Yet the Thomson sisters treated him with kindness and understanding, and he began to respond. At the end of his second term they noted “very satisfactory progress,” and, after the third, “very marked progress.” He was first in his classics class and near the top in English, French, and Scripture knowledge. He began to enjoy school: “We are learning Paradise Lost for Elocution, it is very nice.” He was “getting on capitally in Euclid. I and another boy are top of the school in it we have got up to the XXX Proposition.” In French they were rehearsing “Molière’s ‘Médecin Malgré lui.’ I take the part of ‘Martine.’ ” In Greek, he wrote, “I have at last begun the verbs in ‘μι’ of which the first is ‘ιστημι.’ ” He proudly wrote his mother: “I have got two prizes one for English Subjects & one for Scripture.” He even wrote Jack, aged six: “When I come home I must try and teach you the rudiments of Latin.” In later life he recalled: “At this school I was allowed to learn things which interested me: French, History, lots of Poetry by heart, and above all Riding and Swimming. The impression of those years makes a pleasant picture in my mind, in strong contrast to my earlier schoolday memories.”24
Collecting stamps, autographs, and goldfish, he began to share the interests of the other boys. He even tried sports—“We had a game of Cricket this afternoon, I hit a twoer, as the expression goes, my first runs this year”—though that didn’t last long. He was now reading every newspaper he could find, poring over accounts of the Belgian conquest of the Congo, the Haymarket riot in Chicago, the death of Chinese Gordon, the erecting of the Statue of Liberty, and, in Germany, Gottlieb Daimler’s invention of the first practical automobile. (These years also saw the founding of the Fabian Society and the Indian National Congress, both of which were to play major roles in his life, but London editors had dismissed them as insignificant.) In the spring of 1885 he was aroused by the uproar in Paris over whether or not Victor Hugo should receive a Christian burial and wrote his mother: “Will you send me the paper with Victor Hugo’s funeral in it?” King Solomon’s Mines, published during his first year in Brighton, held him mesmerized. He begged Jennie to send him everything Rider Haggard wrote, and was transported when her elder sister Leonie, who knew the author, took the boy out of school to meet him. Afterward he wrote Haggard: “Thank you so much for sending me Allan Quatermain; it was so good of you. I like A.Q. better than King Solomon’s Mines; it is more amusing. I hope you will write a good many more books.”25
The visit with Haggard, though unusual, was not unique; teachers and relatives were taking the restless boy off the school grounds on frequent trips. He saw what he described as “a Play called ‘Pinafore’ ” with Leonie’s daughter Olive, and, with Randolph’s sister Cornelia, heard Samuel Brandram recite Twelfth Night. Then came electrifying news. “Buffalow Bill,” he wrote home, was bringing his show to London; Bill was a friend of Clarita Jerome’s husband, Moreton Frewen, who owned a Montana ranch. Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee was to be celebrated the Monday after that weekend, and Winston was determined to see both of them. He wanted to come home to Connaught Place on Saturday and stay until Wednesday. The Thomsons discouraged him, explaining that there would be no place for him in Westminster Abbey and his mother would be far too busy to look after him. Predictably, Jennie agreed with the sisters; she rejected his first appeal. He wouldn’t give up: “I can think of nothing else but Jubilee. Uncertainty is at all times perplexing write to me by return post please!!! I love you so much dear Mummy and I know you love me too much to disappoint me. Do write to tell me what you intend to do. I must come home, I feel I must…. Please, as you love me, do as I have begged you.” Before she could reply, he wrote again: “Miss Thomson says that she will let me go if you write to ask for me. For my sake write before it is too late. Write to Miss Thomson by return post please!!!” In the end, his mother relented. A seat for him in the abbey was in fact out of the question—though Jennie had a good one—but he did see Buffalo Bill and all the rest. Thus it was that Winston Churchill stood among the cheering throngs on June 21, 1887, as the old Queen rode by, crowned by a coronet-shaped bonnet of lace studded with diamonds, her hands folded, her head bowed, her cheeks glistening with tears. Afterward Jennie and the Prince of Wales took him for a ride on the royal yacht, where he met the future King George V. It would be pleasant to report that his conduct was exceptional. It wasn’t. He was loud, he stunted, he showed off. Back in Brighton he apologized to his mortified mother: “I hope you will soon forget my bad behavior… and not… make it alter… my summer Holidays.”26
