London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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A very good morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Sunday, June 29th, 2025.
I’d so like to know what you think. What you make of this. What your response is.
Isn’t going to happen. But one can dream, one can fantasize.
So my dream is this session of London Calling gets transposed. It gets transposed to Ag Hall. Ag Hall – it’s short for Agriculture Hall – was the biggest lecture hall at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s. Its seating capacity was something like 700. It was for the superstar professors. The ones whose courses were far and away the most popular courses on offer in any given semester. The courses every student wanted to take.
So, transposing this session of London Calling to Ag Hall, I’ve got all 700 of you in one room, under one roof. And I’m going to say to you, “Ok, I’ve got a bit of news for you today. I’ve got an announcement. I’m going to put it on the board here. And as soon as I do I want you to write down what your response is to the story that’s about to go up on this board. Basically I want you to free associate. I’m going to tell you something. And I want you to tell me what your first thought is in response to what I’m going to tell you. You’re going to tell me by writing it down on a piece of paper, folding it, and handing it in. Sort of like a free vote in Parliament. A free vote in Parliament – also known as an unwhipped vote – is one in which MPs or members of the Lords are not put under pressure to vote in a certain way by their party.
Now you are going to know what my free vote is. Because I’m going to tell you. And, yes, bears repeating this – I’d so like to know what springs to your mind – what your first thought is – when I break this news story to you.
My free vote, my first thoughts, are, in the first instance, those wonderful lines from Andrew Marvell’s great poem “To His Coy Mistress.” The lines read, “The grave’s a fine and private place. But none, I think, do there embrace.”
And in the second instance, the slightly modified axiom, “you can’t take them with you.” Modified because the phrase is of course “you can’t take it with you.” Meaning, better spend your money now because when you die you can’t take it with you.”
Well, my second free association response to today’s news story was, “she couldn’t take them with her.”
Ok, so what’s the news story, what prompted, what gave rise to those two responses in my noggin.
Drum roll here. Moment of suspense. This is a little bit like that unforgettable moment at King Belshazzar’s feast. Those words – mene mene tekel upharsin – suddenly appear on the wall, in tongues of flame. They mean the days of King Belshazzar’s reign are numbered, he’s been weighed in the scales and found wanting.
So the mene mene tekel upharsin here – the writing on the wall in this instance – is Jenny Jerome has died. It’s June 29th, 1921. So today’s, what, the 104th anniversary of her death.
And that double-barrelled response of mine: The graves a fine and private place and you can’t take them with you – Jenny Jerome’s death triggered that response because she was said to have some 200 lovers during her life. She had numerous affairs even during her three marriages. She was popularly known as ‘Lady Randy.’ It’s a nifty pun that. Randy for her first husband Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s father. And, yes, Jenny Jerome aka Lady Randy was Winston Churchill’s mother. So she’s Lady Randy as in Randolph Churchill’s wife. But she’s also Lady Randy because ‘randy’ the adjective means sexually aroused or excited.
The point being – and surely I’m belabouring the obvious here but so what – the point being, all those lovers, she couldn’t take them with her to the grave. And yes the grave’s a fine and private place – none do there embrace.
Ok, let’s do the darkroom number, bring a photo of Jenny Jerome up from a negative. Who was she? Apart from being Winston Churchill’s mother, I mean. Let alone the future Edward VII’s lover. And Bismarck’s lover… and, well, that list stretches out to the crack of doom, and even I, much as I love gossip and the salacious, grow aweary at the thought of having to take survey of a lineup of some 200 dim-witted aristocrats and princes and kings and business moguls.
So, yes, having made the point that if Jenny Jerome were a golf tournament she’d be the U.S. Open, we’ll just pay a little bit of attention here to the lady herself. And leave it at that.
Jenny Jerome was born in Brooklyn, New York on January 9th, 1854. Jenny Jerome had rich blood in her veins. Her father was Leonard Jerome. His ancestry was Scottish and Huguenot. He had ancestors who fought against the British in the American War of Independence. A flamboyant stock speculator, Leonard Jerome was known as the King of Wall Street. In Jenny Jerome’s words, her father made and unmade several fortunes. Jenny Jerome’s mother Clara was said to be Iroquois native American descent. She, Jenny, grew up in a Madison Avenue mansion that had a breakfast room that seated 70 people and a theatre that seated 600.
When Jenny Jerome was just 20 years old she married Lord Randolph Churchill at the British Embassy in Paris.
Winston Churchill was born seven months later at Blenheim Palace, the seat of his grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough.
Twenty years later Jenny Jerome’s first husband and son Winston’s father Randolph Churchill was dead. Of syphillis
Two other husbands followed. Ditto the continuation of lovers. Jenny Jerome became a society hostess. And a writer.
Now as to Jenny Jerome’s death. It was the last weekend in May. She was at a country house in Somerset. She was wearing new shoes. Going upstairs she slipped and broke two bones in her left ankle. It didn’t heal properly. Gangrene set in. On June 10th her leg was amputated. She came home – to 8 Westbourne Street in London. The house is still there. It’s a far cry from the Madison Avenue mansion she grew up in but it’s a handsome, white stucco’d 12-room establishment. She lived there by herself. Attended by a nine live-in servants. She seemed to be on the road to recovery. But it wasn’t to be. On June 29th an artery in her thigh haemorrhaged. Her heart stopped. Jenny Jerome was no more. Her son Winston Churchill and his brother Jack were with her when she died.
But let’s leave the last word about Jenny Jerome to Edward Marsh. This is from his biography of her son, Winston Churchill:
“She was an incredible and most delightful compound of flagrant worldliness and eternal childhood, in thrall to fashion and luxury (life didn’t begin for her on a basis of less than forty pairs of shoes) yet never sacrificing one human quality of warm-heartedness, humour, loyalty, sincerity, or steadfast and pugnacious courage.”
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating:
the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative –
is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor
(and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)…
well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar
and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…
come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.