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‘Please my darling Mummy be kind to your loving son’
Winston Churchill adored his mother Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill. Between 1881, when Churchill was six, and 1921, the year of Jennie’s death, mother and son were prolific letter-writers. In Darling Winston, David Lough has compiled the first-ever edited selection of their voluminous and entertaining forty-year correspondence.
Churchill’s life across this period follows a trajectory of adventure and political ambition – army service in India, escape from a Boer POW camp, swift ascent from Conservative MP for Oldham to Liberal First Lord of the Admiralty, resignation in the wake of the debacle of Gallipoli, and eventual return to the cabinet in 1917. His mother’s life, by contrast, follows a downward spiral: her second marriage founders and she becomes a lonely figure, moving forlornly around the country homes of her wealthy friends. As Winston joins Asquith’s cabinet and meets his wife-to-be, Clementine, Jennie is getting divorced and making faltering attempts to embark on a literary career. Darling Winston reflects Churchill’s emotional, intellectual and political development as confided to Jennie as his mentor; but it also charts a mother–son relationship characterized at the outset by Winston’s dependence on Jennie, which is dramatically reversed as her life crumbles towards its end.
Brimming with gossip, name-dropping and chutzpah, and populated by a cast of the great and the good of late Victorian and Edwardian England, Darling Winston enriches our understanding of the political apprenticeship of Britain’s most celebrated statesmen, and offers poignant insights into his relationship with the woman whose worldly advice and loving encouragement first set him on the path to power.
Welcome Page
About Darling Winston
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
Editorial Notes
Chapter: 1 His Mother’s Son 1881–90
Chapter: 2 Trials with a Teenager 1890–92
Chapter: 3 Coping with a Cadet 1892–4
Chapter: 4 Dying by Inches 1894
Chapter: 5 Single Parent 1895–6
Chapter: 6 A Long Way Apart 1896
Chapter: 7 Egypt or India? 1896–7
Chapter: 8 Army or Politics? 1897
Chapter: 9 A Splendid Episode 1897
Chapter: 10 Hobson’s Choice 1897–8
Chapter: 11 Both Stone Broke 1898
Chapter: 12 Lances and Pistols on the Nile 1898
Chapter: 13 Final Passage to India 1898–9
Chapter: 14 The Sinews of War 1899–1900
Chapter: 15 End of an Era 1900–01
Chapter: 16 Both Hunted 1901–2
Chapter: 17 The Pig Goes to Market 1903–5
Chapter: 18 Turning the Tables 1905–6
Chapter: 19 Solace in Scribblings 1907–8
Chapter: 20 End of a Marriage 1908–14
Chapter: 21 Coda at the Front 1915–18
Chapter: 22 Last Words 1920–21
Endpapers
Appendix – People, Places
Acknowledgements
Sources and Letter References
Bibliography
Index
About David Lough
Also by David Lough
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
To Felicity, a brilliant mother to our five children
by Randolph Churchill
I VERY MUCH welcome the first publication of these letters between my great-grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill, and his mother, Jennie, as a correspondence in their own right. I believe that history has under-appreciated the role of Jennie Jerome (as she was known at her birth in America) in shaping the early years of her son, Winston, and the influence she had on the life of a great statesman. Nothing illustrates better how she did it than these letters.
Jennie Jerome and her American ancestors, who were of early pioneering stock, are legends in my family history. My great-grandfather loved the stories of supposed Iroquois antecedents, which we are now told are untrue. But Jennie’s father, the fabulous Leonard Jerome, created a spark of energy in her, because Jennie was beautiful, talented and captivating. So much so that when, aged nineteen, she met the young Lord Randolph Churchill when they were guests on board HMS Ariadne in 1873, he proposed to her just two days later. Although Jennie’s parents did not think that the second son of a duke was good enough for their daughter, the young couple were very much in love. They married in 1874 and Winston was born later that year.
Jennie had to bring Winston up almost single-handed once he was a teenager, because his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was so ill and away so much. He died when Winston was barely twenty. Thereafter Jennie was completely on her own, and Winston was a handful.
But, then, Jennie was no ordinary Victorian mother, as David Lough makes clear in his Introduction. She combined a naturally warm and vivacious personality with considerable talents. She was a concert-standard pianist and was fluent in several languages, skills she had acquired during a childhood spent in New York, Trieste and Paris. This equipped her to survive the shock of marrying into the stiff, male-dominated world of the Victorian upper class and, indeed, to carve out a position among its top politicians, soldiers and intellectuals.
Jennie kept this position after her husband died and used her network of friends to pull all sorts of strings on Winston’s behalf; at the same time, she tried to smooth his rougher edges without blunting his exuberance. Jennie also passed a spark of strong American independence onto Winston, which was to manifest itself in the darker years ahead when Britain ‘stood alone’ and then later alongside her American allies after he persuaded them to enter the war. I love the tribute Winston gave his mother when he addressed the joint houses of Congress in December 1941 and said: ‘I wish indeed that my mother, whose memory I cherish, across the vale of years, could have been here to see.’
