Word: frewen
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...SPLENDID PAUPER, by Allen Andrews. The zany life and beguiling times of Moreton Frewen, Winston Churchill's scapegrace uncle, who was born to lose with grace, charm and class...
Late in the fall of 1878, the two brothers and four of Moreton's hunting friends from Cambridge reached southern Wyoming and spent six weeks shooting. By wintertime, when it was clearly too risky for any sensible man to cross the Big Horn range, the two Frewen brothers slogged through waist-high snow to the spot on the Powder River where they intended to become cattle barons...
Elephant Trap. Within three years, Frewen had married Clara Jerome, the daughter of a New York financier (her younger sister Jennie had recently married Lord Randolph Churchill). He had also regularized the shipment of champagne to the Powder River settlement, introduced white riding breeches and the English saddle to the region, made a friend of Buffalo Bill Cody, and become manager of a cattle empire capitalized at $1.5 million. In 1884, his sixth year in Wyoming, his Powder River company declared a dividend of 24%. The next year, however, a combination of bad weather, rustlers, homesteaders and an obtuse board...
...President from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. The wedding reception of his daughter Clare in 1910 was attended by four members of the British Cabinet, including Churchill, then Home Secretary. It was also attended by several bill collectors, who were seated by themselves in a downstairs parlor. Frewen had, however, paid cash for his daughter's wedding gown. The seamstress who delivered it that morning had refused to accept a check...
Biographer Allen Andrews, a British freelance writer, has sized up both Frewen and the times delightfully. He is right to point out that though other adventurers have enriched both themselves and vast territories with wilder schemes, they are perhaps less interesting as people. Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder, died leaving Rhodesia and the Kimberly Mines. Frewen, an empire bungler, left only splendid material for a loser's biography...