Subscribe now and receive weekly newsletters with educational materials, new courses, interesting posts, popular books, and much more!
Articles
A new expanded edition of The Churchills by Celia and John Lee
The Lee epic
Celia & John Lee, The Churchills: A Family Portrait. London: Lume Books, 2021, 412 pages. Paperback, $16.99, Kindle $3.99.
Celia and John Lee are, respectively, biographers of Lady Jean Hamilton and Sir Ian Hamilton, well known friends and associates of the Churchill Family. The Churchills is a revised version of their 2010 account by the same title. Their aim is to make Winston’s parents, Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome, and his brother Jack, less of a back story. Pushing them to the foreground provides a better integrated portrait of Churchill family life as foundational to Winston’s later fame. (The Lees published Winston & Jack: The Churchill Brothers in 2007).
Standard sources are not ignored; in fact, the acknowledgements are a veritable Who’s Who of Churchill scholars. But the Lee book specializes in underutilized or even unused sources. Prominent among them are the papers of Jack’s son Peregrine and the Hamiltons, especially Lady Jean’s diaries.
Facts and tall tales
Even though there is nothing especially new in the account of Lord Randolph and Jennie, a more accurate context emerges. Celia and John Lee show them to have been no better or worse as parents than others of their class. The authors suggest that such notions come in part from the misleading autobiographies of Jennie (1907) and Winston (1930).
Some issues or “stories” about the parents are in the Authors’ Note, more of an epilogue (five entries in the 2010 edition, four in 2021). The first is whether Lord Randolph died of syphilis. The authors reject the theory, using the groundbreaking work of John Mather MD, and the evidence of Jennie’s relations with other men. They also effectively dispute the notions that Winston was born prematurely and that Jack had another father. While Jennie had several affairs, including with the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), American politician Bourke Cockran, and several military officers, they were nowhere near the prodigious number alleged by critics. What is odd is the book’s resurrection of Jennie’s supposed native American heritage, dismissed as a family joke in the 2010 edition. The legend was decisively dispelled in Elizabeth Snell’s 1994 The Churchills: Pioneers and Politicians (1994), and Richard Langworth’s Winston Churchill: Myth and Reality (2016). The Lee 2021 edition accepts the story, with no documentary sources cited.
Jack and Winston
John Strange Spencer-Churchill (1880-1947) is revealed as a real unsung hero of the family. A better student and more financially stable than his mother or brother, his career as a stockbroker and the family “brains” often staved off financial disaster (227). Like Winston, he served in both the Boer War and First World War. He was mentioned in dispatches in both, winning the DSO and France’s Croix de Guerre in the latter. The Lee portrayal shows Jack as a brave and enterprising officer. Winston loved him, but strangely failed to acknowledge his important assistance on Lord Randolph Churchill and The World Crisis.
Sadly, Jack and his wife Lady Gwendolyn (“Goonie”) both died too young, leaving their stories untold. Fortunately, much was preserved in their son Peregrine’s archive, which the Lees thoroughly mined. With it, they can reveal that the previously unknown youth Winston saved in an 1892 Swiss boating accident was actually Jack. They also show that in 1914, Jack learned that his mother had been cheating her sons out of hundreds of pounds a year, which they should have been receiving from their father’s estate income (246). An oddity is turning Winston’s short story of a ghostly visit by his long-dead father into a conscious event (342).
Winston’s own life is concisely handled. He is criticized over Antwerp and Gallipoli in the First World War. Postwar, the Lee critique is over the “Black and Tans” in Ireland, intervention in Russia and opposition to Indian self-government. They praise his work as Munitions Minister (1917-18) and in the Irish Treaty (1921-22). Amusingly, they apply the family motto “Faithful but Unfortunate” to his love life before he met Clementine Hozier (230).
The new edition
The 2021 edition adds a three-part Chapter 20 on the tragic losses of 1921: Baby Marigold, Jennie, Clementine’s brother Bill, family friends. We read of the pregnant Clementine’s 1918 offer, to the childless Lady Jean Hamilton, of one her babies should she have twins. This gesture was apparently unknown to both husbands. The Lee book also reveals that Winston and Clementine had a burial plot reserved next to Marigold’s at Kensal Green Cemetery. But Winston later decided to be buried in the family plot in Bladon, along with his parents, Jack and Goonie. In 2020, almost a century after her death, Marigold was reburied there with her family (310). The Kensal plots are empty now, but we read of Winston quietly sitting at her grave during the Second World War. As Mary Soames wrote, the little girl occupied a quiet corner of both their hearts.
The new edition will cause a stir in how the family has heretofore been interpreted. It is well worth reading despite idiosyncrasies noted, and a few odd mistakes. For example, the Lees state that the British created the first concentration camps in South Africa during Boer War. Actually the concept was originated by the Spanish some few years before in Cuba. In 1918 they refer to a British Ministry of Defence (274; UK spelling), which did not exist until 1964. (There were however Defence Ministers from 1940, when Winston created that role.) Finally, women over 30 got the vote in 1918 (275), but only those with minimal property qualifications. The index in the 2010 edition is unfortunately lacking, though the photographs and endnotes are very useful.
The author
Mr. Shepherd, an archivist and historian, is a long-time contributor to The Churchill Project.