The striking intimacy of their long correspondence will give pause to those who assume their relationship was distant or strained. For his mother’s eyes only, Winston confided his innermost thoughts on his strengths and weaknesses, on the senior generals and politicians of the day, and on his early attempts to devise his own political philosophy. Jennie told him whenever she thought he was wrong, at the same time describing evocatively the gilded lives of the Victorian and Edwardian elites among whose country estates she moved effortlessly as a popular guest.
All this we can now read in an exchange of sparkling letters spanning forty years. David Lough has assembled a wonderful collection that takes us through mother and son’s shared successes and failures, love and disappointment, exhilaration and despair.
The result is not just wonderfully entertaining; it also sheds important historical light on a relationship that was pivotal in the growth of my great-grandfather’s personality, political philosophy and moral courage.
RANDOLPH CHURCHILL
Crockham Hill
March 2018
WINSTON CHURCHILL and his mother Jennie Jerome1 exchanged more than a thousand letters in the forty years between his sixth birthday and her death. Jennie was better at keeping her son’s letters than he was at keeping hers, especially while he was fighting as a young man in north-western India, the Sudan and southern Africa. Nevertheless, I estimate that at least three-quarters of their letters survive; although many have found their way individually into biographies of either mother or son, they have never before appeared as an uninterrupted correspondence between the two.
I have had to omit some letters for reasons of space, but the majority of these omissions date from Winston’s days at boarding school when he had to write a weekly letter home and he followed the schoolboy’s well-worn formula of weaving appeals for more pocket money or parental visits into tales of sporting or academic achievements. I have included a representative but far from exhaustive sample of the genre.
The many attractions of the letters exchanged between Winston and his mother Jennie struck me while I was researching an earlier book, No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money. It is not just the entertainment that two natural writers provide us as they express themselves to each other without reserve; nor is it just the historical light that each shines on the ruling elite at work and play in the years before the First World War, when Jennie in her own right was as well known a public figure as her son.
There are two additional attractions. The first is the insight that the letters offer into the curious mind of Winston Churchill as he develops his adult personality. By the time he was a teenager, his father Lord Randolph Churchill was seriously ill with a disease that doctors at the time treated as syphilis, although modern medical opinion is not so sure. So it was Jennie who took the strain of bringing up their difficult son and his brother Jack, six years younger.
Soon after Winston’s twentieth birthday, his father died and Jennie became a single parent. From this moment onwards, she helped him to develop his education and his philosophy towards life. He confided intimately in her while testing out his increasingly assertive views about the military, social and political figures or controversies of the day. She was able to respond in kind because, being both well educated and socially well connected, she knew all the leading actors whom her son was precociously judging.
The second attraction is the almost operatic quality that the Churchills’ letters bring to the universal story of a mother’s invincible love for a son, counterpointed by her gradual decline from the vibrant, young giver of life in the child’s early days to the lonely, elderly burden that she felt herself to be in her later years.
In the first act of the drama, this mother struggles to cope with a wayward child while losing her husband inch by inch, in public, to a terrible disease. Following his death, the second act sees her subsume her ambitions into those of her son, deploying her many great gifts to advance his career. Then, in the third act, just as their joint endeavours are bearing fruit, she falls for the charms of a young suitor half her age. Despite many warnings against the alliance she marries him while her son stands loyally by.
After an interval, in the fourth act her attractions fade, the new marriage cracks and her life crumbles. By the time she calls on her son for help, he is too busy and successful to give it. It takes a serious check to his career in the final act to revive their intimacy and provide a fitting coda to their correspondence as he goes off to war. He survives; yet she meets a tragic end soon afterwards and her son arrives at her deathbed just too late to say goodbye. The curtain falls.
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When Winston Churchill was born in 1874, letter-writing was the standard way for family members and friends to keep in touch with one another. The invention of a self-adhesive stamp in 1840 had transformed the popularity of the post by allowing the writer of a letter, rather than its reader, to pay for its delivery. Between 1837 and 1874, the number of letters posted in Britain rose from 67 million a year to more than a billion. For the price of a red penny stamp (a little more than we pay today in real terms), the Royal Mail delivered a letter of up to half an ounce in weight to almost any part of the country on the day after postage. London houses could receive six to twelve deliveries a day.
After 1870 there was the alternative of sending a telegram, but its first nine words cost six times as much as a letter. In addition, its contents had to be transcribed at each end by clerks in post offices nearest to the sender and receiver. It therefore offered no assurance of privacy. The abbreviated language of a telegram could also cause misunderstandings, so even the extravagant Churchills preferred to write a letter in most circumstances.
Proper Victorian letter-writers, of whom Jennie was one, spent the first hour or two of each day after breakfast in the bedroom attending to their correspondence. The owners of the country houses that they visited prided themselves on the quality of the crested notepaper provided to their guests. Their young sons learned the habit of letter-writing as soon as they left home at the age of eight. Every Sunday their boarding schools would set an hour aside for them to write a letter home, under supervision.
