Historian Arthur J. Marder requested access to Winston Churchill’s papers shortly after the Prime Minister died in January 1965. I found the rejection to his request when I worked in Professor Marder’s archive at the University of California, Irvine a little more than a year ago. Churchill’s son Randolph, who had exclusive rights to his father’s papers at the time, replied to Marder’s request for access with this curt dismissal:
 
       My father’s papers will certainly not be available to anyone except
       myself for five or six years. I should like to help you but the copyright
       in them has been sold.
          Yours sincerely,
          Randolph Churchill
 
You do not have to read very deeply into the life of Randolph Churchill – Winston and Clementine’s only son – to learn that he could be singularly rude, pompous, and vile. His sister, Mary Soames, wrote that her brother would “pick a quarrel with a chair.” In that light, his reply to Professor Marder was relatively courteous.
 
I stumbled upon an example of Randolph’s worst instincts when I bought a used copy of Twenty-One Years, Randolph’s memoir of his first twenty-one years in the shadow of his father. When I’m reading for research, my reaction to new information typically ricochets between “nope,” “interesting, but I can’t use this,” “I should save this just in case,” and “this definitely goes in the book.” A few rare discoveries trigger an immediate “I have to write about this” response. This was the case with a section in Twenty-One Years … not because it was so good, but because it was so horrid.

Randolph had sold the serialization rights to Twenty-One Years to London’s Sunday Times. The paper supplemented their excerpts from Randolph’s memoir with an interview by the paper’s managing editor, Clive Irving. In the transcript of that interview, which leads off my copy of his book, Randolph wrote, “The object of the interview was to bring out how I feel today more than thirty years after the close of the book.”
 
Here is the excerpt from the interview that triggered this newsletter:
 
       Irving: Do you think that women have been bad for politics?
       They’ve made language too polite?
 
       Randolph: Yes, certainly, I think the whole art of political invective is dead,
       the days of great oratory are over, women are so easily shocked.
       “I don’t think that’s very nice,” they say. But obviously the women’s vote
       is here to stay. It’s always struck me as a great mistake on their part.
       The influence of women is only successful when it’s indirect.
 
       Irving: Then it can be quite influential.
 
       Randolph: Oh, certainly, so long as it’s exercised in country houses,
       at the dining-room table, in the boudoir and the bedroom, it can be
       very beneficial. But I believe with Dr. Johnson, “A woman talking
       is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, sir,
       but one marvels that it’s done at all.” Curiously enough,
       the better a woman speaks the more embarrassing I always find it.
       It makes me feel quite uncomfortable.
 
       Irving: That must be one of the few things that manage
       to make you feel uncomfortable.
 
       Randolph: I think a woman must learn to be a good listener.
 
If nothing else, it was certainly thoughtful of Randolph to accept that “the women’s vote is here to stay.”
 
There is a surprisingly happy ending to this story … in one respect for Randolph, but much more so for Arthur J. Marder.
 
Before he died of a heart attack in June 1968, Randolph won acclaim for his work on the first two volumes of his father’s official biography. He had gathered a team of assistants around him, and one of those assistants – Martin Gilbert (later Sir Martin Gilbert) - succeeded Randolph, and is revered in Churchill circles for his work on the life of Winston Churchill. (He also wrote extensively on the Holocaust). I found a letter of gratitude from Martin Gilbert in response to a letter of congratulations from Professor Marder on his new responsibilities as Churchill’s biographer. The Gilbert letter to Marder includes this anecdote:
 
       “In many ways you have made my work much more difficult:
       for you have written too persuasively and expertly for anyone else
       to be able to operate without great extra effort.
       Randolph was always saying: “Well, what’s in Marder?”
       or “That’s not new, it’s in Marder.”
 
Arthur J. Marder was fortunate to learn that Randolph Churchill truly valued his work. We are fortunate beneficiaries of the work of Sir Martin Gilbert and Professor Arthur J. Marder.
 
Thanks for reading,
Bill
 
 
PS. Sir Martin Gilbert might have helped me in a most unlikely way. As I wrote in Everybody Knows a Salesman Can’t Write a Book, one of my favorite Winston Churchill stories tells of a dinner at which Churchill “sent back a disappointing dessert, damning the concoction with ‘Take away this pudding, it has no theme.’” I put a lot of time into confirming the accuracy of the stories I write. My book includes 23 pages of notes documenting my sources. When I attempted to verify the veracity of the pudding quote, the best I could find was a statement on the International Churchill Society’s website that the quote “is probably true, though not attributed.” I recently re-read a fascinating, yet under-appreciated book by Sir Martin Gilbert, titled In Search of Churchill. Gilbert begins the account of his quest to track down every available detail about Winston Churchill' life with the often humorous details of his first meeting with Randolph. Over dinner at Randolph’s home, Randolph told Gilbert “that his father had always insisted on ‘an important pudding’, and had once sent a dessert away with the words “This pudding has no theme.” I think I might have found the original source! (At least as far as Randolph can be trusted).
 
Until next month, may your days be filled with important puddings.