The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (6 page)

I could see it perfectly in my mind’s eye: the coats of the revellers hastily pushed off the bed, the ewers filled with hot water—and on the bed the sinuous shape of Jennie Churchill, too far gone in labour to try to make it upstairs. She was only twenty years old, but already famous as one of the most beautiful young women on the London scene.

Everyone had been out shooting all day, and by some accounts she had slipped and fallen earlier; others say that she had whirled too enthusiastically at the dancing. At 1.30 a.m. on 30 November 1874 she was delivered of a baby her husband described as ‘
wonderfully pretty and very healthy’.

To understand the psychological make-up of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, we should be attentive to both the place and the time. The room was in the heart of Blenheim Palace—the superfluously colossal home of the Duke of Marlborough. This house has 186 rooms and the structure alone spreads over 7 acres (to say nothing of the lakes, mazes, columns, parkland, triumphal arches, etc.). It is the only non-royal or non-episcopal building in Britain that is called a palace.

Though it has its detractors it is for my money by far the greatest masterpiece of English baroque architecture—with its vast wings rising and falling in minutely symmetrical and wonderfully pointless
parapets and finials of honey-coloured stone. Blenheim is an architectural statement, and that statement is: I am big; bigger and grander than anything you have ever seen.

It was given to one of Churchill’s dynastic forebears, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, for what was seen as his excellent work in thrashing the French and helping to make eighteenth-century England top nation in Europe. Churchill was born there for the very good reason that it was his home: he was the grandson of the seventh Duke, nephew of the eighth Duke and the first cousin of the ninth Duke—and if that beloved cousin had not himself produced an heir, as seemed likely for quite some time, then Churchill would himself have been the Duke of Marlborough.

That is important: he was not just posh; he was ducal—and always at the forefront of his sense of self was the knowledge that he stood in dynastic succession to one of this country’s greatest military heroes.

As for the time of his birth—well, that is also revealing; because it looks as though he appeared two months ahead of schedule, only seven months after the wedding. This has always raised eyebrows. Although it is possible that he was born prematurely, the simplest explanation is that he was in fact born at full term, but was conceived out of wedlock.

If that is so, it would not be surprising—because his parents, in their own way, were about as self-willed and unconventional as their son. Their most important contribution to civilisation is that they were both neglectful of the child.

His mother was the daughter of a successful American businessman called Leonard Jerome, a man who at one stage had a majority share in the
New York Times
, owned racehorses and an opera house and made love to female opera stars. Jennie had (allegedly) a small
dragon tattooed on her wrist and (indubitably) a voluptuous hourglass figure. She is credited with the invention of the Manhattan cocktail, and was so admired for her wit and her dark and ‘
pantherine’ good looks that she attracted scores of lovers, including the Prince of Wales. She eventually had three husbands, some of whom were younger than her son.

‘
She shone for me like the Evening star,’ Churchill later wrote. ‘I loved her dearly—but at a distance.’ His letters from his schools are full of plaintive entreaties for love, money and visits. But it was his father who really moulded him—first by treating him abominably and then by dying prematurely.

When you read Randolph’s letters to his son, you wonder what the poor kid had done to deserve it. He is told to drop the affectionate ‘
Papa’. ‘Father’ is better, says Randolph. He can’t seem to remember whether his son is at Eton or Harrow, and prophesies that he will ‘
become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy and futile existence’.

Perhaps the most tragic example of Winston trying to please his father is the story of the watch. Randolph had given his son a new watch when he was a cadet at Sandhurst, and one day he lost it in a deep river pool. Churchill dived in repeatedly to get it, but was frustrated by the icy water. He then tried to dredge the river, and when that failed he hired twenty-three fellow cadets—at a cost of £3—to dam the stream, divert it into a new path, and actually drain the river bed. The watch was found.

None of this Herculean exertion impressed the crazed Randolph, who said that his son was a ‘
young stupid’ and ‘definitely not to be trusted’. There was perhaps a medical reason for this extreme behaviour: Lord Randolph Churchill was dying of syphilis.