Letters could be gossipy and intimate, their contents (by convention) to be absorbed only by the reader unless he or she was invited by the writer to share them more widely. In some cases, the reader might be asked to burn the letter after reading it; Winston asked his wife Clementine to burn several letters, but he only asked his mother to destroy one.
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Jennie’s ancestors had emigrated from Britain to its colonies in North America as early as 1710. The founding fathers had set out to establish a less patriarchal society than the one they had left behind; thus, when Thomas Jefferson drew up the laws of Virginia, he consciously rejected the incorporation of primogeniture and male entail, the twin pillars of English aristocratic society. So far as American inheritance laws existed at all after 1800, they treated sons and daughters alike, including those born outside marriage.
Most well-to-do American parents used very different methods of bringing up their children from the Victorian elite in Britain. The authoritarian controls of the latter gave way in America to a more relaxed relationship between the generations, in which mothers played a more influential role in bringing up their sons than they did in Britain.
The country’s rapid economic growth required its children to assist their parents as soon as they were sufficiently able-bodied to do so. Values that shaped America’s culture, such as personal autonomy and success, also infused the attitudes of parents towards their children. As a result parents encouraged displays of initiative, gave their young more independence and employed a less rigid approach to discipline.
By contrast, English parents of the Victorian era imagined their children to inhabit a state not of ‘childhood’ but of ‘defective adulthood’. Children learned to eradicate their defects over time by acquiring rules of behaviour which would breed a moral rectitude that led in turn to social and economic success.
When Winston was born, British law still subordinated the role of the mother to that of the father. It was the father who owned the family’s property and who was legally responsible for the welfare of his children. As portrayed in John Galsworthy’s novel The Man of Property (1906), the archetype of the Victorian father was authoritative and wise, benignly exerting his influence over the whole family, yet remote from his children, who lived, ate and slept in a separate part of the house.
By the time Queen Victoria came to the British throne in 1837, wealthier parents had acquired the habit of delegating the teaching of these adult rules to a servant – the nursery nurse or ‘nanny’, who ruled over the nursery, a suite of rooms on the top floor of the house, usually filled by pieces of furniture not required elsewhere in the ancestral home.
More than 100,000 nannies were in service in Britain in 1874, when The Times each day carried advertisements for an average of twelve new such positions.2 Unlike governesses, nannies usually came from working-class homes and occupied a strange middle ground in the domestic household, part servant and part in loco parentis. Relationships between a mother and her nanny ranged between a genuine partnership in bringing up the child and cases where the nanny seized effective control.3 In most families, however, the nanny acted as the child’s de facto mother, deferring only briefly to his or her real mother during a daily visit downstairs at teatime to its parents’ drawing room. The nanny took responsibility for the child’s clothes, food, sleep, play, health and behaviour.
Today it is difficult to conceive how tens of thousands of British mothers handed over the care of their young, almost from birth, to women of whose background they often knew little. In part, perhaps, it was a way of coping with the risk of infant mortality, still a defining feature of life for the Victorian social elite. When Winston was born in 1874, diseases like diphtheria, smallpox, measles, rubella, polio and meningitis still killed more than 7 per cent of children born to the British aristocracy in the 1870s before they reached the age of one and probably as many again before they reached the age of five.4 Children were of limited use to the dynastic family until they reached adulthood.
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Jennie had warmed more to her gregarious father, Leonard Jerome,5 than to her mother, Clara, during her childhood years. These were split between New York and Trieste, the summer playground of the Austro-Hungarian court on the Adriatic Sea, where Leonard spent two years as the American consul. Jennie’s father pursued many enthusiasms in his life – money, horse racing, sailing, the opera and women among them – yet he always seemed to have time for his three daughters.
It was the difficulty of dealing with the extra women in Leonard’s life that led his wife Clara to leave him behind in New York and return to Europe with their three girls in 1867, when Jennie was thirteen. Clara had developed a fascination for the European aristocracy while the family lived in Trieste. On their way home through Paris, the self-styled emperor of France, Napoleon III, and his empress, Eugénie, had greeted the Jeromes warmly and invited them to return. Clara took him at his word, generously funded by Leonard who crossed the Atlantic regularly to visit his family in the French capital in between tending to his business affairs in New York.
The family’s idyll in Paris lasted only three years until 1870, however, when the fragile French Second Empire crumbled following military defeat by Prussia. As the invading troops closed in on the capital, the Jerome women escaped by one of the last trains to the north coast. From there they crossed the Channel to England, where Leonard installed them at Brown’s Hotel in London, an altogether drabber city than Paris. To allow them to escape the city’s pollution in the summer, he rented a seaside cottage for them each year in the sailing resort of Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
There, in August 1873, the nineteen-year-old Jennie unexpectedly encountered Lord Randolph Churchill, second son of the duke of Marlborough. Twenty-one years old and newly graduated from Oxford University, Lord Randolph was slim, fashionably dressed and sported a large moustache. Destined for a career in politics by family expectation and personal ambition, Lord Randolph exuded an air of impulsive, excitable energy. Within seventy-two hours of meeting Jennie, he had proposed marriage and she had accepted.
