie Churchill was a notable woman at a time when woman were mainly considered to be trophies, concubines or breeders.

She slept with men, though the number is vastly exaggerated. But while others of her class indulged in primping and fripperies, she raised the statesman of the century, produced a literary magazine, displayed multiple talents, raised money for charities, wrote literate memoirs, aided troops on the scene of battle, and set new standards in dress and manners. Anne Sebba suggests perceptively that while Randolph lived, he stood in the way of Winston’s aspirations. His death in 1895 was as crucial for Winston as the other things that happened that fateful year. 

Jennie didn’t have the vote and didn’t want it. Yet she knew politics inside out, and probably influenced more votes than many in Parliament. If she were alive and sentient today, she could easily gain elective office. Her influence on her son, her efforts to launch him on his twin careers of writing and politics, far exceeded those of the father Winston held awe. For Winston Churchill, the right parent survived.

The author

Barbara Langworth was publisher of Finest Hour from 1982 to 2014 and contributed twenty installments of “Recipes from Number 10 for the modern kitchen.” She is the author of “Churchill and Polo” (2018), appearing in two parts for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

The Jennie bibliography

Mrs. George Cornwallis-West, The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill. London: Edward Arnold, 1908. A charming memoir, but discreet and circumspect. Victorian society as seen by a participant.

Kraus, René, Young Lady Randolph, New York: Putnam, 1943. A capable biography by a journeyman writer, who also produced a wartime biography of Winston and the men around him.

Leslie, Anita. Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill, London: Hutchinson, 1960. A competent biography by a member of the family who stands for no nonsense or salacious rumors.

Ralph Martin, Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph (2 vols.). New York: Prentice Hall, 1969-71. Widely acclaimed at the time, but withdrawn in Britain after Peregrine Churchill objected to its characterization of him as a bastard son.

Peregrine Churchill & Julian Mitchell, Jennie: A Portrait with Letters. London: Collins, 1974. Written mainly to dispel Martin’s reflections on Jennie’s alleged reputation, well backed by letters from Lady Randolph’s own archives.

Charles Higham, Dark Lady: Winston Churchill’s mother and Her World. London: Virgin, 2006. “Disappointing, perplexing and decidedly odd…a soup bowl of scandals and a forest of family trees.” —Finest Hour 135

Anne Sebba, Jennie Churchill: Winston’s American Mother. London, Murray, 2007)  American Jennie: The Remarkable Life of Lady Randolph Churchill), (New York: Norton, 2007).

Video and related books

ITV and Thames Television, “The Life and Loves of Lady Randolph Churchill.” Lee Remick received a  Golden Globe Award and the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for her role as Jennie in this brilliant, seven-part television documentary. Ronald Pickup played Lord Randolph and Warren Clarke was young Winston.

Celia and John Lee, Winston and Jack: The Churchill Brothers. London: Celia Lee, 2007. The only work on the long filial relationship, with much on Jennie, by accomplished researchers relying on Churchill family archives.

Richard M. Langworth, “Jennie’s Indiscretions, Jack’s Parentage,” Chapter 2 in Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality: What He Actually Did and Said. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2017. Other chapters discuss the myths of Jennie’s Iroquois ancestors, young Winston’s education, and Lord Randolph’s illness.

“No Cutlet Uncooked”

He lies at Bladon in English earth, “which in his finest hour he held inviolate.” He would enjoy the controversy he still stirs today, in media he never dreamed of. And he would revel in the assaults of his detractors, the ripostes of his defenders. The vision “of middle-aged gentlemen who are my political opponents being in a state of uproar and fury is really quite exhilarating to me,” he said in 1952. (Yes, and the not so middle-aged, too.) Most of all, Winston Churchill would love this noble book. It peers into every aspect of a career six decades long, and not, as he once quipped, “entirely without incident.”

In 1960 General Lord Ismay, the devoted “Pug,” said an objective biography could not be written for fifty years. Andrew Roberts weighs in at year fifty-eight. The delay paid off. Roberts was able to access sources only recently available. Not least of these are The Churchill Documents—invaluable papers in print through World War II. Roberts researched the Royal Archives at Windsor, the private papers of Churchill’s family. He quotes diarists like Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s ambassador to Britain. With his gift for separating wheat from chaff, this accomplished historian boils the saga down to digestible size.

* * *

Full disclosure: This writer labored for over a year as one of Roberts’ readers, sifting every word of his manuscript. Our emails, as he kindly notes, reached four figures. Together with the tenacious Paul Courtenay, we tackled every question. We ran down facts and factoids, arguing out every conclusion. With Hillsdale’s help, we checked unpublished parts of Sir Martin Gilbert’s “wodges.”  These are documents, clippings and letters, compiled by Sir Martin, for almost every day of Churchill’s life.

Mr. Roberts, to quote his subject, “left no cutlet uncooked.” This is the first biography I’ve proofed since Manchester’s The Last Lion, so I am perhaps qualified to compare. No one will ever reach the lyrical heights of Horatius at the Gate, like Manchester did. Roberts is far more illuminating, accurate and up to date. Walking with Destiny is a masterpiece—the finest single Churchill volume you can hope to read. To paraphrase Simon Schama on Gilbert’s volumes, it is a “Churchilliad,” and Andrew Roberts is its Bard.

Seeing the Whole Man

Roberts captures the essence of his subject, beginning with courage. How many 40-year-olds, sacked from their job, go off to fight in a world war? “You must not let this fret you in the least,” Churchill nonchalantly assured his wife. Fret she did: “…you seem to me as far away as the stars, lost among a million khaki figures.” He left the trenches in 1916, Roberts notes. “He had written over 100 letters to her, which allows us to peer into his psychology better than at any other period of his life.”