Recent scholarship has attempted to remove the venereal stigma and to suggest that it was actually a brain tumour—but even so, he believed it to be syphilis, his wife thought it was syphilis, and so did his doctor. So did Churchill, who spent his adolescence watching the awful political implosion of his father—from supernova to black hole—and then his death, by inches, in public, from a shameful disease.

So he grew up with two powerful and simultaneous feelings about his father: that he was a disappointment to Randolph, and that Randolph himself had been cheated of the greatness that should have been his. He wanted therefore to do two things: to prove himself to his father, and to vindicate him.

It is only when you dig into the relation with Randolph—and Randolph’s mesmerising example—that you start to see how Churchill could have behaved as he did. He had to emulate him—how else could he properly prove himself to Randolph? And he had to imitate his life and even his pattern of behaviour, because that was the only way to vindicate him in the eyes of everyone else.

‘
He is completely untrustworthy, as was his father before him,’ said Lord Derby in 1916. Theodore Roosevelt said they were both ‘
cheap fellows’.

There was a reason he had that reputation—and that is that to a large extent Churchill set out deliberately to make his father’s life the programme and template for his own.

CHAPTER 4

THE RANDOLPH FACTOR

A
t the age of seventy-three Winston Churchill wrote a curious little essay that he did not intend for publication—at least not until after his death. It is all about a spooky experience that he had in the winter of 1947. The glory days of the war and the premiership are over, and he finds himself in his studio in the cottage at Chartwell.

He is getting ready to paint, when he feels an odd sensation—and turns round to see his father sitting in an armchair. Randolph’s eyes are twinkling and he is fiddling with his amber cigarette holder, just as Churchill remembers him from those rare moments when he was both charming and loving to his son.

There then takes place a poignant conversation. The conceit is that in the fifty-two years since he died—in political isolation and syphilitic despair—Randolph does not know what has happened in the world. So Churchill fills him in.

He tells him that King George VI is on the throne, and that they still race the Derby, and that the Turf Club is ‘OK’ and that ‘OK’ is a new American expression. He tells Randolph how the former Tory
leader Arthur Balfour eventually came a cropper—a pleasing reflection, since neither of them really got on with snooty old Balfour. He relates the rise of socialism. He explains that there have been two world wars in each of which about thirty million people have died, and how the Russians have a new type of tsar, more fell and murderous than any that has gone before.

The trick of the piece is that Randolph never quite understands what his son has accomplished. The father gathers that the son is now a part-time painter, of indifferent ability, that he appears to live in a small cottage, and that he never rose above the rank of major in the yeomanry.

At the end of Churchill’s grim exposition of the modern world, Randolph seems vaguely impressed with how much his son seems to know about current affairs. He says, with deafening irony, ‘
Of course you are too old now to think about such things, but when I hear you talk I really wonder that you didn’t go into politics. You might have done a lot to help. You might even have made a name for yourself.’

At this he smiles and strikes a match, and in the flash the apparition vanishes. Many historians have taken this sketch—which Churchill’s family called ‘The Dream’—to be immensely and deliberately revealing about the psychological make-up of Winston Churchill. So it surely is.

It is elegiac; it is wistful; it is in one sense a great sorrowful sigh of yearning from a man who always wanted to impress his father and never succeeded. As Winston Churchill used to tell his own children, he never had more than five conversations with his father—or not conversations of any length; and he always had the feeling that he didn’t quite measure up to expectations.

He spent his youth in the certainty, relentlessly rubbed in by Randolph, that he must be less clever than his father. Randolph had been to Eton, whereas it was thought safer to send young Winston to
Harrow—partly because of his health (the air of the hill being deemed better for his fragile lungs than the dank air by the Thames) but really because Harrow, in those days, was supposed to be less intellectually demanding.

Randolph had been to Merton College, Oxford, and had almost got a first in law. He could quote Horace with fluency. Churchill, on the other hand, had flunked his exams and only scraped into Sandhurst.

