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Landscape for a Lifetime: Winston, Woodstock, and Oxfordshire
Winston Churchill’s journey began at Blenheim Palace, the second-largest dwelling in Britain, covering seven acres with a 480-foot-long frontage, a magnificent building commanding thousands of acres of park and pastureland. “There is no house like it in the Western world,” wrote J. H. Plumb.1 This chapter examines the extent to which Churchill was rooted in English history and the history of his family because of the place of his birth and emphasizes his lifelong connections with Oxfordshire. The Blenheim fiefdom, located about nine miles north of Oxford, lies adjacent to the town of Woodstock. Despite its proximity, Woodstock remains distinct from the ancient university city, forming its own island in the heart of rural England, in many ways an annex of the great park it abuts. Like many small English towns, it possesses “an efficiency, culture, and charm which are the gradually matured expression of generations of settled life.”2 A handsome church and town hall stand amid long-established hotels, hostelries, and tearooms. Nestling in between are dignified town houses and wisteria-draped cottages, concealed courtyards, and English gardens glimpsed over honey-colored stone walls against which hollyhocks droop in summer months. Through gaps between buildings, views of the Oxfordshire countryside stretch into the distance as the town slides gently downhill to the water meadows of the River Glyme. The expansive 150-acre lake that this modest river feeds lies concealed behind Blenheim Park’s eleven-mile-long encircling wall, monumental gates, and shelter belt of mature trees, adjacent to the town yet separated from it.
When George III visited Blenheim in 1786, he was prompted to remark: “We have nothing to equal this.”3 The scale of Sir John Vanbrugh’s baroque extravagance is betrayed by another bold architectural statement visible from certain Woodstock streets, a monument that rivals Nelson’s Column in height and declares an earlier hero of Britain’s wars abroad: John Spencer Churchill, captain general of the English and allied forces in Europe in 1702–11, 1st Duke of Marlborough.* There he is captured in classical triumph atop Hawksmoor’s hundred-foot Doric column, standing thirty-four feet in height, dressed as a Roman general and holding aloft a Winged Victory and eagles. And there the young Winston Churchill read about his triumphs in European warfare and was inspired.
On a beautiful spring day in early May 1874, his newlywed parents had arrived at the Woodstock railway station, where a public reception had been arranged. Attended by thunder and torrential rain, the couple were met by cheering tenants, who unharnessed their horses and dragged the carriage from the station to the palace. Though the Blenheim brass band was engaged elsewhere, the town was dressed with flags and bunting, and among the crowd was the Woodstock Lodge of Foresters. At the Bear Hotel, the mayor of Woodstock delivered an address of welcome as the carriage paused on its way from the station to the Triumphal Arch, from which vantage point Jennie Churchill caught her first glimpse of the palace. “The place could not have looked more glorious,” she later wrote, “and as we passed through the entrance archway and the lovely scenery burst upon me Randolph said with pardonable pride, ‘This is the finest view in England.’.”4
It was from a house on Park Street in Woodstock that Dr. Frederic Taylor was summoned to Blenheim to attend twenty-year-old Jennie Churchill on a winter’s day in 1874. Hurriedly he made the short journey, entering the walled grounds through the Triumphal Arch, or Town Gate as it is known to locals, and proceeding along a drive that intersects the Mall. Here the breathtaking panorama of lake, palace, and Grand Bridge, with its thirty-three empty rooms, stretched out before him. His arrival was awaited by Jennie’s anxious husband, Lord Randolph Churchill, second son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough and member of Parliament for Woodstock since February of that year. Because of her condition, Jennie had missed the Nobility Ball at the King’s Arms in Woodstock, attended by Randolph, his mother, sister, and cousins. On November 24, she had had a slight fall, though on November 26, Randolph felt able to travel into Oxford to receive his master of arts degree in the Sheldonian Theatre. On November 28, Lady Churchill overexerted herself during a shooting party on the estate and then endured a bone-shaking ride back to the palace in a pony carriage. This brought on the pains. She remained in labor until Dr. Taylor delivered a boy at 1:30 a.m. on St. Andrew’s Day, November 30, two months premature or, looking at the mathematics another way, seven and a half months after his parents’ marriage. As Henry Pelling wisely leaves it, we must suspend judgment as to whether this was simply the first instance of Winston’s impetuosity “or whether it also involved yet another example of Lord Randolph’s.”5