Lord Randolph found his fiancée a complete contrast to the daughters of the English aristocracy whom he was used to meeting. Where they had been tutored inside their own home by a single governess, Jennie had already lived in New York, Trieste, Paris and London and had attended a private school in America followed by a lycée in Paris. She was widely read, spoke two languages and was a gifted musician. Above all, she could converse with him as an equal.
Further differences between the American and British backgrounds of the couple became apparent well before their wedding. For example, when the two families discussed the financial settlements that each would make for the marriage, Jennie’s father Leonard was at a loss to understand why the income from the capital sum handed over by the Jeromes should go only to Lord Randolph. ‘My daughter … is an American and ranks precisely the same as you,’ he told his future son-in-law.6 They compromised halfway the day before the wedding took place in Paris on 15 April 1874.
Jennie Jerome, shortly before her marriage to Lord Randolph Churchill, 1874.
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By the time the newlyweds settled down to life in London, Lord Randolph had already been elected member of Parliament for the family-controlled seat of Woodstock, next to his ancestral home of Blenheim Palace, in Oxfordshire. Aspiring politicians and their wives were expected to take part in a seemingly endless round of entertaining while parliament was sitting in London, but Jennie needed no persuasion to play her full part as a hostess; she threw herself enthusiastically into her husband’s social and professional world, quickly finding that it absorbed her.
So when a first child, a son whom they named Winston, arrived after only seven months of marriage, he presented an awkward choice between her instincts as a mother brought up in America and her duty as the new wife of a British aristocrat immersed in the world of politics. There may have been a brief tussle in Jennie’s mind, but she soon employed a nanny, Mrs Everest,7 to look after Winston: the British approach to parenting offered an attractive route by which she could still conform to the expectations of her new tribe while her children were young.
Little evidence survives of the way that Jennie and Mrs Everest divided the duties of mother and nanny. Jennie’s diary of January 1882 (the only year for which it survives) records her reading and giving lessons to the seven-year-old Winston.8 The fact that Mrs Everest stayed with the Churchill family for seventeen years, much longer than the normal tenure of a nanny, also suggests that she and Jennie established one of the more satisfactory partnerships.
Winston was two years old when his family moved to Dublin, taking Mrs Everest with them. The move was forced on the family by a serious falling out between Lord Randolph and the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII). Lord Randolph, in an attempt to prevent his elder brother, the marquess of Blandford, from being named in a divorce suit, threatened to reveal compromising letters written by the Prince some years earlier. The outraged ‘Bertie’ announced he would no longer visit any house in London which admitted Lord Randolph and Jennie. The prime minister, the earl of Beaconsfield (the former Benjamin Disraeli), had to step in to defuse the scandal by proposing that Lord Randolph’s father, the duke of Marlborough,9 serve as viceroy of Ireland and take his son with him as his private secretary.
Years later Winston wrote of his memories of his mother during that spell in Dublin: ‘My picture of her in Ireland is in a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spotted with mud … My mother always seemed to me a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power.’ 10
During Lord Randolph’s frequent trips home to keep in touch with the political world at Westminster, Jennie was seldom short of male company, often hunting in the company of young men in military uniform to whom she would be attracted throughout much of her lifetime. One young officer in the Coldstream Guards, Edgar Vincent (later an eminent diplomat as Lord D’Abernon), provided a different perspective of her from that of her son when he described her impact at a reception given in the Vice-Regal Lodge:
a dark lithe figure … appearing to be of another texture to those around her, radiant, translucent, intense. A diamond star in her hair, her favourite ornament – its lustre dimmed by the flashing glory of her eyes. More of the panther than of the woman in her look, but with a cultivated intelligence unknown to the jungle.11
The Churchill family moved back to London in March 1880, a few months after Winston’s fifth birthday. On his return to full-time politics at Westminster, Lord Randolph revealed a sharper edge to his oratory, honed by his contact with genuine poverty in Ireland. More aware of the hidden costs of social division, he became a mordantly effective speaker both inside and outside the House of Commons; together with friends he formed a ‘fourth party’ to articulate the case for a more compassionate form of Conservatism, soon dubbed ‘Tory democracy’.
Politics became a shared obsession of both Lord Randolph and Jennie. ‘Our house became the rendezvous of all shades of politicians,’ Jennie wrote. ‘Many were the plots and plans which were hatched in my presence.’ 12 She proved a valuable asset at her husband’s side, attracting many of the leading political figures of the day.
The controversy surrounding Jennie’s record as a mother concerns whether she neglected Winston and Jack during this period when they were young children. Sylvia Henley, a cousin, told Winston’s youngest daughter, Mary Soames, that even by the standards of their day Jennie and Lord Randolph had been ‘pretty awful’ parents.13 Winston himself fuelled the fire when he wrote a passage in Marlborough: His Life and Times that seemed to convey an authenticity born of personal experience:
It is said that famous men are usually the product of an unhappy childhood. The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished.14
Furthermore, he would write in his autobiographical volume My Early Life that, while his mother had ‘shone for me like the Evening Star’, he had ‘loved her dearly but at a distance’.15 Many have interpreted that distance as lasting throughout his mother’s life, although the passage appears at the beginning of the book, set in the context of his earliest years.
