Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

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  Other items on the personal front also kept him happily busy. His painting was going well and drawing compliments from friends. During the British-American polo match at Hurlingham, Lady Jean Hamilton had visited his studio to look over the paintings he had brought back from his Middle East journey as well as others he had painted that year, and to his delight she purchased one. ‘I am steadily improving,’ he enthused to Charles Montag in Paris, and invited the Swiss painter over to London so that together they could explore the Tate Gallery where there were many ‘fine pictures’ to be examined. Montag was unable to come, but instead arranged for a Paris bookseller to have a package of books sent to him via the British Embassy in Paris. One was a volume on the doctrines of Confucius. The others were lengthy studies on the art of Corot, Renoir, and Cézanne, and he valiantly began to struggle through them in French.10 ‘Painting is the joy of my life,’ he told Lord Riddell over lunch one day as the Imperial Conference was nearing its end. Meanwhile, the Strand magazine visited his studio and chose the eighteen paintings it planned to use as illustrations for his article on ‘Painting as a Pastime’. Most were landscapes painted at the homes of friends with whom he spent weekends, such as Lympne and Breccles. But the selection also included a handful from that year’s visits to the Riviera as well as one of the pyramids outside Cairo. Two more were also carefully packed to go with him to Dundee, where he was due to visit his constituency in the autumn.

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  Nor was he neglecting his other great passion. Vindicating his record at the Admiralty was central to his political comeback and long-term political ambition. The week before lunching with Riddell, he sent off yet another draft chapter of The World Crisis for comments to Admiral Thomas Jackson, a pre-war head of naval intelligence who had served as his Director of Operations at the Admiralty including planning for the Dardanelles. The chapter covered his account of the Battles of Coronel and the Falkland Islands fought early in the war against the German Navy in the south Atlantic. In addition to having Jackson check, correct, and amplify his account, Churchill asked for any suggestions or criticism he might have from the naval point of view. ‘I am most anxious . . . to do justice to the Navy and to the Sea Lords on the Boards of Admiralty with whom I was associated,’ he stressed. Yet he made no attempt to disguise the fact that he intended to place himself at the centre of the story. ‘I feel fully justified in showing the part which I played personally,’ he told him.11

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  On the domestic front, plans for the summer holidays were well advanced. During the first half of August all four of the children would be sent off to the seaside resort of Broadstairs in Kent in the care of Rose, their young French nursery governess. Once Parliament recessed in mid-month, their parents would travel up to Scotland to stay with the Duke and Duchess of Westminster at Lochmore Lodge on their vast estate in county Sutherland. The children would join them there. In the meantime, with Winston still taking care of Middle Eastern and Imperial matters, Clementine would go on her own to stay with the Westminsters at their English home at Eaton Hall near Chester, for a tennis tournament. When she left, she would join the children on the train taking them north where the family would be reunited for a holiday amidst the moors and glens of Scotland.

  He had a few special summer treats planned for himself as well. The same day that he informed the Cabinet of Faisal’s forthcoming coronation, he celebrated the receipt of his first advance for The World Crisis by purchasing one of the most expensive cars of its day, a Rolls-Royce ‘Silver Ghost’ Cabriolet (Convertible), so-called because of the ghost-like quiet of its engine. It cost him £2,595. In homage to his ducal heritage, he ordered it to be painted in Marlborough blue. It was to remain at the coachbuilders until he returned from his visit to Scotland at the end of September. Meanwhile, he grandly hired another ‘Silver Ghost’ to use over the weekend.12

  There was just one small cloud on the horizon. ‘Winston v anxious about his sick child,’ noted H. A. L. Fisher, the President of the Board of Education, after the Cabinet meeting. Childhood diseases were still a cause for concern in these pre-antibiotic days, and especially so in the immediate shadow of the great influenza pandemic. Only the previous month, while Clementine was staying with Goonie at Menabilly, Sarah had fallen ill and Churchill was profoundly anxious until the family doctor telephoned with the good news that it was ‘only’ measles. He was vastly relieved to hear it, and she soon recovered. The only inconvenience was that he had to cancel a dinner he had planned for the Prince of Wales – the heir to the throne had never had the highly contagious disease and didn’t want to risk his approaching holiday.13

