Objecting to Randolph
From Mr Geoffrey Wheatcroft Sir: An unreasonable degree of confusion over Randolph Churchill seems to have crept into your pages. Stephen Glover (Media studies, 31 March) now acquits an Observer reporter (as opposed to a sub on the paper), whom he had earlier (Media studies, 17 March) accused of mistaking Sir Winston Churchill's father Lord Randolph Churchill for his son, also Randolph. Lord Randolph is of course treated at length in the DNB. It is not the father who is 'excluded from the present edition of the Dictionary of National Biography. . . banned from existing volumes on account of his alcoholism', says Mr Glover (17 March), though 'it is certainly true that' for that reason 'young Randolph does not figure' in the dictionary.
But he does. 'Young Randolph' died in 1968, less than four years after his father, and he does not appear in the decennial volume covering those who died in 1961-70. The omission may have been oversight or censoriousness; I believe that Guy Burgess was specifically excluded from the same volume out of moral disapprobation. Or perhaps there was a sense that it would be too bathetic to have Randolph's chequered annals immediately next to his father's story.
Then the supplementary volume called 'Missing Persons' — an existing volume of the present edition of the DNB — was published in 1993. It wraps up such persons previously omitted from the dictionary, among them Churchill (and, indeed, Burgess). Lord Blake's essay is notably candid. Randolph 'became somewhat bloated in middle age, and his potations did not improve his appearance', while Sir John
Colville is quoted as finding him 'one of the most objectionable people I had ever met'. However that may be, there Randolph is.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Savoy, France
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