

George’s boarding school a few weeks before his eighth birthday. In 1882, as befitted his family’s wealth and social standing, Winston Churchill packed up his belongings and was shipped off to St. George’s School in Berkshire Brunswick School (since renamed Stoke Brunswick School) in Hove and Harrow School. During his childhood education, Churchill maintained a poor academic record. Growing older, Winston passed the age of in-home learning and moved toward boarding school. Elizabeth Everest, making sure that Churchill’s efforts to care for his childhood nanny did not cease. Now, The Churchill Centre and the Churchill family keep attention to the grave of Mrs. In his bedroom hung a picture of her until he died as with many children of the Victorian aristocracy, Winston found a real mother figure in his nanny, rather than in his biological mother. In a letter to his mother, Churchill wrote, “I feel very low, and I find I never realized how much old Woom meant to me.” viii He kept her memory alive, though. vi “I shall never know such a friend again.” vii Everest had served as his comrade, nurse, and motherly figure.

“She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole twenty years I had lived,” he said. Upon her death, Churchill arranged her funeral, provided the tombstone for her grave, and paid for its continued upkeep. Leaving his military duties, he brought a doctor and a nurse to her deathbed. Churchill grew older, and he was the only member of his family to visit her when he learned that she was gravely ill of peritonitis in 1895. Everest it was who looked after me and tended all my wants.” v Their relationship grew into a close friendship as Winston S. Elizabeth Everest, 1 to whom he fondly referred as “Old Woom” or “Woomany.” He later said, “Mrs. ivĪs he was often separated from his parents, Churchill developed a strong and close relationship with his nanny, Mrs. When she died in 1922, Churchill said, “All the sunshine and storm of life was over,” perfectly exemplifying the difficult and disruptive life they had lived together as mother and son. In 1899, she married a man twenty years younger than herself, and after a divorce, she married again in 1917 to another man twenty years her junior. After he died, Jennie married twice, and both men proved unsuitable partners. According to some reports, Jennie Churchill found solace in the company of other men, considering that her husband was syphilitic, a fact Churchill did not know until his father was near death. Reportedly, the relationship between Churchill’s parents took a downward turn, and his mother was absent for a large portion of his childhood. The family traveled between homes often, moving from Ireland to the Isle of Wight off England’s southern coast to Blenheim Palace and to London. It was here in Dublin that Winston Churchill’s little brother, Jack, was born and Churchill began the earliest stages of his education in which his governess instructed him in those noble pursuits of history, literature, writing, and mathematics. Churchill called Dublin, Ireland, his home from ages two to six while he lived with his grandfather who served as Viceroy of Ireland and employed Churchill’s father as his private secretary. Soon after Winston was born, the family moved.

iii It was rather common in the late nineteenth century for British aristocrats to marry American heiresses, as the women often arrived with sizeable wealth. Jerome, a New York financier, avid horse-racing fan, ii and partial owner of the New York Times. Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, was born to Leonard W. In light of John Churchill’s deeds, parliament granted him the money to build a family seat, henceforth known as Blenheim Palace, which was named after his greatest victory. Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a direct descendent of John Churchill, the man who became first Duke of Marlborough early in the eighteenth century after fighting for king and country against Louis XIV of France during the War of Spanish Succession.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, into the influential and aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough, a branch of the Spencer-Churchill family, in the closely knit inner circle of Victorian society.
