Lord Randolph in later years
She minded very much. The trip was a six-month ordeal for her. She wrote her sister Clara aboard ship on the Bay of Bengal, after a week in Rangoon: “I cant tell you how I pine for a little society…. And yet the worst of it is that I dread the chance even of seeing people for his sake. He is quite unfit for society…. One never knows what he may do. At Govt House Singapore he was very bad for 2 days and it was quite dreadful being with strangers. Since then he has become quieter & sometimes is quite apathetic but Keith thinks it a bad sign.” She felt that it was “quite impossible for us to go travelling about in India. It means staying with people all the time & R is too unfit for it…. Dearest Clarinette I cannot go into all the details of his illness but you cannot imagine anything more distracting & desperate than to watch it & see him as he is.” As if this weren’t enough, she had received a further jolt in Burma. Of all her men, the one she had loved most deeply was Charles Kinsky. For years he had remained single, hoping that one day she would be free. Now he had given up; he had found another woman, a countess twenty years younger than Jennie: “I had a telegraph from Charles at Rangoon telling me of his engagement. I hate it.”152
Dr. Keith blew the whistle in Madras. On November 24 he wired Roose that their patient had begun to sink and the party would return to London as soon as possible. Six days later Keith wrote Randolph’s sister Cornelia from Bombay: “I regret extremely that we have to come home but for everyone’s sake I know it is the only thing to do. Lord Randolph is in no condition to continue his journey: it is the worst thing for him, he gets no pleasure out of it, and did he understand how he is he would be the last person to wish it…. It may seem that rather a cruel way has been taken to prevail on Lord Randolph to return but he really does not think about it much and it does not strike him in the way it would do if he were well. We ought to reach Marseilles on the 20th of next month and our subsequent movements must be entirely guided by Lord Randolph’s condition. He stood the journey from Madras very well, it certainly did him no harm. I will write you again from Port Said.”153
Winston’s awareness of what was happening seems to have come to him in fits and starts. He would accept the situation, reject it, accept it again, and reject it again—the cycle was repeated over and over. Nearly a month earlier, before his parents had even reached Yokohama on the Empress of Japan, he had confronted Roose and demanded to know the facts about the state of his father’s health. He wrote his mother on November 2, “I thought it was only right that I should know exactly how he was progressing. You see I only hear through grandmamma Jerome who does not take a very sanguine view of things—or through the Duchess who is at one extreme one minute and at the other the next. So I asked Dr Roose and he showed me the medical reports…. I need not tell you how anxious I am. I had never realised how ill Papa had been and had never until now believed that there was anything serious the matter. I do trust & hope as sincerely as human beings can that the relapse Keith spoke of in his last report was only temporary and that the improvement of the few months [sic] has been maintained. Do, my darling mamma when you write let me know exactly what you think.” He suggested that she and Keith “write nothing but good to the Duchess” because “she lives, thinks, and cares for nothing in the world but to see Papa again.”154
Six days later, after Keith had sent Roose his report from Japan, Winston had written Jennie: “I am very very sorry to hear that so little improvement has been made, and that apparently there is not much chance of improvement.” Yet a few lines later he suggested, “If I were you I would always try and look on the bright side of things and endeavour perpetually to derive interest from everything.” In addition, as we have seen, he had not only sent his father a cheery report on the Sandhurst riding competition but felt the world opening for him “like Aladdin’s cave.” And by then he had known the worst. Upon receiving Keith’s Madras telegram, Roose had summoned Winston from Hindlip Hall and informed him that his father’s life was approaching its end. On Christmas Eve his parents reached London. “For a month,” Winston wrote in his biography of Randolph, “he lingered pitifully.” Most of the time he was in a stupor. His son had by now become reconciled to the inevitable. He saw his father only as “a swiftly-fading shadow.” In the early hours of Thursday, January 24, 1895, Winston was roused in the mansion of a neighbor, where he had been sleeping. “I ran in the darkness,” he wrote, “across Grosvenor Square, then lapped in snow.” It was all over. Three days later Randolph was buried in Bladon churchyard—the bells overhead, which had pealed merrily at Winston’s birth, now tolled slowly—and a memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey.155
Behind him Randolph left disorder. His career had been one long strife, and it did not end at the Bladon grave. He had his defenders. The Saturday Review thought him “the greatest elemental force in English politics since Cromwell,” and Sir Herbert Maxwell wrote in the National Review: “Reckless beyond all men’s reckoning in prosperity, he was wont to be swift and dangerous when hard pressed…. Lord Randolph remained, to the last, first favourite among his party with a very large section of the people. No one can doubt that, who was in London during the closing weeks of his life, for one had only to lend an ear… to hear anxious discussion of the latest bulletins about ‘Randy,’ as he was affectionately called.” But de mortuis nil nisi bonum was not observed by his enemies. Other obituaries described him as a man lacking in delicacy, subtlety, or decency—the Outlook said that he represented “the coarser qualities of his race… his defect was his lack of power of subordination.” An officious young man from the Treasury even appeared at the Grosvenor Square portal and demanded the return of the robes Randolph had worn as chancellor of the Exchequer. His widow replied superbly—and prophetically—“I am saving them for my son.” Jennie’s demeanor was the subject of much comment. Harper’s Weekly had reported on the fateful last trip: “Lady Churchill’s devotion to her husband won for her the admiration of all who saw them abroad. Vigorous and active, and still a great beauty, she gave up every other pleasure to give him constant and loving care.” That wasn’t the half of it. She had vowed that the nature of his disease should remain forever secret. To Leonie she wrote that “up to now the General Public and even Society does not know the real truth, and after all my sacrifice and the misery of these 6 months it would be hard if it got out. It would do incalculable harm to his political reputation and memory and be a dreadful thing for all of us.”156 Nevertheless, there was some ill feeling toward her in her husband’s family. Duchess Fanny felt that her mourning for Randolph was inadequate. There was some truth in this. Jennie was grief-stricken, but it was for Count Kinsky, who had been married just two weeks before she returned to England. The duchess extended her resentment to Winston, however, and that was unjust, for he was, and would continue to be, obsessed with the memory of his father. Seldom, indeed, has a man invested so little affection in a son and reaped such dividends of posthumous loyalty.