Jennie’s niece and biographer Anita Leslie provides the picture that best fits her record as a mother from the evidence of her correspondence with Winston: ‘She loved and hugged [her sons] as babies, she forgot about them as schoolboys, she rallied to their side as young men and slaved during their early years of endeavour.’16
If we accept that Jennie ‘forgot’ about Winston during his schooldays, 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.
During Winston’s years away at boarding school, however, there is ample evidence that Jennie had other preoccupations and kept a distance from her son that was more typical of the Victorian elite than of its American counterparts. There is no sign that either she or Lord Randolph inspected Winston’s first boarding school before they sent him there just before his eighth birthday in 1882. As he arrived in the middle of the school term, the selection of St George’s School in Ascot bears the hallmark of haste, caused by his parents’ imminent departure to spend two months in America.
St George’s was a fashionable and suitably exclusive establishment that prepared its pupils for Eton, Harrow and Winchester, the public schools of choice for the sons of the British aristocracy, but its headmaster ran a brutal regime. Within eighteen months of Winston’s arrival his health had broken down so seriously that Mrs Everest and the family doctor combined forces to persuade his parents to remove him.
They chose a gentler establishment on the south coast near Brighton, where the doctor lived. The school, which enjoyed no formal name, was run by two elderly spinsters, the Misses Thomson, in a house on Brunswick Road in Hove. Jennie and Lord Randolph both wrote to Winston there from time to time, although never as regularly as he would have wished. Jennie travelled to the school once in February 1885, but his father did not visit Winston until March 1886, when he contracted pneumonia and almost died.
This period of Winston’s schooling coincided with the brief phase of Lord Randolph’s career in which his brand of progressive Conservatism became increasing influential in the party and his star rose rapidly, although he was already experiencing the first signs of ill health. He entered the cabinet as secretary of state for India in June 1885, when he was thirty-six and Winston was ten.
On this first occasion Lord Randolph stayed in office for only seven months until the minority Conservative government lost power in January 1886. Back in opposition, he led the party’s resistance to Prime Minister William Gladstone’s policy of Home Rule for Ireland, which the House of Commons rejected at the end of June. The Conservative leader Lord Salisbury, on being asked by Queen Victoria to form another government, requested an immediate dissolution of parliament. In the general election campaign that followed, Lord Randolph played what was acknowledged to be the leading role in winning a decisive majority for the Conservatives over all other parties. He emerged as the second most important figure in the new government formed by Lord Salisbury, holding the twin posts of leader of the House of Commons and chancellor of the exchequer.
On this second occasion Lord Randolph lasted in office for only five months. Just before Christmas 1886 he ostentatiously resigned over the opposition of some cabinet members to his plans to cut military spending. Lord Randolph’s expectation had been that his actions would trigger a crisis from which he would emerge pre-eminent; but his budgetary proposals had caused such unease among his colleagues that Lord Salisbury calmly accepted his resignation, making no attempt to persuade his chancellor to change his mind.
Lord Randolph Churchill, in his short-lived prime.
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Jennie was devastated. She had thrown herself behind her husband’s career, yet he had not consulted her before making the move which had brought it to a sudden halt. Their marriage had already been under strain before this development, following which Lord Randolph left England for several months in early 1887 to lick his wounds and nurse his health overseas.
Still only thirty-three years old, Jennie kept up her social round. She found that many men were ready to fill the gap left by Lord Randolph’s absence and by the doctors’ diagnosis of his illness. A series of discreet affairs followed, in the course of which Jennie displayed her continuing attraction to dashing young officers. Among them was a young scion of a princely Austro-Hungarian family, Count Charles Kinsky,17 who had first visited England in the late 1870s. He returned in the early 1880s as an attaché (and probably an intelligence agent) at the Austro-Hungarian embassy in London. When he won the Grand National steeplechase in 1883 on his own horse Zeodone at the age of twenty-four, Kinsky became a prize catch for London’s hostesses. The short but confident and trim aristocrat could pick and choose between the many women who vied for his attention and it was Jennie to whom he was attracted more than anyone else. Kinsky and Jennie would each have other flings over the coming years, but their relationship proved a lasting love affair.
The turmoil in Jennie’s personal life now took over from politics as her chief distraction from Winston’s many appeals for more attention. Neither of his parents, for example, made it to Brighton in November 1887 to celebrate his thirteenth birthday.
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Winston entered Harrow School in April 1888. Jennie paid more visits to Harrow, only a half an hour’s journey by train from central London, than she had to Brighton, yet she still turned down most of Winston’s requests for her presence.
