After thirty years of marriage the Churchills had reached the age at which familial bonds loosen. All the children except Mary, now in her midteens, were grown. Diana, nearly thirty, had married the son of Sir Abe Bailey, a wealthy South African and a friend of Winston’s; three years later she divorced him and married Duncan Sandys. Now she was the mother of two. Randolph, in his late twenties, had been engaged to a girl from Cleveland, Ohio, until his mother talked him out of it. Her motive had been his happiness, but the real winner was the girl. Despite his distinguished name and his leonine features, the Churchill’s only son was a grim prospect for any bride, or, indeed for anyone who crossed his path. Already he had as many enemies as his father. The constitution of one club had actually been amended to read: “Randolph Churchill shall not be eligible for membership.” During one dinner-party argument he shouted at an executive of British Petroleum: “You have nothing to contribute to this. You are only a clerk in an oil store.” He was a chain-smoker, and late in his life, when a tumor was discovered in his alimentary canal, many hoped for the worst. They were disappointed. It was benign. Lord Stanley of Alderly learned of the surgery while standing at the bar in White’s. “What a pity,” he said, “to remove the one part of Randolph that is not malignant.” Both parents shared the responsibility for having raised a cad, though Winston’s guilt was more conspicuous. Remembering his own wretched school years, he had approved of his son’s contempt for Etonian discipline. After only four terms at Christ Church, Randolph came down from Oxford to launch his public career by a lecture tour of the United States. Everyone in the family except Winston, Mary recalls, thought the scheme “a hare-brained adventure.”35
Eventually—and perhaps inevitably—the youth turned on his father. One mealtime after another erupted in terrible rows between the two, often in the presence of eminent guests. It became, in Colville’s words, “a sad and sorry relationship.” The climax followed a January 1938 visit to Chartwell by Leslie Hore-Belisha, the war minister. A few weeks later Churchill sent him a small gift. It was a typical Churchillian gesture—magnanimity toward a man whose company he enjoyed despite their disagreements on the government’s defense policy. One evening during dinner en famille he was highly critical of Hore-Belisha’s role in shaping that policy. Randolph interrupted to say that since he felt that way, the invitation to the war minister and the gift must have been meant to curry favor. The rest of the family gasped. Young Churchill meant to be ironic, but he must have known that his father’s personal honor was no joking matter. Outraged, Winston stopped speaking to his son. Randolph wrote him the next day, not to apologize, but to reproach him for “relapsing into moody silence.” Churchill replied: “I thought yr remark singularly unkind, offensive, & untrue; & I am sure no son shd have made it to his father. Your letter in no way removes the pain it has caused me, not only on my own account but also on yours, & also on account of our relationship…. I really cannot run the risk of such insults being offered to me, & do not feel I want to see you at the present time.”36
As the years passed, Colville recalled, “the worm turned, and when Randolph arrived, resolved to be good and peaceful, it would be Winston who launched an attack.” Thus their relationship deteriorated, never sinking to the depths of Winston’s with his own father but nevertheless a source of pain for the entire family. The intriguing question arises: Where was Randolph’s mother? The answer is that she was there but might just as well not have been. Aloof, silent, eyes averted, Clementine by her whole manner proclaimed that she had warned her husband, he hadn’t listened, and this was the result. But the son felt uncomfortable with his mother, too. Later, after he had married Pamela Digby, he told her that Clementine “hated” him. That was absurd, but friends of the family thought her an unusual mother. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the wives of Britain’s public men balanced their obligations to their husbands against those to their children. Most compromised. To Clementine, Winston always came first. Mary recalls that he and his career “consumed the cream of her thought and energy.” That was not entirely true. She “never became a yes-woman,” in Mary’s words, “or lost her capacity for independent thought.” Certainly she had a strong mind of her own. When Pamela was having difficulties with her young husband, Clemmie advised her: “Pack up, take the children, leave and don’t tell him where you’re going. You can’t imagine how kind and sweet he’ll be when you return.”37
