Word: randolphs
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...long way that seems to take one back!" Winston Churchill, in a letter to his mother, was musing on the long reign of Queen Victoria and her death in 1901. The reader may well say "gadzooks" about the first volume of the life of Churchill by his son Randolph, which goes back even farther. Churchill, then 26, missed Queen Victoria's funeral (he was in Winnipeg winding up a profitable lecture tour); there would not be a greater one in London until his own death 64 years later...
Little is unknown about the private life of the most famous public man of modern times. It may be wondered how even his son could add much to the animated image of the great man. Yet Randolph's biography succeeds. It is not just another item in the hefty shelf of Churchill memorabilia, and it is more than a son's pious exercise. Randolph, 55, is able to suppress his own rather gaudy personality, intrudes into the narrative only once or twice, and then only with the purpose of contrasting the generous treatment he received at the hands...
Olympian Ultimatums. In Victorian times, the game of Fathers & Sons was a ruthless affair. Lord Randolph, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1886, was type and exemplar of a caste-the British aristocracy, whose members had pride, privilege, titles to mark them off from lesser men, retinues of servants and the habit of ruling a vast household and an empire. They exacted a fearful price of admission from their heirs; the initiation rites were as painful as and more prolonged than those for an Apache brave. Before the little lordlings could dish it out, they had to learn to take...
...Lord Randolph, a genial wit to his public, was pretty much an ogre to his son. He believed that he had been cursed with a backward boy and treated Winston like a delinquent dunderhead. He hardly condescended to correspond directly with his son, and communicated his bleak Olympian ultimatums on Winston's tardiness, low school marks and other failures, through Lady Randolph. He did not even let little Winny know that he himself had gone to Eton (as, explains Etonian Randolph, had six generations of Churchills), and contemptuously shoved his unsatisfactory son into Harrow...
...Later he took more interest, especially as Winston was becoming more expensive. Winston had scraped into Sandhurst but only into the cavalry, which was not expected to have as much brains as the infantry. Horses and the higher style of living required of a cavalry cadet would cost Lord Randolph an extra ?200 a year. Winston, high-spirited as always, had the nerve to express pleasure at his feat in getting into Sandhurst at all. His reward was a letter from his imperious papa which must rank as one of the nastiest ever written by a father...