Yet Churchill was no dolt. Unlike many of his peers, he had an impressive head for business, serving as Chairman of the Great Western Railway, President of the Overseas Bank and a director of the Peninsular & Orient steamship company. Outwardly self-assured, he ruthlessly divested himself of his ancestral estates, ‘breaking away from Victorian stuffiness to lead an up-to-date fox-hunting life in Leicestershire with plenty of loose cash available’.15 Forty-five years old, he was the product, his son believed, of an era in which ‘the Englishman’s tweeds had become a sort of contemporary version
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