Digging in Churchill's Garden (Fake or Fortune, Series 13 Episode 1)
Unsolved cases are the gift that keeps on giving. Usually, that gift is frustration. Such is the case for even the most high-profile research projects, like the first episode of Fake or Fortune Series 13, “The Mystery of Churchill’s Garden.” More information must be out there - but where? Perhaps there’s a few more hints. Among them: a darker side to Claude Lowther; a clue in the underpainting; and proof that not every Churchill book can be trusted.
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PART 1: Lowther’s Lambs to the Slaughter...
(Spoilers ahead: the episode has concluded, for now, with a lack of definitive proof that Winston Churchill stayed in Herstmonceux Castle in June 1916, which would confirm the authenticity of the inscription on the painting.)
In the “Mystery of Churchill’s Garden” episode, we only saw a short extract of Violet Bonham-Carter’s dramatic account of her Herstmonceux visit. Fifty years had passed since the incident. Some sensible skepticism is warranted. How reliable was Violet, anyway? Did it truly happen in June 1916, or could it have been August, the date of Churchill’s gloomy “Dear Jack” letter? There are so many unanswered questions, especially regarding Herstmonceux’s auspicious occupant, Claude Lowther. Violet makes him out to be quite a dandy - not wrongly, either:
None of that reflects particularly well on Lowther, except for his taste in art. It’s not a flattering account. And for good reason: there was a darker side to Lowther’s presence in Sussex. An odd phrase kept cropping up as I delved deeper into the history of Herstmonceux Castle - “Lowther’s Lambs.”
June 30, 1916, is known as “The Day that Sussex Died.” It still lives in the public memory. At the Battle of Boar’s Head, 11th, 12th, and 13th Battalions - the Lambs - were brutally massacred. Countless local boys met an early and gruesome end, like the story of Arthur Gurr, killed at age 20. This inexplicably pro-Lowther museum webpage offers an alternative perspective, noting his efforts to find employment for soldiers after the war, but I discovered that Lowther was in favor of forced mass civilian conscription in 1916. Make of that what you will.
This all matters, of course, because Violet Bonham-Carter’s story involves Peter the Sheep and “Lowther’s Lambs.” Upon the group’s arrival, she wrote, the animal was gleefully announced by Claude Lowther as “my beloved Peter, the mascot of my Territorial Battalion, Lowther’s Lambs,” with absolutely no mention of the catastrophe that had befallen those poor men.
This strengthens the case that Violet’s story may be credible. At first I’d doubted it, because Violet refers to Churchill’s mother Jennie as “Mrs. Cornwallis-West,” but she’d dropped that name two years before. After divorcing her husband for infidelity in 1914, Jennie returned to the name “Lady Randolph Churchill.” It seems like a surprising error in chronology. Nonetheless, the incident with Peter the Sheep points more closely towards a June date, before tragedy struck and the German forces mercilessly cut down “Lowther’s Lambs.” The tragedy would’ve been impossible to ignore in the following weeks and months; the funeral for the young lad Arthur Gurr took place in mid-July. So, either this story dates to June, or Lowther was unbothered by what happened to his recruits - which is possible, though I dearly hope not.
What next, then? The Lambs are a potential data point, but nothing conclusive. Still, it might be possible to narrow down the date of this particular event by cross-matching Churchill’s observations and frustrations with the political events swirling in the summer of 1916. A World War I historian would be far better-equipped to do this, but there is plenty of material to analyze here, regarding Churchill’s frustration at his exclusion from government and the “Fisher speech” that Violet mentions. There are probably a dozen other clues in here I can’t see, but it’s worth a look over.
Nevertheless, based on my scouring of online newspaper/document archives to establish a recreation of Churchill’s June 1916 calendar, I suspect the 17th/18th is the likeliest weekend for that Herstmonceux visit…
On Saturday, June 3, and Sunday, June 4, Churchill was away at Hartsbourne Manor with Clementine and numerous other guests.
On Saturday, June 10th, Churchill went to the Admiralty at 1 o’clock to give a statement on British naval forces, and returned at 5 or 6 o’clock, leaving no room for a two-day weekend trip.
Nothing is recorded on Saturday, June 17th, and Sunday, June 18th. The previous day, Friday, June 16th, the news had reported his collaboration with Lord John Fisher - but I couldn’t find any documented appearances or travels. The Churchills could easily have taken that weekend off.
On Saturday, June 24th, no record of Winston, but Clementine Churchill distributed prizes at an athletic event in London. And, in terms of proving the garden picture, her presence is just as important - she was the model for it!
