Randolph Churchill

• 1. Introduction

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  Randolph Churchill, the only son of Winston Churchill, announced in a 1932 newspaper article that he planned to "make an immense fortune and become Prime Minister". He was twenty-one years old. He achieved neither ambition. Over the decades that followed he lost every parliamentary contest he fought, except the one in which nobody stood against him. He also earned a reputation as one of the most combustible dinner guests in England.

  He was raised to believe that high office was waiting for him. What happens to a boy brought up like that when the voters, and eventually his own father, decline to cooperate? Why did a man who loved his son so openly keep ending evenings in shouting matches? And what did Randolph build instead, in newspaper columns, in the Libyan Desert and in the mountains of Yugoslavia?

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• 2. Born to Inherit

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  The crypt of the House of Commons was the setting for Randolph's christening on the 26th of October 1911. Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and the Conservative politician F. E. Smith were among his godparents. Before he was even born, his parents had nicknamed him "the Chumbolly". His father was already a leading Liberal Cabinet Minister. Threats from suffragettes to kidnap the children meant that Randolph and his older sister Diana were, for a time, escorted on their walks in the park by plain clothes detectives.

  At Sandroyd School in Surrey, the headmaster told Winston that the boy was "very combative". Winston had been neglected by his own parents as a small child, so he visited the school as often as he could. Randolph later admitted that he had always had a problem with authority and discipline.

  Winston offered his son a choice between Eton College and Harrow School, and Randolph picked Eton. He later wrote that he had been "lazy and unsuccessful both at work and at games... and was an unpopular boy". In November 1926 his headmaster caned him at the age of fifteen. All five masters teaching him had independently reported him for "either being idle or being a bore with his chatter".

  From his teenage years, Randolph was encouraged to sit at his father's dinner parties among the leading politicians of the day, to drink and to have his say. He later recalled that he would have laughed at anyone who suggested he would not go straight into politics. He even imagined becoming prime minister by his mid-twenties, like William Pitt the Younger. One of his sisters wrote that he "manifestly needed a father's hand", yet Winston "spoiled and indulged him".

  Christ Church, Oxford, took him in January 1929, partway through the academic year and before his eighteenth birthday. Professor Lindemann, a friend of his father, had heard that a place had fallen vacant. Randolph did little work and played little sport, and he spent his days at long lunches and dinners. On the 29th of December 1929, Winston wrote him a stern letter. It warned that he was "not acquiring any habits of industry or concentration" and threatened to withdraw him. Winston had once received a similar, much-quoted letter from his own father, Lord Randolph Churchill, at almost exactly the same age.

  Randolph's mother guessed correctly that he would never finish his degree. In October 1930 he dropped out to cross the Atlantic.

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• 3. Debts and Marriages

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  Twelve thousand dollars, about 2,500 pounds at the exchange rate of the day, was what Randolph earned from his American lecture tour. Public speaking came easily to him, unlike his father, who prepared every speech at length. His own son later judged this a mixed blessing, because the ease kept him from making the effort that might have brought greater success. The money did not last. By the time his mother arrived in New York, he had spent 1,000 pounds in three months, although his allowance was only 400 pounds a year. He left the country owing 2,000 dollars to the financier Bernard Baruch, a friend of his father, and he did not repay it for thirty years.

  Kay Halle of Cleveland, Ohio, seven years his senior, very nearly became his first wife. Winston wrote begging him not to marry before he had established a career. Newspapers claimed that Clementine had crossed the Atlantic to stop the wedding. In fact she learned of the engagement only when she arrived, and she wrote to Miss Halle's father, who agreed the match would be unwise.

  In October 1931 Randolph lost 600 pounds by betting wrongly on the result of the general election. Winston paid the debt on one condition. Randolph had to give up his chauffeur-driven Bentley, a more extravagant car than the one his father drove.

  Late September 1939 brought his engagement to Pamela Digby, and they married the following month. Rumour said he had proposed to eight women in the preceding weeks. He seems to have decided that, as Winston's only son, he owed the family an heir in case he was killed. On their wedding night he read her long passages from Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Their son Winston was born on the 10th of October 1940.

  A voyage to Africa in early 1941 cost Randolph 3,000 pounds in gambling losses. His salary as a journalist for Lord Beaverbrook was 1,500 pounds a year. Pamela asked Beaverbrook for an advance, and he refused. She sold her wedding presents, took a job arranging housing for redeployed workers, and moved into a cheap room at the top of The Dorchester during the Blitz. By accepting dinner invitations from friends, she could put her entire salary toward his debts. At the same hotel she began an affair with Averell Harriman. By November 1942 Randolph had formally left her, and they were divorced in 1946.