He feared a summer tutor. One tutor had spoiled a seaside holiday at Cromer, then as now a watering place on the North Sea coast; Winston had complained that she was “very unkind, so strict and stiff, I can’t enjoy myself at all.” But the reports of improvements in Brighton had lifted that threat. He was free to play, and in his choice of games we see the growth of his combative instincts. Once he talked Woom into taking him and his cousins to the Tower of London, where he delivered, with great relish, a lecture on medieval tortures. Pencil sketches of cannon and soldiers adorned the margins of his letters. His cousin Clare Frewen recalled in her memoirs that when the Churchills rented a summer house in Banstead, Winston erected a log fort with the help of the gardener’s children, dug a moat around it, and, with Jack’s help, built a drawbridge that could be raised and lowered. Then, she said, the children were divided into two rival groups and “the fort was stormed. I was hurriedly removed from the scene of the action as mud and stones began to fly with effect. But the incident impressed me and Winston became a very important person in my estimation.” Shane Leslie, Leonie’s son, remembered that “we thought he was wonderful, because he was always leading us into danger.” There were the fort struggles, fights with the village children, and raids on the nests of predatory birds. In Connaught Place he had converted the entire nursery into a battlefield. According to Clare Frewen, “His playroom contained from one end to the other a plank table on trestles, upon which were thousands of lead soldiers arrayed for battle. He organized wars. The lead battalions were maneuvered into action, peas and pebbles committed great casualties, forts were stormed, cavalry charged, bridges were destroyed…. Altogether it was a most impressive show, and played with an interest that was no ordinary child game.” It impressed Lord Randolph. One day he put his head in the door and studied the intricate formations. He asked his son, then in his early teens, if he would like to enter the army. In Winston’s words: “I thought it would be splendid to command an Army, so I said ‘Yes’ at once: and immediately I was taken at my word. For years I thought my father with his experience and flair had discerned in me the qualities of military genius. But I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar.”27
On such slender evidence was so weighty a verdict reached. Winston was clearly ready for intellectual stimulation, and one might expect that he would have found it in the home of a lord who was also a member of Parliament and a charismatic MP at that. Instead, the boy’s mind was fired by, of all people, Mrs. Everest’s brother-in-law, John Balaam, a senior warden at Parkhurst Prison. British workmen in the nineteenth century, undiverted by mass media, often read deeply and thoughtfully. The family of Woom’s sister Mary lived in the coastal town of Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight, and she took him there on holiday. It was the first time Winston had seen a humble English home. The experience was worthwhile for that alone, but the old warden, after holding the boy spellbound with tales of prison mutinies, produced a worn copy of Macaulay’s History of England. He read passages aloud; Winston listened, rapt, to the cadences of the majestic prose. Later in India he remembered those evenings in the cottage on the sea. He acquired his own Macaulay and, in his words, “voyaged with full sail in a strong wind.”28
Woom never let him down, but her health did. During the Christmas holidays at the end of 1887, while Jennie and Randolph were abroad, she contracted diphtheria, then a fearsome disease and oft
en fatal. Dr. Robson Roose found two bad patches of false membrane in her throat and moved the two boys from Connaught Place to his own home. “It is very hard to bear—we feel so destitute,” Winston wrote. “I feel very dull—worse than school.” Duchess Fanny whisked them off to Blenheim, and Leonie telegraphed the news to their parents. Fanny, very much in charge, wrote to Randolph: “I fear you will have been bothered about this misfortune of Everest having diphtheria but she appears to be recovering & the 2 children are here safe & well.” Blandford (George) offered to take them into his London house. Fanny wrote: “They leave here & go to Grovr Sq tomorrow so you might write (or Jennie might in your name) a line to B for having had them here. It has done them good & I keep Winston in good order as I know you like it. He is a clever Boy & not really naughty but he wants a firm hand. Jack requires no keeping in order. They will stay at 46 till you return.”29
By January 12 Winston could write his mother: “Everest is much better—thanks to Dr Roose. My holidays have chopped about a good deal but… I do not wish to complain. It might have been so much worse if Woomany had died.”30 There seems to have been a tacit acceptance by the relatives of both parents that Randolph and Jennie were not really responsible for their children. As a consequence, Winston’s awareness of his grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins deepened; they move in and out of his early life like characters in a Pirandello play. Had his immediate family been more self-sufficient, he might have been less conscious of his Marlborough heritage on one side and his American roots on the other. Jennie, by now, was indistinguishable from the titled Englishwomen of her social circle. She had no interest in Buffalo Bill. But her sisters were vibrant with the U.S. chauvinism of the time. Jennie, a purebred American, had become indifferent to the fact. Her son was half American, was constantly reminded of it by his maternal aunts, and never forgot it.