The London obstetrician who was supposed to have ushered Winston Churchill into this world was unable to attend. The telegram had got through, but the train timetables confounded his efforts to reach his distinguished patient. The Woodstock physician proved a capable substitute, and with the arrival of a baby boy, the church bells around Blenheim rang out, and Randolph and the Duchess of Marlborough wrote detailed letters to Jennie’s mother in Paris announcing the birth. Winston’s surprise arrival meant that a cradle had to be improvised, and clothes borrowed from the Woodstock solicitor’s wife. Dr. Taylor received the sum of twenty-five guineas and a letter from Lord Randolph thanking him for his “skilful management of and careful attention to her Ladyship during her confinement.” With period condescension, the Duchess of Marlborough wrote to Mrs. Leonard Jerome, Jennie’s American mother, saying that she had “only” had the Woodstock doctor, but that despite the absence of the London doctor or “an accoucheur from Oxford,” “she could not have been more skillfully treated . . . than she was by our little local doctor.”6 The birth was registered in Woodstock on December 23, 1874, the baby’s name appearing on the certificate as Winston Leonard, the latter being the Christian name of Jennie’s father, Leonard Jerome, sometime American consul in Trieste, principal proprietor of the New York Times and founder of the American Jockey Club. Thus, in the words of Lord Randolph, a “wonderfully pretty” boy with “dark eyes and hair & very healthy” entered the world.7
Churchill’s place of birth warrants our consideration, because he remained attached to this particular region of England throughout his life and chose to complete his life circle by being buried there. It shaped him profoundly. Blenheim Palace lies “at the heart of the Whig legend of that past which the English had manufactured in order to underpin their imperial ambitions and in which Winston Churchill had implicit belief.”8 His great ancestor’s life was to provide a mental backdrop to Churchill’s conception of himself and his actions, and on a more practical level his place of birth was to be the venue for countless holidays, house parties, and army camps as he grew up, as well as for family Christmas gatherings and research trips when he undertook to write biographies of both the 1st Duke, John Spencer Churchill, and his own father, Lord Randolph, and a place of refuge at moments of personal trouble. His birthplace is also of great importance because throughout his life, Winston Churchill was gripped by an almost primordial sense of place and the significance of time and history. This sense of history, and of his position within it, was developed at Blenheim and by what it represented. Churchill’s birthplace is notable not only because it chimes well with his subsequent identification with England as both a historical and romantic landscape, but because he repeatedly returned to this part of the world and was eventually buried in the village of Bladon, nestling on the other side of the great lake near the point at which it flows into the River Evenlode. The church, visible from the windows of the palace’s south face and the vast lawns before it, lies only a few hundred yards from the room in which he was born. Thus Churchill was both born and buried in a setting saturated with the history of England and of his own family, and the significance of it deeply influenced his conception of the world and the sense of personal destiny that was to be a lodestar throughout his life.
During his most formative childhood years, Churchill spent school holidays at Blenheim, shooting, scrumping
fruit from the walled garden, playing “French and English,” and riding his horse across the Grand Bridge to the Column of Victory or Rosamond’s Well. With absentee parents heavily involved in the political and social life of the aristocracy, Winston was often cared for by his grandparents at Blenheim and spent many Easters and Christmases in the palace, sometimes with his beloved mother and father, more often without. The infant Winston spent his first Christmas at Blenheim with his parents, and on December 27, 1874, was baptized in the chapel of Blenheim by the duke’s chaplain, the appropriately named Reverend Henry Yule.
