July 5, 2017

Finest Hour 176, Spring 2017

Page 04

By David Freeman, April 2017


In our last issue we looked at some of the women closest to Winston Churchill. In this issue we look at some of the men who surrounded his life, especially those in his family.

Churchill was the grandson of both the stolid seventh Duke of Marlborough and the mercurial Leonard Jerome. Paul J. Taylor looks at this Yankee entrepreneur and finds that no shortage of the American’s personality found its way into his grandson. Paul Addison then examines the enigmatic relationship between Churchill and his father Lord Randolph and notes a key difference in their political vision.

Much has been written about the relationship between Churchill and his parents, which Churchill saw as unbearably distant. Little attention, however, has been paid to how Lord and Lady Randolph were viewed by their younger son. Celia and John Lee look at the life of Jack Churchill and, in so doing, slightly change our perception of the self-centered young Winston. Similarly, we see Churchill’s own son Randolph somewhat differently by looking at him here through the eyes of his sister Sarah Churchill.

We are also pleased to follow a long standing Churchill tradition of having sons write of their fathers. Randolph Churchill, President of the International Churchill Society, tells the story of his father the “Younger Winston” and the challenges of living up to such a famous name.

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Churchill, of course, felt the influence of men outside his family. One such was his Head Master at Harrow, J. E. C. Welldon, who had an interesting career of his own, as Fred Glueckstein explains. As the son of an American mother, Churchill cared deeply about American history. Not surprisingly, the greatest man of the twentieth century found a hero in the greatest man of the nineteenth. Lewis E. Lehrman compares and contrasts Churchill and Abraham Lincoln as the leaders of democracies at war.

John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, was part of Winston Churchill’s family. Like Lincoln, however, the great general was an influence Winston Churchill could only learn from through reading. John von Heyking shows how Churchill’s study of his most famous ancestor prepared him for the responsibilities of the Second World War.

Finally, news of Churchill’s “belief” in extraterrestrial life swept through the global news media earlier this year. Timothy Riley of the National Churchill Musuem in Fulton, Missouri explains the story, while providing the most reliable and authoritative account of what it is really all about. He shows once again why Finest Hour is the recognized journal of record on all things related to Churchill.

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