Winston’s own illnesses, with one important exception, were normal for children of the time. He caught mumps (“My mumps are getting smaller every day the very thought of going home is enough to draw them away”) and, later, measles, which—to his mother’s intense annoyance—he passed along to her current lover, the dashing Austrian sportsman Count Charles Kinsky. The important exception was double pneumonia. All his life he would be plagued by recurrences of bronchial infections; his consequent indispositions would play a role in World War II. He was first stricken in his twelfth year, on Saturday, March 13, 1886. The danger was clear from the outset; Jennie and Randolph arrived separately in Brighton, and Dr. Roose, who kept a house there, remained by the boy’s side, sending them bulletins after they had departed. These survive. At 10:15 P.M. Sunday he scrawled: “Temp. 104.3 right lung generally involved…. This report may appear grave yet it merely indicates the approach of the crisis which, please God, will result in an improved condition should the left lung remain free. I am in the next room and shall watch the patient during the night—for I am anxious.” Infection of the left lung swiftly followed. At 6:00 A.M. Monday he wrote: “The high temp indicating exhaustion I used stimulants, by the mouth and rectum…. I shall give up my London work and stay by the boy today.” Then, at 1:00 P.M.: “We are still fighting the battle for your boy…. As long as I can fight the temp and keep it under 105 I shall not feel anxious.” At 11:00 P.M.: “Your boy, in my opinion, on his perilous path is holding his own well, right well!” Tuesday: “We have had a very anxious night but have managed to hold our own…. On the other hand we have to realise that we may have another 24 hours of this critical condition, to be combatted with all our vigilant energy.” By Wednesday the worst was over. At 7:00 A.M. Roose scribbled: “I have a very good report to make. Winston has had 6 hours quiet sleep. Delirium has now ceased.” Later in the day he wrote from the Brighton train station: “Forgive my troubling you with these lines to impress upon you the absolute necessity of quiet and sleep for Winston and that Mrs Everest should not be allowed in the sick room today—even the excitement of pleasure at seeing her might do harm! and I am so fearful of relapse knowing that we are not quite out of the wood yet.”31
But they were, and the suggestion that Woom might constitute a threat is curious. Duchess Fanny agreed. “I hope Everest will be sensible,” she wrote Jennie, “and not gushing so as to excite him. This certainly is not wise.” His nurse was entrusted with his love, but not his health. In an emergency, it was thought, women of her class could not be depended upon to remain stoical. A display of affection could endanger him; only patricians could be counted on to remain poised. Jennie, certainly no gusher, was admitted to the sickroom (Randolph sent her sandwiches and sherry) while the woman who had saved him from emotional starvation was deliberately excluded. A child of the aristocracy was in jeopardy, and the Churchills’ peers were closing ranks. Because Randolph was at the pinnacle of his career that year, powerful men were concerned for Winston’s survival. Sir Henry James prayed for him; so did Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Lord Salisbury, who had succeeded Disraeli as the Tory leader, wrote of his anxiety from Monte Carlo, and Moreton Frewen told Jennie that the Prince of Wales had “stopped the whole line at the levée” to ask after Winston. In a sense, the boy’s recovery was an affair of England’s ruling families, and the humble people whose lives had touched his did not belong.32
At Brighton, in his later words, “I got gradually stronger in that bracing air and gentle surroundings.” Meanwhile, his relatives sententiously vowed to cherish him the more now that he had been saved and urged Jennie to do the same. Frewen thought of “poor dear Winny, & I hope it will leave no troublesome after effects, but even if it leaves him delicate for a long time to come you will make the more of him after being given back to you from the very threshold of the unknown.” Duchess Fanny was “so thankful for God’s Goodness for preserving your dear Child,” and Jennie’s own mother, in London but sick herself, wrote her, “I can’t tell you how anxious we have all been about poor little Winston. And how delighted & thankful now that he is better. And what a relief for you my dear child. Yr whole life has been one of good fortune & this the crowning blessing that little Winston has been spared to you. You can’t be too grateful dear Jennie.”33
