August 1, 2013

Finest Hour 125, Winter 2004-05

Page 11

Leading Churchill Myths (8): “Jack Churchill was not Lord Randolph’s son”


The myth that Winston’s brother John (“Jack,” 1880-1947) was illegitimate has persisted since publication of Shane Leslie’s “Randolph Churchill 1849-1895” in Leslie’s Men Were Different (London: Michael Joseph, 1937, pp. 68-75). It was taken up again by Ralph Martin in his Jennie: The Romantic Years 1854-1895 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), who wrote (p. 134):

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“One of Jennie’s favorite riding partners during her three years in Ireland was John Strange Jocelyn… third son of the third Earl of Roden [who was] ‘exceedingly handsome…with a wild dash in him.’ He was the kind of man who could climb up the drainpipe to a bedroom window, and did. Tall and striking, with flashing black eyes and curly black hair, he was then barely fifty and still in the prime of his vigour….Jennie was again pregnant in the summer of 1879, and her second son was born in Dublin on February 4, 1880. She named him John Strange Spencer-Churchill.”

This report was the subject of a lawsuit by the late Peregrine Spencer-Churchill, Jack’s second son, which ended with the book being withdrawn in England. Writing in Finest Hour 93, Winter 1996-97 (“Lord Randolph Churchill: Maladies et Mort”), Dr. John Mather states: “John Strange…at that time was the same age as Jennie’s father-in-law, the Duke [of Marlborough]. There is no substantiation for this story and pictures of Winston and Jack together belie the suggestion.”

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