Churchill & Son

by Josh Ireland Narrated by Jonathan Cowley

Overview

The intimate, untold story of Winston Churchill's enduring yet volatile bond with his only son, Randolph

“Ireland draws unforgettable sketches of life in the Churchill circle, much like Erik Larson did in The Splendid and the Vile.”-Kirkus ¿ “Fascinating... well-researched and well-written.”-Andrew Roberts ¿ “Beautifully written... A triumph.”-Damien Lewis ¿ “Fascinating, acute and touching.”-Simon Sebag Montefiore

We think we know Winston Churchill: the bulldog grimace, the ever-present cigar, the wit and wisdom that led Great Britain through the Second World War. Yet away from the House of Commons and the Cabinet War Rooms, Churchill was a loving family man who doted on his children, none more so than Randolph, his only boy and Winston's anointed heir to the Churchill legacy.

Randolph may have been born in his father's shadow, but his father, who had been neglected by his own parents, was determined to see him go far. For decades, throughout Winston's climb to greatness, father and son were inseparable-dining with Britain's elite, gossiping and swilling Champagne at high society parties, holidaying on the French Riviera, touring Prohibition-era America. Captivated by Winston's power, bravery, and charisma, Randolph worshipped his father, and Winston obsessed over his son's future. But their love was complex and combustible, complicated by money, class, and privilege, shaded with ambition, outsize expectations, resentments, and failures.

Deeply researched and magnificently written, Churchill & Son is a revealing and surprising portrait of one of history's most celebrated figures.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

01/18/2021

Journalist Ireland (The Traitors) delivers an immersive account of British prime minister Winston Churchill’s tempestuous relationship with his only son, Randolph. In Ireland’s view, Churchill’s one-sided dynamic with his distant father caused him to overcompensate in indulging Randolph, who was “too often angry, too often drunk, too often gratuitously offensive, and too unwilling to engage in the sort of patient grind upon which careers were built in the twentieth century.” Winston’s devotion to his son produced great expectations (Randolph thought he would become prime minister at age 24, like Pitt the Younger), but also enabled Randolph’s weaknesses, including profligate spending and drunken rages. In July 1945, father and son lost reelection bids (Winston for prime minister, Randolph for parliament), but only Winston was able to reclaim his seat. A final rapprochement between father and son came in the 1960s, when Winston allowed Randolph to become his biographer and the younger Churchill, suffering from severe pneumonia and a series of heart attacks (he died in 1968, only three years after Winston), found that “in the process of telling the story of his father’s life, he belatedly gave meaning to his own.” Consistently entertaining and insightful, this deep dive will reward even the most knowledgeable Churchill buff. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

Robustly researched, eminently readable…a gloriously entertaining family soap opera set against the sweep of history.”—The American Conservative
 
“Josh Ireland has produced the most objective and balanced biography of Randolph Churchill to date.”—International Churchill Society

“Churchill & Son is a thoughtful study of a father-son relationship during the storms that rocked the 20th century…adding fresh insights and thoughtful appraisals to our understanding of the great man and his offspring.”—The American Spectator
 
“No matter how low Randolph's reputation plummeted, Winston's love remained undimmed and this fine book may now allow the rest of us to appreciate the younger Churchill's merits.”―The Times
 
“Beautifully written, revelatory, evocative and hugely timely. A triumph.”—Damien Lewis, author The Nazi Hunters and Churchill’s Secret Warriors

“A fascinating, acute and touching portrait of Churchill and Randolph, revealing there is no greater curse than to be the son of a great man.”—Simon Sebag Montefiore, New York Times bestselling author of The Romanovs: 1613-1918 and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“In this fascinating account of the turbulent Churchill father-and-son relationship, Josh Ireland shows how central Winston and Randolph were to each other’s lives. It is notoriously hard to be the child of a great person (although Winston himself managed it), and Randolph has rarely been approached so sympathetically as in this well-researched and well-written book. It proves that whereas Randolph has been mostly remembered as an irritant on the margins of Winston's life, for many years he was a focus of his interest, pride and love.”—Andrew Roberts, New York Times bestselling author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“This is a revelatory portrait of an explosive relationship between a great man and his infamous son. With skill and sensitivity, Josh Ireland lays bare the anguish of their dysfunctional love.”—Jonathan Dimbleby, author of The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War
 
