The Press: Randolph the Gadfly

Sons of great men bear the handicap of comparison with their fathers. And Sir Winston Churchill’s son Randolph has been more handicapped than most. In his headlong rush to get out of the great man’s shadow, Randolph Frederick Edward Spencer Churchill has flopped spectacularly in politics, succeeded only erratically in journalism, and earned such labels as “rampant Randolph” and “England’s answer to Elliot Roosevelt.” But in the last two years, Randolph Churchill, now 44, has been emerging in a role all his own as the sharpest, scrappiest critic of Britain’s wayward press.

Last week some of the toughest hides on Fleet Street were smarting cruelly from Churchill’s thrusts. It was Randolph who punctured the inaccuracies in a series on his father begun (and abruptly dropped) by the Daily Mail (TIME, Dec. 12). Next to feel the sting was the Sunday Pictorial (circ. 5,466,255), whose blatant stories about a modern “virgin birth” created an uproar in the whole British press, until Journalist Churchill, under his frequent pen name, Pharos, in the weekly Spectator, exposed the fact that the hard-boiled Pic had been taken in by a prankster. Then Randolph needled the Kemsley Sunday Graphic for announcing, but never printing, a “revealing, exciting, touching” series called “Those Churchill Girls.” The reason the series never saw print, suggested Randolph in the Spectator, lay in a telegram he had sent to Lord Kemsley (family name: Berry), reading in part: WONDER WHETHER I COULD HAVE YOUR COOPERATION FOR SERIES I AM PLANNING FOR “DAILY MIRROR” AND GLASGOW “DAILY RECORD” ENTITLED “THOSE BERRY GIRLS” . . . WARMEST REGARDS TO YOU AND ALL THE BERRY GIRLS.

Dog Don’t Eat Dog. Though Randolph carries on a special vendetta against what he regards as the invasion of his own family’s privacy, he campaigns outspokenly in columns, speeches and letters to the editor against all that riles him about British journalism, from the accent on sex and crime in the “popular” press (which led him to brand the press lords “important pornographers and criminologists”), to the smugness of the august Times.

Randolph takes on all comers. When most dailies ignored his speeches attacking “the river of pornography” in the press, he printed the talks in a shilling pamphlet called “What I Said About the Press.” Later he stung the Press Council, the British newspapers’ own watchdog on press ethics, into scolding Daily Sketch Editor Herbert Gunn for changing an adverse criticism of a movie that his wife helped make into a favorable review. By then Randolph was busily battling the trade weekly, World’s Press News for suppressing the story of that dispute because, wrote Randolph, its boss is a cousin of Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Sketch.

Randolph’s one-man campaign is a flagrant breach in the conspiracy of courtesy that by long tradition keeps Fleet Street mum about its own foibles. “It is a curious thing,” he has written, “that wealthy men who own papers set themselves up to criticize every kind of institution, but they themselves are the one institution which is totally immune from criticism . . . Dog don’t eat dog. That is one of the reasons why some of the London press is so bad.”

Natural Gifts. As a boy under a doting father’s eye, Randolph was taught to air his opinions. He sat at the family table, often monopolizing conversation and contradicting distinguished visitors. As he grew older, handsome young Churchill’s assurance was taken successively for brashness, arrogance, and what the Sunday Observer called his “natural gifts in the unfashionable art of rudeness.” After Eton and 18 months at Oxford, his assurance helped him pull off a seven-month, $12,500, U.S. lecture tour at the age of 19. It also helped him to lose six elections for Parliament from 1935 to 1951; the only time Randolph managed to get into Commons was during the wartime political truce, when the Conservative Party let him have an uncontested seat.

Randolph shone most brightly in a recklessly courageous military career: he jumped into Yugoslavia as a parachutist with a Commando unit, also served in North Africa and Italy, reached the rank of major. He covered the Korean war for the Daily Telegraph, managed to rub most of his fellow correspondents the wrong way until the day he returned from a patrol action with a half-dollar-sized shrapnel hole in his shin and coolly dictated a dispatch.

Attacking the press fits Randolph’s taste and temperament. “I’m a naughty tease,” he admitted last week in his 20-room, seven-bath Essex farmhouse, where he lives with his second wife and their daughter, Arabella, 6. (His son Winston II, 15, is at Eton.) “I like to attack rich and powerful people. I like to do things the hard way.” In the Spectator, in a signed weekly column for Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard and by freelancing, Randolph plays his role of gadfly. His cause, and the lusty Churchillian way he fights it, has gained him new respect in Fleet Street. Said an editor: “He’s done a lot of good. He’s saying things that should be said.”