Word: winstone
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...WINSTON S. CHURCHILL by Randolph S. Churchill. 614 pages. Houghfon Mifflin...
...Gadzooks, what a 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...
...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 of his father with the harsh and demanding rule that Lord Randolph imposed upon the boy Winston. This is not the Churchill who was frustrated at Yalta but the Churchill who was flogged for stealing sugar from the pantry at his prep school, the Churchill who collected toy soldiers (at a few shillings a platoon...
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...
Harum-Scarum. 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...