“A fascinating study of the family relationship beneath the most dramatic events of the twentieth century. It is the thrilling story of a man trapped between an epic sense of entitlement and the constant awareness of his own failure.”—Joshua Levine, author of Dunkirk
 
“If you’re game for a fascinating, revealing historical biography, look for Churchill & Son by Josh Ireland.”—AARP magazine
 
“Ireland draws unforgettable sketches of life in the Churchill circle, much like Erik Larson did in The Splendid and the Vile.... Tragedy as well as triumph in this meticulous, fascinating tale of three generations of Churchills.”―Kirkus
 
“A compelling tragedy, but one which casts valuable new light on the outsized human dimensions of both men.... Agonising but excellent.”―The Telegraph
 
“Students of father-son relationships will find this treatise compelling and full of eyebrow-raising anecdotes.”—Booklist
 
“Consistently entertaining and insightful, this deep dive will reward even the most knowledgeable Churchill buff.”—Publishers Weekly

“Highly readable.… This is a story of frustrated ambition and squandered potential. Above all, it is a study of personality. The author vividly portrays the character of Winston and Randolph, showing how their respective personalities interacted in a relationship that could be, in turn, loving and volatile. Ireland evokes this turbulence in an outstanding account.”—Winnipeg Free Press

Library Journal

03/01/2021

In his latest work, Ireland (The Traitors) examines the complicated relationship between Winston Churchill and his only son, Randolph. Ireland points out that the Churchills were close: they dined and drank together; they traveled for business and on holiday; and they confided in each other. Winston, neglected by his own father, loved his son, and desired great success for him. Randolph, in turn, idolized his father, and according to the author, Winston was the only person he truly ever loved. Ireland explores how the events of the Second World War deeply challenged their relationship as Winston rose to become one of Britain's greatest statesmen. He also considers the positive traits they shared, including bravery and intelligence, as well as their faults, like arrogance and a bad temper. Winston felt keenly that he was destined for a higher purpose, and his political career became his priority. Randolph resented having less access to his father, and although he became a war hero, he also became increasingly erratic and prone to drunken outbursts. The rift between father and son never completely healed. Ireland depicts their story in an eloquent, lively manner overall, with sympathy for both of them. VERDICT A comprehensive account for those who like biographies about important historical figures.—Dave Pugl, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL

Kirkus Reviews

2021-01-13
Churchill as family man.

In addition to being the subject of countless biographies, Churchill published hundreds of articles and more than 40 books of his own. In this detailed, engaging narrative, Ireland demonstrates that there is more to be learned about one of the most written-about political figures in history. Exploring the statesman’s relationship with his son, Randolph, the author begins with Churchill’s own famously unhappy childhood, chronicling his parents’ “almost comically detached method of care.” Churchill overcompensated for his father’s neglect by spoiling his son, a poorly behaved boy who became a profligate student and undisciplined adult. For all his gifts and achievements, Randolph led a chaotic life. In one two-week period in 1939, anxious for an heir lest he be killed in the war, he proposed to eight different women, all of whom turned him down. The ninth, Pamela Digby, accepted, and a year later, she became mother to his son, also named Winston. Shortly after, she was forced to rent out their home and take a job to pay down his gambling debts. On the positive side, Randolph was a gifted extempore speaker, effective journalist, and influential counselor to his father—and, later, his biographer. While recounting their relationship, Ireland draws unforgettable sketches of life in the Churchill circle, much like Erik Larson did in The Splendid and the Vile. For example, the family home at Chartwell required nearly 20 servants, as celebrities, politicians, and other “extraordinary people” came and went on a daily basis. Throughout, Ireland is generous with the bijou details: Churchill hated whistling and banned it. When dining alone, he would sometimes have a place set for his cat. His valet would select his clothes, “even pulling on his socks.” After retiring to Pratt’s club after Parliament ended its evening session, he would sometimes “take over the grill and cook the food himself.”