As Winston had struggled on his duffer’s career path, he had watched his father’s meteoric ascent, his rise to the Chancellorship, how he dominated the Tory Party; and then it was the cruel fate of young Winston also to watch his father’s decline. He scoured newspapers for accounts of his speeches. He was furiously loyal. He refused to accept that his faculties were dimming, that his diction was slurred and that he lacked his former oratorical fire; and when once he was in the audience and someone let out a catcall, the teenage Churchill whirled round and hissed, ‘
Stop that now, you snub-nosed radical!’

When Churchill was twenty his relations with his father had a last golden moment. He found himself invited to lunches with great and famous men such as Joe Chamberlain, Herbert Henry Asquith and Lord Rosebery, and performed creditably. ‘
He has much smartened up,’ noted his father, ‘and he has got steadier . . . Sandhurst has done wonders for him.’ By his own account, Churchill dreamed of being politically useful to his old man, of joining him in Parliament, of rallying to his cause—and then he was gone, dead at forty-five, before his son had the chance.

So here he is now in ‘The Dream’, with his father before him, and the moment has finally come to explain to his wrathful parent that the cosmic Head Master has a new end-of-term report for Winston; that he is no longer a wastrel and an idler but the Greatest Living
Englishman and the Saviour of his Country—and, puff, Randolph has gone again before he can hear the good news.

We end the piece in a state of melancholy. Churchill feels too tired to go on painting. His cigar has gone out and the ash has fallen among the paints. On the face of it we are meant to feel sorry for him and the hyper-Victorian distance of his relationship with Randolph. But I can’t help thinking that there is also a bit of smugness in this essay.

He is not only seeking his father’s posthumous approval. He is surreptitiously boasting—to Randolph and to the reader—of how he defied those miserable expectations, and actually exceeded his father in virtually every respect.

So there! says Winston Churchill to the vanished shade of Randolph. Put that in your cigarette holder and smoke it, you gooseberry-eyed and walrus-moustached demagogue. You had no right to be so critical—that is the message to Randolph and the subtext of the essay.

What was Churchill trying to do in that studio at Chartwell, when the ghost of his father appeared? He was actually repairing an old oil painting of Randolph, one that had been damaged in some Ulster club. He was taking that image, and he was using his own paints and his own skill to tart it up.

There, surely, is the metaphor that sums up the whole exercise. Churchill said that he set out to ‘vindicate’ his father, and that is true. But he also means to go one better. He takes that battered and nicotine-stained canvas and he embellishes it.

It was Randolph who began the family tradition of making money from journalism. As Churchill notes in ‘The Dream’, Randolph went off to South Africa for the
Daily Graphic
, and earned the colossal sum of £100 an article. So how does Churchill launch himself upon the world?

He goes off to South Africa, among other places, and becomes the most highly paid journalist of his age; and like Randolph, he makes a bit of a habit of cheesing off the people who help him in his ambitions.

And what kind of lesson did Randolph offer his son, about how to get on in Parliament? He displayed a shocking disloyalty to the Tories, and set up a group called the ‘Fourth Party’, whose mission was to bash Gladstone but also to wind up the Tory Party leadership, in the form of Sir Stafford Northcote.

Randolph and chums called him ‘the goat’, and after a while the goat could take it no more, and wrote to Randolph, begging him not to be such a tosser. Randolph wrote back, with blissful condescension, saying: ‘
Since I have been in parliament I have always acted on my own account, and I shall continue to do so.’

There, too, is young Churchill’s cue: and when he gets to Parliament in 1900 he begins by setting up his own group of rebellious young Tories—called the Hughligans, in honour of Hugh Cecil, one of their number—and razzes the Tory high command, with Randolphian brio and insolence.

It was Randolph who showed the first and programmatic disdain for the very idea of party loyalty. As his son later described it, his father’s preferred strategic position was ‘
looking down on the Front Benches on both sides and regarding all parties in the House of Commons with an impartiality which is quite sublime’.