In the first of a new series on overners with Isle of Wight connections, Island Echo looks at Winston Churchill’s deep association with our Island.
Numerous world-famous visitors have made the short trip across the Solent.
The greatest novelist in the English language – Charles Dickens – began his best-known novel David Copperfield in Bonchurch. Naturalist Charles Darwin worked on The Origin of the Species in the Shanklin, and renowned poet John Keats wrote many of his greatest poems in the environs of The Bay.
Sadly, many Island visitors have been infamous rather than illustrious. Karl Marx – originator of a warped philosophy that enslaved millions – vacationed in Ryde and Ventnor. Numerous notorious criminals incarcerated in our prisons are probably best forgotten.
The man most recognised as the greatest ever Briton – Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill – is associated with several Isle of Wight localities, including Ventnor, Cowes, Mottistone, Compton Bay and Parkhurst.
But for the Isle of Wight, Winston Churchill would never have been born. Winston’s father Lord Randolph first met his mother American Jennie Jerome on the guardship HMS Ariadne during Cowes Week in 1873. They were introduced to each other by the then Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. The pair agreed to meet again on Cowes Esplanade the following day.
Lord Randolph Churchill proposed to Jennie after 3 days courtship in the garden of Rosetta Cottage in Cowes. The pair were married in Paris, and Winston was born the next year.
Both of Winston’s parents had Isle of Wight connections. The ancestors of Jennie Jerome’s father were said to have emigrated to America from the Isle of Wight in 1710. An ancestor of Lord Randolph – John Churchill – was MP for the rotten borough of Newtown.
Winston Churchill was a frequent visitor to the Island from an early age. When asked about his earliest memories, he replied: “I love Ventnor”.
The future Prime Minister spent 4 holidays in the 1870s and 80s at Flint cottage in Ventnor with his nanny Mrs Everest. It was here that he wrote his first surviving letter in 1882.
In 1878, 3-and-a-half-year-old Winston had the misfortune to see HMS Eurydice sink off the South East Coast of the Island with the loss of 317 lives.
He wrote in a letter some time after the tragedy:
” The divers went down to bring up the corpses. I was told – and it made a scar on my mind – that some of the divers had fainted with terror at seeing the fish eating the bodies of the poor soldiers who had been drowned just as they were coming back home after all their hard work and danger in fighting savages.
“I seem to have seen some of these corpses towed very slowly by boats one sunny day. There were many people on the cliffs to watch, and we all took off our hats in sorrow.”
Winston Churchill was also connected with West Wight, as he was a great friend of Jack Seely, owner of Mottistone Manor, seat of the Seely family. He was godfather to Jack’s son David and a frequent visitor in the 1900s.
The paths of Jack Seely and Winston Churchill often crossed: both saw active service in both the Boer War and World War I, both entered parliament in 1900, and both left the Conservatives to become Liberals in 1904.
Whilst staying at Mottistone Manor, Winston was said to have helped dig out a blocked lake, allowing it to flow out into the sea. The point at which the resulting stream reached the cliff edge and formed a chine subsequently became known as Churchill Chine. Winston was also said to have accompanied the Seely children on trips to build sandcastles at Compton Bay.
Churchill also had a strong connection with the Isle of Wight prisons. He visited Parkhurst Prison as Home Secretary in 1910 – then a prison for young offenders.
Winston’s views on the treatment of prisoners were surprisingly liberal. Following his visit, Churchill said in the House of Commons:
“The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.”
Parkhurst had been notorious for having a harsh regime in which inmates were shackled in leg irons.
In 1912, Churchill officially opened a new establishment at Camp Hill with a more humane approach. There, prisoners could work in the gardens, do small jobs to earn a wage and visit the 2 chapels on the site.
However, the public and local politicians perceived the new establishment as being ‘too soft’, a perception made worse by a serious riot in December of that year.
Do you believe Churchill was the greatest ever Briton (as voted for in a BBC poll), or do you sympathise with ‘woke’ interpretations of his legacy that see him as an ‘evil’ imperialist? Let us know in the comments…
In the next edition of famous Isle of Wight visitors, we shall look at the Isle of Wight connections of Charles Dickens.