Tragedy as well as triumph in this meticulous, fascinating tale of three generations of Churchills.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177030371
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/30/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

Do Try to Get Papa to Come,

He Has Never Been

One night in November 1947, Winston Churchill was sitting in the long dining room at Chartwell with Randolph and his daughter, Sarah. There was a gap in the conversation, which Randolph filled by "suddenly" pointing to an empty chair and asking his father: "If you had the power to put someone in that chair to join us now, whom would you choose?"

Randolph and Sarah sat back, expecting Winston to say Julius Caesar or Napoleon. Instead, he thought for a moment and then, "very simply," said, "Oh, my father, of course."

Winston followed this by telling them a story. On a foggy winter evening he had been copying a portrait of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, when just as he was trying to capture the twirl of his mustache, he realized that he had materialized before him, looking "as I had read about him in his brief year of triumph." Father and son talked about the ways in which the world had changed since the elder man's death, and the great events that had taken place, until the apparition suddenly said, "I was not going to talk politics with a boy like you. Bottom of the school! Never passed any exams, except into the Cavalry! Wrote me stilted letters. I could not see how you would make your living on the little I could leave you and Jack [Winston's younger brother] . . . But then of course you were very young, and I loved you dearly. Old people are always very impatient with young ones. Fathers always expect their sons to have their virtues without their faults."

As the conversation progressed, it became clear that Lord Randolph assumed his son had lived an undistinguished life as a mid-ranking army officer. You should have gone into politics, he told Winston, "You might even have made a name for yourself." With that the apparition lit a cigarette. As the match flared, he vanished.

Neither Randolph nor Sarah was sure at that moment whether Winston was recalling a particular dream or "elaborating on some fanciful idea that had struck him earlier," although in the months before, he had complained of endless nightmares in which Lord Randolph had appeared to him.

But the story, which his family called "The Dream" and which Winston referred to only by its original heading, "Private Article," left both brother and sister hugely excited, and they urged their father to commit it to paper. Over the next few months, he worked obsessively at drafting and redrafting it. Then, for reasons he never disclosed, Winston locked it away in a private box for ten years. It only emerged, Randolph wrote, just before Winston's death, when he scribbled some final changes on the manuscript.

That Lord Randolph was on his mind even as his own life came to a close is not surprising. Winston never stopped thinking about the man he had hero-worshipped ever since he was a boy. He was, Winston would later say, "the greatest and most powerful influence in my early life," a fearless, dynamic politician who died at the age of just forty-six. Winston learned his father's speeches by heart; took his "politics unquestioningly from him"; and every step in his own career was accompanied by an insistent voice wondering whether Lord Randolph would have approved of the decisions he made.

The problem was that while he was alive, Lord Randolph barely spared his son a second glance.

Lord Randolph cut an unforgettable figure. His head was large, his body short and frail, his walrus mustache was extravagant, and he was "addicted to dressing loudly," but what struck those who met him most deeply was the pair of bulging eyes that gazed uncompromisingly back at them. He suffered from exophthalmos, which caused his eyeballs to protrude and made him seem as if he was looking at the world in a supercilious, offensive fashion. Which, in truth, he generally was. When he wanted, he could be charming and funny, but more often, especially when confronted by those he did not know, or disapproved of, he slipped into a glacial aristocratic hauteur.

The second son of the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Randolph had struggled at Eton and began his time at Oxford badly. He drank, broke windows, and chased women. "I don't like ladies at all," he said. "I like rough women who dance and sing and drink-the rougher the better."

And yet he also possessed certain gifts. His memory was extraordinary. He could read a page from, say, Gibbon, and then repeat it verbatim. He was clever, quick, and witty. These gifts were sufficient to gain him a respectable degree, which was considered so unusual for the son of a duke that it was immediately predicted that he would go on to achieve great things. (His position in society meant that an arrest for drunkenness and assault was something that could be overlooked.)

