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 Remembering Winston Churchill II
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| Rector and Greenwich Street. 3:30 PM. Photo: JH. |
Wednesday 3/3/10. Cool but a warmer day for late winter in New York, with grey clouds harboring rain that left only damp pavements and roadways.
I didn’t know Winston Churchill II, who died yesterday after battling cancer, although I was in his company a number of times at dinner parties here in New York in the last several years. He was married to a very nice woman named Luce.
He was a good-looking man, flushed sunny face, slightly balding white hair that naturally took blondish tints in the sun. Average height (I’d guess five-nine or ten); well-formed but perhaps prone to be stocky. I remember his figure well because he was ... Winston Churchill. A name I and two generations of Americans regarded as something of a god. His grandfather, I’m talking about. What’s in a name? A whole life; a career, a full-time business. That sounds cynical but that is the nature of fame and politics. Think Roosevelt. Think Kennedy. Think Bush.
Mr. Churchill had not only a remarkable grandfather, an allegedly brilliant father with a few other foibles to color the mix; but a mother who was just about The Courtesan of the 20th Century. And a very charming one - I can attest humbly - known at the end of her life as Pamela Harriman.
So during those brief times when I was in the company of Mr. Churchill who as the son of the son of the second son carried his sanctified family name sans title – in a world where titles matter, it was always curious to see how he comported himself. In the company of mainly rich Americans who know little if anything about names with titles so it doesn’t matter. His two names were enough.
The Churchills are one of the great families of modern British history, as we all know, dating back to John, the first duke, England’s legendary general who was born in the middle of the 17th century, and whose palace, Blenheim, was a gift from a grateful nation (and Queen Anne – Churchill’s wife Sarah’s best friend) named after a battle he won for England against Louis XIV. John died in 1722. His legacy was a dukedom (Marlborough) and the legend. For the next two hundred years, the family lived off that in a variety of clever ways (marrying for money, etc.). Until Winston, son of the American, Jenny Jerome (of Madison Square, New York City) and Lord Randolph, second son of the 8th Duke of Marlborough. Winston Churchill, son of a second son, reinforced the family name and legend and nevertheless, despite being without title, outshone all the dukes who came before him except for the first.
This was the heritage of Winston II. He served in Commons, as you will read about in the following obituary. He annoyed people with certain positions and certain habits. But such is life. He evidently annoyed his mother when he wanted to divorce his first wife after having an affair with an American woman of certain notoriety. He annoyed his countrymen when he made money off his grandfather’s papers, and probably annoyed a lot of relatives also (families are families). The story going around at the time of his mother’s death was that she left half to Winston’s divorced wife Minnie, and half to her son and only child Winston because she didn’t trust him to look after his wife and family once in the hands of another woman (Mama knew whence she spoke, as we know).
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| Jul 01, 1952: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sitting in chair in garden of 10 Downing Street with his grandson, Winston Churchill II. Photo: Carl Mydans/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images. |
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The message inherent in that action by mama tells you much about the man and what his road of life was like. He was an only child of two very strong, self-centered, willful people. Maternal and paternal were likely remote qualities in both individuals. By the time he was a little boy his mother had had famous affairs as the mistress of Rothschild, Agnelli, Whitney and Harriman, not to mention a host of others who fell under her spell. By the time he was a young man, she’d married twice and become a Harriman. Not unlike many other men and women and quite unlike those who can free themselves of the umbilical cord of those with the purse strings.
So, with all that in mind as I spent casual time at table in the company of Winston Churchill II, I saw a charming man who managed to be pleasant but very unobtrusive, with a very nice wife who seemed very supportive. If he didn’t have a famous name I would have pegged him as a Wall Street banker, very possibly Morgan back before it was known as JP Morgan Chase.
What I did not see and did not know was that Mr. Churchill led a fascinating, big life, wisely taking full advantage of his distinguished connections and working earnestly, if at times cloyingly, at carrying on the great name of his grandfather and father. This led to a very interesting life, as you will read.
Luce and Winston Churchill were very popular in New York and Palm Beach. The latter years of his life with Luce were evidently happy and fulfilling for the man. He became ill several months ago and in the past few weeks it has been said that he was near death. His devoted wife was by his side, till the end.
The following is Winston Churchill’s obituary from the Telegraph of London. There will be many tributes and memorials and obituaries of the man but I doubt many, if any can match this:
Faced with the choice of emulating Sir Winston or pursuing a career outside politics, he opted for the former, proved competent if mercurial, but lacked the exceptional flair to establish himself in his own right.
Churchill was at a disadvantage not only through his legacy but because his preoccupation with it led some to consider him bumptious; alone of more than 650 MPs, he insisted on signing Commons motions without using his Christian name.
He caused a furor in 1995 when he negotiated the payment to the Churchill family of £12.5 million in National Lottery funds for his grandfather’s personal papers to remain at Churchill College, Cambridge, rather than be sold abroad, himself retaining the copyright for 20 years. It had not been widely appreciated, even among historians, that the papers were eligible for sale as the family had already received £393,000 for them in 1946.