In all events, the Chumbolly—his petit nom in childhood—had become a problem. So had “Mule,” Sarah, now in her early twenties, green-eyed and stunning, with titian hair and milk-white skin. Her mother wrote a friend: “Sometimes she looks absolutely lovely—but on the other hand she can look like a moping raven.” She moped when she didn’t have her way. In the end she always had it; she was her father’s favorite; he could deny her nothing. She decided on a theatrical career and got it, beginning in the chorus line of C. B. Cochran’s “Young Ladies,” which, according to Pamela, was “a London revue of girls who danced fairly naked—as naked as you could get in those days. That was not really what her parents had in mind for their daughter.” Then, while playing in Follow the Sun, she fell in love with a music hall comedian, Vic Oliver, a thirty-three-year-old Viennese, thought to be Jewish, who had already been married twice. The response of her parents was a vehement No. They wouldn’t budge; neither would she. After a year of quarreling she bolted to New York, where Vic was working. Winston sent Randolph after her and engaged American lawyers to stop the marriage, but since she was legally of age, they were helpless. On Christmas Eve, 1936, two weeks after Edward’s abdication, Sarah became Mrs. Victor Oliver. The newspapers made a carnival of the affair, and Randolph’s public denunciation of them made everything worse. Hankey wrote Chartwell, “We both sympathise with you two,” and even Baldwin wrote that he wanted Churchill “to know that I felt with you from my heart when I read in the papers of certain domestic anxieties that must have caused you pain. I know you well enough to realize how closely these things touch you.” In the end, a family friend says, “Sarah broke Winston’s heart, and he hers.”38
That left Mary, the Chartwell child—unlike the others, she could remember no other home—with the companionship of an astonishing array of pets: lambs, bantams, a Blenheim spaniel, a beige-colored pug dog, and a marmalade cat, two fox cubs, and three goats, one of whom produced twins while the other gave birth to triplets, and all of whom ate the cherry trees, to Clementine’s indignation. Sarah had learned French in a Paris finishing school from Georges Bidault, then obscure but later foreign minister of France; Mary was taught at Chartwell during school holidays by Madame Gabrielle l’Honoré, a discovery of Clemmie’s. A nearby riding school provided Mary with mounts. Her relationship with her mother, she now recalls, was “respectful and admiring rather than close,” though Clementine had taken her skiing in the Arlberg mountains. After ten days, Winston received a report on their first Zürs expedition: “Mary fell down 19 times…. Today I am going in a sleigh as I am really bored with tumbling down!” The letter was signed: “Your bruised & struggling but undaunted Clemmie.”39
Sometimes husband and wife spent holidays together. They were welcomed at Blenheim and Lou Sueil by the Marlboroughs; at Taplow by Lord and Lady Desborough; at Trent Park by Sir Philip Sassoon; and the Duke of Westminster (known as Bendor to his friends) was their host at his several homes in England, France, and Scotland. But these were relatives or very old friends. Other patricians felt awkward with them. Winston’s criticism of the new Germany was considered bad form—even disloyal to His Majesty’s Government. And his manners were odd. How could you entertain a man who wouldn’t laugh at anti-Semitic jokes? His wife was almost as bad, and in some ways worse. She would even walk out on her own guests at Chartwell, something one didn’t do. Mary recalls that “her victims were never the timid, however tedious, but the brash and powerful,” and her “basic and undying radicalism also made high Tories and most very rich people potential targets for
her scorn.” Twice at Chartwell she humbled a British general. Leaving her guests to bathe before dinner, she told his aide-de-camp that she looked forward to seeing him in a half hour. The general said that his ADC didn’t dine with him. Clementine turned on him and said: “In my house, General, I invite whom I wish and I don’t require your advice.” The ADC dined. The second time, the general muttered the threadbare old military myth that all politicians are dishonest. She rose starchily and said: “If that is your view, General, you should leave Chartwell at once. I shall arrange to have your bags packed.” He stammered his apologies.40
Usually, however, the Churchills took separate vacations. Winston’s painting was his release, his escape valve, and he found the “paintatious” Riviera, as he called it, irresistible. “I paint all day, and so far as my means go, gamble after dark,” he happily wrote the former Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor, in the early spring of 1937. He was seeing a lot of Edward and Wallis. To Clemmie he wrote from Maxine Elliott’s Château de l’Horizon:
The Windsors dine here and we dine back with them. They have a lovely little palace next door to La D [La Dragonnière, Lord Rothermere’s villa at Cap Martin]. Everything extremely well done and dignified. Red liveries, and the little man himself dressed up to the nines in the Balmoral tartan with dagger and jabot etc…. I am to dine with him tomorrow night with only Rothermere. No doubt to talk over his plans for returning home. They do not want him to come, but they have no power to stop him.41