  Laura Charteris was the woman he really wanted. He wrote to her far more often than to his wife, and he kept trying to persuade her to marry him. She told friends that he needed a mother rather than a wife.

  June Osborne became his second wife in November 1948, after a stormy three-month courtship. Evelyn Waugh wrote to Randolph that June "must be possessed of magnificent courage" to marry him. Their daughter Arabella was born in 1949. His sister Mary later wrote that "He does not seem to have possessed the aptitudes for marriage". At Queen's Restaurant in Sloane Square, he once shouted at June over dinner until the room fell silent. When another diner objected, Randolph rebuked him for interfering in a private conversation. The diner replied that it sounded like a public one. June left in the summer of 1954, filed for divorce in January 1958, and the divorce became final in 1961.

  Natalie Bevan called on him in 1958 and he fell for her at once. A friend, Patrick Kinross, watched the sudden thunderbolt of infatuation happen. She turned down his proposal of marriage in August 1960. She stayed married to her husband and never lived with Randolph, yet the two settled into a stable relationship. Her husband Bobby Bevan would sometimes wait patiently downstairs while she and Randolph enjoyed an early-evening cinq à sept.

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• 4. Lost Elections

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  The Oxford Union in February 1933 gave Randolph his first great public humiliation. Three weeks after the Union passed a pacifist motion, he and his friend Lord Stanley proposed to delete it from the records. Randolph had persuaded former students, who were life members, to turn up and carry the motion. They failed, and it was defeated by 750 votes to 138. The minutes record a "very antipathetic and even angry house" and "delighted jeers". Stink bombs and hisses greeted him. Oxford Conservatives and police escorted him back to his hotel, and Sir Edward Heath later recalled that some undergraduates had meant to remove his trousers. Winston wrote to praise his courage, adding that he "was by no means cowed".

  In February 1935 Randolph stood in the Wavertree by-election in Liverpool as an Independent Conservative. His platform was rearmament and opposition to Indian Home Rule. The money came from Lucy, Lady Houston, an eccentric nationalist who owned the Saturday Review. Labour won the seat. Michael Foot, who watched the campaign, said Randolph had collected 10,000 Independent votes in a few days and "handed the seat on a platter" to the Labour Party. The Secretary of State for India, Samuel Hoare, privately called him "that little brute Randolph". Winston criticised his son for splitting the official Conservative vote.

  Norwood was next, in March 1935. Again with Lady Houston's money, Randolph sponsored an Independent Conservative named Richard Findlay, who was also a member of the British Union of Fascists. Findlay lost to the official Conservative, Duncan Sandys. In September Sandys married Randolph's sister Diana and joined the family. Randolph had a violent row with his father over Norwood, and he grew jealous as Winston warmed to his new son-in-law.

  That summer Randolph libelled Sir Thomas White, the leader of the Liverpool Conservatives, and was summoned to the High Court to pay 1,000 pounds in damages. When he was told that without an apology his political career was over, he backtracked at once.

  West Toxteth, in November 1935, was a Labour-held seat where he ran as the official Conservative. He was reportedly so unwelcome that bananas were thrown at him. On the 10th of February 1936 he stood at Ross and Cromarty against the National Government's candidate, Malcolm MacDonald. Candidates drove many miles over narrow mountain tracks in wintry conditions, carrying spades to dig their cars out of snowdrifts. Randolph enjoyed every minute and lost anyway. His father, who was hoping for a Cabinet post at that time, was embarrassed. Lady Houston died late in 1936, ending her funding. Freddie Birkenhead remarked that Randolph was "unbowed but bloody as usual".

  Virginia Cowles, who first met him in New York in the early 1930s, praised his courage. She also said that going out with him was "like going out with a time bomb".

  In September 1940 the voters of Preston never had to choose. A wartime by-election returned Randolph unopposed. His attendance in the Commons was irregular, which may have contributed to his defeat in July 1945, a result he had not expected. He never won a contested election to Parliament.

  Michael Foot was his Labour opponent at Plymouth Devonport in February 1950 and again in 1951. Foot wrote that Randolph talked as though Plymouth belonged to him and issued "a brilliant cascade of abuse" in all directions. In private the two got on well. Foot and his wife, Jill Craigie, would sometimes escort Randolph to his train after his own party workers had deserted him. Foot later said: "You and I belong to the most exclusive club in London: the friends of Randolph Churchill".

