May 7, 2013

FINEST HOUR 146, SPRING 2010

BY CELIA LEE

Mrs. Lee is the main author of The Churchills: A Family Portrait, reviewed on page 39. All photographs are published by kind permission of Mrs. Peregrine Spencer Churchill.

ABSTRACT
She was widely renowned for living life large, so few were surprised when Winston and Jack Churchill’s mother raised $150,000 to furnish and equip a hospital ship for the Boer War—or when Jennie herself embarked for South Africa, and personally directed the nursing.

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Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s mother, was born Jennie Jerome in Brooklyn on 9 January 1854. Her star sign is Capricorn, the mountain goat, which always climbs higher, discontented until it reaches the top.

In 1874 Jennie fell in love with and married Lord Randolph Spencer Churchill, second surviving son of the Seventh Duke of Marlborough and Frances Vane Tempest. Randolph became an expert on Irish affairs and rose rapidly to become Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in 1886. But he fell out with the Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, over defence cuts he’d proposed in his first budget, and resigned as a point of principle. The strain of political life had taken its toll of his health and Jennie had much experience of nursing him through bouts of illness until his death in January 1895.

The Anglo-Boer War broke out in 1899, and Mrs. Blow, the American wife of the manager of one of South Africa’s richest mining syndicates, determined to provide a hospital ship to care for the war wounded. Jennie became chairman of the U.S. Hospital Ship Fund and worked enthusiastically to raise what she recalled in her memoirs was $150,000 (nearly $4 million in today’s money). An American millionaire, Bernard Nadel Baker, founder of the Atlantic Transport Company in Baltimore, provided one of his transport vessels, the Maine, which required a complete refit. Jennie organised a huge fund-raising event at Claridge’s Hotel in London and decided to travel on the ship to Cape Town as both her sons were serving in South Africa.

The fund-raising was marred by the devastating news that Jennie’s son Winston had been captured by the Boers. He eventually escaped unscathed, but while he remained in captivity it was a harrowing time for Lady Randolph, as she was still known.

The launch ceremony of the hospital ship Maine was conducted by HRH the Duke of Connaught, a younger brother of the Prince of Wales. Flying the flags of the United States, Great Britain, the Red Cross, and the Admiralty’s transport fleet, Maine left Portsmouth Harbour on Saturday 23 December 1899. She was equipped with an isolation ward, an operating theatre and an X-ray machine—an innovation at that time.

At sea, there was conflict between the American and British staff, and Jennie acted as peacemaker. Her 46th birthday passed unnoticed and on January 23, Maine arrived in Cape Town. The war-readied harbour was full of ships disembarking troops, and the streets filled with soldiers. Deployment of the Maine was the responsibility of the Chief Medical Officer for Cape Town, who wanted to send the ship to Durban to take on wounded for immediate return to England. Jennie opposed this, and got her way. Her younger son Jack arrived in uniform, wearing a large sombrero hat which gave him rather the appearance of a cowboy. It gave Jennie peace of mind when his brother Winston arrived, and the three Churchills were reunited for two days.

With the Battle of Spion Kop underway, the ship would soon be filled to capacity. Winston and Jack left to join their regiments and Jennie and her staff took charge of the wounded, who were arriving in wagons. She wore a nurse’s uniform of her own design, a starched white apron, white blouse and an armband with a red cross. When the ambulance train arrived on February 5th, Jennie and Miss Hibbard and the nursing staff were ready to care for the first sixty-seven casualties. There were twelve stretcher cases, but the rest were walking. The Central News of Durban reported that: “Lady Randolph personally superintended their reception, directed berthing, and flitted among the injured as ‘an angel of mercy.'”

To Jennie’s distress, Jack was wounded and became the first officer casualty received on board, on 13 February, just nine days after his twentieth birthday. Winston later explained that while on reconnaissance on horseback, Jack had been shot in the calf: a near thing, since the bullet passed close to his head. Winston wrote his mother that the field doctors had told him Jack’s wound would take a month to heal. Jack wrote to his Aunt Clara Frewen on 27 March:

Thank goodness it had turned out to be nothing, but it hurt a good deal at the time. I mounted again as the squadron continued to retire, but after going about a mile, Winston made me get into an ambulance; and so my military career ended rather abruptly. It was very hard luck being hit the first time I was under fire. But I saw a very good day, and while it lasted, I heard as many bullets whiz past as I ever want to. I went straight onto the Maine, and there I remained until she sailed for the Cape.

Jack’s bullet is on display at the Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum in London.

The Maine was soon filled with wounded soldiers, and Jennie and her team worked day and night. Her personal role was largely administrative. British and Boer casualties, arriving in tattered uniforms covered in dirt, were treated equally. Twenty operations were performed and there were three deaths, one each from typhoid, aneurysm and tuberculosis. The nurses cleaned and dressed the wounds, administering morphine as a painkiller. Surgeons removed bullets under ether anaesthesia. Winston wrote in a press report: “During the two months the ship has been at Durban, more than 300 cases have been treated, and many difficult operations have been performed successfully.”

Jennie had for many years been a close confidant of the Prince of Wales, who wrote in February to congratulate her for her courageous work. Jennie replied: “I am satisfied with the Mission the Maine has fulfilled—& if I may say so my connection with it. It has been hard work & sometimes the temptation has been great to fly off in a mail steamer for home—but I am glad I resisted.”

The Maine sailed for England with its cargo of casualties and arrived back in Southampton on 23 April, carrying twelve wounded officers and over 350 woundedmen. The press reported that Jennie looked lovely in a blue serge dress and a sailor’s straw hat with a blue ribbon. From the flag-bedecked quay, the patients were taken by special train to the hospital at Netley.

Having once boasted that she would live to be 90, Jennie died aged only 67, on 9 June 1921, after a fall at “Mells Manor,” the home of her friend Frances, Lady Horner. Winston was at her side. On July 1st he wrote to a friend in what may serve as her valedictory:

I wish you could have seen her as she lay at rest—after all the sunshine and storm of life was over. Very beautiful and splendid she looked. Since the morning with its pangs, thirty years had fallen from her brow. She recalled to me the countenance I had admired as a child when she was in her heyday and the old brilliant world of the eighties and nineties seemed to come back.* ,

*Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume IV, Part 3, Documents April 1921 – November 1922 (London: Heinemann, 1977), 1532.