Clementine Churchill never begrudged his predilections, from battle to politics, where somehow he managed to remain friends with opponents. He even socialized with them, in a club he invented for the purpose: “With Churchill there was very often a political angle to friendship. An extraordinarily large contingent of Other Club members came together to help make Churchill prime minister in several different ways, and then to serve in his wartime Government…. Churchill had built something that by 1940 was to make a very real contribution…”

The great man’s courage vied with his emotion, Roberts writes: “Lady Diana Cooper left a charming account of [a wartime] weekend at Ditchley…. ‘We had two lovely films after dinner…. Winston managed to cry through all of them, including the comedy.’ She told him that night that the greatest thing he had done was to give the British people courage. ‘I never gave them courage,’ he replied. ‘I was able to focus theirs.’” Exactly.

Canards fall like matchsticks…

 … as Roberts methodically writes them off. It was not true, as Lord Mountbatten said, that young Winston left Cuba in 1895 with a liking for siestas and cigars. He already smoked cigars, did not start his afternoon nap until 1914. Regarding his overblown spells of the blues: “Churchill was not a depressive at all, let alone a manic one.” More likely he was a hypochondriac, “a man who took his own temperature daily and believed he had a sensitive cuticle.” His references to his “Black Dog” were part of “the sheer exaggeration to which he was prone. (Amateur diagnoses of him being bipolar can be even more easily dismissed.)”

At Omdurman in 1898, “within shot of an advancing army,” Churchill exclaimed, “Where will you beat this!” Such outbursts gained him “the undeserved reputation for being a lover of war, even though he was at constant pains to point out that the warfare he was describing was a world away from the industrialized horrors of the First World War.” His exuberance as WW1 began is frequently excoriated. “But it was the exuberance of someone who had not wanted the war to break out, had offered Germany the most generous and comprehensive plan to prevent it, had nonetheless planned meticulously what his department would do if it did, and who commanded the weapon that he believed could end it.”

* * *

Another myth is that Churchill always overemphasized the interests of whichever department he headed. Yet in the 1920s, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he opposed deeper naval cuts than he’d budgeted: “Any other realistic alternative chancellor—Neville or Austen Chamberlain and certainly any Labour or Liberal one—would have been much tougher on the Admiralty…Overall, the naval budget increased during Churchill’s chancellorship.” (Italics mine.)

In World War II, Roberts explodes the myth that Churchill opposed a Second Front: “The very phrase Second Front was itself a term of Soviet propaganda, because Britain had already been fighting Germany on at least five fronts before the Soviets were forced by invasion to drop their pro-German neutrality; in Northern France, the air, the Atlantic, North Africa and the Mediterranean.”

“I want to see a great shining India…”

On India Churchill was partly influenced by diehards, like Beverley Nichols, author of Verdict on India. “It certainly shows the Hindu in his true character and the sorry plight to which we have reduced ourselves by losing confidence in our mission,” Churchill reported to Clementine.

But then his prescience surfaced: “Reading about India has depressed me for I see such ugly storms looming up…. still more about what will happen if [Britain’s connection] is suddenly broken. Meanwhile we are holding on to this vast Empire, from which we get nothing, amid the increasing abuse and criticism of the world, and our own people, and increasing hatred of the Indian population, who receive constant and deadly propaganda to which we can make no reply.” (And this long before the Internet!) Uniquely, Churchill saw and predicted India’s division: “…only a Muslim-majority state in the northern part of the Indian sub-continent would protect Muslim minority rights if and when the British left.”

* * *

He was right about that—and consistent. In July 1944 he told Sir Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, India’s representative on the War Cabinet: “It was only thanks to the beneficence and wisdom of British rule in India, free from any hint of war for a longer period than almost any other country in the world, [that India produced] this vast and improvident efflorescence of humanity…. Your people must practise birth control.” Then he added (and we will never see this quoted by his Indian haters) that the old idea that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must go. Specifically he said: “We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.” ** There is the true Winston Churchill.

** Duff Hart-Davis, ed., King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 173.

Roberts Insights

Churchill famously “ratted” on the Conservatives over Free Trade—but was that his only objection? No, says Roberts: “Years later Churchill admitted that such was his reaction against the party at the time, over the harsh treatment of the defeated Boers, Army reform and the way the 1900 election victory was being exploited, that ‘when the Protection issue was raised I was already disposed to view all their actions in the most critical light.’ Churchill was spoiling for a fight with his own party.” This is fresh, excellent analysis. I have never heard his change of parties so comprehensively explained.

Had the 9th Duke of Marlborough died without an heir in 1934, Churchill would have become Duke, losing his Commons seat and any chance at the premiership, Roberts notes wryly: “He could survive a school stabbing, a 30-foot-fall, pneumonia, [nearly drowning in] a Swiss lake, Cuban bullets, Pathan tribesmen, Dervish spears, Boer artillery and sentries, tsetse flies, a Bristol suffragette, plane crashes, German high explosive shells and snipers, and latterly a New York motorist, but such was the British constitution that he also required the fecundity of a duke and duchess to allow him to be in the right place to save Britain in 1940.”

* * *

Saved by fecundity, he went on to warn the country in the 1930s. “It was a fascinating dichotomy,” Roberts writes, “that the leading appeasers had not seen action in the Great War…. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, John Simon, Samuel Hoare, Kingsley Wood, Rab Butler and Lord Halifax did not serve in the front line or see death up close.” But the anti-appeasers, “Churchill, Anthony Eden MC, Harold Macmillan MC, Alfred Duff Cooper DSO, Roger Keyes KCB, DSO, Edward Spears MC and George Lloyd DSO all had.”

