March 12, 2015

Finest Hour 158, Spring 2013

Page 54

Monty Porch: A Charmed Life, by Roger Parsons. Self-published, soft- bound, illus., 48 pp., £8 ($12). Find more information here. 

Roger Parsons has done history a favor with a captivating biography of the Edwardian gentleman who sought fortune in the Empire, fell in love with a woman thirty years his senior, and became Winston Churchill’s second stepfather, three years younger than Churchill himself.

The second son of a prominent Glastonbury family, Montague Porch had no prospect of vast inheritance, but was educated at Oxford, made archeology digs in Sinai, and in 1908 joined the civil service as Third British Resident in Nigeria, building a grand home in Zaria City which has since become a landmark. He also served gallantly in the Boer War and World War I.

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Porch met Lady Randolph in Rome in 1914. He was thirty-seven, she was sixty, but she still had the dazzle that had captivated Lord d’Abernon three decades earlier: “…a dark, lithe figure… radiant, translucent, intense. A diamond star in her hair, her favourite ornament—its lustre dimmed by the flashing glory of her eyes. More the panther than the woman in her look….”

Freshly divorced from George Cornwallis-West, Jennie suggested he go dance with the younger girls, but Monty was smitten. He pursued her for years, their friendship warmed. In the spring of 1918 they shared an idyllic fortnight in Ireland, and married in June.

Jennie’s son Winston said he “hoped marriage wouldn’t become the vogue among ladies of his mother’s age,” but he and Jack were glad for their mother. At the wedding Winston told Porch, “You’ll never regret you married her.”

Monty had ignored official duties during his romance, and soon had to return to Nigeria, Jennie unable to join him because of wartime travel restrictions. He hurtled back as soon as he could to “step out” with her in London society—whose amused whispers Jennie characteristically scorned: “They say. What do they say? Let them say!” And, memorably: “He has a future and I have a past, so we should be all right.”

There were fortunes to be made in Africa, and Monty needed money to support his famously extravagant wife. In the spring of 1921, Winston and Jack financed his exploratory trip to the Gold Coast (now Ghana). He left Jennie for the last time, writing touching letters to his now-67-year-old spouse. At the end of May Jennie fell, breaking two bones. She recovered, but gangrene set in and a surgeon was forced to amputate her leg above the knee.

Porch, while doing well in Africa, was desperately anxious; Winston cabled him the news. Alas on June 29th Jennie suffered a sudden hemorrhage and died. Winston “was reported spending his days weeping.” Porch returned to an empty house and an empty life. Distraught, he returned to Africa for a spell, then Italy where he remarried: this time to a much younger woman!

Porch never forgot his first love. In old age he would sit admiring her famous sketch by John Singer Sargent, which he willed to Sir Winston; it has since passed to his great-grandson Randolph. He never lost his wonder, Parsons writes, that such a dazzling star had ever loved him. Finally he returned to Glastonbury, where he lived quietly with friends, died at 87 just two months before Winston, and was buried in a sadly unmarked grave.

The author confronts various fictions surrounding Porch and Churchill. The tallest tale is that WSC paid secret visits to Porch’s home in Glastonbury to get away from World War II. German Intelligence supposedly finds out, and parachutes Waffen SS troopers onto Glastonbury Tor “to capture Churchill, and also to seize the Holy Grail [allegedly entombed in the Tor] for Himmler while they were in the neighbourhood.” But a hot reception awaits and all are killed, “buried in secret on the moors, and the whole matter was hushed up!” I am delighted to see Mr. Parsons skewer such nonsense before it gets onto the Internet.

Monty lived “a charmed life,” the author writes: “A man of cultivated taste and enquiring mind, an archaeologist, an able administrator and businessman …generally quiet and undemonstrative…willing to dice with fame in return for love and approval; a man perhaps continually seeking a role and a place in the world, but never quite finding it.”

This is a remarkable monograph, not only on a little-known player in the Churchill drama, but on the society which bore him—and Jennie, and her sons—a society you must understand if you are really to understand the whole of Winston Churchill. Parsons offers unprecedented detail, and his well-written text is thoroughly documented, nicely illustrated and factual. I couldn’t begin to list all the details this little book offers on the personal life of the Churchill family in the Teens and Twenties. Email the author (he will accept cheques in U.S. and Canadian dollars) and order a copy