There were suggestions that Churchill needed the cash to offset his losses as a “name” at Lloyds, to finance his divorce from his first wife or even to bail out his mother, Pamela Harriman, who had almost exhausted the £100 million railroad fortune of her final husband. The Churchill trustees insisted first that he would only receive some of the investment income, then said they would consider a request to fund the divorce.
Randolph Churchill had observed of his son: “His name is such a disadvantage”, but young Winston saw both sides: “A famous name can be terrible if you are lousy, but if you are any good, it helps.” It may have seen him bullied at school, but later it did secure him the best tables at restaurants. It did not always carry weight, however; when after the Gulf War he introduced himself to a squaddie in the desert, he received the reply: “Yes, and I’m Rommel.”
It would have been difficult for Churchill to escape his legacy even had he tried. He was a favourite grandchild; Sir Winston once asked his tobacconist to send some cigars “of good quality, but not quite as good as mine” for his birthday, and he was a valued bricklayer’s mate at Chartwell.
From his appearance as page at the wedding of the tenth Duke of Marlborough’s daughter Lady Sarah Spencer Churchill in May 1943, he was part of the Churchill legend. He was one of three generations of Churchills to attend the Coronation, as page to Viscount Portal; in his teens he dined with Aristotle Onassis and Greta Garbo; and he accompanied his father to the ceremony in 1963 at which President Kennedy signed the legislation making Sir Winston an American citizen. The pictures at his first wedding in July 1964 were the last taken of Sir Winston.
Churchill was frequently at the bedside during his grandfather’s final coma; his elder son Randolph was born two days before the great man died. At the funeral he and his father walked beside the gun carriage, and afterward Lady Churchill came to stay. He kept the flame alive as a trustee of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, an honorary fellow of Churchill and an honorary LLD of Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, where Sir Winston’s “Iron Curtain” speech was delivered.
He was quick to protect his grandfather’s reputation. When in 1968 Rolf Hochhuth’s play Soldiers accused Sir Winston of complicity in the wartime death of the Polish leader General Sikorski, Churchill led the protests against this “ungrounded libel”; he was trenchant four years later in attacking a BBC programme suggesting that Sir Winston connived in the sinking of the Lusitania, and in 1981 when the BBC (again) claimed he had planned biological warfare against Germany.
But his most celebrated defence of his grandfather came in the Commons on November 30 1978, when James Callaghan, recalling Sir Winston’s role in the 1911 South Wales pit dispute, urged him not to pursue “the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy”. Churchill demanded that the prime minister withdraw, as Sir Winston had not sent in troops as Labour tradition maintained; Speaker George Thomas declared that as an old boy of Tonypandy grammar school he had never imagined he would have the last word on the issue.
Churchill at the end of his parliamentary career produced His Father’s Son, a supportive, but fair, biography of Randolph Churchill. But he also had his own reputation to protect. He sued successfully for libel several times, notably when the The Observer claimed during the Spycatcher affair that he was one of two Conservative MPs hired by MI5 to undermine Harold Wilson. However when lurid details of his affair with Soraya Khashoggi, British ex-wife of the Saudi arms dealer, appeared in the tabloids he had the sense not to sue.
Politically Churchill was a Right wing maverick, urging Mrs Thatcher to take a tougher line with the Russians and the unions and bring back hanging. But he was never predictable: in 1988 he rebelled against the ending of free sight and dental checks on the NHS and four years later he campaigned against Michael Heseltine’s 31 pit closures.
Winston Spencer Churchill was born at Chequers on October 10 1940, days after the victorious conclusion to the Battle of Britain which his grandfather hailed as the nation’s “finest hour”. He was the only child of Randolph Churchill’s wartime marriage to the young Pamela Digby, who would enjoy a near-scandalous romantic career and eventually, after outliving the much older Averell Harriman, become President Clinton’s ambassador in Paris.
When his parents divorced in 1945, Churchill remained with his mother in Grosvenor Square, from where he had been taken to see his Aunt Mary (Soames) commanding an anti-aircraft battery in the park. At nine he was sent “because of his asthma” to Le Rosey in Switzerland, where he developed a lifelong expertise at winter sports — he went down the Cresta Run at 11 — before following his Digby forebears to Ludgrove and Eton – not Harrow, like Sir Winston. In 1954 he conveyed to his grandfather at Downing Street an 80th birthday gift of two watercolours of the 1879 Zululand campaign – a gift from Eton to “the greatest of all Harrovians”.
After a brief, unpaid job as a copy reader on the Wall Street Journal while staying with his mother in New York, Churchill went up to Oxford. At Christ Church he avoided politics, concentrating on his skiing as secretary of the university team and coming third in the British championships. He became a keen amateur pilot. When he sought to fly around Africa with a friend, his grandfather objected; when young Winston pointed out that by that age he had charged with the 21st Lancers at Omdurman the old man conceded: “I suppose you have a point.”
Graduating with a fourth in History, he followed his grandfather’s young footsteps as a war correspondent. Over 12 years he saw action and observed conditions in the Yemen, Borneo, Vietnam, the Middle East — writing a successful book on the Six-Day War with his father — Czechoslovakia, Biafra — his reports of “indiscriminate bombing” sparking a parliamentary row — China and finally, for The Daily Telegraph, Portugal after the collapse of the Salazar regime.
