Josh Ireland - Churchill & Son

The Traitors

Winston Churchills hands were very white, delicate, and slender, so slender that the triple-banded signet ring he liked to wear would sometimes slip from his fingers. One person who met him during the Second World War was surprised that a pair of such soft hands was holding off the Nazis so forcefully.

He was not alone. Many people, when meeting Churchill for the first time, were confounded by his hands beauty, especially as he grew older and the rest of his body became coarse and bloated. Winston knew this and was proud of it. He could laugh off most insults but was hurt by a Punch cartoon in which his hands appeared podgy and shapeless: Look at my hands, he complained to his doctor, Lord Moran. I have beautiful hands.

Another thing people noticed was his hands constant motion: the way he held his cigarbetween the first finger and thumband rolled it untiringly around the rim of his coffee cup without seeming to have any idea what he was doing, or his habit of breaking matches.

Small, restless hands were a feature he shared with his only son, Randolph, who resembled him in so many ways. When Winston looked at Randolph, he knew that he had given him, or encouraged within him, the best elements of his own personality: kindness, originality, eccentricity, heedless bravery, and a flamboyant disregard for anybody elses opinion. He would also have seen colossal faults: arrogance, recklessness, an uncontrollable temper, and a perplexing weakness for self-sabotage.

There were other people about whom Winston Churchill felt as tenderly as he did his son and there were other people who provoked in him insensate rage, but Randolph was the only person in his life to elicit both emotions.

He could draw from his father thoughts that read almost like love letters (I have been very remiss in writing to you, but that is not because you are not constantly in my thoughts... I have so many things to tell you that I hardly know where to begin), and yet he was also capable of making him so angry that those watching worried Winston would have a heart attack.

Randolph got under his fathers skin, and in doing so, he left him exposed and raw, prey to gusts of emotion that he could not control. It was Randolph in whom his father confided his fears, plans, and secrets. Whether they were friends or enemies (they could sometimes be both during the course of a single dinner), Winston was never more himself than in Randolphs company.

Randolph was glorious in his own way: a giver and devourer of pleasure, the kind of man who exploded into rooms, trailing whisky tumblers and mischief. He was born beautiful, blessed with eloquence, energy, and a photographic memory that allowed him to recite verbatim whole passages of classic literature and history.

When Randolph was young, his father encouraged him, praised him, told him that the future was his to seize. Winston was determined that his son would not suffer the same neglect that had blighted his own childhood. He was also determined that between them they would build a dynasty to equal any in history. Winston was obsessed with his son, but he was also consumed by his own sense of destiny, his belief that fate had singled him out for a higher purpose. Everything and everyone were secondary to this. Randolph, whose loyalty to his father was so extreme that it came to hinder almost every aspect of his existence, would learn this to his cost.

This book is the story of their lives together, and how Winston built and broke his son.

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 mans 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 [Winstons 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.