Churchill Randolph Spencer - Jennie

The American beauty who became the toastand the scandalof two
continents, ruled an age and raised a sonWinston Churchill
who shaped history

RALPH G. MARTIN

2008 by Ralph G. Martin
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Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following works:
My Early Life by W. S. Churchill, published by Charles Scribners Sons and by Odhams Books Ltd. (The Hamlyn Group).
My Life and Loves, by Frank Harris, reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. 1925 Frank Harris, 1953 Nellie Harris, 1963 Arthur Leonard Ross, as executor of the Frank Harris estate.
Winston S. Churchill: Youth, 18741900, by Randolph S. Churchill, reprinted by permission of the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Company.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission granted by C & T Publications, Ltd., to quote from the letter written by Winston S. Churchill about his mothers death.

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by Sir Martin Gilbert

More than forty-two years have passed since Ralph Martin began delving away in Britain on what was to become his master work: this biography of Winston Churchills mother. I remember our visit together to the palatial but cold and draughty halls of Blenheim, where the tenth Duke of Marlborough, puzzled by the perseverance and zeal of his American visitor, gave him access to his famed Muniment Room (the vast repository of the Churchill family archives, seen by so few people, in which there lay archival treasures almost beyond compare). Here were the many hundreds of letters written by the remarkable woman who was Churchills mother, but was so much more besides.

Jennie Jerome, Lady Randolph Churchill, Mrs. George Cornwallis West, Mrs. Montagu Porch was a woman calling out for a biography. She had died forty-three years before Ralph Martin and I entered this room of wonders, and later that day stood in the pouring rain at her graveside in the tiny parish churchyard at Bladon, within sight of the ornate towers of Blenheim. The mother of Winston, she was also the mother of Jack, her seldom written about younger son. Her American parents, family, and ancestors were shadowy figuresif they were figures at allto those who were coming to know every facet of her famous sons life and career. She existed only in her own volume of reminiscences, a book seldom found, let alone read, and in Winstons memoirs of his own early life, in which he wrote the bitter-sweet words: She shone for me like the evening star. I loved her dearlybut at a distance.

Ralph Martin was determined to change all this. I have in front of me a file of the letters that he wrote to me while writing Jennies story. They are full of the enthusiasm and immediacy of a journalist (his earlier, wartime career), a detective, and a novelist combinedideal characteristics for a biographer. He was no stranger to the demands and challenges of writing about the past. He had been writing books for twenty years before he turned to Jennie. Each of his eighteen previous books, including pictorial biographies of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, were marked by the endless exuberance of search and discovery. Jennie was to be no exception; the book pulses with energy as the author leads us from her cradle to relatively early grave, at the age of sixty-seven, of a woman who finally emergesunder his guiding handfrom the shadow of being a great mans mother, to being a woman in her own right.

And what a woman she was. Ralph Martin explores the many extraordinary worlds that she inhabited: the United States at the time of the Civil War; Paris at the time of the Prussian siege; London when her marriage to a dukes sonalbeit not the elder one who would succeed to the dukedomwas the talk and the gossip of the town. In a passage that raised eyebrows when it was published, the author reflects on the fact that Winston Churchill was born seven months and two weeks after his parents marriage: It is possible, of course, that the birth really was premature. However, it is not difficult to imagine that the two lovers, with passions intensified by their long separation and the fear their chances of marriage were dribbling down the legal drain, might determine to force the marriage, or simply let their emotions overwhelm them.

As Ralph Martin pointed out, with a full wealth of documentation, in the months before the marriage the respective fathers had been having an acrimonious and prolonged legal wrangle over the marriage settlement. When the wedding took placenot, as expected, amid gilded pageantry in England, but in the British Embassy in Paris before a small number of witnessesLord Randolphs ducal parents did not attend.

As I watched this book in preparation, I learned something of the biographers craft that was to serve me well in my own future work then more than two years awayas Churchill Biographer. It was Ralph Martin who taught me just how much could be found by making contact with those who had lived through the period as relatives and friends of the subject of the biography. This approach was not new, but Ralph raised it to new heights. Jennies favorite grandson, Peregrine, the son of Jack, handed over a substantial bundle of letters from his grandmother. Her nephew, Sir Shane Leslie, had yet more written materialand many fine personal anecdotes. Door after door opened to the man from Long Island.

So rich was the documentation Ralph Martin uncovered, and the range of memoirs and contemporary accounts that he ferreted out on two continents, that he decided to break the book into two, with the first volume ending at the death of Jennies first husband, Lord Randolph Churchill. This was a wise decision, for it raised the profile of Jennie in the public eye as someone whose story was interesting enough to merit two volumes, the second showing her life as Winstons strongest supporter during his struggle to build himself a career, and her own second and third marriages. From the moment of their publication, these books made Jennie a household name.

Among the achievements of Ralph Martins research in the United States was to tell the story of Winston Churchills American grandparents and their heritage. The grandson of a duke was also the grandson of The King of Wall Streetone of nineteen millionaires in a New York of half a million peopleand the great-great-great-grandson of an American Indian woman. Indeed, Winstons American grandmother was known in the family as Sitting Bull. Jennies two sisters also married Englishmen. Ralph Martin delves deftly into their story, and into the whole of Jennies world. Reviewing volume one in the Washington Post, Kay Halle, a good friend of the Churchill family, described his researches as conducted in greater depth and with more honesty and psychological perception than any previous biographer.