Churchill's mommie dearest

History hasn’t been kind to Jennie Churchill, who died 100 years ago. But the New Yorker was her son’s greatest influence. By Anne Sebba

- Anne Sebba

Jennie Churchill, Winston’s American mother, died shockingly prematurely 100 years ago this month, on 29th June 1921, after a fall downstairs.

She was 67 and in the prime of life, newly married to a man 20 years younger and had finally found a way of earning money, one of her lifelong preoccupations.

But how many people today, even those who idolise the man they consider Britain’s greatest prime minister and saviour of the nation from Nazi Germany, know who she was? If they know anything about her, she is often maligned as a woman who had 200 lovers – a suspiciously round number, according to Churchill’s biographer Roy Jenkins – or a woman with a snake tattoo on her wrist (unproven).

The big question is: how important was her American influence on her son? Even though Jennie died almost 20 years before her older son took the top job, it was Jennie who instilled in him an unwavering belief in his destiny.

Jennie Jerome was the favoured second daughter of the New York stock speculator, entrepreneur and racecourse owner Leonard Jerome, who made and lost several fortunes in the wake of the American Civil War.

Born in Cobble Hill, New York, she was educated mostly in Paris and, by the time she came to London, was quite a catch: a highly accomplished pianist, a well-read, fluent French-speaker and a beautiful woman who had learned to dress herself in gowns from M Worth.