Winston & Randolph

Winston Churchill loved and depended on his wife, Clementine, he adored his three daughters Diana, Sarah and Mary, but he was obsessed with his only son Randolph. Nevertheless, Randolph occupies a curious place in the Churchill legend. He buzzes briefly in and out of biographies of his father, like a particularly vexatious fly, before being dismissed as a diversion. And yet had you asked Winston, he would have placed his son at the centre of his life.

Winston’s relationship with Randolph went to the heart of his quixotic personality. It showed his strange mix of imperial sophistication and childish simplicity; his galactic ability to show both affection and ruthlessness, his unrelenting selfishness and prodigal generosity. Most of all, it presents us with an image of the vulnerable, insecure, contradictory man who existed beneath the pugnacious surface.

Fatherhood was central to the formation of Winston’s identity. His own father, Lord Randolph, was a haughty, flamboyant aristocrat whose political career burned briefly but brightly in the second half of the 19th century. Lord Randolph barely seemed to notice his son. On those occasions when he deigned to register his existence, it was only to express disappointment. Winston, he believed, was a feckless mediocrity barely worthy of his family’s name.

This created a situation in which, as Winston would later confide to Clementine, ‘I have no good opinion of myself. At times I think I could conquer everything – and then again I know that I am only a weak fool.’ Everything Winston did in the decades after his father’s early death was, in some way, an attempt to prove that he deserved the love and admiration Lord Randolph had denied him. Even as he neared his own end, Winston was in constant communication with his father’s ghost.

Things were very different once Winston had a son of his own. In the gaps between his political embroilments, Winston could be seen reading Beatrix Potter books in the nursery; acting out the Battle of Jutland with wine glasses and decanters (he barked to imitate gunfire and puffed on his cigar to create gun smoke); and worrying that his cherished son wasn’t wearing thick enough underclothes. Because, more than any of his children, it was Randolph he loved.

Randolph was petted and praised by his indulgent father, fed oysters from the dinner table. When Randolph misbehaved, which he did often, Winston would laugh, seeing it only as a reflection of his own youthful mischief. When eminent guests came to stay at Chartwell, Winston pushed the teenage Randolph forward and introduced him before Clementine. At dinner, Winston would listen enraptured to his son, waving his cigar to ensure everybody else paid attention.

His love for Randolph was an embodiment of the mystic, sentimental streak that was so fundamental to his make-up. For Winston, there was magic in the Churchill name. And there was magic, too, in the way that power might be handed on from generation to generation. Randolph, Winston believed, was the next link in the great dynastic chain that had begun with Lord Randolph.

Randolph in Cairo during the war

Randolph emerged into adulthood with a personality that had been almost entirely formed by his father’s overbearing charisma. When Winston looked at Randolph, he saw many of his best qualities reflected back: kindness, originality, eccentricity, bravery and a dazzling disregard for anybody else’s opinion. Some of his faults were present too – arrogance, recklessness, an uncontrollable temper – except that something in Randolph magnified them.

Although Winston could see that Randolph was turbulent and idle, and a demon when drunk, although some part of him must have known that he had helped create these extravagant flaws, he would always defend his son. He had spent too much time dreaming of the time when he could recreate the golden bond between father and son that he had been denied by Lord Randolph’s majestic disdain. He could not let his fantasy go.

It wasn’t just that Randolph was the embodiment of Winston’s hopes for the future, he also paid him in his most precious coin: loyalty. Randolph gave his father the love and unstinting admiration that had been so conspicuously absent from his childhood. During the bleak Wilderness Years, Randolph was Winston’s most enthusiastic cheerleader, attaching himself to his father’s doomed causes, even though this defiance helped immolate his own chances of achieving the glittering political future that Winston had predicted would be his.

This was their bond’s central and ultimately fatal contradiction. As Winston’s own career floundered, he continued to encourage his son’s ambitions; often talking ruminatively about retiring to leave the field clear for him. Winston knew how much he owed to the fact that his own famous parent had died early. But he also remained consumed by his own sense of destiny. It didn’t matter that he was shunned by his party’s elite, or that all of his warnings went unheeded, he was convinced that fate still had a role for him to play. So even as he led Randolph to expect that he would be prime minister before he was 30, he demanded an asphyxiating loyalty from him. Every time Randolph tried to fashion an opportunity for himself, or attempt to assert an independent position, he found himself accused by Winston and Clementine of sabotage. This, inevitably, caused trouble between them.

Few men were as easily hurt as Winston. When he felt betrayed by a friend, his spaniel eyes would brim with tears and he would say, with almost childlike surprise, ‘You are not on my side.’ And yet he could appear incapable of registering when he had given offence, largely because he was almost completely blind to what was happening in the hearts and minds of others. Randolph was probably more sensitive than his father; he was certainly more combustible.

Onlookers were horrified by the fierceness with which the two men fought. When, during the war, Randolph accused Winston of encouraging his wife Pamela’s affairs, their rows became apocalyptic. More than once, Clementine feared that her increasingly fragile husband would have a heart attack. What actually happened remains uncertain. At the very least Winston turned a blind eye to his daughter-in-law’s indiscretions, largely because most of the relationships were with politically useful Americans. Looked at from this angle, it was an unsettling display of Winston’s ruthless pursuit of his own priorities, no matter what the cost.

The two men had been inseparable during the 1930s, and yet the grievous arguments began to tear at the fabric of their relationship. Winston had begun the war saying that he would not be able to continue if anything were to happen to his son, in the years afterwards he began to shun him.Randolph was left with a contradiction of his own. He still loved his father – ‘more than any man or woman I have ever met’ – and yet he could not forgive him for what he regarded as a betrayal.

Randolph’s personality was shaped by the strange contradictions in his father’s personality. Ultimately, he would also be broken by them.

Josh Ireland is a journalist and author of The Traitors: A True Story of Blood, Betrayal and Deceit, an account of four Britons who betrayed their country during the Second World War. His latest book is Churchill & Son.