It is clear now that Randolph, had he lived, would have been a crushing burden for Winston’s parliamentary ambitions. But the boy did not see it that way. He never would. At the funeral he felt that his task was “to lift again the flag I found lying on a stricken field.” Over thirty years later he would write: “All my dreams of comradeship with him, of entering Parliament at his side and in his support, were ended. There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.” Unfortunately, aspiring politicians needed money—even ambitious cavalry officers needed it—and although his father had left an estate of £75,951, debts claimed most of that. Winston’s pay as a subaltern would be £120 a year. Fortunately Jennie received $10,000 a year from the rental of the Jerome family home on Madison Square in New York, and she told Winston she would provide him with another £300. It wasn’t nearly enough, but a dim plan was forming in his mind. He must take his father’s place in Parliament. To be elected he would have to become famous. The quickest way to popular acclaim, he believed, was
to acquire a reputation for military heroism. This, he knew, would be difficult. He wrote afterward: “In the closing decade of the Victorian era the Empire had enjoyed so long a spell of almost unbroken peace, that medals and all they represented in experience and adventure were becoming extremely scarce in the British Army.” Still, there were always small wars here and there. Someone was always fighting someone else. He would shop around. There was nothing to stop him. Here, at least, he was realistic about Randolph’s death: “I was now in the main the master of my fortunes.”157
Among his father’s last words to him had been: “Have you got your horses?” Winston interpreted this to mean an end to talk of the Sixtieth Rifles and approval of the cavalry. Jennie agreed. Their relationship had changed. “My mother was always at hand to help and advise,” he later recalled, “but I was now in my twenty-first year and she never sought to exercise parental control. Indeed, she soon became an ardent ally, furthering my plans and guarding my interests with all her influence and boundless energy. She was still at forty young, beautiful and fascinating. We worked together on even terms, more like brother and sister than mother and son.” Jennie had been indifferent toward him in his childhood, but she knew men. Now she wired Brabazon, who suggested she reopen negotiations with the Duke of Cambridge, which she did. In less than two weeks Winston’s orders were cut. On February 18 he reported to the Fourth Hussars, and two days later he was awarded his commission, informing him: “VICTORIA by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, & To Our Trusty and well beloved Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, Gentleman, Greeting: We, reposing especial Trust and Confidence in your Loyalty, Courage and Good Conduct, do by these Presents Constitute and Appoint you to be an Officer in Our Land Forces from the twentieth day of February 1895. You are therefore carefully and diligently to discharge your Duty as such in the Rank of 2nd Lieutenant….”158
Discomfort has always been the lot of men being initiated into professional soldiering, and Sandhurst graduates were not exempt. Winston’s first six months were to be spent in the company of enlisted recruits, drilling under the command of the regimental riding master, a fiery tyrant nicknamed “Jocko.” After the glamour of the regimental mess, this was a comeuppance. The life, Winston wrote Jennie, “is fearfully severe and I suffer terribly from stiffness—but what with hot baths and massage I hope soon to be better. At present I can hardly walk. I have however been moved up in the 2nd Class recruits which is extremely good. The horses are very different to [sic] the Sandhurst screws. Rather too broad I think for me.” Jocko’s taunts were humiliating for a green officer, and were meant to be. Early in the course Winston strained a thigh muscle, necessary for gripping a horse; the choice was to suffer tortures or be thought wet, so he suffered, and sometimes fell. He later wrote: “Many a time did I pick myself up shaken and sore… and don again my little gold braided pork-pie cap, fastened on the chin by a boot-lace strap, with what appearance of dignity I could command, while twenty recruits grinned furtively but delightedly to see their Officer suffering the same misfortunes which it was their lot so frequently to undergo.” But he was a good horseman, and it began to show. In a break with precedent, his time of indoctrination was cut to three months. He began to like Jocko, though not the drill, “which as usual I loathe and abominate.”159
He was still drilling, and still under Jocko’s eye, when older officers invited him to ride in the regiment’s annual point-to-point for subalterns. Jennie had tried to discourage him from steeplechasing—Kinsky had nearly come to grief that way—telling him it was “idiotic” and could be “fatal.” As yet he had no horse of his own, and had therefore reassured her that his participation was out of the question, but when another subaltern offered to lend him a charger, he couldn’t resist. Afterward he wrote his brother: “It was very exciting, and there is no doubt about it being dangerous. I had never jumped a regulation fence before and they are pretty big things as you know. Everybody in the regiment was awfully pleased by my riding, more especially as I came in third. They thought it very sporting. I thought so too.” Jennie was reproachful. So was Woom, and for the same reason. She wrote him: “I hope you will take care of yourself my darling. I hear of your exploits at steeple chasing. I do so dread to hear of it. Remember Count Kinsky broke his nose once at that.”160
