The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  She left soon after for England, stopping en route at Pretoria where with difficulty she attempted to obtain a room at the fully booked Grand Hotel. The manager suggested that one apartment might soon be free as the gentleman was packing to leave, so with Lady Sarah in tow he politely knocked on the door of the suite:

  Great was my surprise [Lady Sarah wrote] at discovering in the khaki-clad figure, thus unceremoniously disturbed in the occupation of stowing away papers, clothes, and campaigning kit generally, no less a personage than my nephew, Winston Churchill, who had experienced such thrilling adventures during the war, the accounts of which had reached us even in far-away Mafeking. The proprietor was equally amazed to see me warmly greet the owner of the rooms he proposed to allot us, and, although Winston postponed his departure for another twenty-four hours, he gladly gave up part of his suite for our use, and everything was satisfactorily arranged.22

  It was the final note in Winston’s Boer War. Later, his fellow prisoner Haldane (who as Lord Haldane would serve as Secretary of State for War from 1905 to 1912) wrote an assessment of Winston at that time which shows how he saw himself, and how easy it was for him to make enemies as well as friends: ‘He is always unconsciously playing a part – an heroic part. And he is himself his most astonished spectator…He thinks of his great ancestor…[and] thus in this rugged and awful crisis will he bear himself. It is not insincerity; it is that in that fervid and picturesque imagination there are always great deeds afoot with himself cast by destiny in the Agamemnon role. Hence the portentous gravity that sits on his youthful shoulders so oddly.’23

  As for Winston, now leaving South Africa for England with high hopes of making his mark in British politics, he believed it was the last time he would hear bullets fired in anger.

  11

  1900–4

  The Young Lion

  When they celebrated the relief of Mafeking so enthusiastically in London, most people thought the Boer War was over. Certainly, most volunteers such as Winston and Marlborough had begun returning home by July, leaving the long task of mopping up the remaining guerrilla fighters to the regulars. In fact, the Boer War was to wear on for a long time yet and claim many casualties, but except for Jack the Churchills were out of it by then.*

  Winston was a driven man, keen to kick-start his career on the back of his recent deeds. ‘I need not say how anxious I am to come back to England,’ he wrote to Jennie. ‘Politics, Pamela, finances and books, all need my attention.’1 During his return voyage he dashed off another book, Ian Hamilton’s March, an edited compilation of his dispatches as a war correspondent. Together with London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, these two volumes were to sell twenty-two thousand copies in the first year.

  When he arrived back in England in late July 1900, he headed for London to stay with his mother, naturally regarding her home as his own. To his chagrin he found she had let the house at Great Cumberland Place, an economy suggested by George Cornwallis-West who had pointed out that it was far less costly for her to stay at the Ritz when she was in London than to run the house and maintain a full staff in order to entertain there. This meant that Winston had nowhere to stay until Sunny stepped in and offered to lend him an apartment he had formerly used himself at 105 Mount Street,* which had a short lease, two years remaining. It was an excellent address in Mayfair, close to what is now the Connaught Hotel.† Winston took the apartment as his first flat, and later bought a new lease on the property and lived there for five years very comfortably. It was an ideal arrangement for a bachelor, as the hotel sent waiters out to nearby residences, providing meals from their regular menus. Winston asked his Aunt Leonie to arrange the furnishing and decor for him, telling her that he was not fussy as long as he had a clear table and plenty of writing paper. Leonie, however, did not allow his new home to become a monk’s cell. The flat was well furnished with items retrieved from Jennie’s home, including Lord Randolph’s desk and chair and his massive brass inkwell. Comfortable old leather chairs were supplemented with newly purchased items. On the walls, Spy cartoons of Lord Randolph were aligned with a painting of his most successful racehorse, Abbesse de Jouarre (called by bookies on racecourses and by many of the race-going public ‘Abscess of the Jaw’).