She is most vulnerable to charges of neglecting her son in the summer of 1891 when he was sixteen years old and his father had left to spend nine months in southern Africa leading a gold-prospecting expedition that was designed to improve the family finances. Jennie took advantage of her husband’s absence to spread her own wings at a time when her affair with Kinsky was its height. Her letters of the time carry an air of distraction; for example, when Winston was struggling with acute toothache and appealed to his mother to go with him to the dentist in London while the tooth was extracted, Jennie stayed with her party of house guests at the Newmarket races and sent her younger sister Leonie instead.
Still, soon after leaving Harrow, Winston would lament his mother’s absence in words that are unusual for a twenty-year-old son: he would miss ‘my own one love to talk to’.18
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Mother and son were drawn together by the last stages of Lord Randolph’s illness, which became so severe by the summer of 1894 that Jennie took him away for a long journey around the world to avoid its horrors.
In November 1894, just before his twentieth birthday, Winston learned from the family doctor that his father was terminally ill. The tone of his letters to his mother changed: ‘Now about yourself. Darling Mummy …’
Two months later, after her husband’s death in January 1895, Jennie responded in kind. She declared that she would centre her ambitions on her sons; she changed the greeting at the top of her letters from the ‘Dearest Winston’ which she had used in his schooldays to ‘My darling boy’, ‘My darling Winston’ or just ‘Darling Winston’. She cast off the vestiges of a Victorian parent, reverting to the easy intimacy more typical of her American upbringing. From this point onwards, Winston wrote in My Early Life, he and his mother ‘worked together on even terms, more like brother and sister than mother and son’.19
Well, not quite. Jennie was quite capable of issuing firm parental guidance or strictures on her elder son’s behaviour and attitudes, or of remonstrating with him fiercely when she thought it necessary. Jennie’s elder sister Clara told Anita Leslie:
[Jennie] could be a terror, but for that fatherless youth she was just right. Never flattering or possessive, she tempered his steel. And though everyone called her selfish she cherished his ambition, when better informed, more detached observers failed to discern greatness.20
Jennie suggested and supplied much of the reading material that Winston wanted after he decided that he had missed out on a ‘liberal education’; she found literary agents, newspaper editors or publishers for him when he needed them; she spoke to top generals or politicians to ease his career path; she checked out the credentials of lecture agencies that wished to engage him; she ‘boomed’ (as she put it) his books and articles among her wide circle of friends; she arranged his first political engagements; she found his first houses and decorated them for him; she lent him her personal secretary and recruited his servants. She also acted as the first sounding board for the early political philosophy that Winston expounded in his letters to her from India, to which he travelled in 1896 as a subaltern in the army, aged twenty-one. She encouraged him to express himself, yet criticized him when she thought his conclusions too simple.
The mail between England and India left weekly and they wrote to each other almost every week. Letters took sixteen days to make the journey, travelling by land across Europe to southern Italy, then by sea to Bombay (now Mumbai) and on again overland to Bangalore (now Bengalaru) where Winston was billeted. If either he or Jennie was away from home (and Jennie frequently ‘visited’ friends at their country estates), the letters had to be forwarded, adding extra days to their journey.
Hence any favour that Winston asked of his mother had to wait at least five or six weeks for a response. Seen from his end of the correspondence, she may have taken a long time to react to his many requests. I have ordered the letters, however, in the sequence that Jennie would have read or written them; seen from this perspective, she answered the great majority of her son’s many requests promptly, patiently and to great effect. Her own social preoccupations rarely caused her to miss the weekly mail in the three years Winston spent in India.
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The emotional intimacy of the correspondence while Winston was fighting on India’s north-western frontier, in the Sudan or in southern Africa, faded after 1900 when his mother remarried. It did not help that she chose a man of her son’s age, a young officer called George Cornwallis-West. Winston and Jack shared private misgivings about her decision, yet stood loyally by their mother, coached by her own adage: ‘Remember that a son should always seek & find extenuating circumstances for his Mother.’21
Even after her second marriage Jennie featured surprisingly often in Winston’s life for a son who was now twenty-five years old and a busy new member of Parliament. He was still a bachelor and looked to his mother for practical help with his clothes or furniture or secretarial arrangements; for Jennie’s part, her son provided the opportunity to relive through him the life on the edge of politics which her husband’s impulsiveness had denied her fifteen years earlier.
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Jennie believed, like the playwright George Bernard Shaw, in the age of the ‘new woman’ who could match any man in her education and was therefore equipped to be as bold or enterprising. She was one of the first homeowners to install electricity in a London home; she founded and edited an expensive literary magazine; she raised large sums of money from her network of wealthy friends to help good causes; she wrote magazine articles, two plays and a book; and she played the piano at private concerts.
The list of men who are thought to have slept with Jennie is long and often distinguished. She is supposed, for example, to have featured at the top of the Prince of Wales’s list of mistresses for two years from 1895 to 1897. If this is correct (their correspondence is too discreet to confirm it), she displayed with the future king the same talent that she exercised with other former lovers: the ability to remain on friendly terms with them and to tap them for continuing favours, including towards her sons Winston and Jack.