For a while it seemed that he would live a life governed by his worst qualities. A Grand Tour was followed by a brief period as an idler and a carouser. He was also afflicted by melancholy and bad nerves, and for a time these forced him to withdraw almost entirely from society. Instead, he read French novels and smoked Turkish cigarettes "until his tongue was sore."

But then he stood for his father's seat of Woodstock in 1874. In the same year, he made an impulsive marriage to Jennie Jerome, an American heiress, daughter of the financier Leonard Jerome. Dark, vivacious, and magnificent, Jennie had an irresistible feline quality. Margot Asquith wrote, "She had a forehead like a panther's and great wild eyes that looked through you." Viscount D'Abernon was another who compared her to a panther, but also noted "a cultivated intelligence unknown to the jungle."

The young couple were popular and sociable, and neither the arrival of their first son, Winston, in November 1874, nor their shallow pockets (Disraeli observed to Queen Victoria that Lord Randolph's father was "not rich for a duke"; Leonard Jerome, his wife would one day claim, did not himself know how many millions he had made or lost) prevented them from entering fashionable society.

They set up home on Charles Street with a combined income of £3,000 (the average wage at the time was around £50 a year) and then spent all the money they had. Lord Randolph, like most of his ancestors, liked to gamble-he played cards, bet on horses, and was a familiar presence in all the casinos around the coast of France-and Jennie knew her way around a Paris couturier.

Before long, they were negotiating loans and had been forced to put their home on the market. None of this stopped their fun.

"We seemed to live in a whirl of gaieties and excitement," Jennie later recalled. "Many were the delightful balls I went to, which, unlike those of the present day, lasted till five o'clock in the morning." On those rare occasions when they did not have a party to go to, they hosted exclusive dinner parties that they could not really afford to put on. The Prince of Wales was an occasional guest.

Lord Randolph ignored his political career, and both he and Jennie ignored their child. As Randolph noted in his biography of Winston: "The neglect and lack of interest in him shown by his parents were remarkable, even judged by the standards of late Victorian and Edwardian days." Whereas most of their aristocratic peers established arrangements (often somewhat grudgingly) that meant they saw their children at set times, Lord Randolph and Jennie's hedonism meant that they avoided even this.

The couple became famous for their love of good living, and Lord Randolph became famous for his stunning insolence. At a dinner at Lord Salisbury's, he was overheard complaining, within earshot of Lady Salisbury, about the "bad dinner, cold plates, beastly wine." On another occasion, when cornered by a bore at a club, he rang the bell for a member of staff and said, "Waiter-please listen to the end of Colonel B. 's story."

It was this insolence that brought their gilded existence to an abrupt end in 1876. Lord Randolph's behavior in the furor provoked by his brother's affair with Lady Aylesford so offended the Prince of Wales that he refused to see not only the Churchills but anybody who had received them. Socially they ceased to exist.

The situation was temporarily resolved when Disraeli prevailed upon Lord Randolph's father to become Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and to take his son with him. When they returned from their chastening exile four years later, Lord Randolph had changed. Although Lord Randolph realized he had gone too far, he could not, Winston later wrote, forgive the way so many former friends had turned their backs on him. His formerly "genial and gay" nature "contracted a stern and bitter quality, a harsh contempt for what is called 'Society,' and an abiding antagonism to rank and authority."

Now began his astonishing rise. Returning to politics, he began working at breakneck speed. He and a small group of sympathetic Tories known as the Fourth Party made an endless stream of brutal attacks on both the Liberal government and those sitting in opposition on the Conservative front bench. There were days when his actions so outraged the House of Commons that barely a member would address him, and yet he "continued along his sensational path with cold indifference."

Lord Randolph was brazen and impulsive but possessed a charisma and energy that set him apart from almost everyone else. Equal parts music hall performer and guttersnipe, he was a showman who mocked his enemies in the political establishment, flailing his arms to make points and riding a bicycle across the House of Commons terrace.