British expatriates on the Mediterranean liked to think of their society as neo-Edwardian, and those who could afford it were as idle as only the idle rich can be. But Churchill was a working man. Typically, he wrote his wife: “I have stayed in bed every morning and made great progress with the book. We have averaged fifteen hundred words a day, though nominally on vacation. I shall have a lot for you to read when you come home.” His occasional forays into Riviera diversion were, almost without exception, disappointing. He was taking lessons in what he called a “very pretty dance. We take three steps and give a hop.” He added ruefully: “I always hop at the wrong time, which, I am afraid, provokes small minded people to laugh.”42
Nevertheless, the creature comforts of the expatriate society appealed to the hedonistic streak in him; if he was well supplied with Pol Roger, fed by a great chef, and offered his choice of the best cigars, the identity of his suppliers was of little interest to him. As a statesman he was fiercely incorrupt, but on holiday he could be had—for a stiff price, to be sure—by women like Maxine Elliott and “Daisy,” the daughter of the Duc de Decacazes, known in newspaper columns as “Mrs. Reginald Fellowes,” though Mr. Fellowes was invisible. Daisy spent a great deal of her valueless time trying to seduce Winston, but between his paint box, printers’ galleys, losing money on the green baize of the Riviera’s gaming tables, monologues over brandy, and the pleasures of the table, he had no time for the pleasures she had in mind and may indeed have been unaware of her intentions. He would always find women mysterious. He had Clementine; that was enough for him.
It was not always enough for her, however. Late in life she told Mary, “It took all my time and strength just to keep up with him.” This was hyperbole. Certainly, being Mrs. Winston Churchill required rare stamina. Fortunately, Clemmie had it. Indeed, she had enough to pursue her own pleasures, which were very unlike his. She didn’t write, paint, gamble, or enjoy the company of gens du monde; she didn’t like Maxine and wouldn’t speak to Daisy. “Her favorite holiday,” her youngest daughter recalls, “was to stay in a modest but comfortable hotel in some beautiful or interesting place,” where, in the company of congenial people, she would “spend a week or two sightseeing and gallery visiting in an unhurried fashion.” Winston disliked sightseeing, and he loathed being part of a tour group which would pause, in this gallery or that museum, while a guide explained what the tourists should appreciate and why. If so trapped, Churchill would stand on the outer fringe of the party, seething with frustration because he wasn’t talking, couldn’t even interrupt, and therefore wasn’t the center of attention.43
Ambitious politicians try to project an image of radiant health, and to his admirers Churchill was the robust personification of John Bull. But he had been prey to ills since childhood. Some of his vacations were taken on doctor’s orders; others were interrupted by bouts of influenza or infectious fevers. Once, when en route to Venice—where he expected to holiday with Clemmie, Randolph, Sarah, and the Prof—he had been stricken by paratyphoid in Bavaria. His condition was grave; a return to England was out of the question; he lay in a Salzburg sanitarium for two weeks, unable even to raise his head. His confinement continued through a third week, and he abandoned all hope of reaching Italy. He could write, however, and his bank balance, which was always in and out of the red, made work essential. Still in the sanitarium, he began a series of twelve articles on “The World’s Great Stories,” commissioned by Lord Riddell for News of the World. Back at Chartwell he wrote his cousin the Duke of Marlborough that he was “rather battered, but in another week I shall be alright. It was an English bug which I took abroad with me, and no blame rests on the otherwise misguided continent of Europe.”44
Clementine, now moving gracefully into her fifties, shared with her husband the same peculiar mélange of exceptional energy and an unreliable constitution. As the Chamberlain government approached the end of its first year, with Halifax and the prime minister negotiating agreements with Italy—thus assuring Mussolini’s support in any future European conflict, they confidently told the House—Clemmie took the cure in the Pyrenees at Cauterets, near Lourdes. Winston celebrated the following Christmas without her; she was resting on a South Pacific beach in the French colonial archipelago Îles sous le Vent. Perhaps enforced pleasure whetted her appetite for more. A splendid horsewoman, she rode often, and she played tennis with increasing skill, often with the Prof, who had made her an exception to his misogyny. She swam, hunted boar at Bendor’s invitation, and beginning in 1936, the year of the Rhineland crisis, had improved her skiing while holidaying with her sister-in-law Lady Gwendeline (“Goonie”) Churchill and Venetia Montagu, spending long hours après-ski by firesides in Zürs or Lenzerdeide, trying to forget the troubling present with tales of the serene past.45