Another deft comparison: In India and the Sudan, young Winston had encountered Islamic fundamentalism, “a form of religious fanaticism that in many key features was not unlike the Nazism that he was to encounter forty years later. None of the three prime ministers of the 1930s—Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain—had seen true fanaticism in their personal lives, and they were slow to discern it in Nazi Germany. [Churchill] had fought against it in his youth and recognized its salient features earlier than anyone else.”

“Never Surrender”

Churchill’s attitude towards Russia is often warped by his critics. Roberts sorts it out. “He started with profound enmity of the Bolsheviks, then by the late 1930s advocated an alliance with them. Then in 1939-40 he supported Finland in its war against them, then in 1941 he allied Britain with them overnight. In 1946 he denounced them, only in the 1950s to seek détente with them.” His view of Russia changed five times. “Yet the explanation was not in any inherent lack of consistency, as is often alleged, but what was in the ‘historic life-interests’ of Britain.”

Deftly Roberts explains the peace chatter of late May 1940. With Britain’s back to the wall, Lord Halifax clamored for an armistice brokered by Mussolini. Halifax was “the only one who understood,” nodded French Premier Reynaud’s Anglophobic aide Lt-Col. Paul de Villelume. Churchill was “prisoner of the swashbuckling attitude he always takes in front of his ministers.”

Halifax first thought Churchill welcomed a deal which preserved Britain’s independence. Then he protested that the PM believed in nothing save a fight to the finish. “This was in fact always Churchill’s line,” Roberts explains. It’s quite clear “if all five days’ discussions are read in context.”

* * *

Six weeks before D-Day Churchill was cautious. “We can now say, not only with hope but with reason, that we shall reach the end of our journey in good order. [The] tragedy will not come to pass. When the signal is given, the whole circle of avenging nations will hurl themselves upon the foe.”

Roberts juxtaposes two reactions. “This was the speech of an old man,” said the King’s private secretary. “Someone who clearly did not think so was Anne Frank, the Jewish Dutch teenager, who wrote in her diary from her secret attic in Amsterdam, ‘A speech by our beloved Winston Churchill is quite perfect.’”

General Sir Alan Brooke’s late night fuming about Churchill is often held to show the PM’s feet of clay—and Lord knows he had them. But Roberts shows us a different Brooke. Take when the boss arrives in France after D-Day. “I knew that he longed to get into the most exposed position possible. I honestly believe that he would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success. He [had said] the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” Part of Churchill’s admiration for Admiral Nelson, Roberts suggests, “was for his glorious death at the moment of victory.”

Readers: Buy This Book

Space is running out and I haven’t told you the half of it. There are 78 illustrations, most of them unique even to jaded Churchillians. Roberts did his best to avoid “old chestnuts.” There are sixteen pages of clear maps. The 1950s Reader’s Union map of Churchill’s wartime journeys is worked nicely into the endpapers. The book weighs 3 1/2 pounds—don’t drop it on your foot. The page stock is thin, but well chosen to minimize bleed-through. The bibliography, attesting to its thoroughness, runs to 23 pages, the author’s notes to 37, the index to 60. Amazon offers an attractive 40% discount and a Kindle version. This is little to pay for the education you’ll receive.

Andrew Roberts has been book-touring Britain (as he soon will be in North America). His has encouraging news for all who “labor in the vineyard,” as dear Martin Gilbert always described it. “There’s an explosion of love of Churchill among ordinary people away from the London metropolitan bubble,” Roberts writes. “It’s like 1940 in terms of his popularity, whenever you get away from the smug elites. We sell out constantly. Very heartening. Sometimes one can feel down over the Internet attacks and the statue smearings. But out in rural England he’s as much loved as ever. Our life’s work has borne fruit.”

See also my tribute to Lee Remick as “Jennie.” and Part 1 of the film. 

David Lough…

…added significantly to our knowledge with No More Champagne (2015), his study of Churchill’s finances. Now he fills another gap in the saga with this comprehensive collection of Churchill’s exchanges with his mother Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill. They range from Winston age seven to the very last letters before Jennie’s death, aged 67, in June 1921.

On the surface it may seem an easy task. Most of the letters are at the Churchill Archives in Cambridge. What could be simpler than digitalizing and publishing the lot? Not so fast. To publish them all would overwhelm the reader, not to mention the publisher. David Lough had to eliminate (or insert ellipses in) many of Winston’s letters from school, for example. This was acceptable, especially for the mandatory weekly “letter home.” Repeatedly those ask for money or parental visits, or offer exaggerated tales of prowess at sport or lessons. Lough offers “a representative but not exhaustive sample.”

Jennie was much better at keeping Winston’s letters than he hers. As a result, “connecting tissue” is often required from the editor to explain the context. The dearth of Jennie’s letters requires familiarity with her own story. At this Mr. Lough excels, providing us with just enough narrative, without taking over and distracting the reader from his subjects. He also provides excellent maps and uncommon photographs.

“You are in danger of becoming a prig!”

Having David Lough as narrator is like having a skilled tutor guiding us through the four-decade relationship between mother and son. He never falls short. “If we accept that Jennie ‘forgot’ about Winston during his schooldays,” Lough writes, “the ease with which they took up the striking intimacy of their correspondence after Winston left school suggests that she must have forged a stronger bond in his pre-school years than was typical of Victorian parents.” She certainly did—witness her own diaries, and her loyal support of Winston when rebuked by his father. Do well in your grades, she wrote him, and it will eclipse your father’s low view of your prospects. Yet she didn’t hesitate to criticize. Once, finding him adopting a “pompous style,” she warned: “You are in danger of becoming a prig!” For the most part, though, she took joy in his letters.

