Father love
Patrick Cosgrave
Randolph: A Study of Winston's Son Brian Roberts
(Hamish Hamilton £12.95) Without work there is no play.' Thus Winston Churchill in one of the most delectable chapters of that delectable book, My Early Life. The chapter 'Education at Bangalore' — describes the formidable reading programme young Winston set himself when he was a subaltern in India. He was as keen as any other young officer — ferociously keener than most — on the social, military and polo playing rounds of the old Indian Em- pire. But, while his friends slept through the hot afternoons, Winston read. The list of his reading is formidable, and still surprises those who know only the public image of the later years, for it includes Plato, Schopenhauer, Malthus and Darwin. He lamented the fact that he had nobody to guide his reading and that he had to be, per- force, his own critic. But what he achieved in that brief and intense period of self- education remains staggering.
`Without play there is no work.' That might well have been the motto of Winston's son, Randolph. Showered with gifts — connections, charm (when he wanted to apply it), talent and good looks — Randolph thought he could equal his father, without acquiring the habits of in- dustry that his father displayed throughout his life. When he interrupted his under- graduate career at Oxford to undertake a tour of the United States and when, later, he broke his word to his parents and refus- ed to return to the university, Winston (who bitterly regretted his own lack of formal education after school) was more than a tri- fle upset, for he knew better than Randolph what was good for Randolph.
Beatrice Webb's description of the young Winston — 'restless, egotistical, bump- tious, shallow-minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magnetism, great pluck and some originality not of intellect, but of character' — might well have been applied to Randolph when, before attaining his majority, he assaulted the world. But, whereas Randolph believed he could reach every goal he set himself almost solely by the exercise of his personality, and that his lavish indulgence in the weaknesses of the flesh would in no way inhibit his progress, Winston realised very early in life how in- dispensable industry was to achievement. It was a lesson Randolph did not learn until he began to write his father's biography, and by then he was so physically weakened by his excesses that he did not have enough time to apply it. In writing about this extraordinary, this magic and fated, figure, Mr Roberts has managed to do what I would have thought impossible: he has produced a dull book. It amounts, almost, to a litany, a plodding record of what Randolph did and said, where he went, who he saw, and which women he favoured at any given moment. And when Mr Roberts seeks to plumb more deeply the recesses of the personality of the greatest Churchill's son, he is required by his own inadequacies to fall back on in- numerable variations of the old cliches about the difficulty of being the offspring of a famous father. At no point in the 364 pages of his text did I feel I was anywhere near a serious understanding of what and even who — Randolph was.
I did not meet Randolph Churchill until he was a couple of years from death. He was already a ruin of a man, but one could see the outline of beauty and the flash of ability in the husk that confronted one. He talked only about Winston, and about the monumental biography on which he was then engaged, and which is now being brought to a triumphal conclusion by Mr Martin Gilbert. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that Randolph's tragedy was not just that he wanted to equal or ex- cel his father, but that he wanted to be his father. That identification with paternity, which shows so often in the mock- Churchillian rhythms of his prose, was
tragic, because he so evidently lacked the application and understanding that were in- dispensable parts of his father's greatness.
On the other hand — and this, too, was tragic — the young Randolph had something the young Winston lacked. That something was great physical beauty, for he inherited his mother's rather than his father's looks, and Clementine Hozier was one of the most beautiful women of the age. That beauty — allied to quickness of wit, unbounded self-confidence, and ruthlessly used contacts — gave Randolph a start in life which a more self-critical man would have not envied merely, but used with care. But, perhaps because beauty was the one thing he had which his father did not have, Randolph assumed that it was the only thing which mattered. He was wrong. The injured note which he sounded again and again throughout his life, specifically one of amazement that he was not in the House of Commons and effortlessly rising in politics immediately after reaching the age of 21, demonstrates that he never understood either his situation or himself.
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