Finest Hour Winter 2017

Winston Churchill was surrounded by strong women all his life, from the day he was born until the day he died. This can easily be overlooked, given that his professional career took place at a time when politics was all but exclusively the realm of men. Yet Churchill absolutely required the nurturing, the example, and the strength of mind that the women in his life provided. In this issue we look at some of the key women in the life of the Greatest Briton. Churchill’s story begins with his mother Jennie Jerome. Bright and beautiful, Jennie was frustratingly constrained by the conventions of her time. Anne Sebba examines how Jennie attempted to be an independent woman. Constrained himself as a child by the customs for raising the children of the well-to-do…

Finest Hour 174 Getting the Bearings HAMPSHIRE—The description of the armorial bearings of the Royal College of Defence Studies on page 21 [image on page 18] is unspecific about which elements represent the branches of the armed forces. Could you please elucidate? —Paul H. Courtenay Dr. Stewart obliges: OXFORD—I am happy to provide the expanded version of the text describing the “Beast” or “the Great Beast,” as the bearings are affectionately known, which features in the College’s updated history that I completed last month: The trident represents the Royal Navy, the lion the Army, and the wings of the lion the Royal Air Force. In 1955 a silver chain was added around the neck to denote the civilian members in attendance at Seaford House; the laurel wreath replaced this after consultation with the Foreign and Commonwealth…

A few years after she was married, Jennie Jerome wrote to her mother Clara trying to close off a conversation: “Money is such a hateful subject to me just now…don’t let us talk about it.” She was explaining why she could not attend as many balls as she wished and why her expenses were so great. From the day she married Lord Randolph Churchill on 15 April 1875 in Paris, money (or the lack of it) dogged her life. The wedding could only take place the day after the money forming her marriage settlement had arrived. Leonard Jerome was finally prevailed upon to agree to a capital sum of £50,000, yielding approximately £2,000, a year of which Jennie was allowed to keep half as “pin money” and Randolph the other…

Sir Winston Churchill is often said to have had an emotionally deprived childhood, with his distant mother and scolding father. It is an easy picture to paint, but to do so ignores the role played by the woman who became his closest companion, Mrs. Elizabeth Everest. Known to Winston by a variety of names including “Woomany” and “Oom” (from his infantile efforts to pronounce “woman”), she was the person with whom he formed the strongest emotional attachment of his childhood and into adulthood became his “dearest and most intimate friend.” Winston was a very affectionate boy, and letters to Mrs. Everest are signed off with “100 000 kisses,” whilst those to his parents are filled with doubly-underlined requests for his nanny to come visit and telling stories of the adventures they…

In Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills (1999), Mary Soames wrote of her father: “Winston was never a ‘ladies’ man,’ yet he greatly admired beautiful, spirited women, and over these last years formed several attachments. His first great love was Pamela Plowden, daughter of the Resident at Hyderabad, whom he had met as a young subaltern in India.” Although he proposed marriage to her that she did not accept, Churchill’s friendship with Pamela Plowden, later Countess of Lytton, continued for the rest of his life. As a junior officer with the Fourth Hussars stationed in Bangalore, Churchill first met the India-born Pamela Frances Audrey Plowden in November 1896. Her father was the diplomatic representative of the British government in Hyderabad. On 26 October 1896, Churchill wrote his mother, who…

Winston Churchill was not at all the sort of husband that Lady Blanche Hozier had had in mind for her unusual daughter Clementine. He had no small talk and was not—to be frank—conventionally good-looking or athletic. He also lacked a title, a stately residence, and, above all, a suitably aristocratic pot of money. Lady Blanche came to realise, however, that despite these serious shortcomings, he was a practically perfect match. Lady Blanche had given birth in some haste to Clementine Ogilvy Hozier on the drawing room floor of her London townhouse in Grosvenor Street on 1 April 1885 (eleven years after Churchill’s equally precocious arrival at Blenheim Palace). Clementine was her second daughter, and the grand-daughter of a Scottish earl, and was apparently blessed with the usual trappings of her blue-blooded…