There are early examples of Churchill’s wry wit and powers of observation. Take Calcutta—please: “A very great city and at night with a grey fog and cold wind—I shall always [be] glad to have seen it—for the same reason Papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbon—namely ‘that it will be unnecessary ever to see it again.’” On his grandmother Frances, 7th Duchess of Marlborough: “Old age is sufficiently ugly and unpleasing without its too frequent accompaniments, capriciousness and malevolence.” Ouch.

Once commissioned, Winston was desperate for action: “scenes of adventure and excitement,” where he could “gain experience and derive advantage.” He felt hampered in “tedious” India, denied both “the pleasures of peace and the chances of war.” Before long, he was yearning for Crete. Why? Because, Lough explains, he hoped for assignment as a war correspondent during the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule. In a paragraph, Lough explains how this promising fracas was resolved, much to young Winston’s frustration. Yet India would soon provide plenty of war’s chances with the Malakand Field Force. It was the grist for Churchill’s first book.

“Your political career will lead you to big things”

Throughout his letters, notably in his soldier years, we see how Churchill planned his course, always aiming toward politics. “My soldiering prospects are a present very good,” he wrote Jennie from India. “I should continue in the army for two years more. Those two years could not be better spent on active service.” He would ride fame into Parliament. And he did. Politically, his mother’s predictions were more accurate than his. Winston was sure the Conservatives would lose power by 1902, for example. As Jennie expected, they hung on for another four years. Yet, with the sense of timing for which he was renowned, Winston managed to bolt to the Liberals in time for the 1906 election.

Jennie “did nothing to discourage a switch of careers,” David Lough tells us. Indeed his “political ambitions excited her after the premature end of her husband’s ministerial career.” This is exemplary of Lough’s penetrating observations. It is often overlooked that Lord Randolph’s precipitate political fall greatly depressed Jennie, more even than his death. Their son revived her hopes, especially after his hair-raising Boer War adventures: “I am sure you are sick of the war,” she wrote. Now “you will be able to make a decent living out of writings, & your political career will lead you to big things.” She was right again. He was also safer—relatively. In politics you can be killed many times, he later observed; but in war only once.

Separated as they were by oceans and continents, two-thirds of their letters span the years before Churchill entered politics. The rest are largely from early in his political career. There is much more than politics, including details of his romances. He broke up with Pamela Plowden, whom Jennie was sure he would marry, writing his mother in 1901: “We had no painful discussions, but there is no doubt in my mind that she is the only woman I could ever live happily with…” (Not quite.)

Disappointingly, there are no Jennie letters about Lord Randolph’s death. We have no inkling of what she thought: relief, grief, both? Neither will the prurient find the oft-rumored, unsubstantiated, Jennie letters about Clementine Hozier, another woman with whom Winston soon found he could live happily. Jennie had reintroduced them in 1908, after a bad start four years earlier. A long, happy marriage began that year. A fine coda to their early relationship is Winston’s letter to his mother a few days after she ceased being the most important woman in his life: “Clemmy v[er]y happy & beautiful…. You were a great comfort & support to me at a critical time in my emotional development. We have never been so near together so often in a short time.”

“I might have known that 50 miles behind the line was not your particular style…”

Nor do we find revealing letters at critical junctures to come: Churchill’s appointment to the Admiralty, the outbreak of the Great War, his abrupt fall from power. Only after he has resigned to join his regiment do we find him in Jennie’s thoughts again: “I might have known that 50 miles behind the line was not your particular style….It is no use my saying ‘be careful.’ It is all in the hands of God. I can only pray & hope for the best.”

God granted her prayer and he was soon back in the thick of politics. But they never indulged much in political exchanges, as Winston did with Clementine. Jennie’s few letters now were filled with family things: pride in grandchildren, happiness at Winston’s political success, her 1918 marriage to Montagu Porch. His step-father was actually three years younger than Winston, but the marriage worked somehow. Moreover, his mother was happy, and that was what mattered to her son.

This is quite a wonderful collection, shedding bright light on the youthful Churchill’s hopes and dreams, while revealing the worldly, solicitous, loving influence of his American mother. No son could wish for more. For those of us similarly blessed in our lives, David Lough conveys an understanding of why a man is fortunate if he is his mother’s son. As Jennie would write to him often, as our mothers wrote to us: “God bless you my darling and keep you safe.”

This book is both delightful and educational, a luxurious production for a modest price. Printed on thick, coated paper with many illustrations, it weighs over two pounds. The only technical complaint is that, with lots of white space available, the type could be larger.

Brough Scott, a horse racing journalist and former jockey, is ideally qualified to write. He is the grandson and biographer of Churchill’s lifelong friend Jack Seely, later Lord Mottistone (1868-1947). “Galloping Jack” led Canadians in one of the last great cavalry charges, at Moreuil Wood in March 1918. (That was two decades after Omdurman, which is usually and wrongly cited as the finale.)

Scott on Omdurman

Of the charge at Omdurman we are forcefully reminded on page 1. Scott makes the first of many penetrating observations. “Think about it,” he asks:

It is actually pretty difficult to do, and that’s if the horse is standing still. Without taking your left hand off the reins, you have to raise your cavalry sword in your right hand across in front of you, and resheath it in the scabbard attached to the near side of the saddle. At 8.40 on a steamy hot morning in the Sudan on 2 September 1898, Winston Churchill did it at a gallop…. To keep his seat as he and his horse crashed into, down and through the seething, hacking throng in that dried river bed where the main body of the enemy were concealed, took riding skills and dexterity with a pistol almost off the scale.