Jennie had been scared, and was doubtless relieved, but if gratitude meant changing her life-style, she wouldn’t have it. These were the busiest years of her life, and she was enjoying them immensely. In those days an ambitious woman—and she was very ambitious—could express her drive only by advancing her husband’s career. In the year of Winston’s pneumonia, Anita Leslie writes, “Jennie took it for granted that her husband would reach the post of Prime Minister,” but she was leaving nothing to chance.34 She was active in the Primrose League; she campaigned for Randolph in a smart tandem with the horses beribboned in pink and chocolate, his racing colors; she gave endless dinner parties. No one declined her invitations, for she had become a celebrity in her own right. In the England of the 1880s and 1890s beautiful young genteel ladies diverted the public as film stars do now; their photographs were displayed in shop windows and sold as pinups. Jennie’s was among the most popular. She was also recognized as a gifted amateur pianist, always in demand for charity concerts. In addition there were her social schedules. It was a grand thing to leave each autumn on her annual tour of Scotland’s country houses, grand to receive the Order of the Crown of India from the Queen’s own hands, grand to be courted by Europe’s elegant gallants. There were hazards, to be sure, but they merely added to the excitement. Ironically, the only public embarrassment to arise from Jennie’s catholicity of friendships among the eminent had nothing to do with her role as a romantic adventuress. She cultivated both Oscar Wilde and Sir Edward Carson. Later this proved awkward when Wilde and Carson faced each other in the Old Bailey with the ugly charge of sodomy between them.
In short, Jennie had her priorities to consider, and while the frail child in Brighton was not at the bottom of the list, he scarcely led it. She wrote him, but except when he lay at death’s door and propriety gave her no choice, she avoided the school.
Pleas continued to pepper his letters: “Will you come and see me?” “When are you coming to see me?” “It was a great pity you could not come down Sunday,” “I want you to come down on some fine day and see me,” he would give her billions of kisses if she came. She never found time. He had the chief role in a class entertainment, and he wanted her in the audience—“Whatever you do come Monday please. I shall be miserable if you don’t.” He was miserable. Another entertainment was planned—“I shall expect to see you and shall be very disappointed indeed if I do not see you, so do come.” He was very disappointed. They were going to perform The Mikado—“It would give me tremendous pleasure, do come please.” He forwent tremendous pleasure. He ached for the sight of her—“Please do do do do do do come down to see me…. Please do come I have been disappointed so many times.” He was disappointed once more. Learning that a dinner party at Connaught Place conflicted with a school play, he begged her to cancel the dinner—“Now you know I was always your darling and you can’t find it in your heart to give me a denial.” Nevertheless, she found it in her heart to do just that.35
At times the breakdown in communications was total. He made elaborate plans for Christmas in 1887, only to discover at the last minute that both his parents were away on a seven-week tour of Russia. Jennie’s sister Clarita—now called “Clara,” like her mother—invited him to her home but then fell ill, so he spent the holiday with his brother, Woom, Leonie, and his uncle Jack Leslie. Once he wanted to write his mother but didn’t have her address, didn’t even know which country she was visiting. He was too young to travel in London alone, yet he couldn’t even be sure there would be anyone to greet his train when he arrived: “We have 19 days holiday at Easter. I hope you will send some one to meet me at the station.” Astonishingly, Randolph met an appointment in Brighton a short walk from the school but didn’t bother to cross the street and call on his son. Winston found out about it. “My dear Papa,” he wrote, “You never came to see me on Sunday when you were in Brighton.” It happened again: “I cannot think why you did not come to see me, while you were in Brighton, I was very disappointed but I suppose you were too busy to come.”36 There was a note of resignation here. He was disappointed, but he was not surprised. His father was too busy. His father would always be too busy. Indeed, unlike his wife, he rarely wrote Winston. Jennie was a lax mother, but later, when her situation altered, she became a loving one. In Randolph’s case that was impossible. Randolph actually disliked his son.
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