  Bournemouth in 1959 was his last attempt. The local Conservative Association interviewed him in May but did not put him on the shortlist. It cannot have helped that twenty-five years earlier in Liverpool he had said he did not want to represent "a lot of stuffy old ladies in Bournemouth".

  In October 1963 he turned up at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool, to push the claims of Lord Hailsham over Rab Butler. He knocked on Butler's hotel door and urged him to withdraw, pointing to 60 telegrams for Hailsham, many concocted by his own team at East Bergholt. He handed out "Q" badges, for Quintin Hogg, and accidentally stabbed Lord Dilhorne with a pin. Meanwhile he hedged his bets with 1,000 pounds on the eventual winner, Alec Douglas-Home, at odds of 6-1. He still hoped, with little realism, for a peerage in Harold Macmillan's resignation honours.

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• 5. Soldier in Three Theatres

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  The 4th Queen's Own Hussars, his father's old regiment, gave Randolph a commission as a second lieutenant in August 1938. He was called up for active service on the 24th of August 1939. He was one of the oldest junior officers and not a popular one. To win a bet, he walked the 106-mile round trip from Hull to York and back in under 24 hours, with a car following in case his blisters became too painful. He finished with about twenty minutes to spare, and his brother officers never paid up.

  HMS Kelly carried him to Cherbourg early in the war, alongside Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten. Their task was to bring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor back to England. Randolph boarded in an untidy 4th Hussars uniform, with the spurs attached to his boots upside down. The Duke was mildly shocked and insisted on bending down to fit them correctly.

  Many people suspected, Randolph included, that secret orders kept the 4th Hussars out of action. They were sent into battle as soon as he transferred out. He joined No. 8 (Guards) Commando, which sailed in February 1941 on a six-week voyage by way of the Cape of Good Hope. In Egypt he served as an intelligence officer at Middle East headquarters, then took charge of Army information at GHQ. For a time he edited a newspaper for the troops, Desert News, and lived at Shepheard's Hotel. Anita Leslie, then serving in an ambulance company, wrote that he "could not cease trumpeting his opinions" and called him "insufferable". A brother officer once told him to his face how disliked he was, and Randolph was reduced to tears, having had no idea.

  In April 1942 he volunteered for the newly formed SAS, to his mother's dismay. She worried about the strain on Winston but knew Winston would want him to go. In May 1942 he joined the SAS commander David Stirling and six men on a mission behind enemy lines to Benghazi. The raid did not reach its goals. On the journey home his truck overturned in an accident, and Randolph severely dislocated his back.

  Fitzroy Maclean, whom he had met in the Western Desert, invited him to join a mission to Tito's Partisans in Yugoslavia. Winston agreed, with a grim warning not to be captured, in case the Gestapo sent his fingers back one by one. Randolph parachuted in on the 20th of January 1944. Evelyn Waugh and Freddie Birkenhead later joined the group, and Tom Mitford was already there.

  After the German airdrop on Tito's headquarters at Drvar in June 1944, known as Operation Knight's Leap, Randolph was awarded the MBE in August. He had been recommended for a Military Cross. On the island of Vis, he and Waugh met Tito on the 10th of July. Later that month a Dakota crashed with both men aboard, and they were among ten survivors. Randolph suffered spinal and knee injuries. He cried on learning that his servant had been killed, yet as an invalid he behaved with "his usual loud rudeness".

  By September he was back in Yugoslavia, where Waugh recorded that he was drunk most days. Waugh judged him "a flabby bully" with "no intellectual invention or agility". On the 16th of September 1944 Randolph and Waugh set up a military mission at Topusko. It produced a formidable report on Tito's persecution of the clergy. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden buried it, since Britain then needed Tito as an ally.

  Tom Mitford, one of Randolph's few close friends, was killed in Burma in March 1945.

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• 6. Father and Son

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  "Deep animal love" was Winston's phrase for what he felt toward Randolph. He added that "every time we meet we seem to have a bloody row". A sister said Randolph "would pick an argument with a chair". He believed he could control his temper by willpower, but could not do so when drunk.

  In November 1943 Randolph and his sister Sarah accompanied Winston to the Tehran Conference. On the way back they quarrelled again about Randolph's failed marriage. That quarrel may have contributed to the serious heart attack Winston suffered at Tunis.

