"...He continued, for some years longer, to take a considerable share in the proceedings of parliament, giving a general, though decidedly independent, support to the Unionist administration. On the Irish question he was a very candid critic of Balfour's measures, and one of his later speeches, which recalled the acrimonious violence of his earlier period, was that which he delivered in 1890 on the report of the Parnell commission. He also fulfilled the promise made on his resignation by occasionally advocating the principles of economy and retrenchment in the debates on the naval and military estimates. In April 1889, on the death of Bright, he was asked to come forward as a candidate for the vacant seat in Birmingham, and the result was a rather angry controversy with Chamberlain, terminating in the so-called "Birmingham compact" for the division of representation of the Midland capital between Liberal Unionists and Conservatives. But his health was already precarious, and this, combined with the anomaly of his position, induced him to relax his devotion to parliament during the later years of the Salisbury administration. He bestowed much attention on society, travel and sport. He was an ardent supporter of the turf, and in 1889 he won the Oaks with a mare named the Abbesse de Jouarre. In 1891 he went to South Africa, in search both of health and relaxation. He travelled for some months through Cape Colony, the Transvaal and Rhodesia, making notes on the politics and economics of the countries, shooting lions, and recording his impressions in letters to a London newspaper, which were afterwards republished under the title of Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa. He returned with renewed energy, and in the general election of 1892 once more flung himself, with his old vigor, into the strife of parties. His seat at South Paddington was uncontested; but he was active on the platform, and when parliament met he returned to the opposition front bench, and again took a leading part in debate, attacking Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill with special energy. But it was soon apparent that his powers were undermined by the inroads of disease. As the session of 1893 wore on his speeches lost their old effectiveness, and in 1894 he was listened to not so much with interest as with pity. His last speech in the House was delivered in the debate on Uganda in June 1894, and was a painful failure. He was, in fact, dying of general paralysis. A journey round the world was undertaken as a forlorn hope. Lord Randolph started in the autumn of 1894, accompanied by his wife, but the malady made so much progress that he was brought back in haste from Cairo. He reached England shortly before Christmas and died in London on the 24th of January 1895.
Father: John Winston Spencer-Churchill
Mother: Frances Anne Emily Vane
Brother: George Charles Spencer-Churchill
Sister: Anne Churchill
Brother: Augustine Churchill
Brother: Charles Churchill
Sister: Cornelia Churchill
Sister: Fanny Churchill
Sister: Georgiana Churchill
Sister: Rosamund Churchill
Sister: Sarah Churchill
Wife: Jeanette Jerome (American, "Jennie", m. 15-Apr-1874)
Son: Winston Churchill (b. 30-Nov-1874)
Son: John Strange Churchill (b. 9-Feb-1880)
High School: Eton College (1863-65)
University: Merton College, Oxford University
Chancellor of the Exchequer (1886-87)
UK Leader of the House of Commons (1886-87)
UK Secretary of State for India (1885-86)
UK Member of Parliament for Paddington South (1885-94)
UK Member of Parliament for Woodstock (1874-85)
Carlton Club
Conservative Party (UK)
Coma
Risk Factors: Smoking, Alcoholism, Depression
Author of books:
Men, Mines, and Animals in South Africa (1892)
Winston Churchill, his mother and the philandering Prince - Life & Style - London Evening Standard
These remarkable assertions are made by husband-and-wife historians Celia and John Lee in their new biography of the Churchill family, based on thousands of documents kept secret for years in a locked room by Winston's late nephew, Peregrine Churchill.
Celia Lee had agreed to help Peregrine on a family biography, restoring his father Jack to what he considered his rightful place as the pragmatic, helpful heart of the spendthrift Churchill clan. When Peregrine died of a heart attack in 2002, Celia spent seven years sifting through the goldmine of papers entrusted to her by Peregrine's widow, Yvonne. The cache, she discovered, included scores of intimate notes from the King when he was Prince of Wales to Peregrine's grandmother.