  This time it was Marigold who was sick. Along with her brother and two sisters, she had been in Kent since the beginning of the month. From the start she had suffered from a slight cold and a cough. The local doctor did what he could. But by mid-August her throat had become seriously sore. Alerted by the landlady at Broadstairs, Clementine rushed down from Eaton Hall and the other three children travelled to Scotland as planned accompanied by Bessie, her maid. Marigold was now gravely ill, with septicaemia. A specialist was called in, but could do nothing. Two days after voicing his anxieties to Fisher, Churchill told Curzon that Marigold was a little improved but that he and Clementine were still dreadfully anxious about her. That evening, Monday 22 August, Clementine was sitting by Marigold’s bedside. ‘Sing me Bubbles,’ she said suddenly and her mother bravely began singing her favourite song. But she had not gone far when Marigold whispered, ‘Not tonight . . . finish it tomorrow.’ On the following evening she died, with both of her parents at her side. She was just two years and nine months old.

  The day should have been one of celebration for Churchill. Early that same morning on the banks of the river Tigris Gertrude Bell, wearing her CBE star and three war ribbons, had watched proudly as Sir Percy Cox announced that Faisal had been elected King of Iraq and there followed a twenty-one-gun salute and a playing of ‘God Save the King’.14 Instead, it was one of intense private sorrow. Clementine, so Winston later recalled, ‘gave a succession of wild shrieks, like an animal in mortal pain’. Three days later, Marigold was buried at Kensal Green cemetery in London, close enough to their London home for her parents to make regular visits to the grave; subsequently, it was marked by a headstone carved by the renowned artist Eric Gill. Press photographers were present at the burial but at Churchill’s request none of the pictures were used. That evening, ‘stupefied by grief’, he and Clementine took the sleeper train north to join the other children at Lochmore Lodge. ‘My mother never got over Marigold’s death,’ recalled her youngest daughter, Mary, ‘and her very existence was a forbidden subject in the family.’15 For Churchill, Marigold’s death appears to have been so closely associated with his purchase of the Rolls-Royce that he couldn’t bear to use it. Shortly after returning from Scotland, he sold it to his ever supportive Aunt Cornelia.

  Marigold’s death generated widespread sympathy. From New York, Bernard Baruch wrote a heartfelt letter of sympathy and Gertrude Bell sent her own special condolences to Clementine from Baghdad; only five months before, they had been happily exploring the bazaars of Cairo together. ‘What a cruel year this has been for you,’ wrote Venetia Stanley, ‘and this last blow seems the most cruel and wanton of all. That divine perfect little creature!’ John and Hazel Lavery were in Edinburgh when they received the news. ‘Dearest Winston and Clementine,’ read their telegram, ‘we are so deeply grieved for you our tenderest love and sympathy.’ From Taplow, Ettie Desborough addressed a letter to Winston. ‘The baby of the family always seems in a way the focus point,’ she wrote, ‘& Marigold was such a wonderful, darling & beautiful little child – everything that was bright seemed to lie open before her, the little Duckadilly . . . My deepest heart is with you,’ she added, ‘no one, no one, knows what the pain of losing a darling child is but those who have borne it.’ Ettie knew of what she wrote. Two of her three sons had been killed on the Western Front.16
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br />   His political colleagues added their voices, and Lloyd George took the opportunity to mend relations between them; he himself had lost his favourite young daughter some fourteen years previously, a death that finally killed off his own religious faith. Following his mother’s death, this was the second family loss that Churchill suffered that summer. ‘You were saying the other day how closely death had pressed home to you this year,’ wrote Lord Grey of Fallodon, ‘and now it has come again in a particularly poignant form.’ Sir Abe Bailey expressed a similar sentiment. ‘My dear Winston,’ he wrote, ‘You seem to be getting quite your share of trouble and family losses & might well say “How much more.” ’