  Claridge's was the scene of a blazing row on the 31st of August 1945, with Brendan Bracken also at the table. The subject was Winston's planned war memoirs. Winston had misunderstood Randolph to be suggesting a literary agent, when Randolph was urging him to take tax advice from lawyers. Randolph stalked out because he disliked being spoken to abruptly in public. He had to write that same day to explain himself.

  As relations cooled, Winston lavished affection on a series of surrogate sons. They included Brendan Bracken, Randolph's brothers-in-law Duncan Sandys and, from 1947, Christopher Soames, and to a degree Anthony Eden. Randolph loathed them all. He resented Eden's position as his father's political heir and called him "Jerk Eden". When Eden married Clarissa Churchill in 1952, Randolph's ranting phone calls became known as the "Eden Terror". His articles in the Evening Standard harmed Eden's reputation, and Eden complained about them privately to John Colville.

  After the 1951 general election, while his father was forming a government, Randolph amused himself by phoning Conservative MPs and saying that "Mr Churchill" wished to speak to them urgently. They hurried to the phone, expecting a ministerial post.

  One furious row at Chartwell came while Winston was still prime minister. Randolph called Christopher Soames "a shit" and Eden "a jerk". Winston was so "shaken with fury" that he seemed about to have a seizure. Randolph went upstairs for another noisy row with his wife and declared that he would never see his father again. Sir Winston patched things up at 1am.

  Twice Winston refused a peerage, first the Dukedom of Dover in 1945 and then the Dukedom of London in 1955. The ostensible reason was to avoid blocking his son from the Commons. The real reason was that Winston wanted to stay in the Commons himself. By 1955, Randolph's political career was already hopeless.

  It was Randolph who introduced his father to Aristotle Onassis, in January 1956. In June 1963, aboard Onassis's yacht Christina, he "erupted like Stromboli", according to Winston's secretary Anthony Montague Browne. He shouted abuse at his aged father and accused him of having connived at the wartime affair between his then wife and Averell Harriman. Winston shook with rage. The next day Onassis got Randolph off the boat by arranging for him to interview the King of Greece. He left in tears, declaring his love for his father.

  A lunch at 28 Hyde Park Gate in the early 1960s showed the family pattern. Jonathan Aitken drove Randolph there from London, stopping three times for drinks. When Randolph quarrelled with his mother, the old Sir Winston turned red and beat his walking sticks together in anger.

  Clementine had thrown Randolph out of Chartwell several times in the 1930s and once told him she hated him. In November 1958 he gatecrashed a dinner for Winston at the British Embassy in Paris. His mother, who had not spoken to him in two years, greeted him with "dear boy", to general relief. After Winston's death, she often sought and took his advice. Randolph organised a luncheon party at the Café Royal for her 80th birthday on the 1st of April 1965.

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• 7. Pen and Press

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  The Daily Graphic in March 1932 carried a column by Randolph warning that the Nazis meant war. His son Winston later claimed that he was the first British journalist to say so. That July he reported from the German elections, and he urged his father to meet Adolf Hitler while retracing the Duke of Marlborough's march to Blenheim. The meeting fell through when Hitler excused himself at the last minute.

  In August 1932, Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express sent the twenty-one-year-old to Paraguay. Soon after arriving in Asunción, he interviewed Major Arturo Bray Riquelme, the director of the Military School. Bray was in high demand with the British press, having served as a highly decorated British officer in the First World War. The interview appeared on the 11th of August 1932, as his cadets prepared for the Chaco war front.

  Six weeks after the North Korean invasion in 1950, he began reporting from Korea. His father had written a letter of introduction to General Douglas MacArthur. The work was dangerous, and 17 war correspondents were killed, including those of The Times and the Daily Telegraph. Wounded on patrol near the Naktong River, Randolph insisted on finishing his copy before seeking treatment. He handed it to the crew of a plane bound for Hong Kong. He later covered the Inchon landings, the liberation of Seoul and the crossing of the 38th Parallel.

  Cyprus and Algeria were also on his list, and so was South Africa. Although he had no sentimental illusions about colonial peoples, he had no time for regimes built on supposed white superiority. Entering South Africa, he insisted on giving a thumbprint in ink, as a black person was expected to do, instead of signing the entry form. Customs officers detained him until they confirmed he was entitled to do so. He interviewed Hendrik Verwoerd, who was surrounded by revolver-toting bodyguards. After the Sharpeville Massacre he said that "10 London bobbies" could have dispersed the crowd relatively peacefully.