Her most cherished memories of those interwar years were of a spectacular voyage halfway round the world in the second winter of the Third Reich, roughly the period between the Nazis’ murder of Austrian chancellor Dollfuss and Hitler’s announcement that Germany was rearming in defiance of Versailles. Clementine was an enchanted guest aboard Lord Moyne’s yacht Rosaura. Moyne—who would be assassinated ten years later in Cairo by Jewish terrorists—was sailing off on one of those whimsical adventures, evocative of King Kong, which spiced the idle life of wealthy Englishmen between the wars. His destination was Komodo, an obscure island in what is now Indonesia, reportedly inhabited by “dragonlike monster lizards.” Moyne intended to capture some for the London zoo. These creatures actually existed—one member of the party photographed a twelve-foot lizard with a pig in its jaws, and Moyne brought back two smaller specimens—but the real purpose of the trip was to visit exotica and to escape the gloom and vulgarity of Europe. Her husband and children saw her off at Victoria Station, and in her first letter she wrote that at the moment of departure, seeing “you all collected on the platform, I thought how much I love you all, and above and more than them all you my darling Winston…. You all looked so sweet and beautiful standing there, and I thought how fortunate I am to have such a family. Do not be vexed with your vagabond Cat—She has gone off toward the jungle with her tail in the air, but will return presently to her basket and curl down comfortably….”
Clementine on the high seas was—at least at the outset—the quintessential Clementine. As she lay in her stateroom, she wrote home, she could “contemplate the photographs of my family erected on the chest of drawers.” She had begun “an enormous piece of needlework which Venetia made me bring. I have g
ot 144 reels of silk with which to quilt it & I calculate that even if I sew all day & never catch a butterfly or dragon I could not finish it before my return!” After thirty years of marriage her intimate letters to Churchill, and his replies, were as charming as an exchange between honeymooners. On New Year’s Day she wrote from Madras: “Oh my Darling, I’m thinking so much of you & how you have enriched my life. I have loved you very much but I wish I had been a more amusing wife to you. How nice it would be if we were young again.” He replied that she had written
some words vy dear to me about my having enriched yr life. I cannot tell you what pleasure this gave me, because I always feel so overwhelmingly in yr debt, if there can be accounts in love. It was sweet of you to write this to me, & I hope & pray I shall be able to make you happy & secure during my remaining years, and cherish you my darling one as you deserve, & leave you in comfort when my race is run. What it has been to me to live all these years in yr heart & companionship no phrases can convey. Time passes swiftly, but is it not joyous to see how great and growing is the treasure we have gathered together, amid the storms & stresses of so many eventful & to millions tragic & terrible years?46
Winston’s domestic stresses, during his wife’s absence, were trivial but irksome to a man trying to sway Parliament and write the opening passages of his next Marlborough volume. His eminent ancestor fascinated him, though he saw some of his warts; Marlborough had “far less pride than the average man,” he wrote Clemmie, and was in fact capable of “grovelling.” It was “only in the field and in his love for Sarah that he rises to the sublime. Still Mars and Venus are two of the most important deities in the classical heaven.” It was maddening to descend from the eminence of character analysis to cope with the fox who was devouring his geese, an astonishing explosion among Chartwell’s canine population, and feverish young Churchills who, he reasoned, ought to be too old to catch infectious childhood diseases. Discovering that every bitch on the grounds was giving birth to litters of puppies, Winston unmasked the culprit. He was Mary’s pug, a slave of lust. But Mary couldn’t be admonished; she had whooping cough. Randolph was home with a severe case of jaundice. Sarah was pale and tired, a consequence, her father wrote her mother, of “dancing practically four hours a day as well as going to balls…. I have therefore told her that she must not go to balls on any night when she practises dancing.” As to the puppies, he had “banished all dogs from our part of the house…. I really think you will have to buy a new strip of carpet outside my landings.”47
Alone, 1932-1940 Page 37