Before the autocar…

Such feats encouraged Scott to learn more about Churchill’s remarkable experiences with horses: “He rode more extensively than any British Prime Minister before or since. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Winston Churchill was born a full twenty years before the first car was driven on a British highway…”

He goes on that way for 230 pages, with fresh observations that cause graduate Churchillians to wonder: “why didn’t I think of that?” Take Scott’s analysis of young Winston’s letters to his mother to fund his polo (“the greatest of my pleasures”) at Sandhurst. One letter “may have included the programme for [a race meeting]…but it did not start with saddle talk. It began with acute observations abut the Sino-Japanese war over Korea…. ‘I take the greatest interest in the fleets and armies,’ he wrote.” Even as a skinny Sandhurst cadet, his interests were global.

Comprehensive and thorough

The photos of Churchill himself are mostly old chestnuts, but not all: there are charming post-World War II riding scenes with his daughter Mary. Scott’s “supporting” images include color prints of people and events, and the occasional surprise. (Did you ever see a carriage pulled a team of zebras?) Scott chooses well. A photo of Hadendoa tribesmen, who fought for the Mahdi at Omdurman, dramatically conveys the valor that won Churchill’s respect in his book, The River War.

Most of the sixteen chapters begin with arresting illustrations. A color cartoon depicts the startled young Winston in Ireland on his donkey, confronting what he thought were Fenians. A chapter on Cuba begins with sketches of the Spanish column Churchill joined. The resulting images illustrated his despatches for The Daily Graphic. Thus we proceed through Churchill’s life, Scott drawing out horse references from his writings and those of specialist historians, like Hal Klepak on the Cuban adventure.

Churchill’s campaigns in India, the Sudan and South Africa are nicely laid out with contemporary photos, maps and plans. Before and after the Great War, his pursuit of polo is adequately documented. The emphasis is always equestrian, but these are as good accounts as you can read anywhere. Thus the book delivers much more than its cover promises.

Skillful observation

Churchill was in his fifties before he played his last polo game, and was riding to hounds in his seventies. Of course, as he aged, his time in the saddle diminished. Scott covers his later years in fifty pages, not omitting his experiences as a thoroughbred race horse owner. The author has a facility for drawing out thoughtful conclusions. Discussing horses and racing in The Dream (WSC’s fictional conversation with his deceased father, 1947), Scott writes:

Winston’s parenting may have been unorthodox, not to say dysfunctional, by today’s standard, but there is no doubt that Jennie and Randolph left the deepest of impressions, and who is to say that he wasn’t reaching towards them in his diversions? He had long found precious solace in the painting at which his mother had so excelled, and now, in old age, he was about to re-register the chocolate-and-pink racing silks in which L’Abbesse De Jouarre [his father’s thoroughbred] had won the Oaks all those years ago.

* * *

Dear Martin Gilbert warned us all never to say “perhaps.” He would always retort, “Perhaps not!” Scott avoids that, but puts this conjecture in a way Sir Martin might let pass. Who indeed is to say the thought doesn’t fit? It seems to fit very well.

One wouldn’t expect it in a horse book, but Scott even manages to answer one of our most frequent questions, about WSC’s weight, at least in 1954. His wife had tried to put him on a diet, and Sir Winston was resisting. His scale read 14 1/2 stone (204 pounds), he wrote her, compared to 15 stone (212) on hers. “…if your machine is proved to be wrong you will have to review your conclusions, and I hope to abandon your regime. I have no grievances against a tomato, but I think one should eat other things as well.”

Scott adds: “That weedy 31-inch-chest Sandhurst cadet belonged to another age.”

==============

Churchill loved polo, which he called “The Emperor of Games.” A contemporary writer’s description of his polo tactics is remindful of much else in the statesmen’s approach to life and politics:

He rides in the game like heavy cavalry getting into position for the assault. He trots about, keenly watchful, biding his time, a matter of tactics and strategy. Abruptly he sees his chance, and he gathers his pony and charges in, neither deft nor graceful, but full of tearing physical energy—and skillful with it too. He bears down opposition by the weight of his dash, and strikes the ball. Did I say strike? He slashes the ball.

Sandhurst

Churchill first mentions polo in a letter to his father, seeking permission to ride in September 1893. He had just arrived at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. In the entrance exam, his final test score was too low for him to be accepted in the infantry and qualified him only for the Cavalry. This was a disappointment to his father Lord Randolph, who was troubled by the expense: “In the infantry one has to keep a man; in the cavalry a man and a horse as well.” His son recalled later: “Little did he foresee not only one horse, but two official chargers and one or two hunters besides, to say nothing of the string of polo ponies!”

In the spring of 1894, Colonel J.P. Brabazon expressed interest in having Winston join a cavalry regiment. He wrote his mother, Lady Randolph: “How I wish I were going into the 4th [Hussars] instead of those old [60th] Rifles. It would not cost a penny more & the regiment goes to India in 3 years which is just right for me.” Following Lord Randolph’s death in January 1895, Winston duly joined the 4th Hussars. On 12 February 1895 he received his commission as a second lieutenant.

Polo at Aldershot

At Aldershot the same month, Churchill began intensive training as a cavalry officer. As his father had feared, finances were a problem. It was a stretch for their mother to maintain Jack, Winston and herself in the way they would all like. And by now young Winston had discovered polo. In April 1895 he wrote his mother,

Everyone here is beginning to play as the season is just commencing. I have practised on other people’s ponies for 10 days and am improving very fast. If therefore, as I imagine—you have some ready money do lend me a hundred pounds…. I cannot go on without any for more than a few days unless I give up the game, which would be dreadful.