Proving a negative is ultimately fruitless, however. Just because Churchill wasn’t in London doesn’t mean he was in Sussex. And all attempts to decisively place him there in June have failed so far (see: Part 3 of this post.) However, as noted on Fake or Fortune, there are countless Churchill archives to be searched yet - some of which require a hefty three-figure subscription fee, thus inaccessible to individual researchers. Still, it’s well worth mentioning that outside the UK, there’s countless scattered Churchill archives in America, kept at universities and academic institutions of all sorts. Who knows what might be lurking in there?
PART 2: Underpaint and Overpaint
A while back, some wit on social media posted a “Fake or Fortune bingo” that aptly includes “Finding a painting underneath the painting.” The Churchill episode is no exception.
In this case, X-raying the painting revealed an underlying composition - an outdoor scene with a dramatic backdrop, described as an “unfurling hill line” on “rising ground.” It’s unmistakably some sort of towering building in a rolling landscape. Then, it’s compared to Herstmonceux Castle - but I’m not wholly convinced the image is clear enough to identify the location. Several things just seem to be in the wrong place: the moat border is misplaced, there is no large shape on the right-hand side of Herstmonceux, and the painted building lacks the fortress’s imposing bulk. Besides, those sprawling hills seem somewhat exaggerated.
Returning to Violet’s book, she describes more of Churchill’s quirks: back in his “early painting days” (probably 1915), he had once spontaneously invented a grand landscape of rising mountains in the background of a country manor, just to spice up a boring scene. Could it be possible that the garden’s underpainting here, as seen in the X-ray, is another such example? Note those firmly painted slopes and looming background shapes.
It’s a shot in the dark, but what if the underpainting beneath the garden is even that very same picture with the make-believe mountains? “I couldn’t leave it quite as dull as all that,” Churchill had said to Violet. Maybe he scrapped that disliked early composition, and painted right over it a year later, immortalizing Clementine amid the Herstmonceux roses instead.
I was curious enough to dig a bit deeper. I inverted the second painting and overlaid it atop the first, then edited brightness levels and applied minimal inpainting to cancel out those wayward floral paint blotches. It worked fairly well, as seen below. (It’s a gif - wait for it.) Comparing Herstmonceux to that original composition, it seems even less likely that the castle is identical, but it's still hard to say. My graphic is not quite better than the ForF version; without the help of the colorful zinc overlay, the foreground towers have unfortunately lost some clarity and integrity. But that boxy shape on the right stands out more boldly, with that strong band of light-colored paint. So does the remarkably hilly background.
Building upon this, we can re-use the colorful zinc map to learn more about the vague background shapes. The upper left corner is particularly confusing: are those distant mountains, or just a portion of the large tree in the garden scene? After comparison, I think the far upper right area is a bush from the garden, while the rest of the zinc belongs to the original landscape, including that darkened patch in the upper left. Could it be more of that imaginary mountain range? Impossible to know, but intriguing to speculate.
If not Herstmonceux, though, then where could this be? Regrettably, it’s unlikely that the building can be identified at such low-resolution. A deeper dive into the 1915 travels of Violet and Winston might help, but it’s a very long shot. However, the ultimate research goal is a piece of evidence outside Violet’s book, which would rule out the possibility of a later forgery. Still, if this happens to be the faux-mountains picture, painting one fake Churchill underneath another fake Churchill is an extraordinarily excessive amount of effort, even for a forger! Without the help of an X-ray, who would ever know about it? Additionally, this painting wasn’t even sold as the work of Churchill. Rather, the information was hiding beneath the frame’s backing board. Surely that’s a point in its favor. It wasn’t trying to pass itself off as anything.
PART 3: The Importance of Primary Sources
Naturally, Fake or Fortune episodes with inconclusive endings tempt others to try their hand. Following the airing of the episode, a few art history enthusiasts made suggestions on Twitter/X, sent directly to Philip Mould. One user proposed “Churchill sent a letter to Archie Sinclair from Herstmonceux on 23rd June 1916.” Another speculated that the letter appeared in the 2005 book, “Winston and Archie,” by Ian Hunter, a longtime Churchill Centre member. It seemed almost too easy. How did that June 23 letter resurface? I wondered if a keyword search for “Herstmonceux” had unearthed that clue. But what if the message wasn’t sent from Herstmonceux, but only mentioned the place? It was too tempting not to follow up.
I should note, I have my own paintings to look into, and had no expectation of cracking the case. If Fake or Fortune can’t get it with a head-start and all the evidence, it’s unlikely that any viewers can solve it independently. But, I realized, the commenter’s reply to Philip with the source citation had been mistakenly hidden by Twitter’s malfunctioning spam-filter! I felt obliged to dig it up, and off I went. (This incident, of course, happened before all of my research described above. Admittedly, I got carried away.)