  The answer came soon enough. Thomas Walden had been butler to Lord Randolph and stayed with the family, served loyally and bravely as Churchill’s valet in South Africa, and shared his Boer War dangers. Shane Leslie knew him well. ‘Strong and faithful,’ he recalled, ‘he valeted Randolph and Winston whose dress was often almost ragged until he reached the period of uniform.’ Walden died in early August and both Winston and Jack attended his funeral, and paid its expenses. A quarter of a century before, he had also stood by the freshly dug grave of his childhood nanny, Mrs Everest, ‘my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived,’ he later wrote in My Early Life. Now another important link with his childhood was severed. ‘What a wonderful and terrible year this has been for you. Full of political triumph and material good fortune but crossed with too much sadness,’ wrote Archie Sinclair from his family seat at Thurso Castle in Caithness.17

  For two weeks the Churchill family stayed together as guests of the Westminsters at Lochmore Lodge. No record exists of what they did, what they said, or how they coped. Afterwards, Clementine left for London with the children to prepare them for school while Churchill went to stay with the Duke of Sutherland at Dunrobin Castle, as he had arranged the month before over a dinner at Philip Sassoon’s. A vast baronial mansion north of Inverness designed by Sir Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament, the castle had served as a naval hospital during the war and after a disastrous fire in 1915 had recently undergone considerable refurbishment at the hands of another renowned architect, Sir Robert Lorimer. It also enjoyed its own private railway station and ran its own carriages as well as a special locomotive equipped with an upholstered seat high up at the back of the driver’s cab for special guests such as crowned heads of state and members of Royalty. This year they included the Prince of Wales and his brother, the Duke of York – the future King George VI. They were met by the duke at Inverness station and escorted in his private train to the castle. There were some thirty or so guests during Churchill’s stay. Mrs Dudley Ward, as well as her husband, was amongst them.

  By this time – as The Times put it – ‘everybody who is anybody will now be found north of the Tweed’.18 King George V and Queen Mary were firmly ensconced at Balmoral. Grouse shooting had begun as always on 12 August (‘the Glorious Twelfth’) and Highland lodges and grand houses were packed with shooting parties. Other members of the Royal Family also headed north, many of them solemnly attending the unveiling of war memorials now being completed in towns and villages across Scotland. Soon, the Highland Games were also under way at Ballater.

  But Churchill was in no mood for heavy socializing. Besides, he found the company at Dunrobin, many of them there for tennis, to be ‘extremely young’ – a sure sign that he himself was now feeling distinctly middle-aged. Instead, he preferred to wander off by himself with his brushes and easel and paint. On one cool but brilliant afternoon, under a cloudless sky, he went out and painted what he described to Clementine as ‘a beautiful river in the afternoon light with crimson and golden hills in the background’. He was so refreshed by the outing that he declined an invitation the next day from the duke to join a grouse-shooting party and instead went off again with his canvas. When rain kept him indoors he spent time reading Amelia, a domestic novel by Henry Fielding describing the hardships of a newly married young couple in London. ‘It’s saltly [sic] written’, he told Clementine.

  There were other distractions, too. One morning a Royal Navy destroyer dropped anchor in a nearby bay and gave him the chance to go over it with an expert eye. He knew his ships and noted immediately that it was far larger than any destroyer from his own time at the Admiralty, almost as large as a cruiser. ‘I expect they have gone too far in the direction of size for a vessel which has no armour and now becomes such a very easy target,’ he mused critically. He also spent time corresponding with his brother about his personal finances. They were due money from their grandfather Leonard Jerome’s settlement on their mother. But getting their hands on it proved difficult and they had to hire an American lawyer. ‘I should be glad to get it ferried safely across the Atlantic and invested here,’ he told Clementine. ‘There are so many splendid things going cheaply now.’ In the end it provided him with some more useful income.19

  Most of his time, however, he spent on mapping out the speech he planned for his approaching visit to Dundee. It would give a tour d’horizon of the major issues facing the government: unemployment, Ireland, and the forthcoming Washington Conference. ‘I intend to make a very careful and thoughtful speech,’ he wrote.

