BIOGRAPHY: ROBERT O'BYRNEreviews The Churchills: A Family at the Heart of History – From the Duke of Marlborough to Winston ChurchillBy Mary S Lovell Little, Brown, 624pp. £25
AT THE END of King Vidor's 1937 weepie, Stella Dallas, the eponymous heroine, played by Barbara Stanwyck, stands in the rain outside a grand mansion looking through the window at all the smart rich folk enjoying themselves indoors. Mary S Lovell has taken up a similar position when considering the Churchill family, thrilled with whatever she is permitted to glimpse through a chink in the curtains but lacking any wish to investigate beyond the immediate spectacle.
Her attitude is simultaneously prurient and respectful, eager to pry yet disinclined to pass judgment on her subjects’ behaviour. The effect is to present the English aristocracy as belonging not only to a different class but also to another breed, both expected and obligated to behave in a way unlike the rest of the population. The American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, we are told, was a fit bride for the ninth duke of Marlborough because “in addition to her unusual beauty and graceful carriage, there was a natural nobility coupled with a modest simplicity about this young woman”. Well, that’s all right, then: just imagine the disappointment had she suffered from a deficit of “natural nobility”, whatever that may be.
Typically, Lovell notes more than once that Churchill children suffered from parental neglect but then, in case we might imagine she was daring to be critical, hastens to assure us that this was not unusual for patrician offspring. Likewise, by the way, marital infidelity, despite the peerage’s abundance of natural nobility.
In fact nobility, in the sense of high ideals or character, is a trait few of the Churchills have possessed. The subtitle of Lovell’s book is misleading, as it implies this is a history of the entire family, whereas she dispatches the first notable Churchill, John, first duke of Marlborough, in a single chapter and summarises more than a century of successors to the title in four pages. For more than 100 years after the original duke’s death the Churchills were not so much at the heart of history as on its periphery, distinguished only by their determination to dissipate their inheritance. The unpleasant Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, proved a disappointment to his parents, but he was only reverting to type when showing himself shallow and spendthrift. “Dear Randolph,” commented Noël Coward, “entirely unspoilt by failure”. Evelyn Waugh was right to call him “a flabby bully who rejoices in blustering and shouting down anyone weaker than himself and starts squealing as soon as he meets anyone as strong”. In this he continued a long family tradition.
The wonder, therefore, is that from such stock should have sprung Lord Randolph Churchill and his elder son, Winston, two men who did not believe the world owed them a comfortable living but were driven by an ambition to leave their mark on it. Lord Randolph is a particularly fascinating study in political failure, a man of enormous promise who climbed high fast but then fell with equal speed.
This, however, is not the book in which to find details of his public career, as Lovell is much more interested in Lord Randolph’s private life. Tellingly, one of the book’s two appendices is devoted to a discussion of whether he suffered from syphilis caught from a Paris courtesan. Lovell writes what might be described as boudoir history, or What the Parlourmaid Saw. As much space is devoted to the wartime amours of Winston’s daughter-in-law Pamela (who, after divorcing Randolph, would end up as Pamela Harriman, US ambassador to France) as to his efforts to defeat the Germans.
Nor is nuance a characteristic of the author’s style. Instead her preference is for sweeping generalisation. Paris in the 1860s, for example, was “the city of the Impressionists . . . Each spring when the warm sunshine turned the chestnut-flower buds into candles, visitors flocked to the city to walk beneath the scented blossom in the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne.” This is the Barbara Cartland school of literature.
In her defence, Lovell’s preface makes plain the intention to adopt “a gossipy approach to my subjects”. She argues that in her experience the world has always thrived on gossip, “and provided contemporary gossip is presented with appropriate explanation and is properly sourced, then it can have a place even in serious biography”. Perhaps this is true, but she has given a hostage to fortune by referring to gossip being properly sourced. Lovell’s book contains too many basic errors to merit being considered serious biography.
She writes that when the seventh duke of Marlborough arrived in Dublin as lord lieutenant in 1877 it was nearly 20 years on from the Great Famine, which would therefore have had to end a decade later than was actually the case. The writer Anita Leslie is presented as Jennie Churchill’s niece rather than great-niece, and Winston Churchill’s inspiration as orator was called Bourke Cockran, not, as Lovell seems to believe, Cochran. The cumulative effect of these inaccuracies is to discredit the entire text and do a disservice to both Lovell and her publisher.
As he waited to die Winston Churchill turned to his son-in-law Christopher Soames and exclaimed: “I’m so bored with it all.” After wading through more than 600 pages of Lovell’s prose I know how he felt.
Robert O’Byrne is a writer and critic. His most recent book is a biography of Desmond Leslie, published by The Lilliput Press
