The personal history of a family famous for its role in world history

The Churchills: A Family at the Heart of History

If her title had been Churchill: A Love Story it would have been as accurate as her chosen one, which suggests a dynastic compilation of the Churchills. Yet although only a few Churchills are worth writing about, love and gossip thicken the fascinating text. Lovell has written about people rather than events; she sticks to this astutely but even in a family-orientated story it is difficult to treat international events as background material.

Churchill’s role in history, from the Boer War to his last parliamentary election in 1959, has been exhaustively covered already, not least by Sir Winston himself. Lovell’s bibliography runs to four closely-printed pages and her notes could act as a social and political gazette of the movers and shakers of the British, American and European landscape over 100 years. Lovell begins with John Churchill, born in 1650 as the elder son of Winston Churchill, MP for Weymouth. Early court intrigues, misalliances and affairs encouraged rather than inhibited his route to fame, ensured first by his marriage to the intrepid Sarah Jennings, and then, following the succession of English kings, queens and wars, by his triumph at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704 and his eventual dukedom.

Together, John and Sarah — by then immensely powerful herself, through her domination of Queen Anne — built the house that remains the single constant of the story, which leaps over the intervening centuries to arrive at the birth of Winston Churchill in 1874 at Blenheim in Oxfordshire.

His mother was the lovely, energetic American Jennie Jerome, his father Lord Randolph Churchill, unfortunately a second son, which meant that Blenheim, while always hospitably open to Winston and his family, could never be his home. Winston loved the palace, which went first to his uncle Blandford, the eight duke, and then to his cousin Sunderland. The ninth duke was known as Sunny and was unhappily married to another glorious American, Consuelo Vanderbilt. A later duchess remained defiantly at Blenheim after her divorce, breeding spaniels who used the priceless carpets as litter trays and for whom flaps were cut in the antique mahogany doors.

The Churchill tradition seemed to be benign-but-distant care for their children. Winston, while enduring a sadistic schoolmaster and hopelessly enamoured of his distant mother, was raised by a nannie to whom he and his younger brother were devoted. When he became a father, both his political and active social life meant that he reproduced the same parental distance. While loyal to, and supportive of, his children, and faithful to his poisonous son Randolph, of whom, as a teenager, it was said that he could pick an argument with a chair, he and his wife Clementine Hozier left the youngsters for months at a time. Well, there were boarding schools and a phalanx of nannies, nurses, housekeepers, cousins and friends all willing to take over.

Lovell can make a kind of sense of this lifestyle; never wealthy until Winston’s books restored his finances, well-being and confidence, the Churchills required that their country house at Chartwell should have a large, airy sewing room.

It’s all relative, and there were a lot of relatives. As prime ministers and cabinet ministers and secretaries and officers weave in and out of so many often tumultuous years, the cousins appear and re-appear. Sir Winston’s father was one of the eight children of the seventh Duke of Marlborough to marry and pro-create (later, there were still many children, but not necessarily as many marriages), with the result that Winston had 30 Churchill first cousins and seven maternal, all of whom went forth and multiplied, and then there were Clementine’s cousins, in-laws, step-children, and on goes what must, at times, have been a bewildering if merry dance. But for many of them, it was merry.

The Churchills were a family who always had a world elsewhere, and it was mostly on the Riviera, with a hearty dash of America and bursts of Italy and Greece, with villas (one built by the Duke of Westminster for his lover Coco Chanel) and yachts (Onassis, naturally!), sprinkling the most famous or notorious names through the Churchill calendar.

Lovell keeps a coherent account of all this dazzling traffic, from the Lords of the Admiralty to the astonishing Pamela Digby Harrison (President Bill Clinton sent Air Force One to collect her body after her death at the Ritz in Paris). One might quibble at her depiction of Lady Hazel Lavery as the lover of Michael Collins, and so distraught at his death that she tried to throw herself into his grave and thereafter wore widow’s weeds. Can this be true? Yet from Gallopoli to Washington DC, from palaces to country houses, Lovell seems in charge of her absorbing canvas, even to the fate of Winston’s pet budgie, carried with him on his travels and flying away at last to end his days in the skies of Monte Carlo.