His mother had scarcely recovered from this, and he had hardly seen the last of the bull-lunged Jocko, when real trouble loomed, a scandal which could have ruined him. Alan Bruce, a Sandhurst classmate, was about to join the Fourth Hussars. He had been an unpopular cadet, as ill-adjusted there as Winston had been at Harrow. Winston and his new confreres in the officers’ mess decided they didn’t want him; they took him to dinner at the Nimrod Club in London and told him that his father’s allowance of £500 would be inadequate. That was preposterous, and he said so. Since he had failed to take their hint, they discouraged him in other ways. The details are unclear, but it is not a pretty story. Bruce was accused of using foul language, of being familiar with enlisted men, of abusing regimental sergeants. The upshot was that he was asked to resign from the army. His infuriated father, A. C. Bruce-Pryce, persuaded the weekly review Truth to mount a press crusade against an “undisguised conspiracy formed against this subaltern before he joined to have him out of the regiment unless he consented to go voluntarily.” That was the last way to engage the affections of those who had maneuvered Bruce’s dismissal, and the incident would have been swiftly forgotten if Bruce-Pryce hadn’t taken leave of his senses. He charged that Winston Churchill had been guilty of “acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type.”161
Winston moved fast. He hired the Holborn solicitors Lewis and Lewis, who, four days later, issued a writ demanding damages of £20,000. Within a month he got £500, an apology, and a complete withdrawal: “I unreservedly withdraw all and every imputation against your character complained of by you in paragraph 2 of your Statement of Claim and I hereby express my regret for having made the same.” Truth howled on, now charging that the point-to-point had been rigged, but the great reef had been skirted. Except for an absurd remark by Lord Beaverbrook—that Winston had told him he once went to bed with a man to see what it was like—nothing in Churchill’s life offers the remotest ground for intimations of homosexuality. At the time, however, the barest rumor of it, unless instantly suppressed, could have been calamitous. As Brabazon wrote him, expressing “very great relief” at the outcome, “one cannot touch pitch without soiling one’s hands however clean they may originally have been and the world is so ill natured and suspicious that there would always have been found some ill natured sneak or perhaps some d——d good natured friend to hem & ha! & wink over it—perhaps in years to come, when everyone even yourself had forgotten all about the disagreeable incident. You took the only line possible…. For malignant, preposterous as it was, it would have been impossible to have left such a charge unchallenged.” Thus, with the colonel’s sanction, the regiment regarded Winston as a martyr. The triumph of irony was complete. The Harrovian who had been at odds with his peers and a rebel against school authority was now accepted, and content with his acceptance, in an authoritarian sodality.162
Hubert Gough, later recalling his days at Aldershot as a subaltern in the Sixteenth Lancers, said: “We led a cheerful, care-free life; what duties we had to do… did not call for much mental effort. Afternoons were usually free for most officers.” Winston’s life there followed a relaxed routine. His batman brought him breakfast in bed. A subaltern’s only obligations in a typical day were to spend two hours riding, an hour with the horses in the stables, and ninety minutes drilling. The rest of his time was his own. If he remained in barracks, Winston might play bezique for threepence a point, “a shocking descent from the shillings at Deepdene,” he wrote, or whist, “a most uninteresting game and one at which I have but little luck.” He liked games he could win. He described golf, one of his failures, as “a curious sport
whose object is to put a very small ball in a very small hole with implements ill-designed for the purpose.” Polo and steeplechasing occupied him more and more, though he paid for his recklessness; after one fall, which confined him to bed for three days, he explained to his mother that at a jump “the animal refused and swerved. I tried to cram him in and he took the wings. Very nearly did he break my leg, but as it is I am only bruised and stiff.” Another young officer might have kept that information to himself. Winston didn’t; he was still an egotistical, bumptious, rude youth. But these traits were common among young Victorian officers. Besides, he was witty, daring, generous, entertaining. Jennie had found the right word for him. He was interesting.163
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