He had narrow scrapes, mostly when flying his own plane; the one time he was attacked was by the Chicago police when reporting the 1968 Democratic Convention. He also — like his grandfather and father before him (though less lucratively) — began a series of North American lecture tours which continued for three decades.
In 1961 Sir Winston introduced him to the Commons, but when the former Prime Minister announced his retirement from the House two years later, Churchill eschewed his seat at Woodford. In the 1964 election (the only one in the 20th century, 1997 apart, not fought by a Churchill) he was personal assistant to Edward Heath, and in September 1967 he was selected to challenge an 8,300 Labour majority at Manchester Gorton.
Churchill fought a strong by-election campaign, falling short by just 577 votes. He had expected to do well; visiting the Beyer-Peacock locomotive works, he noted that every engineer had a copy of his election address taped above his machine. An elderly Guardian reporter cautioned: “Aye, lad, but never forget: Monty had a picture of Rommel in his bloody caravan.”
When Randolph Churchill died in 1968, Churchill wanted to take on the biography of Sir Winston that his father had begun. But Lord Hartwell, proprietor of the Telegraph, with whom the decision lay, engaged the academic Martin Gilbert, who went on to produce a classic.
In June 1970, less than six years after his grandfather had left the Commons, Churchill was elected for Stretford, Lancashire, overturning a Labour majority of 3,365. Despite a tight race in October 1974 he represented Stretford, and its successor Davyhulme, until the constituency was abolished in 1997, leaving him without a seat.
In the House he successfully promoted a Bill requiring drivers to take out insurance for their passengers, and became a key member of the Parliamentary ski team and chairman of the Commons Flying Club (as a volunteer St John Ambulance pilot he flew several kidneys overseas for emergency operations).
Julian Amery, Minister of Housing and Construction, appointed him his Parliamentary private secretary; in February 1972 Churchill became embroiled in a furor after “planting” tame parliamentary questions supplied to order by Amery’s civil servants.
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| Luce and Winston Churchill in Palm Beach. |
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Churchill moved with Amery to the Foreign Office later that year. But he wanted to take a hawkish line on world issues — particularly the Middle East and human rights in the Communist bloc — and after publicly questioning the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, he resigned in November 1973. He strongly defended the Army in Ulster, demanded the return of the death penalty for terrorism and, in 1975, forced the sacking of two announcers on the BBC Portuguese service for broadcasting pro-communist propaganda.
This activity impressed Margaret Thatcher, and in November 1976 she appointed him a front-bench defence spokesman. The role did not come naturally to him; his manner was staccato rather than persuasive, and he had a tendency to say what other Tories only thought, as when he accused the Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen of “treacherous” talk over Rhodesia, and urged China to form a common front with Britain against the Soviets.
In November 1978 Mrs Thatcher sacked him “with great personal sadness” for voting against sanctions on Rhodesia; though he did not know it, his chance of a ministerial career had gone. Churchill hoped his stand would earn him a place on the party’s backbench defence committee; he was heavily defeated, but was elected to the 1922 Committee executive by the new intake after the Conservatives returned to power in 1979, remaining on it for seven years.
Late that year, Churchill’s two-year affair with Mrs Khashoggi hit the headlines after three police officers were tried at the Old Bailey on blackmail charges and Churchill figured as “Mr X”. The tabloids had a field day, the Daily Star dwelling on a 100mph drive along an American freeway with Mrs Khashoggi — referred to by the Telegraph in one of its more unfortunate misprints as Mrs Khashaggi — telling him: “The faster you go, the more I’ll take off.” Churchill, who was with his wife on a humanitarian mission to Kampuchea when the story broke, returned to accuse the Star of a “farrago of lies”.
Politically he attempted to compensate by campaigning for tougher trade union legislation ; by asserting (23 years before Tony Blair went to war over the issue) that Iraq could produce an atom bomb; and by launching an air taxi business with his wife.
He jeopardized his relationship with Mrs Thatcher by attacking first her policy over Rhodesia and then her sacking of the Navy Minister Keith Speed for resisting the cuts which would later be blamed for encouraging the Argentine invasion of the Falklands; he even accused her of having done less for defence than Harold Wilson. |
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| Winston Churchill at his flat with a statue of his grandfather. |
But on the eve of the conflict he was appointed Conservative coordinator on defence and disarmament, to rally the party behind government policies. In the short term he was an effective cheerleader for the war; over three years his vigorous attacks on CND helped turn back the unilateralist tide in public opinion; he also organised Radio Free Kabul, broadcasting dissident propaganda to Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
In his later years in Parliament, Churchill pressed hard for Britain to intervene in Bosnia; campaigned for a better deal for British pensioners overseas; and demanded an end to the “relentless flow” of Asian immigrants in an inflammatory speech whose statistics he immediately had to retract.
When the Davyhulme constituency disappeared, and as the row broke over the Churchill papers, he made few efforts to find another seat.
Winston Churchill married first, in 1964, Minnie d’Erlanger; they had two sons and two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1997, in which year he married, secondly, Luce Engelen.
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