My Darling Winston: The Letters Between Winston Churchill and His Mother

by David Lough (Editor), Randolph Churchill (Preface by)

Overview

A significant addition to the Churchill canon, My Darling Winston traces Churchill’s emotional, intellectual, and political development over a forty-year period as confided to his mother.

My Darling Winston is an edited collection of the personal letters between Winston Churchill and his mother, Jenny Jerome, between 1881—when Churchill was just six—and 1921, the year of Jenny’s death. Many of these intimate letters— between two gifted writers—are published here for the first time, and the exchange of letters between mother and son has never before been published as a correspondence.

A significant addition to the Churchill canon, My Darling Winston traces Churchill’s emotional, intellectual, and political development as confided to his primary mentor, his mother. As well as providing a basic narrative of Jenny’s and Winston Churchill’s lives over a forty-year period, My Darling Winston tells the story of a changing mother-son relationship, characterised at the outset by Churchill’s emotional and practical dependence on his mother, but which is dramatically reversed as her life begins to disintegrate tragically towards its end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681778822
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	10/02/2018
Pages:	648
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

David Lough studied history at Oxford University. After a career in finance, his first book was No More Champagne (Picador), a Wall Street Journal and The Times of London Best Biography of the Year. He lives in England.

Randolph Churchill is the great-grandson of Sir Winston Churchill. After attending Harrow, Randolph served in the Royal Navy and subsequently attended Buckingham University. He is a Trustee of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, Director of the Armed Services Charities Advisory Company, and Trustee of the Churchill Centre in both the United States and United Kingdom. A regular speaker at Churchill conferences and dinners, Randolph and his wife have four children and live close to Sir Winston's home at Chartwell in Kent.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Introduction xiii

Editorial Notes xxxv

1 His Mother's Son 1881-90: 'Mice are not caught without cheese' 1

2 Trials with a Teenager 1890-92: 'Too busy with your parties' 37

3 Coping with a Cadet 1892-4: 'What a goose you are - write!' 67

4 Dying by Inches 1894: 'I feel too low to write' 97

5 Single Parent 1895-6: 'You really ought to leave no stone unturned' 115

6 A Long Way Apart 1896: 'This godless land of snobs and bores' 147

7 Egypt or India? 1896-7: 'All my political ambitions shall be centred in you' 173

8 Army or Politics? 1897: 'I am a Liberal in all but name' 195

9 A Splendid Episode 1897: 'I play for high stakes' 215

10 Hobson's Choice 1897-8: 'My pen wanders recklessly' 247

11 Both Stone Broke 1898: 'Relax not a volt of your energy' 269

12 Lances and Pistols on the Nile 1898: 'It passed like a dream' 297

13 Final Passage to India 1898-9: 'Patriotism and art mix as little as oil and water' 315

14 The Sinews of War 1899-1900: 'I understand you as no other woman ever will' 337

15 End of an Era 1900-01: 'Are all Mothers the same?' 371

16 Both Hunted 1901-2: 'Naturally we see little of each other' 385

17 The Pig Goes to Market 1903-5: 'I cannot help admiring Chamberlain's courage' 399

18 Turning the Tables 1905-6: 'Yon evidently forgot you were writing to your Mother' 425

19 Solace in Scribblings 1907-8: 'Le Bon Dieu has work for you yet' 447

20 End of a Marriage 1908-14: 'Of what use to chain him to me?' 481

21 Coda at the Front 1915-18: 'I am a great believer in your star' 521

22 Last Words 1920-21: 'You are tired out and a little disheartened' 557

Appendix - People, Places 563

Acknowledgements 583

Image Permissions 586

Sources and Letter References 587

Bibliography 595

Index 598

Editorial Reviews

10/29/2018
Lough (No More Champagne) curates the correspondence between Winston Churchill and his American-born socialite mother, Jennie Jerome, in this nostalgic collection. The letters span from 1881, when a five-year-old Winston writes “I am so glad you are coming to see us,” to Jerome’s death in 1921, covering many of Churchill’s life milestones: experience as a soldier in India, time as a prisoner of war, election to Parliament, rise to home secretary, and exploits in politics and the military during WWI. Churchill’s missives shed light on his personality as a young child and a truculent teen, and include “passages of self-analysis that valuable... insight into his character”; Jerome’s reveal a dynamic woman leveraging limited agency in a sexist society and also show the parenting dynamics of the time (in one letter, she laments, of her then-22-year-old son, “You seem to have no real purpose in life”). There are a few editorial missteps: some contextual interludes tell exactly what the ensuing letters will say, and sections forego strict chronological presentation, confusing the timeline. But readers who enjoy piecing together history and filling in gaps from primary evidence, as well as historians and Churchill enthusiasts, will find much of interest. Agent: Andrew Lownie, Andrew Lownie Literary (U.K.). (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"A fascinating study. No More Champagne recasts many aspects of Churchill’s well-known biography."

The Wall Street Journal [Praise for No More Champagne]

"Spicy reading in our own increasingly plutocratic times. Lough doggedly pursues the ins and outs of Churchill’s finances."

The Atlantic [Praise for No More Champagne]

"May become a classic. It will transform the way that Churchill is interpreted and understood."

The New Criterion [Praise for No More Champagne]

"A surprising page-turner."

The Economist [Praise for No More Champagne]

"Lough excels, providing us with just enough narrative, without taking over and distracting the reader from his subjects. He accompanies his text with excellent maps and uncommon photographs. Having David Lough as narrator is like having a skilled tutor, guiding us through the four-decade relationship between mother and son. He never falls short."

Richard Langworth

2018-09-02

Lough (No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money, 2015) has collected all available correspondence between Winston and his mother, Jennie Churchill, from his childhood until the end of her life.

With excellent explanations of the events involved, the author gives readers first-rate insight into the personalities of mother and son. "I estimate at least three-quarters of their letters survive," writes Lough in his context-filled introduction. "Although many have found their way individually into biographies of either mother or son, they have never before appeared as an uninterrupted correspondence between the two." Winston's early studies were dismal; he failed his first two attempts to gain entry into the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, before he started in 1893. Many of his letters to his mother complained of lack of money and not enough letters or visits. The impression from his early years is of a tedious, whining boy looking to his mother to fix everything—which she usually did. Money was seemingly always a problem, and mother and son were similar in many ways. Both were selfish, short-tempered, and extravagant, and both talked too freely and always felt entitled to the best. Once Winston got his posting to India, he realized how little knowledge he had of the liberal arts. Amid catching butterflies and playing polo, he spent his time studying the works of Thomas Macaulay and Edward Gibbon. He discovered early his aptitude for writing and found a clear love of politics. His mother's contacts would clear the way for both endeavors. His ego shows in many of his letters—e.g., he told his mother that during battle, bullets were not worth considering because the gods would not create so potent a being for so prosaic an ending. The author includes the available letters with very few gaps, notably after she married a man Winston's age and during his Boer War escapades. Throughout, he always relied on her help furthering his writing and political careers.

A great resource for gaining a further understanding of these two outsized characters and their era.

Kirkus Reviews

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