Lady Randolph — the vivacious, resourceful American socialite and heiress née Jennie Jerome — married Lord Randolph Churchill, the third son of the Duke of Marlborough and a maverick Tory MP, in April 1874. She gave birth to Winston that November — of his "premature" birth, more later — and Jack, christened John, was born in 1880.
The Churchills' position in London society, and Jennie's ambitions for her husband and sons, brought them into regular contact with Prince Albert Edward, Queen Victoria's heir, known as Bertie. The Prince was renowned for his sexual appetite and a string of mistresses, and reportedly held wife-swapping parties in his London home. Jennie, a dark beauty who has also been characterised as a sexual adventurer, did not escape his attention.
Following long discussions with his father before his death, Peregrine Churchill was able to tell Celia that, as early as 1889, Lord Randolph had returned home to find the Prince and his wife together, scandalously unchaperoned, and angrily threw the Prince out. The Lees' book notes that the first condolence letter Jennie received after her husband's death in 1895 was from the Prince, headed "My Dear Lady Randolph". But within a year, he was addressing her far more intimately as "ma chère". She, in turn, christened the portly Prince "Tum Tum".
Bertie's later missives ask if he can visit her for a "Japanese tea", where she would apparently wear a loose kimono (a note from a dressmaker relating to such a garment is in the collection), or promise meetings where Jennie would have her "entertainments". He teases her, suggesting that she should stick by "old friends" rather than chase after new amours, and wondering "where your next loved victim is". Jennie's own notes back to the Prince are lost as he ordered all his private correspondence to be burned after his death, although other letters she wrote openly referring to other affairs survive.
But notes from Jennie to her schoolboy sons — including one where she suggests the Prince will name a new puppy after Jack, and another written on the Prince's Sandringham notepaper — indicate a familiarity beyond that of a widow and a royal "friend". The Lees suggest Jennie enjoyed a privileged position as official mistress, "La Favourite", above criticism, as Celia puts it. John adds that Jennie never made the mistake of falling in love with the Prince, unlike another mistress, Alice Keppel.
"It was not a love affair between Jennie and the Prince but a matter of sexual convenience for both of them," says Celia. "The way the Prince wrote to her, asking her to serve him tea in her geisha dress' — geisha means concubine — would have been a totally inappropriate way to address a woman, married, widowed or single. This, and the amount of time they spent together, marks her out as having had a sexual relationship with him." Celia points out that the two were even photographed together by the Daily Mirror, on a walking tour of the Tower of London, Jennie looking "for all the world like the Queen of England".
It might be thought that the Lees are trying to smear the mother of England's greatest hero but the opposite is true. Jennie, who married twice more to much younger husbands after Randolph's death, was vilified in the 20th century for having an alleged 200 lovers, and in 2009 was the subject of a prurient Channel 4 documentary called Lady Randy. Through close examination of Peregrine's papers and other documents at the Churchill Archives Centre in Churchill College, Cambridge, the Lees put the figure of Jennie's partners at a dozen or fewer, only one of them — the Polish count Charles Kinsky — possibly overlapping with her marriage to Randolph. They pay tribute to her talents as a fundraiser, hostess and writer.
The Lees also debunk rumours that Winston was conceived out of wedlock, that Jack was sired by another man, and that Lord Randolph died of syphilis. They claim a fall from a horse which left Jennie with a pelvic injury resulted in both boys being born a few weeks prematurely (Jack told Peregrine that he had been a "blue baby"). Jennie's nephews, Shane and Seymour — sons of her sister Leonie Leslie — claimed to have witnessed an affair between Jennie and Evelyn Boscawen, 7th Viscount Falmouth, in Ireland at the time of Jack's conception but Celia has proved that neither Leslie boy had actually been born at the time.
The persistent story that Lord Randolph's long years of ill health and early death were caused by syphilis seems to have been an invention designed to discredit Winston when he contentiously rejoined the Conservatives in Parliament in 1920. Celia recovered Lord Randolph's doctor's records and showed them to medical expert Dr John H Mather, who concluded after two years' study that Randolph died of an inoperable brain tumour. Peregrine also told Celia that he believed Randolph's condition rendered him impotent from 1882, which may explain Jennie's need to find physical affection elsewhere.