At Blenheim he was “dazzled by the uniforms and armour, by the wonderful trophies, and by the battle scenes that decorated the walls.”9 Here he reflected upon the story of his famous ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, swashbuckling victor of Blenheim, Malplaquet, and Ramillies, savior of Europe. But Churchill’s roots went beyond just Blenheim and the martial feats of the man for whom it was built: Churchill was infused with a sense of the ancient and medieval history with which Woodstock and the park adjoining it were associated, by the presence of oaks ancient enough to have been “gazed upon by Plantagenets” riding to the chase and the stories of the old kings of England who had once stayed there. As he wrote, “Roman, Saxon, Norman, Plantagenet, Tudor, [and] Stuart prefaced the 1st Duke’s action at Blenheim. . . . The antiquity of Woodstock is not measured by a thousand years and Blenheim is heir to all the memories of Woodstock.” “This great house,” he said of Blenheim, “is one of the precious links which join us to our famous past, which is also the history of the English-speaking peoples, on whose unity the future of the free world depends. I am proud to have been born at Blenheim, and to be an Honorary Freeman of Woodstock.”10
Sometimes political business brought the family to Woodstock, for the politics of the day was conducted across the candlelight and silverware of stately dining tables and to the clack of billiard balls, as well as in the Palace of Westminster itself. In 1874, the year of Winston’s birth, Randolph had used his parents’ ardent wish that he stand for election in Woodstock to win consent for his hasty marriage to Jennie. Having won his point, Randolph threw himself into canvassing. Since leaving Oxford he had been on call for this moment in order to prevent the seat falling to a radical. He was “popular with the farmers around Blenheim who had seen him since boyhood tearing over the countryside on horseback.” “I took the chair at their dinner at the Bear Hotel and you have no idea how enthusiastic they were for me,” he wrote to his brilliant, beguiling, and impulsive new wife.11
Churchill was often billeted at Blenheim when his parents were elsewhere. For Jennie, the London season held more appeal than the dullness of Woodstock and the formal life of Blenheim and its “dignified rhythm of existence,”12 which included two-hour-long breakfasts in formal attire. In the summer of 1876, when he was nearly two, it was reported that “little Winston was now learning to creep in the top-floor nurseries, watched and cosseted by his nurse Mrs. Everest.” In November 1880, Randolph persuaded Lord Salisbury to speak at Woodstock. This coincided with Winston’s sixth birthday, “and the little boy had a first glimpse of the man who would be swept to the Premiership by his father’s brilliance.” In the winter of 1885, with Randolph having entered the Cabinet as secretary of state for India, canvassing in the Woodstock area for the forthcoming election was largely left to Jennie, driven hither and thither by Lady Georgina Curzon in her tandem as they scoured the countryside “with our smart turn-out, the horses gaily decorated with ribbons of pink and brown, Randolph’s racing colors.”**13
At Blenheim, in the company of his brother, Jack, and cousin Sunny (later the 9th Duke), Winston played games in the endless corridors and rooms of the great palace, endured lessons, rode his pony Robroy across the open spaces of the Great Park and through its magnificent clumps of trees, and fished in the lake. His first letter to his mother, written at the age of eight in the neat but tentative hand of one new to the art, came from Blenheim: “My dear Mamma I hope you are quite well. I thank you very very much for the beautiful presents those Soldiers and Flags and Castle they are so nice.”14 Thus Blenheim helped to forge an interest in war and glory, as well as in history, and this was to color every aspect of Churchill’s life. The very architecture proclaimed Marlborough’s victory, stone cannonballs crushing French cockerels, the roofline embellished with martial trophies and, within, paintings and enormous tapestries detailing the battlefield. Later, when a schoolboy at Harrow, Winston drew detailed maps of the disposition of Marlborough’s troops, his historical interests growing against the backdrop of the popular boyhood fiction he loved to read, including the works of G. A. Henty, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and tales told in person by a veteran of the Zulu War.
As a young man, Churchill remained a frequent visitor to Blenheim. He spent Christmas of 1893 there and visited the Dillon family at nearby Ditchley Park. He was at Blenheim again in the winter months of 1901, discussing intraparty intrigues with Lord Hugh Cecil. In August 1908, he was at nearby Nuneham House as a guest of Lewis, Viscount Harcourt, a member of the government. On August 4, 1908, his brother, Jack, married Lady Gwendeline Bertie in a civil ceremony at Abingdon in South Oxfordshire, a religious service taking place in Oxford on the following day. Churchill described how the party swept down on Abingdon in cars from Blenheim, the proceedings feeling like an elopement. In the same month, he was also installed as a member of the Albion Lodge of the Ancient Order of Druids at Blenheim.