  A few days after moving in, on 28 July, Winston attended the wedding at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge of forty-six-year-old Jennie to twenty-six-year-old George Cornwallis-West. Sunny Marlborough, who had only just returned from South Africa in the company of his Aunt Sarah, gave the bride away; and there was, Winston noted, ‘a solid phalanx’ of Churchills2 among the guests, as well as Jennie’s own family, to throw a cloak of respectability over the ceremony. There was no one at all from the bridegroom’s family. The reception was held at the house of Jennie’s sister Clara Frewen in Chesham Place, and the couple were loaned Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire for the first days of their honeymoon. There had been much criticism of Jennie’s relationship with George West, but their marriage shocked Society and George’s resignation from his regiment was ‘requested’ soon afterwards. Even the Prince of Wales was annoyed at this coupling of one of his favourite women with his own godson, and it was some weeks before Jennie was able to wheedle him round. Eventually the Prince met George privately and told him that the large age difference was his only objection to the marriage. But George’s father wrote a blistering letter to Leonie, whom he accused (incorrectly) of promoting the match:

  I wish seriously to ask you if you consider a marriage…between Lady Randolph and my son can possibly lead to the happiness of either? To begin with she is older than his own mother…and she will find herself married to a young man of such an impressionable nature that only a few weeks ago he proposed marriage to a young and pretty girl who refused his attentions – not withstanding his protestations of love and his repudiation of your sister. The life of a couple so ill-assorted is doomed, is painful to think of…I can only add that if this marriage takes place, it will estrange the whole of my family from my son and so I have told him.3

  In a letter to Winston, George addressed him as ‘my dear friend’, and clearly Winston accepted the relationship stoically for his mother’s sake. He was always on friendly terms with his young stepfather, but still there is a hint of disapproval in a letter he wrote to Jack: ‘The wedding was very pretty and George looked supremely happy in having at length obtained his heart’s desire. As we already know each other’s views on the subject, I need not pursue it.’4 Jack, still in South Africa, wrote morosely that he felt like ‘the prodigal son who is sent away to these horrible colonies with instructions never to be seen or heard of again’.5

  Perhaps hoping the gesture would prove the genuine love behind her marriage, Jennie let it be known that she would drop the title ‘Lady Randolph’. It was announced in the newspapers thus:

  The Papers give this information

  At Lady Randolph’s own request

  That now her proper designation,

  Is Mrs George Cornwallis-West.

  Winston had already set about his main objective. Ignoring his mother’s honeymooning status in Scotland he bombarded her with tasks and requests, just as before. He was still targeting the parliamentary seat of Oldham, where he was greeted by the town band as a conquering hero and where he delivered some of his most stirring speeches. When he asked Jennie to come and help him with the electioneering, she obediently left her husband with friends and went to her son’s aid. Winston had a fight on his hands because the Liberal incumbent was not only popular but well financed. When one man declared that he would rather vote for the devil than for Winston, he disarmingly responded: ‘But since your friend is not running can I count on your vote?’ On 1 October 1900 Winston was returned as the Member for Oldham; true, his majority was modest – only 230 votes – and he won only because the Liberal vote had been split by an independent candidate, but Winston’s political career had begun. Now he had to sort out his finances, make enough to live on, and ask Pamela to marry him. He wrote to
Jennie: ‘I think a great deal of Pamela, she loves me very dearly.’6

  What remained of his earnings as a journalist in South Africa had been used to fight the election (together with a donation by Sunny of £400 to his campaign chest). He needed to earn money fast and all he could rely on, apart from his allowance, was the anticipated royalties on his two books. Now, in an attempt to capitalise on his South African adventures – and on a fame he feared might prove transitory – he arranged a punishing series of lecture tours in Britain, America and Canada to build up his financial reserves before Parliament resumed in the spring. This worked well in the UK – in one month he earned £4500; but he found American audiences sparse, sometimes even hostile. He had Bourke Cockran to support him on his tour and he was thrilled to meet Mark Twain, who introduced him at one event. But his talks were not generally well accepted in the USA; the audiences had only a passing interest in the Boer War, while a significant number sympathised with the Boers. He went on to Canada and spent Christmas in Ottawa at Rideau Hall with the Governor General, Lord Minto.* Here he was briefly reunited with Pamela, who was also a guest of the Mintos.7 From the financial point of view, Winston’s goal of marriage to Pamela was at last within sight. In five months he had spoken every day, six days a week, for an hour or more and sometimes twice a day. He had also written articles. All sold well and at the end of his tour – though that date had not quite come when he saw Pamela in Ottawa – he had earned his target amount, the then huge sum of £10,000 (worth over £570,000 today) which he sent to his father’s old friend the financier Sir Ernest Cassel,† asking him to ‘feed my sheep’.8

