by Rowena Mills
When British statesman Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson (also named Winston Churchill) and Mary Caroline d’Erlanager were married in July 1964, the family gathered outside for a group photo. The former prime minister, front and center among his children, grandchildren, and other relatives, holds a very important family member on his lap — his beloved orange tabby tuxedo cat, Jock. Churchill’s private secretary, Sir John (Jock) Colville, had given the cat to Churchill for his eighty-eighth birthday on November 30, 1962.
Churchill was known for his love of animals. He always had several animals, mainly cats but also dogs, pigs, lambs, bantams, goats, fox cubs, horses, and others. He also raised butterflies.
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874–1965), son of Lord Randolph Churchill and the remarkable American heiress Jennie Jerome, was born at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. He had an early career as a military officer and war correspondent. He was a novelist and prolific nonfiction writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953. He served Britain in numerous government positions and was also a member of Parliament for 62 years. The pinnacle of Churchill’s career came during his two terms as prime minister of the United Kingdom (1940–1945 and 1951–1955). He continued to serve in Parliament until 1964.
One of the twentieth century’s most significant figures, Churchill remains popular and is generally viewed as a victorious wartime leader who played an integral role in defending liberal democracy against the spread of fascism. Historians rank Churchill as one of the greatest British prime ministers.
Churchill married Clementine Hozier in September 1908. In late 1922, the Churchills bought Chartwell, a country house in Kent in southeastern England, where their children grew up. Churchill was an accomplished amateur artist and an amateur bricklayer, and many of his paintings and construction projects can be seen at Chartwell.
One of Churchill’s cats at Chartwell was Tango, an orange “marmalade” cat who is remembered in many anecdotes from the 1930s and 1940s. Another was a tabby named Mickey. When Churchill left the office of the First Lord of the Admiralty to become prime minister in 1940, he took a cat named Nelson with him to No. 10 Downing Street. Nelson joined the Munich Mouser, the official feline employee at No. 10, the prime minister’s London residence while in office.
Twenty years later, Churchill’s cat Jock roamed the grounds and terraces of Chartwell. When Jock died, he was buried at Chartwell next to two of Churchill’s dogs.
The Churchills lived at Chartwell until October 1964, and Churchill died in London on January 24, 1965. The National Trust opened Chartwell to the public in 1966 as a historic house museum. One of the conditions the Churchill family requested was that an orange tabby tuxedo cat named Jock will always live at Chartwell. The tradition has been maintained, and a six-month-old rescue kitten named Jock VII arrived at Chartwell in 2020 to take up residency.
Winston Churchill would approve.
Note: See the “Focus on Felines” column in the January-February 2022 issue of this magazine to learn about Larry and the earlier felines who worked as official mousers at No. 10 Downing Street.