Churchill memorably said that “at Blenheim I took two important decisions: to be born and to marry.”15 In 1908, a young lady named Clementine Hozier was invited to Blenheim at Churchill’s behest to join a small party that included the duke, Winston’s mother, his great friend F. E. Smith (later Lord Birkenhead), and Mr. Clarke, a private secretary from the Board of Trade, the department of state to which Winston had been sent. Winston took the duke into his confidence, and the “Blenheim trip was arranged so he could propose to the beautiful girl with whom he was so deeply in love, in a setting which combined the romantic with the heroic, and where he felt so strongly the ties of family and friendship.” Churchill wrote to persuade her to come: “I want so much to show you that beautiful place and its gardens. We shall find lots of places to talk in and lots of things to talk about.”16
Yet despite this unsurpassed setting and all his planning, Winston nearly ruined the proceedings. Retiring for the night, he made a rendezvous with Clementine to walk in the Rose Garden after breakfast the following day, August 11, 1908. Never an early bird, in the morning he failed to appear. Clementine, furious, considered leaving. The duke stepped ably into the breach, however, dispatching a note to the still slumbering Churchill while persuading Clementine over breakfast to take a drive with him in his buggy. He whirled her round the estate for a while, returning to find Winston, finally out of bed, scanning the horizon.
During the course of the late afternoon, Winston and Clementine went for a walk in the grounds. The couple headed toward the Rose Garden and the Cascades, along a path flanked by cedars, beeches, and ancient oaks. Overtaken by a torrential rainstorm, they took refuge in a little Greek temple erected in 1789. This was the Temple of Diana, supported by four pillars with Ionic capitals and flanked by yews, enjoying a striking view of the lake cut through the trees. Here, by a bas-relief of Hippolytus offering a wreath to Diana, an unusually tongue-tied Churchill asked Clementine for her hand in marriage, and she consented. The following morning, Churchill picked a bouquet of roses for her and asked Clementine’s mother for her blessing. Following a London wedding, the honeymoon began and ended at Blenheim, with a trip to Venice sandwiched in between. Arriving by train at Woodstock to begin their married life, Clementine and Winston were greeted by cheering crowds and the ringing bells of St. Mary Magdalene, the same scene that had greeted Winston’s parents on their marriage thirty-four years earlier. Thus was forged a bond that was to remain unbroken until Churchill’
s death and was to anchor him throughout his turbulent life.
One of Churchill’s most abiding links with Woodstock was provided by his military career. Shortly after he left the Regular Army in 1899 and following his escapades in South Africa as war correspondent and irregular soldier, he took a commission in a yeomanry regiment, the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, founded in 1798. So strong were the regiment’s ties to Woodstock and Blenheim that it was known locally as “The Duke of Marlborough’s Own.” At first Winston joined the Woodstock Squadron (other squadrons being drawn from Banbury, Henley, and Oxford), in which he was posted as a captain and second in command. The duke commanded the squadron, and Winston’s brother, Jack, was a lieutenant. His friend F. E. Smith was also an officer in the squadron, enhancing Winston’s pleasure in soldiering with the Queen’s Own even when he attained high political office in Asquith’s Liberal government. Whether as undersecretary of state for the colonies, president of the Board of Trade, or home secretary, he took his part-time soldiering seriously. As he wrote to Clementine during the June 1911 camp:
The weather is gorgeous and the whole Park in gala glories. I have been out drilling all the morning and my poor face is already a sufferer from the sun. . . . We have three regiments here, two just outside the ornamental gardens, & a 3rd over by Bladon.17
The regiment’s summer camp was the main feature of its training, and the officers’ ladies would descend to roost in Blenheim Palace and neighboring mansions, such as Nuneham. In April 1905, Churchill attained his majority and assumed command of the Henley Squadron, replacing Major the Honourable E. Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes. Churchill had been keen to get away from the Woodstock Squadron and its domination by the Marlboroughs, seeking the opportunity to make his own mark on the men and, no doubt, offer his cousin some competition. Henley also benefited from its proximity to London and Whitehall, where Churchill was now making his mark. Records show that Churchill was an extremely attentive officer, concerning himself with the squadron’s training drill and its quartermastering arrangements and issuing detailed squadron orders. His emphasis upon increased training bore fruit when the Henley Squadron swept the board at the annual regimental rifle meetings.
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