Britain: In the Shadow

If it is difficult to be the son of an outstanding father, Randolph Frederick Edward Spencer Churchill had one of the most difficult roles in history. Born in 1911 in the year his father, Winston Churchill, became First Lord of the Admiralty, Randolph keenly felt the overpowering effects of his father’s greatness. “When you are living under the shadow of a great oak tree,” he once reflected, “the small sapling does not perhaps receive enough sunshine.” Last week, at 57 still in the shadow, Randolph Churchill died.

From his early childhood, Randolph felt compelled to emulate his towering father. After undistinguished years at Eton and Oxford, he followed his father’s early example by popping off to the U.S. for a lecture tour. One subject: “Why I Am Not a Socialist.” American audiences loved him, but Britons turned him down when he ran for Parliament. In fact, he lost three successive campaigns for a seat until he finally sneaked into Parliament for a brief stay in 1940 after winning an unopposed by-election. “I like Randolph,” purred Noel Coward. “He is so unspoiled by his great failure.”

Dangerously Overinflated. Randolph’s finest hour came at the same time as his father’s—during World War II. Displaying what one of his commanders called “foolish courage,” Randolph volunteered for a commando raid hundreds of miles behind enemy lines in North Africa. Then in 1943, defying capture by the Germans, he slipped several times by boat and parachute into enemy-occupied Yugoslavia, where he served as his father’s personal envoy to Marshal Tito’s partisan bands—a service that made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire, the country’s oft-awarded distinction for merit.

After the war, Randolph developed into a cantankerous, litigious gadfly who showed Churchillian propensities for good drink and ridicule, but lacked his father’s offsetting attributes of literary genius and intellectual brilliance. He failed in three more attempts to win a seat in Parliament, cranked out nine undistinguished books, and wrote numerous newspaper columns in which he vented his wrath on Americans, British politicians and the Fleet Street press lords. “I’m a naughty tease,” he explained. “I like to attack rich and powerful people.” The London Observer mused that he was “dangerously over-inflated with hot air, bursting with ruderies, strained around the seams, self-sealing against the tin-tacks of opposition and criticism.”

Trouble & Tragedy. Following his father’s death in 1965, Randolph mellowed markedly. Dropping out of the public eye, he turned to a new task; writing a five-volume biography of Sir Winston’s life. “I’ve wasted a lot of my life,” he conceded. “Now there’s a satisfactory conclusion—good solid work to do.” He had finished two of the volumes, both of which won critical acclaim, and was at work on the third when he died of congestive cardiac failure.

Though Randolph ultimately accommodated himself to life in the shadow, the Churchill family has had more than its share of trouble and tragedy. Only his youngest sister Mary, now 46, who is married to Britain’s Ambassador-designate to France Christopher Soames and is the mother of five children, has managed to live a normal life. Randolph’s second-youngest sister, Marigold died in infancy in 1921. His sister Sarah, three years his junior, is afflicted by the “deep belief that I was an accident” and has frequently been arrested for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. His eldest sister Diana, who was married for 25 years to onetime Tory Defense Secretary Duncan Sandys, committed suicide in 1963—a death that stunned Britain, especially since she was active at the time in a London group known as Samaritans, a sort of suicide-rescue corps that attempted to head off suicides before they happened.