Lady Randolph Churchill : biography

Later marriages

Lord Randolph died in 1895, aged 45. On 28 July 1900, Jennie married George Cornwallis-West (1874–1951), a captain in the Scots Guards who was the same age as her elder son, Winston. Around this time, she became well known for chartering a hospital ship to care for those wounded in the Boer War, and in 1908, she wrote The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill. She separated from her second husband in 1912, and they were divorced in April 1914, whereupon Cornwallis-West married the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Jennie dropped the surname Cornwallis-West, and resumed, by deed poll, the name Lady Randolph Churchill. Her third marriage, on 1 June 1918, was to Montagu Phippen Porch (1877–1964), a member of the British Civil Service in Nigeria, who was three years Winston’s junior. At the end of World War I, Porch resigned from the colonial service, and after Jennie’s death returned to West Africa where his business investments had proven successful.Lovell, Mary S., The Churchills, Little Brown, London, 2011, p.332, ISBN 978-1-4087-0247-5.

Death

In May 1921, while Montagu Porch was away in Africa, Jennie slipped while coming down a friend’s staircase wearing new high-heeled shoes, breaking her ankle. Gangrene set in, and her left leg was amputated above the knee on 10 June. She died at her home in London on 29 June, following a haemorrhage of an artery in her thigh (resulting from the amputation). She was 67 years old.Jenkins, Roy., Churchill, Pan Books, London, 2002 edition, pp.353-354, ISBN 0-330-48805-8.

She was buried in the Churchill family plot at St Martin’s Church, Bladon, Oxfordshire, next to her first husband.

Early life

Jeanette "Jennie" Jerome was born in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn in 1854,G. H. L. Le May, ‘Churchill, Jeanette [Lady Randolph Churchill] (1854–1921)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006, accessed September 18, 2010 the second of three daughters of financier, sportsman, and speculator Leonard Jerome and his wife Clarissa (always called Clara), daughter of Ambrose Hall, a landowner. She was raised in Brooklyn and other parts of what would become New York City. She had two sisters, Clarita and Leonie. Leonard Jerome was rumored to also be the father of the American opera singer Minnie Hauk.Anne Sebba, American Jennie, Norton, 2008, page 13

There is some controversy regarding the time and place of her birth. A plaque at 426 Henry St. gives her year of birth as 1850, not 1854. However, on January 9 in 1854, the Jeromes lived nearby at 8 Amity Street (since renumbered as 197). It is believed that the Jeromes were temporarily staying at the Henry Street address, which was owned by Leonard’s brother Addison, and that Jennie was born there during a snowstorm.

A noted beauty (an admirer, Lord d’Abernon, said that there was "more of the panther than of the woman in her look" ) Jennie Jerome worked as a magazine editor in early life. Hall family lore insists that Jennie had Iroquois ancestry, through her maternal grandmother;Ralph G. Martin Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill-The Romantic Years, 1854-1895 however, there is no research or evidence to corroborate this.