Tracing Grandpapa's Path

Following her grandfather's footsteps around the world was an ambitious project for Celia Sandys. Her grandfather was Winston Churchill -- and that meant quite a few footsteps.

"Chasing Churchill: In Search of My Grandfather," a three-part series premiering Thursday on PBS 26, follows her quest to discover the places and people the legendary British prime minister encountered in his travels. Much of the project was based on her book "Chasing Churchill," published in 2003.

The District, Cairo, Hollywood and Morocco were among the stops in her five-month journey, undertaken in 2005.

In her personal pilgrimage, Sandys wanted to uncover aspects of Churchill's life less well-known than his leadership of Britain during World War II. They include his battlefield experiences in Cuba and South Africa as a young man and his lifelong love of painting.

The resulting program is "a combination of travel, art and history," she said.

Producer Stewart Binns said high-definition technology helped capture "stunning" visuals such as Egyptian pyramids and the South of France. Churchill, Sandys said, would have viewed those scenes with "an artist's eye."

Besides delving into her grandfather's life to understand how painting became a source of solace to him, Sandys talks to people who met Churchill or whose relatives had.

The journey was emotional for her as well as for those she interviewed, "because they were telling their story that they hadn't thought about for many, many, many years," she said.

Also poignant, Binns said, are the closing scenes that explore Churchill's feelings before he died (in 1965 at age 90) and show Sandys sitting on the same boat that ferried her grandfather's body down the River Thames after his funeral.

"It's one of the great unfathomable things about him, that having achieved so much, perhaps more than any modern man, that he felt

. . . in some ways that he'd failed Britain and hadn't fulfilled his ambition," Binns said. "He was quite melancholy towards the end of his life, and we wanted to explore that a bit."

But to Sandys, Churchill always will be "grandpapa," a man whose complexity she wants to depict. "I can't say he was a grandfather in this thing, and a painter there, and a politician. They were all interlinked."

Parts 2 and 3 air July 31 starting at

11 p.m. on PBS 26.

chasing churchill

Part 1: Thursday

11 p.m.

PBS 26