In June 1963, Randolph Churchill was invited to join his father Winston aboard the yacht of Aristotle Onassis, the Christina, for a cruise on the Mediterranean Sea. On the first few days of the voyage, Randolph treated his 88-year old father with “infinite affection and respect.” The long and complicated relationship between the father and son, however, meant that the tranquility could not last. One night at dinner aboard the yacht, without any obvious reason, Randolph suddenly exploded. He instantly worked himself into “an inchoate rage directed at Winston.” While the others at the dinner table tried desperately to calm him, he directed “violent reproaches” at his father, accusing him of encouraging his first wife Pamela’s affairs with Americans during the Second World War. Through the outburst, Winston sat silently staring at his son with “brooding rage.” Later when he was taken to his cabin, Winston was “shaking all over” and his private secretary Anthony Montague Browne feared he was going to suffer another stroke. Randolph left the yacht the next day. Accompanied on the launch from the yacht to the harbor by Montague Brown, Randolph was first silent and then wept. He finally confided to the private secretary, “I do very much love that man but something always goes wrong between us.”
Randolph’s observation about his feelings towards his father serves as an excellent description of the 54-year relationship of father and son, love but something always going wrong. This turbulent and complex relationship is the subject of Churchill & Son by Josh Ireland. It is a fine book.
Randolph was the first child and only son of Winston and Clementine Churchill and as Ireland notes Winston was determined to not repeat with his son the neglect he had experienced at the hands of his own father. Unfortunately he spoiled his son enormously, encouraging his arrogance and rudeness, endlessly indulging him, and was amused by his insolence to others. He also encouraged vast political ambitions in his son that included the premiership. In the 1930s, with Churchill in the political wilderness, Randolph was his closest lieutenant and their lives were “tightly entwined,” but this intimacy was lost during the Second World War and did not ever return. As Ireland notes, Winston lost faith in his son’s abilities and Randolph’s place at his side was taken by John Colville, Brendan Bracken, and later by his son-in-law Christopher Soames, while the role of political heir, much to Randolph’s jealousy, was filled by Anthony Eden. After the war, the relationship of father and son was marred by constant fights, rows, and painful scenes that always seemed to return to his parents’ failure to take his side in the breakdown of his wartime marriage to Pamela Digby.
Ireland concludes that Winston first built and then ultimately “broke his son” as “Randolph was shaped by his father’s affection, humor, courage, and generosity” and was “damaged [by] his egotism, his ruthlessness, [and] his obsession with his own destiny and desires.” It is a harsh judgement, perhaps too harsh, but Ireland makes a strong case for such a conclusion.