And he sent millions of men to war risking their lives fighting to protect the shit hole that it is today. What a waste of lives.
Churchill once said
“Old men start wars and young men fight them”
Who in 2025 Britain would fight for this country!,
look at the way we treat ex servicemen and women.
My sympathies pre-date the word ‘woke’ by many decades (what a bloody stupid expression for someone who is conscious of all the nuances of humanity and base judgements on that rather than oblivious single minded hatred? So what’s the opposite…asleep?) because my ancestors were in the same government in the 20s and 30s when he took up his roles. They were not there on merit, but money and position, as was he. They all had an automatic dislike for anyone beneath their status, anyone of a different nationality and it oozed out of every pore. Many of the decisions the Brits took when they sort to interfere in world politics impacted the citizens badly and they simply didn’t care. They laughed about it at their clubs…laughed at the Indian famine, the Irish, the Jews…it was only every about shoring up the elite’s positions. There’s one famous discussion in my family at the breakfast table during the Straits Settlements period, when thousands of people displaced by ‘Greatest Ever Brits’ and the East India Company had tried to fight back from having their homes and businesses just taken and been slaughtered. The wife, reading out the numbers of dead and injured was asked ‘none of our people, surely?’ and she relied, ‘oh no dear, the inferiors’. These were entire families, grandparents, women, children…and just because the Brits had money to be made and communities to plunder to do so.
Evil imperialist? Yes, he was, and so were they all. Many still are. Anyone who never sheds a tear at injustice and steps over the bodies of those ‘beneath’ them due to a geographical accident of birth deserves the same title. His legacy is more of the same.
Do you give him credit for anything?
Anything at all?
*sought, not sort!
I can recommend Churchill’s autobiographical My Early Life for his memories of staying at Flint Cottage, his childhood nanny’s brother’s home in Ventnor — her brother was a prison officer at Parkhurst. The book as a whole is very readable, covering his youngest years, his school years, and his experiences as a young newspaper correspondent in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War, when he was taken prisoner by the Boers. No “bone spurs” for Churchill – he always liked to be in the thick.of it!
The greatest man Lol, I bet he didn’t have to pay
extortionate ferry fares to get here.
Mr Whitmore should hang his head in shame if he seriously claims to be a journalist. Surely, anyone with a shred of professionalism would set aside their own bias and prejudices when writing a piece about the historical link of stateman to a place. To describe Communism as a “warped philosophy” and make snide remarks about ” ‘woke’ interpretations” is bordering on the totalitarian. I understand that Mr Whitmore’s politics are a shade to the right of Attila the Hun and he is entitled to hold those views but if he cannot write with even the most rudimentary independence or balance he has no business to be writing for the media at all.
Seconded, well said. I doubt politics, history or philosophy is his forte, he usually writes about 22 grown men kicking a ball in a field. Maybe he should stick to that.
The term woke has nothing to do with Churchill or liberals at that time period. Woke is a new term and has nothing tondonwoth softness sonI wonder if the writer has any clue what woke means. Churchill and liberals were not woke and they didn’t believe in lgbt or dei policies and rights for special groups which thank God they didn’t. Woke didn’t really get introduced until 12 years ago when new Labour and liberals along with US Democrats started using people with special minorities as a way of gaining sympathy aka votes for political purposes or its called Woke.
No it didn’t. Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction ‘stay woke’. The term acquired political connotations by the 1970s and gained further popularity in the 2010s with the hashtag #staywoke. In other words, to be aware of discrimination of all kinds. It became political when those of the right chose to discriminate openly and dog-whistle to do so, drumming up support for their hatred of others in doing so, and call anyone who called it out ‘woke’. Prior to that there was ‘Libtard’, for any person with non-right wing views.
Those who hold ‘woke’ views are characterised by the sneering contempt they display towards anyone who disagrees with them.
They preach tolerance while demonstrating the exact opposite.