November 29, 2020

By BARRY SINGER

In December 1905, the new Liberal Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman gave Winston Churchill his first government post as Under Secretary of State for the Colonies. Upon his new appointment, Churchill set off in search of the perfect Private Secretary. At a party on December 14, he found his man. Two years Churchill’s elder, Edward Marsh was in many ways his sharply contrasting variant, though hardly his opposite.

Like Churchill, Marsh had a political pedigree—descended from a former Prime Minister, the nineteenth-century Spencer Percival, who alone among British Prime Ministers had died of an assassin’s bullet. Like Churchill, Marsh was also a passionate lover of poetry. Unlike him, Marsh had inherited some money, which he would use to become one of Britain’s great patrons of the modernist twentieth-century arts  supporting and championing the work of avant-garde Bloomsbury Group artists, including Duncan Grant and Paul Nash, and poets like Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon.

The influence that Marsh, Brooke, and Sassoon had on Churchill is explored in the current issue of Finest Hour about “Churchill’s Literary World.”

Barry Singer is the author of Churchill Style (Abrams Image, 2012) and the proprietor of Chartwell Booksellers in New York City.