Word: spencers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sons of great men bear the handicap of comparison with their fathers. And Sir Winston Churchill's son Randolph has been more handicapped than most. In his headlong rush to get out of the great man's shadow, Randolph Frederick Edward Spencer Churchill has flopped spectacularly in politics, succeeded only erratically in journalism, and earned such labels as "rampant Randolph" and "England's answer to Elliot Roosevelt." But in the last two years, Randolph Churchill, now 44, has been emerging in a role all his own as the sharpest, scrappiest critic of Britain's wayward press...
...Idella are now the happy parents of four sons. Each son has two generals as godfathers. The "second shift," as Marx calls them (to distinguish Idella's offspring from the four children by his first wife), boasts a total of 35 sponsoring stars. The eldest boy, six-year-old Spencer Bedell (the only second-shift Marx with a nonmilitary first name) is a godchild of President Eisenhower and Bedell Smith. Ike volunteered again when Emmett Dwight, now five, came along; his other godfather is Rosie O'Donnell. The other sons: Bradley Marshall, 3, and Curtis (for Curtis LeMay) Gruenther...
...couple of years later, when T. S. Eliot was lecturing at Harvard, Theodore Spencer showed him a Levin essay on the metaphysical poets which Eliot liked so much that he decided to publish it in his influential literary magazine, The Criterion...
Button for Perfection. The current Tate retrospective shows why. While earning a living by turning out popular landscapes and portraits, Spencer has devoted the past 22 years to decorating a "chapel in the air" whose dimensions are nothing less than Cookham itself, with the main street for the nave, the River Thames as "a side aisle." Into it, Spencer fits his Pentecost, Cana and "couples" cycles, filling them out with Bruegelesque pictures of everyday life. Nothing is too mundane to leave out. Says Spencer: "All ordinary acts such as the sewing on of a button are religious things...
Latest work for Spencer's proposed chapel is a series on Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. For one panel, Listening from Punts (see cut), Spencer has drawn on his boyhood memories of Edwardian regatta-goers who arrived for river-barge concerts. "From people listening to Bach," says he, "it's not such a long step to people listening to Christ. It's almost the same, nearly there. So I decided to make it Christ preaching a sermon." Spencer liked the idea so much that he plans to repeat the subject on the other side of the Thames...