  Back in London, he edited the Londoner's Diary in the Evening Standard and became one of the best-paid gossip columnists on Fleet Street. This was ironic. When the Daily Express had sneered at him in 1932, he had replied that the gossip writer's trade was not one that "commended itself mostly highly to my generation". He also edited his father's speeches, which appeared in seven books between 1938 and 1961.

  In September 1953, at a Foyle's literary luncheon at the Dorchester, Randolph "had had a few drinks". He asked why a rich man such as Lord Rothermere, his former employer, needed to "prostitute" himself by printing the private lives of public figures. He called it "pornography for pornography's sake". He repeated the charge on the 7th of October 1953 to the Manchester Publishing Association. Later he set up a private company, "Country Bumpkins", to sell a pamphlet of his speeches, What I said about the Press. Most newsagents refused to stock it, and he was soon in a libel case. Under cross-examination he was quick-witted. Michael Foot spoke on his behalf in court in October 1956, risking his own job on the Daily Herald. Randolph was awarded 5,000 pounds in damages in 1958.

  Six articles on the Suez Crisis ran in the Daily Express in late 1958. Soon afterward came The Rise and Fall of Sir Anthony Eden, published in 1959. Evelyn Waugh called it "despicable". Clement Attlee reviewed it as "singularly offensive and inaccurate" and said readers would gain "a full appreciation of Mr Randolph Churchill". Eden's biographer Robert Rhodes James described the book as "a diatribe... best forgotten". Winston was deeply embarrassed.

  Iain Macleod savaged his next book, The Fight for the Tory Leadership, in The Spectator on the 17th of January 1964. Robert Blake wrote that Randolph was "blown out of the water" and, for once, had no comeback. That same year his health gave way.

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• 8. The Last Project

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  Edward Stanley, the 17th Earl of Derby, was the subject of a life Randolph published in 1960. He wrote it to prove to the trustees of his father's papers that he was fit to write the official biography. Alan Brien helped with the research, and in 1953 Randolph and June moved to Oving House near Aylesbury, away from White's Club and his gambling friends. Robert Blake called the result "a reputable if rather dull book" about a "dull man". In May 1960 Sir Winston approved of his son writing his life. "At last his life had found a purpose", his son later wrote.

  Stour House, at East Bergholt near Colchester, was bought by the family trustees and gave him his first proper home. Locals called him "the Beast of Bergholt" and said he did not pay small tradesmen. His team of researchers included Martin Gilbert, Michael Wolff, Franklin Gannon, Milo Cripps, Michael Molian, Martin Mauthner and Andrew Kerr.

  Bronchopneumonia in 1964 left Randolph so frail that he could only whisper. Later that year a tumour was removed from his lung, and it turned out to be benign. Evelyn Waugh, who had barely spoken to him for twelve years, restored friendly relations that spring. He remarked that it was "a typical triumph of modern science to find the one part of Randolph which was not malignant and to remove it".

  At Winston's funeral in January 1965, Randolph walked for an hour in intense cold, though not fully recovered. For twenty years he had been consuming between 80 and 100 cigarettes and up to two bottles of whisky a day. That far exceeded his father's habits. His kidneys were failing, so he seldom drank any more, and he ate little and became emaciated. With Natalie Bevan he spent winters in Marrakesh and summers in Monte Carlo. Mary Lovell writes that he still acted with the arrogance of Louis XIV but was less explosive.

  His memoir of his early life, Twenty-One Years, appeared in 1965, and the first volume of the official biography of his father followed in 1966. He kept working on it with his researchers though mortally ill, and it gave him a fulfilment he had not known before. He finished only the second volume and about half a dozen companion volumes. Five volumes were planned, and the work eventually ran to eight under Sir Martin Gilbert. In 1966 he also signed a contract with Robert F. Kennedy to write a biography of John F. Kennedy. It gave him access to the Kennedy archives, but he died before beginning.

  One of his researchers found him dead on the morning of the 6th of June 1968. A heart attack had struck during the night at Stour House. He was 57, and although he had been ill for years, the death was unexpected. Four years later, Alistair Cooke recalled Randolph telling him that the only day he would make the front page would be the day after he died. "Alas, he died the day of Robert Kennedy's assassination and he never made it."

  St Martin's Church in Bladon, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, holds his grave, beside his parents and all four of his siblings. His mother outlived him by almost a decade. His will was valued for probate at 70,597 pounds. On screen, Nigel Havers played him in the 1981 Southern Television series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, and Tom Hiddleston played him in the 2002 film The Gathering Storm.

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