rifles and bagged five deer between them. 7
All this was of intense interest to Randolph’s ten-year-old son Winston. Winston Churchill had grown up the forgotten child, shuttled from one boarding school to another and scarcely noticed by his parents. His mother’s obsessions were flirting with fashionable young men and fox hunting: Winston’s most vivid early image of her would be her riding breeches, “fitting like a skin and beautifully spotted with mud.” 8 Winston was now at school in Brighton, neglected and lonely, and his letters had a sad, plaintive air. “Do you think Papa will stay long in India?” he wrote to his mother on January 28. “Have you heard from him lately?”
On February 13 Winston wrote a letter to Randolph. “I hope you are enjoying yourself in India,” it read. “I hear you have been out shooting…and shot some animals. When are you coming home again? I hope it will not be long!” He then asked if Randolph was planning to go on a tiger hunt, adding: “Are the Indians funny?” And finally: “I am longing to see you so much.” 9
In fact, Randolph had gone on a tiger hunt two weeks earlier in Dudna, in the foothills of the Himalayas, which he described in a letter not to his son but to his mother. It described how they had spent “all day careering around on elephants after game” and how he found elephants to be “the best means of conveyance I know…Nothing stops them; if tree [is] in the way they pull it down; never crash or fall and don’t run away.” He also described shooting his tiger, a nine-and-a-half-foot specimen: “Heavens! How he growled and what a rage he was in!” The tiger skin “will, I think, look very well in Grosvenor Square,” his mother’s London house where he and Jennie were now living. Tiger hunting, Randolph pronounced, was “the very acme of sport.” 10
By now Randolph had a guide and companion in Sir Lepel Griffin, government agent for Central India and the embodiment of the hard line since the White Mutiny. Indian Britons were seething about Randolph’s friendly visit with native politicians in Bombay. Griffin saw his chance to bring him around. Together they went to Agra, to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight, “an unequaled sight,” and to Lucknow on the twenty-first. Both cities had been besieged during the Mutiny. Both flanked Cawnpore, and the well at Bibighar with its memorial and marble angel, and the red brick Cawnpore Memorial Church. Everything here was a reminder of what hard-liners said would happen if the British grip on India slipped.
Then on February 7 Randolph and Griffin reached Calcutta, the residence of Viceroy Lord Dufferin and the capital of the Raj. There a single white man and his executive council directed the lives of a quarter billion people, with powers far surpassing those of any European head of state. The viceroy built and ran India’s railways; he controlled the sale of opium and salt; he supervised the manufacture of all the Indian Army’s supplies and ammunition and, together with its commander in chief, decided where and when it would fight. The Raj’s vast numbers of public works projects made him the largest employer in India. Compared to the prime minister in laissez-faire Britain, he supervised a “mixed economy” on a massive scale.
The viceroy surrounded himself with the pomp and splendor befitting his imperial powers, with echoes of Mughal ceremonial. When he traveled about the capital in his horse-drawn barouche, he was accompanied by eighteen postillions and guards. Each Indian servant was dressed in scarlet livery with the viceroy’s monogram set out in gold. When he arrived at any dinner with more than twenty-four guests, the band was required to play “God Save the Queen,” and all ladies were required to curtsy as he entered the room. At some ceremonies ladies found themselves having to curtsy eighteen separate times.
Randolph met Lord Dufferin at his country house in Barrackpore, north
All this was of intense interest to Randolph’s ten-year-old son Winston. Winston Churchill had grown up the forgotten child, shuttled from one boarding school to another and scarcely noticed by his parents. His mother’s obsessions were flirting with fashionable young men and fox hunting: Winston’s most vivid early image of her would be her riding breeches, “fitting like a skin and beautifully spotted with mud.” 8 Winston was now at school in Brighton, neglected and lonely, and his letters had a sad, plaintive air. “Do you think Papa will stay long in India?” he wrote to his mother on January 28. “Have you heard from him lately?”
On February 13 Winston wrote a letter to Randolph. “I hope you are enjoying yourself in India,” it read. “I hear you have been out shooting…and shot some animals. When are you coming home again? I hope it will not be long!” He then asked if Randolph was planning to go on a tiger hunt, adding: “Are the Indians funny?” And finally: “I am longing to see you so much.” 9
In fact, Randolph had gone on a tiger hunt two weeks earlier in Dudna, in the foothills of the Himalayas, which he described in a letter not to his son but to his mother. It described how they had spent “all day careering around on elephants after game” and how he found elephants to be “the best means of conveyance I know…Nothing stops them; if tree [is] in the way they pull it down; never crash or fall and don’t run away.” He also described shooting his tiger, a nine-and-a-half-foot specimen: “Heavens! How he growled and what a rage he was in!” The tiger skin “will, I think, look very well in Grosvenor Square,” his mother’s London house where he and Jennie were now living. Tiger hunting, Randolph pronounced, was “the very acme of sport.” 10
By now Randolph had a guide and companion in Sir Lepel Griffin, government agent for Central India and the embodiment of the hard line since the White Mutiny. Indian Britons were seething about Randolph’s friendly visit with native politicians in Bombay. Griffin saw his chance to bring him around. Together they went to Agra, to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight, “an unequaled sight,” and to Lucknow on the twenty-first. Both cities had been besieged during the Mutiny. Both flanked Cawnpore, and the well at Bibighar with its memorial and marble angel, and the red brick Cawnpore Memorial Church. Everything here was a reminder of what hard-liners said would happen if the British grip on India slipped.
Then on February 7 Randolph and Griffin reached Calcutta, the residence of Viceroy Lord Dufferin and the capital of the Raj. There a single white man and his executive council directed the lives of a quarter billion people, with powers far surpassing those of any European head of state. The viceroy built and ran India’s railways; he controlled the sale of opium and salt; he supervised the manufacture of all the Indian Army’s supplies and ammunition and, together with its commander in chief, decided where and when it would fight. The Raj’s vast numbers of public works projects made him the largest employer in India. Compared to the prime minister in laissez-faire Britain, he supervised a “mixed economy” on a massive scale.
The viceroy surrounded himself with the pomp and splendor befitting his imperial powers, with echoes of Mughal ceremonial. When he traveled about the capital in his horse-drawn barouche, he was accompanied by eighteen postillions and guards. Each Indian servant was dressed in scarlet livery with the viceroy’s monogram set out in gold. When he arrived at any dinner with more than twenty-four guests, the band was required to play “God Save the Queen,” and all ladies were required to curtsy as he entered the room. At some ceremonies ladies found themselves having to curtsy eighteen separate times.
Randolph met Lord Dufferin at his country house in Barrackpore, north
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