As the standard-bearer for a progressive vein of conservatism that became known as "Tory Democracy" ("Trust the people, and the people will trust you!"), he supercharged the electoral fortunes of a Conservative Party that had looked tired and listless, and gained an almost unrivaled celebrity: workmen smiled at his mustache and doffed their caps when his carriage passed by, and at meetings, people would greet him with shouts of "Yahoo Randy!" and "Give it to 'em hot!" William Gladstone called him the greatest Conservative since William Pitt.

After the election of 1886, another campaign in which his efforts were central to the Conservative Party's victory, he was made chancellor of the Exchequer, the youngest man to hold the position since William Pitt, although it was plain that his ambition did not stop there. "There is only one place," Lord Randolph said, "that is Prime Minister. I like to be boss. I like to hold the reins." It seemed inevitable that he would get his wish sooner rather than later.

It was about this time that Lord Randolph's freckled, pug-nosed eldest son, who had talked incessantly since the moment he learned his first words and was incapable of sitting still for a minute at a time, developed a precocious interest in politics. He read newspapers avidly (alongside more conventional schoolboy passions such as collecting stamps, autographs, and goldfish), hoovering up accounts of the Belgian conquest of the Congo, the Haymarket riot in Chicago, the death of Chinese Gordon, the erection of the Statue of Liberty, and Gottlieb Daimler's invention of the first practical automobile.

But the stories he followed most closely concerned his brilliant, reckless father. Winston read every word of Lord Randolph's speeches. He bought a scrapbook and pasted into it the cartoons in which "Randy" was depicted. Winston was a feverish advocate for his father and his father's party, passing on pieces of news that he felt sure would please him. "I have been out riding," Winston informed Lord Randolph in April 1885, "with a gentleman who thinks Gladstone is a brute and thinks that 'the one with the curly mustache ought to be Premier.' . . . Every body wants your Autograph but I can only say I will try, and I should like you to sign your name in full at the end of your letter. I only want a scribble as I know that you are very busy indeed." On another occasion, when he was taken to the pantomime, where an actor playing his father was hissed, Winston burst into tears and turned in a rage upon another member of the audience, shouting, "Stop that row, you snub-nosed radical."

His adoration was not returned. Lord Randolph barely seemed to notice his son; he did not even know how old he was. When he did take time to speak to him, it was to upbraid him for his faults. One of Jennie's sisters noted that when Lord Randolph was forced to visit his boys during "the children's hour" he treated them like a general reviewing his troops.

Jennie, who once confided to friends that she ignored her son until he grew up and became "interesting," offered little more affection or attention. In 1882, when he was seven, Winston had been sent to St. George's School in Ascot-a prep school designed to get boys ready for Eton. Close as Ascot was to their home in Mayfair (a short hansom ride, an even quicker train ride), neither Jennie nor Randolph could find the time to see their son, who wrote them heartrending letters.

"come and see me soon"

"Come & see me soon dear Mama."

"I am wondering when you are coming to see me?"

"You must send someone to see me."

Sometimes they replied, more often they did not. Much of the work of looking after Winston was handed off to a spinster called Mrs. Elizabeth Everest, whom he knew as Woom (the result of a failed attempt to say "woman"). Winston would forever be grateful for the immense love and care he received from her. "My nurse was my confidante," he wrote. "It was to her I poured out my many troubles." Her portrait hung in his room until he died. When in later life he wrote about the love Mrs. Everest showed him, it was with a kind of wonder, as if he was surprised that anybody could have thought him worthy of such affection.

And yet this almost comically detached method of care from his parents did nothing to interrupt the veneration he felt for Jennie and Lord Randolph. Of his mother he wrote, famously, "She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly-but at a distance." He considered her to be like "a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power," and his father was accorded similar mythical status: it appeared to Winston that his father owned "the key to everything or almost everything worth having."

The bewilderment and distress he felt was not directed at his parents but transformed into behavior that appalled both masters and his priggish colleagues. A school report noted, "He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere." He was flogged for taking sugar from the pantry. In response he stole the headmaster's "sacred straw hat" and kicked it to pieces. His dancing master remembered "a small, red-haired pupil, the naughtiest boy in the class; I used to think he was the naughtiest small boy in the world."

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