page_title: Randolph Churchill
section_title: Childhood
hierarchical_section_title: Randolph Churchill / Childhood
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph shows Winston Churchill, full-length portrait, seated, facing front, with his son and grandson standing behind him, wearing coronation robes.
context_page_description: Randolph Frederick Edward Spencer-Churchill MBE was a British journalist, writer and a Conservative Member of Parliament for Preston from 1940 to 1945.
  He was the only son of British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine Churchill, Baroness Spencer-Churchill. He wrote the first two volumes of the official life of his father, complemented by an extensive archive of materials. His first wife was Pamela Digby; their son, Winston, followed his father into Parliament.
context_section_description: Randolph Churchill was born at his parents' house at Eccleston Square, London, on 28 May 1911. His parents nicknamed him "the Chumbolly" before he was born.
  His father Winston Churchill was already a leading Liberal Cabinet Minister and Randolph was christened in the House of Commons crypt on 26 October 1911, with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and Conservative politician F. E. Smith among his godparents. Randolph and his older sister Diana had for a time to be escorted by plain clothes detectives on their walks in the park, because of threats by suffragettes to kidnap them. He was a page at the marriage of the Prime Minister's daughter Violet Asquith to Maurice Bonham Carter on 1 December 1915.
  He recalled the Zeppelin raids of 1917 as "a great treat", as the children were taken from their beds in the middle of the night, wrapped in blankets, and "allowed" to join the grown-ups in the cellar; he also recalled the Armistice celebrations at Blenheim Palace.
  He went to Sandroyd School in Wiltshire, and later admitted that he had had a problem with authority and discipline. His headmaster reported to his father that he was "very combative". Winston, who had been neglected by his parents as a small boy, visited his son at prep school as often as possible. Randolph was very good-looking as a child and into his twenties. In his autobiography Twenty-One Years (pp. 24–25) he recorded that at the age of ten he had been "interfered with" by a junior prep school master, who made Randolph touch him sexually, only to leap embarrassed to his feet when a matron came in. At home, a maid overheard Randolph confiding in his sister Diana. He later wrote that he had never seen his father so angry, and that he had made a hundred-mile trip to demand that the teacher be dismissed, only to learn that the teacher had already been sacked.
  He remembered that he and Diana returned from ice-skating in Holland Park on 22 June 1922 to find the house guarded and being searched by "tough-looking men" following the assassination of Field Marshal Henry Wilson.
caption: Randolph with father (seated) and son Winston, in the ceremonial robes of the Order of the Garter
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