Lady Randolph Churchill

A cabinet card portrait of Lady Randolph Churchill(1854-1921), the mother of Winston Churchill.

Born Jennie Jerome in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of wealthy magnate Leonard Jerome, she spent most of her childhood in Paris. During the Franco-Prussian War and the siege of Paris, the family decamped to the Isle of Wight, and it was there that Jennie Jerome met Lord Randolph Churchill, the second son of the sixth Duke of Marlborough. The couple were married at the British Embassy in Paris in January 1874. The elder of their two sons was the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Lord Randolph died, almost certainly of syphilis, in 1895 at the age of forty-five, and in 1910 Jennie married George Cornwallis West, twenty years her junior. They were divorced in 1914 and in 1918 Jennie married for a third time, this time to Montague Phippen Porch, a British colonial service officer who was younger than her son Winston.

She died, aged 67, at her residence at 8 Westbourne Street in London on 29 June 1921, as a result of a haemorrhage of an artery in her thigh following the amputation of her leg. She was buried in the Churchill family plot at Bladon in Oxfordshire beside her first husband.

Photographed by Henry Van der Weyde of London.