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  Introspection was not one of Churchill’s most obvious qualities. But spending these long summer days in the Highlands after Marigold’s death gave him ample time to ponder life’s tragedies and its unpredictable brevity. Close by, there were other reminders, too. The duke’s brother, Alastair, who had been awarded the Military Cross while fighting with a machine-gun regiment, had died of malaria just four months previously aged thirty-one, and lay buried next to his father in a grave by the sea. This raised more ghosts from the past. He penned a note to Clementine:

  It’s another splendid day: & I am off to the river to catch pictures – much better fun than salmon. Many tender thoughts my darling one of you & yr [sic] sweet kittens. Alas I keep on feeling the hurt of the Duckadilly. I expect you will all have made a pilgrimage yesterday. ’Tis twenty years since I first used to come here [when] Geordie [the Duke of Sutherland] & Alastair were little boys . . . Another twenty years will bring me to the end of my allotted span even if I have so long . . . I will take what comes.20

  He had to. Two days later Sir Ernest Cassel died suddenly of a heart attack at his Park Lane home in London. Not only had he often helped Churchill financially, he was also a treasured link to the past and to his father. Only a few months before, Winston and Clementine had been his personal guests on the Riviera. The loss struck Churchill deeply. ‘He was very fond of me and believed in me at all times – especially bad times,’ he told Edwina Ashley, Cassel’s granddaughter, the future Lady Mountbatten. ‘The last talk we had – about six weeks ago – he told me that he hoped he wd [sic] live to see me at the head of affairs . . . I have lost a good friend whose like I shall never seen again. This year has been vy [sic] grievous to me.’21 Clementine shared his grief. ‘I have been through so much lately that I thought I had little feeling left, but I wept for our dear old friend, he was a feature in our lives and he cared deeply for you.’ Four days later, they both attended the Requiem Mass for Cassel held at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Mayfair, which concluded with the playing of Chopin’s Funeral March. Afterwards, Cassel was interred, like Marigold, at Kensal Green cemetery.22

  At age forty-six, Churchill had suffered several heavy personal losses. They had not unnerved him, or made him any less ambitious, but they had made him more reflective and aware of his mortality. No longer was he simply ‘the bold, bad man’ of the year before. He was now a more vulnerable figure, an everyman who had suffered personal tragedies, and with whom ordinary people could identify.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘A SEAT FOR LIFE’

  Meanwhile, Irish affairs had not stood still. With both the commander of British troops in Ireland and General Tudor in favour, a truce finally came into force on Monday 11 Jul
y. ‘The die was now cast,’ wrote Churchill in the final volume of The World Crisis, ‘. . . The gunmen emerged from their hiding-places and strode the streets of Dublin as the leaders of a nation as old and as proud as our own . . . the attempt to govern Southern Ireland upon the authority of the Imperial Parliament had come to an end.’1 Three days later, the Sinn Fein leader Eamon de Valera met Lloyd George in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. Hanging on the wall was a large map of the world with parts of the British Empire vividly marked in red. The Imperial Conference was still in daily session. Lloyd George pointed out the chairs being occupied by the various prime ministers, Smuts here, Meighen there, and so on. His message was clear: the Empire was a sisterhood of nations and Ireland could join them round the table as one of the Dominions.2

  Shortly afterwards de Valera was officially presented with the British government’s proposals. While the north made its own separate arrangements with London, southern Ireland could enjoy Dominion Home Rule including control over its finance, taxation, police, and army affairs. There would be tariff-free trade across the Irish Sea, but Imperial defence would remain in British hands: ‘The Royal Navy alone must control the seas around Ireland.’ In Dublin, the Sinn Fein leadership debated and prevaricated for a month before rejecting the terms and demanding full independence. De Valera scorned the British offer as little better than ‘second-rate political margarine’.3