The Lees' book also debunks the canard that Jennie and Randolph were unaffectionate parents. It is full of generous, loving letters from both parents to the boys during their schooldays, and details of their attempts to get them a position in life. Since Jack was an exemplary and impeccably behaved scholar, it is possible that the headstrong and ill-disciplined Winston resented his parents exhorting him to be more like his younger brother.
Certainly in his first memoir, My Early Life, Winston offhandedly refers to his parents as distant and makes little reference to his brother. He tells a self-aggrandising childhood story of saving "another boy" from drowning in a lake in Switzerland. The boy was, in fact, Jack, and Winston was responsible for getting him into difficulty in the first place. Later in life, Jack would manage the family finances, help research his brother's books, and support his political career — none of which Winston ever acknowledged.
The Lees believe Winston played down his happy family life to suggest that he succeeded by the strength of his own will — "alone I did this" — and that subsequent biographers swallowed the line. They also believe that Winston "airbrushed" Jack out of family history in part because he was ashamed of him.
Aged just 15 when Lord Randolph died, Jack was forced to make a living in the "ungentlemanly" profession of stockbroking (as the third son of the Duke of Marlborough, Randolph did not receive a substantial inheritance). Winston may not have wanted it known that he had a brother in "trade", especially during his days as Prime Minister.
Jack seems to have borne this neglect with equanimity, even when his financial nous uncovered a genuine betrayal by his mother, which was to Winston's disadvantage as much as to his own. In 1914, while sorting out Jenny's divorce from George Cornwallis-West (he had run off with actress Mrs Patrick Campbell) Jack read his father's will. He discovered that he and his brother should have been paid £600 a year on Jennie's remarriage. She had kept the clause, and the money, secret from them. "It makes a considerable difference finding that Papa's will was not made — as we were always led to suppose — carelessly and without any consideration for us," he wrote angrily to his mother.
Nevertheless, the bonds of maternal affection proved strong. Four years later in 1918 when Jack was fighting the Germans in France as an officer in charge of Anzac troops, he heard of his mother's third marriage, to Montagu Porch, a man scant years older than Winston. "What a surprise!" he wrote to Jennie. "Whenever I go to war you do these things!" He signed off with the words: "And so I send you my best love and wishes, and pray that all will be well."Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill, died three years later of a haemorrhage after her leg was amputated following a fall down some steps. Jack died of an aneurysm on the heart in 1947.
Winston, having seen the nation through two world wars, died in 1965. He was given a state funeral and enshrined by popular acclaim as Britain's greatest leader.
The Lees' book is the first to consider Winston Churchill, his brother and his parents as an affectionate family unit, albeit one prone to financial mismanagement and royal peccadillos. "We certainly weren't trying to take anything away from Winston's greatness," says John.
The last word goes to Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre, where Peregrine's papers now reside. "There have been biographies of Lord Randolph, Lady Randolph and Winston, but what this does is to draw all that together and show you how they interacted," he says. "If you really want to understand Winston Churchill you need to understand the family environment."
The Churchills — A Family Portrait by Celia Lee and John Lee, is published by Palgrave Macmillan on 12 February.
The title: “Costs for the genetically ill — Social Consequences.”
The left frame notes that an institution that houses 130 feeble-minded costs about 104,000 Reichsmarks a year. The right frame notes that that is enough to build 17 houses for healthy working class families.
The text in red at the bottom: “The genetically ill are a burden for the people.”
These posters were intended for use in schools to teach Nazi racial doctrines. I include nine of the posters in the book. The material stresses Nazi eugenics doctrine, and makes it clear that Germany would be better off if the “inferior” population was eliminated.
The source: Alfred Vogel, Erhlehre, Abstammngs- und Rassenkunde in bildlicher Darstellung, 2nd edition (Stuttgart: Verlag für nationale Literatur Gebr. Roth, 1939).