Churchill played regularly during his eighteen months at Aldershot. By May 1896 he was hoping to make the regimental team. “I am making extraordinary progress at Polo,” he wrote his mother, “but I want very much to buy another pony, I wish you would lend me £200 as I could then buy a really first class animal which would always fetch his price.”

It bears mentioning, in those far off days, that £200 had the purchasing power of £20,000 today. It is like your son asking for a loan to buy a car…

For six months he lived in London and played polo at Hurlingham in Essex and Ranelagh. As summer ended the 4th Hussars gave up their cavalry chargers to a returning regiment, and sailed for India.

India

In Bombay a native regiment, the Poona Light Horse, was thought to have the best ponies. In what Churchill called an “audacious and colossal undertaking,” the 4th Hussars bought a complete polo stud of twenty-five horses. This gave them a huge advantage of well-trained ponies immediately upon arrival at their duty station, Bangalore in the south of India.

The Hussars were out to win, and Winston’s letters home were full of the sport. “I get up here at 5 o’clock every morning…ride off to parade at 6. At 8 o’clock breakfast and bath and such papers as there are: 9.15 to 10.45 Stables—and no other engagement till Polo at 4.15.″

A polo game lasts an hour and is divided into periods or chukkas of seven minutes each. Churchill played in every chukka he could get into. His prodigious efforts soon came to the notice of the Aga Khan. “It was at Poona in the late summer of 1896 that our paths first crossed,” the Khan wrote later:

A group of officers of the 4th Hussars, then stationed at Bangalore, called on me…. none was a better judge of a horse, than a young subaltern by the name of Winston Spencer Churchill. He was a little over twenty, eager, irrepressible, and already an enthusiastic, courageous, and promising polo player.

“Give your son horses”

In November 1896 Churchill’s team won a tournament at Hyderabad, a 24-hour, 700-mile train journey. Winston told his mother that the entire population turned out to watch, not infrequently betting thousands of rupees:

This performance is a record: no English regiment ever having won a first-class tournament within a month of their arrival in India. The Indian papers express surprise and admiration. I will send you by the next mail some interesting instantaneous photographs of the match — in which you will remark me—fiercely struggling with turbaned warriors….

Churchill was fond of other horse sports; he participated in steeplechases, point-to-points and pleasure riding. In a letter to Jack in November 1896, he proudly noted that their father’s racing colors, chocolate and pink, would appear on Indian soil for the first time at a pony race meeting. In his 1930 autobiography Churchill would advise parents:

Don’t give your son money. As far as you can afford it give him horses. No one ever came to grief— except honourable grief—through riding horses. No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them; unless of course they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die.

Expanding horizons

During leave in 1897, Churchill traveled in Europe and then went home to England. By September he was back in India, chasing fame and notoriety as a war correspondent with Sir Bindon Blood and the Malakand Field Force. From Nowshera he wrote polo team-mate Reginald Barnes, “Best luck at Poona. It is bloody hot.”

Lt. Churchill returned to Bangalore—“to polo and my friends”—in October 1897. But the success of his writing, and the realization that it could be a serious source of income, had taken the edge off his consumption with polo. “I am off to Hyderabad on Sat for a polo tournament,” he wrote his mother. “It is a nuisance having to go when I am so busy.” He referred to the writing of his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Hoping for more action in the Sudan, where General Kitchener had been appointed to reconquer that territory on behalf of Britain and Egypt, was later attached to the 21st Lancers. This adventure provided material for his second book, The River War.

* * *

Before he left India he got “rid of every polo pony I possess…. I hope to get rid of them all soon. They eat.” Churchill would not return to India again, and would soon leave the army. The Malakand Field Force “earned me in a few months two years’ pay as a subaltern.” He was about to publish his novel Savrola and had offers to write biographies of his father and his ancestor the First Duke of Marlborough. Above all, however, Churchill hungered for a seat in Parliament.

Concluded in Part 2.

_____

Barbara Langworth is a bacteriologist, editor and publisher in New Hampshire. Multi-talented, she runs everything.

David Franco, reviewing the film Churchill, starring Brian Cox, raises questions he says everyone should be asking. “Isn’t the ability to accept one’s mistakes part of what makes a man a good leader? …. To what extent should we rely [on] past experiences in order to minimize mistakes in the future? These are the questions that make a bad movie like Churchill worth seeing.”

Well, I won’t be seeing this bad movie. Described as “perverse fantasy” by historian Andrew Roberts, it joins a recent spate of sloppy Churchill bio-pics that favor skewed caricatures over historical fact.

Revisionism: A Thriving Industry

Makers of movies might think it novel to criticize Churchill, but this is far from the case. Attacks on his leadership began early after World War II and have continued ever since. There’s a thriving mini-industry in “Churchill revisionism.” But it started with books, not movies.

In 1963, R.W. Thompson’s The Yankee Marlborough portrayed Churchill as a man of flesh and blood, who made mistakes, like anybody else. In his 1970 study, Churchill: A Study in Failure 1900-1939, Robert Rhodes James focused on Churchill’s political gaffes, such as his dogged support of King Edward VIII in the 1936 Abdication crisis. Edward, later Duke of Windsor, gave up the throne to marry an American divorcee. The Duke’s tepid admiration of Hitler, and dismal performance as Governor of the Bahamas, caused Churchill to reflect: “I’m glad I was wrong.”