She was ‘an incredible mixture of worldliness and eternal childhood, in thrall to fashion and luxury,’ wrote Edward Marsh, the man of many parts who became Winston’s private secretary in 1905, ‘yet never sacrificing one human quality of warm heartedness, humour, loyalty, sincerity or steadfastness and courage’.22
Jennie had her critics who claimed that she was selfish, talked too freely, was extravagant and sometimes short-tempered – all faults later laid at her elder son’s door. The similarities between their characters have struck public and private observers alike. Just after Winston had moved to the Admiralty as first lord in 1912, the Daily Express observed Jennie organising a theatrical pageant at Earl’s Court:
As one realized the enthusiasm with which she has approached her work and complete grasp that she has of all the details, one began to understand how very much Mr Winston Churchill is the son of his mother … He certainly owes to his American mother the superb energy and thoroughness with which he astounded the Board of Trade, appalled the Home Office and is delighting the best elements at the Admiralty.
Jennie in Ireland, in the riding habit remembered by Winston.
© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library
Anita Leslie encapsulates the link between Jennie and her son that fills their correspondence of forty years: ‘Winston she completely understood. Hot-headed ambition, the thirst for fame, that gallivanting in the cannon’s mouth, the bullying of publishers, the nagging of generals – all that lay in Jennie’s province.’23
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The letters begin in 1881 when Winston was not quite seven years old. A year earlier Jennie had told her mother that he was ‘a most difficult child to manage’.24
1 Jennie became known formally as Lady Randolph Churchill on her marriage to Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, in 1874; then as Mrs George Cornwallis-West during her second marriage between 1900 and 1914, before reverting to the name of Lady Randolph Churchill, including during her third marriage to Montagu Porch from 1918 until her death in 1921. To her children she was always Mamma; to the remainder of her family and close friends she was Jennie, which is how I refer to her in this book.
2 J. Gathorne-Hardy, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, pp. 189–90.
3 Idem, p. 126 et seq.
4 C. Corsini and PP. Viazzo, eds, The Decline of Infant Mortality in Europe, 1800–1950, citing Hollingworth’s British peerage series.
5 Leonard Jerome combined newspaper proprietorship and share dealing on Wall Street (see People, p. 566).
6 7 April 1874 Leonard Jerome letter to Lord Randolph Churchill, Blenheim Papers.
7 ‘Mrs’ Elizabeth Everest, who remained with the Churchill family until 1893 (see People, p. 578).
8 P. Churchill and J. Mitchell, Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill, pp. 108–9.
9 John Spencer-Churchill, the 7th duke, who died in 1880.
10 W. Churchill, My Early Life, p. 4.
11 R. Foster, Lord Randolph Churchill, p. 34.
12 Mrs G. Cornwallis-West, The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill, p. 126.
13 M. Soames, interview transcript with author Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, 16 November 2004.
14 W. Churchill, Marlborough, His Life and Times, p. 33.
15 Idem.
16 A. Leslie, Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill, pp. 304–5.
17 Count Karl ‘Charles’ Kinsky (see People, p. 568).
18 3 August 1894, WSC letter to JSC, CAC, CHAR 28/19/33–4.
19 W. Churchill, My Early Life, p. 62.
20 A. Leslie, Jennie, p. xiii.
21 5 January 1917, JSC letter to GCW; P. Churchill and J. Mitchell, Jennie, p. 242.
22 E. Marsh, A Number of People, p. 154.
23 A. Leslie, Jennie, pp. 394–5.
24 10 July 1880, JSC letter to C. Jerome; A. Leslie, Jennie, p. 70.
Abbreviations: Throughout the editorial text linking the letters I refer to Winston Churchill as Winston and his mother as Jennie. The headings of each letter and the footnotes use the initials by which they often signed themselves to each other once Winston was an adult, WSC and JSC.
I have left without elucidation the simple abbreviations that Jennie and Winston each used sometimes (although not always) for common words such as ‘vy’ for very, ‘shd’ or ‘shd’ for ‘should’ and ‘wh’ for ‘which’.
For other abbreviations which they use, I provide the full form of the words abbreviated in square brackets after their first use in each chapter: e.g. ‘S.H. [Salisbury Hall]’.
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‘Conservative and Unionist’ Party: After 1845 the Tory group in British politics officially became known as the Conservative Party, although many people still used the term ‘Tories’ as a form of shorthand. Between 1895 and 1905 the party formed governments with the help of Liberal Unionists (those Liberals who opposed Home Rule for Ireland); it then changed its official name to the Conservative and Unionist Party between 1909 and 1922. Although its members were often known as Unionists throughout these years, for simplicity I have called them Conservatives – or Tories for short.
Dates: Where Jennie or Winston included dates in the body of their letters, I have left their format as they wrote it, including the writer’s abbreviations such as ‘Septr’.
Jennie and Winston each used different methods at different stages of their lives to date their letters (or sometimes forgot to include a date at all). I have adopted a standard format of date at the head of letters, as for example ‘1 September 1900’.
If Jennie or Winston omitted part or all of a letter’s date, I have included the missing component within square brackets, wherever it has been possible to deduce it, e.g. ‘1 September [1900]’.