  Curiously, the meeting in Ottawa between Winston and Pamela, which both had evidently looked forward to, was not satisfactory. Jennie had clearly expected to hear the announcement of an engagement during this time; she had written months earlier to Winston that Pamela was devoted to him, and she was convinced it was merely a question of time as to when they would marry.9 But all was not well. Pamela evidently felt neglected, and before Winston’s departure for the USA she had complained to him that he was ‘incapable of affection’, to which Winston coolly replied: ‘Why do you say I am incapable of affection? Perish the thought. I love one above all others. And I shall be constant. I am no fickle gallant capriciously following the fancy of the hour. My love is deep and strong…Who is this that I love? Listen – as the French say. Over the page I will tell you.’ And on the following sheet he wrote mischievously: ‘Yours vy sincerely, Winston S. Churchill’.

  After Winston left Ottawa, a puzzled Lord Minto wrote to Jennie that the relationship between the young couple, about which she had forewarned him, had shown no sign of romance – indeed, ‘everything seems to me…platonic’. On 1 January 1901, after leaving the Mintos, Winston wrote to his mother but he did not mention Pamela, choosing to write instead about his success: ‘I am very proud of the fact that there is not one person in a million who at my age could have earned £10,000 without capital in less than two years.’ Three weeks later, though, he was writing to Pamela while on a train to Winnipeg that he had heard that ‘the Queen is dying, is perhaps already dead’. If this ‘momentous event’ occurred, he wrote, his cross-Canada lecture tour would be automatically cancelled and he would have to return home.

  Queen Victoria died two days later on 22 January, at the age of eighty-one, after a reign of sixty-three years which had seen the expansion of the Empire and the continuing industrialisation of Britain. Winston was twenty-six years old; his values and mores had been forged in the Victorian era, and like everyone else who had known no other monarch he wondered how the country would fare. Unlike most people, he was acquainted with the new King: ‘Will it entirely revolutionise his way of life?’ he wrote to Jennie. ‘Will he become desperately serious? Will he continue to be friendly to you? Will the Keppel* be appointed to 1st Lady of the bedchamber? Write to me all about this.’10 On the day of the Queen’s funeral, 2 February, Winston sailed from New York for London in order to take his seat in Parliament. He had arrived back in a capital in which everyone was clad in black and the streets were still respectfully hushed.

  On 14 February he wrote his mother a cheque and sent it with a note that made her weep: ‘I enclose a cheque for £300. In a…sense it belongs to you; for I could never have earned it had you not transmitted to me the wit and energy which are necessary.’11 He also formally surrendered his right to the annual allowance which, under the terms of his father’s will, he should have been paid from the interest on the capital sum in which Jennie had a life interest. He then made his way to Westminster to take his seat in the House.

  Against the advice of experienced MPs who cautioned him to wait before drawing attention to himself, Winston had attended Parliament for only four days before he rose to his feet. He wanted to make his maiden speech count. Knowing that the swashbuckling Liberal MP David Lloyd George – who was pro-Boer – was to move a contentious amendment, Winston applied for, and was granted, the opportunity to reply to him. Lloyd George, having got wind of this plan, declined to move his amendment, and was careful to answer all his own questions, leaving Winston with no hook to hang his response on. Instead he sat down suddenly, stating that he ‘would curtail his remarks as he was sure the house wished to hear a new member’.