In 1993, John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory rocked Churchill’s supporters by claiming that he should have backed away from the Hitler war to preserve Britain’s wealth, power, and empire. More recently, Max Hastings criticized Churchill’s war leadership on multiple issues in both World Wars: Catastrophe 1914, on the opening months of WW1, and Winston’s War, 1940-45.

Whatever we make of their assessments, these historians were qualified critics whose thoroughly researched theses merit consideration. Alas, we cannot say the same about the recent round of Churchill movies.

Movies Faithful to Reality

Churchill movies started off well and were honest for decades. Young Winston (1972), starring Simon Ward as WSC and Anne Bancroft as his mother, was a vivid presentation based on Churchill’s own account of his first twenty-five years. Its inaccuracies stemmed from Churchill himself in his autobiography. (In it, Anthony Hopkins played David Lloyd George. Lady Randolph says: “He has the most disconcerting way of looking at women.”)

In 1974, Lee Remick brilliantly reprised the role of Lady Randolph the television series Jennie: as accurate a portrayal as ever existed. We Churchlllians gave her an award for it—the dying Lee’s last public appearance. It was attended by Gregory Peck, who co-starred with her in The Omen, who praised her “depth of womanliness.”

That same year, Richard Burton played a believable Churchill in The Gathering Storm, about the years leading up to World War II. Again, it didn’t deviate from fact, although Burton spoiled the effect by denouncing Churchill for fictitious acts against Welsh miners, including Burton’s father. Privately, Burton had expressed his admiration for “the old boy”.…but later, the cameras were on.

The 1981 TV series Churchill: The Wilderness Years, remains the model Churchill bio-pic. Herein Robert Hardy showed us both Churchill’s human frailties and his greatness. Hardy and his writers partnered with Churchill’s official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert to portray the anxious politician of the 1930s, out of power, vainly warning of the Nazi menace. Brilliantly cast, the result was a masterpiece.

More Recently…

Albert Finney was a solid Churchill in the second Gathering Storm (2002), a 90-minute film for television. As skillfully cast as The Wilderness Years, it featured Vanessa Redgrave in a bavura performance as Clementine Churchill. The story line, while not uncritical, did not deviate from fact. Even in the cynical, anti-heroic 21st century, it seemed, filmmakers could still tell his story without reducing Churchill to a flawed burlesque or godlike caricature. Then came “Into the Storm,” a 2009 television drama broadcast by the BBC and HBO. Here in a series set in 1945 with 1940 flashbacks, Brendan Gleeson gave us the most accurate Churchill since Robert Hardy. Things were looking good.

Or so I thought. Alas, in the last couple of years, we’ve had three films which can only be described as “fake history,” and a one-dimensional documentary that fails to tell the full story.

A Turn to the Worse

The Crown, a 2016 Netflix series covering the early reign of Queen Elizabeth II, was well acted. But John Lithgow portrayed a senile prime minister who hides his 1953 stroke from the Queen and repeatedly paints his goldfish pond in a muddle of depression. Factually, the Queen knew of Churchill’s stroke three days after it happened—and he was never so dotty as to make repeated paintings of his fish pond. The Duke of Windsor resurfaces here, promising that he will get the new Queen to move into Buckingham Palace if Churchill restores his royal allowance. Where do they think of this stuff?

Viceroy’s House has not been seen yet in the US, and we’re missing nothing. A visually elaborate production, it covers the end of British rule in India, under the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, whitewashing the latter at Churchill’s expense. Mountbatten’s insistence that Britain leave before the India-Pakistan boundaries were settled led to violent strife and the massacre of millions. Somehow, the film manages to blame this on Churchill, who was not even in power at the time.

* * *

Churchill starring Brian Cox is built around the myth that Churchill opposed D-Day virtually to the moment of the Normandy landings. In reality, Churchill had sought “a lodgment on the continent” since the British were thrown out of Dunkirk in 1940. His concept of floating “Mulberry Harbors” for landing tanks and equipment dated back to 1917. This hasn’t prevented Mr. Cox from flaunting his ignorance in interviews repeating a host of canards, including the notion that Churchill wanted to invade Germany over the Alps.

I held my breath when the film Dunkirk appeared, hoping it would not be another dose of lame propaganda. Churchill doesn’t appear in it. But his absence, along with other heroes of the Dunkirk evacuation, reduces the film to a one-dimensional portrait. It’s war on a beach, with moving scenes of heroism and survival. Who was the enemy? A viewer has no idea why Churchill said after Dunkirk, “We shall never surrender”—though his words are read movingly by a soldier in the final scenes.

Hope Ahead? We’ll See

There’s no question that fictitious scenes and conversations are legitimate devices in bio-pics. But they must not depart from what we know. And thanks to historians like Martin Gilbert and the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, we know a lot.

There is cause for hope. This autumn, Gary Oldman will star as Churchill in another bio-pic, Darkest Hour, about facing Hitler’s armies in 1940. Promisingly, Oldman has consulted with qualified historians, striving to find “a way in” to the real Churchill. Colleagues who’ve seen previews say he has Churchill down perfectly. But his script contains some bizarre counterfactuals.

One can only wish him success. Perhaps this film will answer David Franco’s questions. Yes, accepting one’s mistakes does make a person a good leader. Yes, Churchill did learn from his mistakes. He was a man of quality—a good guide for our troubled decade. And after a long lapse, he deserves a film that does him justice.

