July 4, 2026

The World of Churchill Collectables

by Brian Krapf

There is so much to say about Lady Randolph Churchill, the mother of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Biographies have been written that provide far more detail than this space allows. In keeping with this year’s ICS theme of “Churchill in America,” it’s important to point out that Lady Randolph was an American, thus making Sir Winston half American by virtue of his birth. Jeanette “Jennie” Jerome was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1854, the second of four daughters of financier, sportsman, and speculator Leonard Jerome and his wife Clarissa. She was raised in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Paris and London. Twenty-year-old Jennie Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill on 15 April 1874 at the British Embassy in Paris. She was one of the first so-called “buccaneers,” American women who crossed the Atlantic to marry into British aristocracy. Lord Randolph was the third son of the Duke of Marlborough. The Churchills had two sons: Winston (1874–1965), and John (1880–1947).

The two cabinet cards pictured here are real photos of Lady Randolph taken in 1885 at a sitting at the Nadar studio during a vacation in Paris. Nadar was the pseudonym for Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, a well-established Parisian photographer who catered to elite clientele. He earned notoriety in 1858, when as a balloonist, he took the first aerial photographs. Nadar’s photographic portraits are prized and held by many of the great national photograph collections. An additional cabinet card photo and a boudoir photo (larger sized cabinet card) from this same sitting are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. At the time these photos were taken, Lady Randolph was thirty-one years old. Her son, Winston, was eleven.

Crown Ducal made a wise decision to utilize this photo of Churchill on their early commemorative. Taken at the height of the Blitz, it came to stand as a symbol of defiance and support for the “Fighting Premier.” Churchill himself chose this photograph as the frontispiece for Into Battle, the first volume of his collected war speeches published in 1941.