Regrettably, “Winston and Archie” was not available online, except for the impenetrable wall of Google Books’s copyright, showing only “snippets” that proved nothing. The second Twitter user also noted it was available at the British Library, but retrieving physical research materials is a time-consuming process. Google Books’s search function deliberately withheld its results - but it still returned a positive result for “Herstmonceux” (aka: Hurstmonceux / Herstmonceaux / Hurstmonceaux: a difficult search!) Hence, I reasoned, the full text must be there somewhere. I took another approach, and tried my hand at manually extracting the page, one sentence at a time. Eventually, it materialized from the digital scraps. Here is the letter, evidently sent on 23 June 1916, from Winston S. Churchill to Sir Archibald Sinclair:
It was mailed from his residence at 41 Cromwell Road, and as I’d suspected, it simply contained the word “Herstmonceux,” rather than decisively placing Churchill there in June with a conclusive address. Still, it was a good lead – or so it seemed. In that letter, Churchill wrote of his plans to travel to Herstmonceux in a week, which logically would have been June 30. I was delighted, and sent it on to Philip, as well as sharing it with the Twitter users who provided the clues.
Unfortunately it’s the job of an art historian to play devil’s advocate. The research has to be absolutely foolproof for something so significant. Therefore, Philip rightly countered in his reply that even if the letter was sent in June, Churchill could’ve arrived at Herstmonceux in early July, and might’ve previously visited his cottage in May. Which is all true. The evidence was close, but it wasn’t 100%. And, as Fake or Fortune had speculated, anyone who read Violet’s book could’ve retroactively written “June” on the picture.
Philip also made note of the line “From my cottage in Herstmonceux I can hear the guns,” which is extremely similar to Churchill’s “Dear Jack” letter of August 13 as featured on the show: “I can hear the guns here [Sussex] quite plainly thudding away.” While this is, in fact, a new letter, and not the very same one from the episode, the similarity of Winston’s phrasing is indisputable. As it turns out, that was a bad sign - and no accident, either.
The “Dear Archie” Herstmonceux letter appears twice in print: in the book “Winston and Archie,” and again in the earlier, very comprehensive, “Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume IV” (1978), by Martin Gilbert. Appallingly, one of the historians has got it wrong. In Gilbert’s reprint of the letter, instead of June, it dates to 23 August 1916!
To my dismay, I realized, between the two volumes, it’s much likelier that the book “Winston and Archie” is incorrect. It makes vastly more sense if the letters about the guns from Churchill’s Sussex cottage were written only ten days apart, both in August. A close timeline analysis of the letter’s contents, juxtaposed with Churchill’s known whereabouts, would undoubtedly confirm it, making the June date impossible.
Most damningly of all, Parliament’s transcript record of Churchill stops at June 1, and does not resume until July 12th. It goes on through July, and ceases on August 22, 1916 - coinciding exactly with Churchill’s message to Archie, “Here Parliament has finished for the time.” It must be August 23. That 2005 book is wrong. This is a critical and relevant mistake in a piece of published scholarship, the sort of tome that’s relied upon as a building block for further research. Nothing could so perfectly illustrate the importance of primary sources. Historians make mistakes, too.
How, exactly, did this happen? I’ll never know, since it’s unlikely that the digital text from “Winston and Archie” can be extracted any further. Meanwhile, that Companion Volume IV sources the letter to the “Thurso papers,” namely, The Papers of Archibald Sinclair, 1st Viscount Thurso. Those, in turn, are kept at the Churchill Archives Centre. The relevant item is most likely in this box, since the finding aid includes “going to Herstmonceux [Sussex] to paint, August 1916.” I’d also made note of that letter in my first reply to Philip, thinking it was a separate document. It was probably the same letter all along.
In terms of furthering the investigation, this was all ultimately pointless. Still, it has value as a cautionary tale. Who could possibly fault any scholarly-minded individuals for believing and recommending such a book? Still, it’s a shame that the research lead didn’t pan out. Nonetheless, I, and presumably all other viewers, am hoping more evidence will turn up. Barry James, the owner of the Churchill painting, wisely opted to wait to sell it until it can be decisively proven. As he said on the show, he’d like to bring his disabled son on vacation to Niagara Falls. I’d very much hoped that that would be possible through the discovery of that June letter. But this was not the missing piece. If not for that damning error, maybe it could’ve been.
I am absolutely sure the Fake or Fortune team is capable of solving this in due time. In the meantime, I did enjoy looking into it. Here’s hoping the remaining episodes will be just as good. And, in my estimation, Barry was right to wait and try to prove it. There’s always one more thing to find.