Jennie’s Encounter

Winston on Blenheim

Her son inherited her way with words. He wrote in his biography, Lord Randolph Churchill, published in 1906:

The cumulative labours of Vanbrugh and ‘Capability’ Brown have succeeded at Blenheim in setting an Italian palace in an English park without apparent incongruity. The combination of these different ideas, each singly attractive, produces a remarkable effect. The palace is severe in its symmetry and completeness…. Natural simplicity and even confusion are, on the contrary, the characteristic of the park and gardens. Instead of that arrangement of gravel paths, of geometrical flower-beds, and of yews disciplined with grotesque exactness which the character of the house would seem to suggest, there spreads a rich and varied landscape…. And yet there is no violent contrast, no abrupt dividing-line betwee

n the wildness and freshness of the garden and the pomp of the architecture.

The whole region is as rich in history as in charm….. Here Kings—Saxon, Norman and Plantagenet—have held their Courts. Ethelred the Unready, Alfred the Great, Queen Eleanor, the Black Prince loom in vague majesty out of the past.

What we have lost

Lady Randolph’s and her son’s beautiful words always remind me of ​ David Dilks​’s remark in his discussion and later essay on The Queen and Winston Churchill:

…the monarchy signified for him something of infinite value, at once numinous and luminous; and if you will allow the remark in parenthesis, ladies and gentlemen, do you not sometimes long for someone at the summit of our public life who can think and write at that level?

Per the previous post, I append for reader comment the contents of my next book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality: What Churchill Stood For.

I have written on most of these matters in the past; the book recasts it afresh. I also acknowledge and cross-reference the work of experts who know far more than I, particularly in the fields of genealogy and medicine. I would be glad to hear your thoughts; please use the “contact” page.

The historian David Stafford wrote: “Myth only develops and takes hold when the time is right, and the climate has long been ripe for the emergence of myths about a wartime hero who stood firm against a totalitarian foe and smote an evil empire.”

Churchill myth is born both of exaggeration and criticism, created either to glorify the record or to belabor it. The former I suppose is somewhat less harmful, born of ignorance. The latter obfuscate the record and distract us from the truth, sometimes intentionally.

Paul Addison wrote, “Paradoxically, I have always thought it diminishes Churchill to regard him as superhuman,” Yet Professor Addison has no doubt about Churchill’s greatness. The most memorable words on that subject were by Churchill’s official biographer, the late Sir Martin Gilbert:

In every sphere of human endeavour, Churchill foresaw the dangers and potential for evil. Many of those dangers are our dangers today. Some writers portray him as a figure of the past, an anachronism, a grotesque. In doing so, it is they who are the losers, for he was a man of quality: a good guide for the generations now reaching adulthood.

The aim of this book is to skewer the most popular allegations about Churchill, to offer readers what he really thought and did, sometimes about matters that are still on our minds today—for as Twain wrote, history never repeats; but sometimes it rhymes.

Youth: Lady Randolph’s indiscretions…The parentage of Jack Churchill…The Menace of Education….The death of Lord Randolph…Women’s Suffrage.

Young Parliamentarian: The loss of  the Titanic…The unpleasantness on Sidney Street…”The sullen feet of marching men in Tonypandy“…Irish independence.

World War I: Warmonger image, peacemaker reality…Defense of Antwerp…Dardanelles and Gallipoli…Sinking the Lusitania…Chemical warfare...America’s involvement in the Great War.

Between the World Wars: “Taking more out of alcohol”…“The foul baboonery of Bolshevism”…Trial by Jewry…”Half-Naked Fakir“…”The Truth About Hitler.”

World War II: Broadcasting the war speeches…Refugees and enemy aliens…Torture as tool or terror…Bombing of Coventry…Pearl Harbor…The Holocaust…Famine in Bengal…Destruction of Monte Cassino…Overtures to Mussolini…Feeding occupied Europe…Firebombing Dresden.

Postwar Years: The fate of Eastern Europe…Nuking the Soviets…The Conservative Party…”Only to have accomplished nothing in the end.”

Appendix: “Things That Go Bump in the Night” (so far-fetched that they defy categorizing). Converting to Islam…A life twice-saved by Alexander Fleming...Engineering the Wall Street Crash…The myths of the Black Dog and an unhappy marriage.

I have two questions. When Lord Randolph Churchill was banished to Ireland in 1876, after the Aylesford incident, did he remain a Member of the House of Commons?  And what were the rules in regard to a Peer of the Realm being a Member of the Commons? Since Randolph was elected to the House in 1874 I assume he could serve. On the other hand, when in May 1940 the question was whether Lord Halifax or Winston Churchill would become Prime Minister, Halifax demurred on the grounds that as a Lord he couldn’t be a member of Commons and that  would would hamper him as Prime Minister.  —S.N.

Protocol and Practice

Exile in Ireland

 

The uproar was over Randolph’s brother the Marquess of Blandford‘s affair with Edith, Countess of Aylesford, wife of the 7th Earl of Ayelsford, aka “Sporting Joe.” It would appear Lady Edith was equally sporting. She wished to divorce the Earl and elope with Blandford, with whom she had conducted a torrid love affair. Hearing of this, HRH the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) condemned Blandford as “the greatest blackguard alive.” Springing to his brother’s defense, Randolph threatened to reveal HRH’s own indiscretions with Lady Edith, whereupon HRH said he would appear in no place where Lord Randolph was present–effectively ostracizing Winston Churchill’s parents from London Society.

Aylesford Redux

By 1880 the waters had calmed and Lord Randolph and his father returned to England, patching things up with HRH. (Young Winston’s first memories were of Ireland.)

“Sporting Joe” emigrated to Texas where he bought a cattle ranch and died of drink and dropsy aged only 36.  Lady Edith went on to further sport, but not with Blandford. A movie could be made. Ah, the Victorians.