Is it any wonder that the lad found that school days at Eton couldn’t compare with dinner conversation at home among the likes of David Lloyd George and Max Beaverbrook? Winston egged on Randolph’s verbal combativeness and instinct for argument. History was repeating, or at least rhyming with, itself: Although Winston and his father, Lord Randolph, differed in their approaches to fatherhood, both produced sons who rewarded them with hero worship. “Slapping him made no difference he even used to confess to crimes he had not committed so he could show that nothing they could do would affect him,” Ireland writes, referring to the futile efforts of nursery maids to corral the youngster. Simply put, Randolph, given a wide berth by his indulgent pop, gradually morphed into a little devil and then a larger devil. While Winston’s overly generous approach to childrearing was benign in and of itself, it seems to have instilled in his male heir a certain full-throated obnoxiousness. “He kept a jealous watch on nursery life, and his letters are full of delight at his babies’ growth, and in noting their mannerisms.” “He was unusually determined to involve himself in day-to-day family life,” Ireland writes of Winston. Nonetheless Churchill adopted a different parenting strategy when it came to his own brood, particularly his son (and his father’s namesake), Randolph, who was born in 1911. “A boy deprived of a father’s care often develops, if he escapes the perils of youth, an independence and vigor of thought which may restore in after life the heavy loss of early days,” wrote Churchill, who, in 1906, would pen a properly admiring biography of his father. To the contrary, Churchill came to feel something good and lasting could result from children being brushed-off or snubbed by their parents. Yet, as a boy, Churchill maintained a reverent attitude about his distant dad (“He bought a scrapbook and pasted into it the cartoons in which ‘Randy’ was depicted”), one that persisted in spite of so many dashed dreams: Ireland writes plaintively of 13-year-old Winston’s plans for a festive family Christmas being upended upon learning that his parents intend to tour Russia for a few months instead.Įven as a grown man, though, Churchill declined to partake in the modern temptation to blame his upbringing for every reversal or character flaw. “When he did take time to speak to him, it was to upbraid him for his faults.” “Lord Randolph barely seemed to notice his son he did not even know how old he was,” Ireland writes. (Leader of the House of Commons, etc.) masked a tactless parenting style. Seeking to trace the history of Churchill’s paternal preoccupation, Ireland revisits Winston’s own childhood of seeking to win favor with, or simply the attention of, his own father, Lord Randolph Churchill, whose dynamic manner and impressive C.V. “He would also have seen colossal faults: arrogance, recklessness, an uncontrollable temper, and a perplexing weakness for self-sabotage.” “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 else’s opinion,” writes Ireland, who quickly adds-and whose book amply demonstrates-that there were downsides to the Churchill inheritance, too. Such is the argument advanced in Josh Ireland’s robustly researched, eminently readable new book, which retells many of the signal events of Winston’s life, service, and exploits through the prism of his relationship with Randolph. For father and son alike, it turned out to be a burden. Instead, Randolph, as the lone male offspring, was called upon to serve as the solitary vessel for his father’s notions about fatherhood, manhood, and family ambitions. In its charming Englishness, the title of the new dual biography Churchill & Son has something of the flavor of a boutique law firm, a shoe repair shop, or, possibly, a novel by Charles Dickens, but in fact it serves as a potent reminder of a most striking fact: Winston Churchill, among the most robust, combative, and, frankly, masculine of 20th-century political figures, had, among his five children with his wife Clementine, just a single son, his second-born, Randolph.įor a man of the energy and temperament of Churchill, two or three or five sons would have seemed to better fit the bill: One can imagine a gaggle of Young Winstons bouncing off the walls at home, helping Winnie lay bricks or prepare speeches to Parliament. Churchill & Son, by Josh Ireland (Dutton: 2021), 464 pages.
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