Churchill and Me by Jonathan Dudley: book review

Churchill and Me: A Memoir of Childhood 1944-1950 (2017) is set in the English countryside of Kent.

Jonathan Dudley is eight years old in 1949 when his classmate, Winston, whom he hardly knows, invites him to spend a 10-day summer holiday in Kent at his grandfather’s place.

Winston’s father is Randolph Churchill (1911-1968), and Winston’s grandfather is Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (1874-1965), the former British wartime Prime Minister from 1940-1945 and Conservative Party leader, who led the country to victory during the Second World War. He will become Prime Minister again from 1951-1955. He will also win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953.

In 1949 Winston Churchill was entering the campaign period, for an upcoming election in six months time, as leader of the Conservative Party in opposition. He was 74 years old.

During the summer holiday Winston Churchill gave a live BBC broadcast to the nation from his painting studio in Chartwell House. The boys, young Winston and Jonathan, agreed to be ‘very good’ and make ‘no sound at all’ so that they could attend.

The boys always attended lunch with Churchill, despite him having guests such as the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies.

After Jonathan’s ‘most successful visit to Chartwell’ Mrs Clementine Churchill (little Winston’s grandmother) invited Jonathan back the following year, in 1950, after Winston Churchill’s election defeat. In the family’s own private cinema at Chartwell House, they watched films such as Pride and Prejudice.

This is a short memoir in an easy-to-read style about the innocence of boyhood in the presence of greatness. Recalling the time 60 years after the event of the two summers at Chartwell, Jonathan Dudley’s memories are somewhat faded. However, the memoir provides a different perspective of the Prime Minister, and his relationship with his family, in all its British decorum, but also in its tenderness and poignancy.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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