Working in Winston’s Animal Kingdom
As an Oxford undergraduate Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, kept his own pack of harriers, nine couple of hounds supervised by a whip dressed in livery. At Blenheim Palace, where Winston was born in 1874, twenty gamekeepers wearing brown breeches, green velvet coats with brass buttons and black billycock hats, assisted by an army of loaders and beaters, ensured that the Duke of Marlborough’s field sports, often attended by royalty, were conducted like military operations. The immense stable block, housing carriage horses as well as a score of magnificent hunters, was run by a platoon of grooms, and in the great house some eighty servants were on hand to cope with a large dog population. Gladys—wife of Winston’s cousin Sunny, ninth Duke of Marlborough—was said to walk around on a “moving carpet of King Charles spaniels,” and she bid fair to turn the palace into a kennel.1 In short, Winston was brought up in symbiosis with animals, both wild and tame, and with the people who managed their lives.
Like other members of the Victorian upper class, Churchill had no difficulty in reconciling his fondness for blood sports with his affection for creatures great and small. Hunting, shooting, and fishing were intrinsic to aristocratic life at the time, activities deemed essential to a wholesome rural existence, part of the natural order of things. At the same time pets