If the writer headed a letter just by a day of the week, yet it is possible to deduce the rest of the date on which it was written by the letter’s contents or by postmark on its envelope, I have shown the date within square brackets followed by the day its author specified e.g. ‘[1 September 1900] Saturday’.
If the writer did not date a letter at all, in almost all cases I have adopted the date attributed to it by the Churchill Archives Centre and shown this within square brackets e.g. [1 September 1900]. I have over-ridden the archival attribution only in a very few cases where the content or context of the letter has convinced me to do so.
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Ellipsis […]: An ellipsis indicates that I have omitted a passage for reasons of space. I have not, however, included an ellipsis if postscripts are omitted.
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Footnotes: I have used footnotes to provide a brief and immediate explanation of the first reference in the letters to any person, place or event. If the person or place appears often in the letters, the first footnote ends ‘see People’ or ‘see Places’, followed by a reference to the fuller information about them then appears in the Appendix.
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Greetings and sign-offs: JSC and WSC both varied the greetings and salutations they used at the beginning and end of their letters. I have shown them as written in each letter, although I have sometimes shortened a long sign-off to conserve space.
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Money values: I have left each reference to a sum of money in its original form. For any amount of £ sterling mentioned before 1914, the simplest method of converting to a similar value today is to multiply the sum by 100. During the First World War, this multiplier should fall gradually until it reaches approximately 50 by the end of the war in 1918.
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Punctuation and paragraph breaks: I have followed the punctuation used by each of Jennie and Winston, unless the sense of the sentence is difficult to grasp without making an editorial change.
Jennie often wrote in the style of a ‘stream of consciousness’, separating her phrases or sentences by a dash rather than by a comma or full stop. Nor did she necessarily start a new topic by switching to a new paragraph that started on a fresh line; often she just left a slightly wider gap than normal between her sentences to signal a change of subject.
I have adopted a policy converting her dashes into a full stop if they clearly separate sentences, for example if she started the next phrase with a capital letter. I have also inserted a paragraph break, starting on a fresh line, in those places where she left a longer gap than usual gap between sentences and switched topic.
Occasionally I have also inserted a paragraph break into Winston’s letters where I feel that this helps comprehension by breaking up a long block of text.
‘Mice are not caught without cheese’
THE YOUNG Churchill family returned to London from Dublin in March 1880. Although the Prince of Wales did not immediately lift his social boycott of the Churchills that had originally sent them into ‘exile’ (see Introduction, p. xxii), Lord Randolph rejoined the world of politics at Westminster with a perspective broadened by his exposure to abject levels of poverty in Ireland.
His elder son, Winston (WSC), now five years old, had a new younger brother Jack, born in February. Their mother Jennie (JSC) delegated the care of both boys to their nanny, Mrs Everest, who was in her early forties when she joined the family after Winston was born. Sometimes called ‘Oom’, ‘Woom’, ‘Womany’ or simply ‘Everest’ by her charges, she accompanied them when they travelled without their parents to visit her sister, who lived at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, or their grandparents, the duke and duchess of Marlborough, who lived at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.
There are two candidates for the first surviving letter from Winston to his mother. Both are thought to have been written in 1881, when he was six: one probably from Blenheim and the other from Ventnor. (Sadly, none of Jennie’s letters to Winston during this period have survived, except one written in April 1889.)
* WSC to JSC *
[1881] Monday
[Ventnor]
My dear mama
I am so glad you are coming to see us. I had such a nice bathe in the sea to day.
love to papa, your loving son
winston
* WSC to JSC *
[1881]
[Blenheim]1
My dear Mamma,
I am quite well and getting on very nicely with my lessons. Baby [Jack] is quite well. I am enjoying myself very much with love and kisses
Your affectionate
W.S. Churchill
* WSC to JSC *
1 April [1882]
[Blenheim]
Dearest Mama
It was such a lovely day yesterday that we went for a drive. I am enjoying myself here very much. It is so much nice being in the country. The gardens and the park are so much nicer to walk in than the Green Park or Hyde Park. Baby is very well and sends you his love. I have been playing out of doors at making encampments which is great fun. I pretend to pitch a tent and make the umbrella do for it.
With best love to you and Papa, Ever your loving son
Winston
Jennie and Winston, aged four.
Churchill Press Photographs Collection, CHPH
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IN NOVEMBER 1882, Winston’s parents sent him away to board at St George’s School, Ascot, twenty miles west of London. Prep schools set aside a fixed time each week when boys would sit down to write a letter home to their parents, supervised by a member of the staff. He or she was there not only to maintain order, but to keep an editorial eye on the content of the letters being written home.
* WSC to JSC *
[3 December 1882]
St George’s School, Ascot
My dear mamma
I hope you are quite well. I am very happy at school.
You will be glad to hear I spent a very happy birthday. I must now thank you for your lovely present you sent me. Do not forget to come down on 9th Decer.
With love and kisses I remain your loveing son,
Winston kisses xxxxx