  Winston, who had taken a seat immediately behind the front bench, was appalled at this turn of events and saw disaster staring him in the face: all the notes he had so carefully made for days about the amendment were suddenly irrelevant. His mother and many women friends were sitting expectantly in the gallery, and members were streaming into the Chamber to see how ‘Randy’s boy’ would do. Luckily, sitting next to him was the experienced and sympathetic parliamentarian Thomas Gibson Bowles.* Quickly appreciating Winston’s position, Bowles whispered a possible riposte. Winston accepted it desperately, he later wrote, as ‘manna in the wilderness’. He rose to his feet and rephrased the sentence Bowles had given him:* ‘When we compare the moderation of the amendment with the very bitter speech which the honourable member has just delivered, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion…that it might have been better on the whole, if the honourable member instead of making his speech without moving his amendment, had moved his amendment without making his speech.’ This was heartily cheered, and gave Winston the space and confidence to lead into the situation in South Africa, a subject upon which he had, after all, spoken about publicly every day for five months. ‘I do not believe that the Boers would attach particular importance to the utterances of the honourable member. No people in the world received so much verbal sympathy and so little support. If I were a Boer fighting in the field’ – he paused and looked around the Chamber, then said emphatically – ‘if I were a Boer then I hope I should be fighting in the field.’12 His own front bench stirred uncomfortably while the Liberals cheered, but Winston continued, neatly placing a small stiletto under the ribs of the Liberals: ‘I would not allow myself to be taken in by any message of sympathy, not even if it were signed by a hundred honourable members.’

  His speech was well received, and afterwards he was in ‘a happy coma’ when approached by Lloyd George who, after complimenting him, noted that Winston had caused a ‘ruffle’ on the Conservative front bench. He warned him amiably: ‘You are standing against the light.’ Thus began a political relationship that was to last many decades.

  It is not the purpose of this book to follow Winston’s political career in detail, but his reputation rose steadily despite his lack of height and a lisp, both drawbacks that were noticed by political pundits. His lisp caused him to slur the pronunciation of the letter ‘s’ and made him a target for mockery by those who did not like him – and these were many. Sometimes sotto voce imitations of the lisp disconcerted him while he was speaking.13 Within a month, though, he was already addressing the House regularly on major topics with the fluent and colourful oratory for which he became renowned, and which could be depended upon to turn votes in his party’s direction.


  He left nothing to chance. He spent as much time as he could with fellow MPs, and whenever he heard of a debate coming up that he wished to participate in he worked through the night, often for several nights running, writing a speech on the subject. This became his modus operandi, and his speeches, which sounded so impromptu, were in fact all written in advance and learned by heart. Take one,* for example, that he delivered a few months after his debut. He took six weeks to prepare it, and he learned it so thoroughly that it hardly mattered where he began or what questions he was asked. Like his father before him, in order to ensure that an important speech was reported correctly the following morning, he often sent copies of the text to major newspapers, before delivering it.

  The speech just referred to firmly established his future in the House of Commons. In addition to his regular appearances in the House, his engagement diary for that period shows that he was in constant demand as a dinner guest; he also hunted a couple of times from Sunny’s hunting box at Melton Mowbray; and in March of that year alone he delivered lectures at Nottingham, Exeter, Plymouth, Torquay, Hastings, Bournemouth, Southampton, Portsmouth, Folkestone, Dover and Chester.†

  This single-minded pursuit of his career jeopardised his personal life, for at one point Jennie wrote to Jack that she could not think what Winston was about: ‘He has not written to Pamela for 8 weeks.’14 She could have known this only from Pamela herself, and when Winston continued to neglect her Pamela evidently considered herself a free agent. Yet Winston clearly loved Pamela deeply – his letters to Jennie during the previous three years had been littered with remarks about his love and admiration for her, and he had said that he hoped to marry her. That summer, though, a deeply concerned Jack visited George Cornwallis-West and told him he had learned that Pamela ‘is the same to three other men as she is to Winston’.15 Winston knew that Pamela had been branded a flirt since the earliest days of his relationship with her; he had defended her to his mother* when Pamela was accused of spoiling the career of an acquaintance by ending their relationship soon after meeting Winston.16 ‘I am sorry for Winston,’ George reported to Jennie, ‘as I do not think he would be happy with her.’17