by Lynne Olson
Throughout their marriage, Clementine was plagued by financial worries, thanks to Churchill’s insistence on leading a luxurious, extravagant lifestyle that most of the time they could not afford. “I am easily satisfied,” he liked to say, then after a pause would add impishly, “with the very best.” The Churchills’ money troubles were exacerbated by his occasional penchant for gambling and stock market speculation and by his 1922 purchase of Chartwell, a ramshackle redbrick Victorian mansion with overgrown grounds and spectacular views of the countryside in Kent. The house, about twenty miles south of London, was meant to be a country retreat for the Churchills and their children. Furious that he had bought the house without consulting her, Clementine believed it would be a money pit for as long as they owned it, as indeed it was. Her mother, recalled Mary Churchill Soames, would reprimand her children “for not turning the lights off. The house was a great burden to her.”
Although both Churchill and his wife came from aristocratic backgrounds, neither had family money, and Churchill’s parliamentary salary was relatively meager. In order to pay for their lavish way of life, he was dependent on his writing of books and articles, which, although prolific, did not always supply the vast amounts of money needed. At one point, to cover their monthly bills, Clementine sold a ruby and diamond necklace that Winston had given her as a wedding present. When someone asked her many years later how Winston was able so effortlessly to combine writing, painting, and involvement in politics and government, she replied acerbically that he “never did anything he didn’t want to do, and left someone else to clear up the mess afterwards.”
During the war, Churchill was more the center of attention than ever; at Chequers and Ditchley, the world revolved around him. While Clementine made sure that all the Churchills’ official guests were well taken care of, not many of them paid much attention to her or, for that matter, to any of the few other women included in the weekend house parties. “A weekend here is very different from anywhere else,” Kathleen Harriman wrote to her sister after a stay at Chequers in the summer of 1941. “Never for a moment is the war forgotten…. Women are rather in the way. They leave [the dining room] right after dinner and then aren’t expected to stay for too long when the men come out, which sometimes isn’t until way after midnight.”
In Kathleen’s view, Clementine was very gracious in “taking a back seat” to her husband. She told her sister: “Everyone in the family looks upon him as God and she’s rather left out, and when anyone pays any attention to her she’s overjoyed…. But don’t get the idea she’s mousy, not at all. She’s got a mind of her own, only she’s a big enough person not to use it unless he wants her to.”
Although Clementine had a keen wit and strong, well-thought-out views on most issues, she rarely tried to inject her thoughts into the torrent of arguments and opinions voiced by her husband and his guests during meals. On the infrequent occasions when she tried to start a conversation about some other topic, the attempts usually were squelched. As the war continued, she began retreating more and more to her bedroom during the dinner hour, asking Pamela, one of the few regular female guests, to substitute as hostess in the dining room. In Pamela’s view, Clementine ate more meals on a tray in her room than with Churchill and his company and, indeed, spent as much as 80 percent of her life alone.
It’s not surprising, then, that she warmed so quickly to the new American ambassador, who made clear he enjoyed her company and conversation. Shortly after Winant arrived in London, Clementine invited him to lunch at Downing Street but noted that Churchill probably would not be there. “This sounds as though I was trying to prevent you and Winston from getting together!” she wrote. “This is not really my wicked intention but it did occur to me that if he were not here to engross your attention, I would enjoy your company even more.”
The ambassador and prime minister’s wife were kindred spirits in a number of ways. Both were shy and reserved by nature, allowing few people to see below the surface. They also shared a sense of idealism, a dedication to the concept that government had a responsibility to help the underclass. Like Winant, Clementine Churchill had been somewhat of a radical since her youth. As a girl, she had loved school and wanted to go to college, a rare path for an upper-class young woman of her generation to follow; her mother, aghast at the idea, refused to allow it. Throughout her life, Clementine was in favor of financial independence for women (although she never experienced such freedom herself) and, long before women’s suffrage became a reality, strongly backed the right of women to vote.
As an ardent member of the Liberal Party, she was discomfited when Churchill left the Liberals to rejoin the Conservative Party in 1924. Although she loyally switched her official party allegiance as well, she never lost her interest in bettering the lives of Britain’s poor or her hostility to her husband’s Tory colleagues who opposed such reforms. She loathed Lord Beaverbrook and most of Churchill’s other wealthy friends, not only because of what she saw as their empty, dissolute lifestyle but also because of their indifference to the nation’s less privileged citizens. “Do not let the glamour of elegance & refinement … blind you,” she once wrote to her husband. “The charming people you are meeting today … are ignorant, vulgar, prejudiced. They can’t bear the idea of the lower classes being independent & free.”
Clementine was never shy about letting those who angered her know exactly how she felt. During a weekend at Blenheim Palace, the Duke of Marlboro ugh, who owned Blenheim and was Churchill’s first cousin, told her she must not write to the Tories’ archenemy—the former Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George—on Blenheim stationery. Hearing that, she put down her pen, went to her room, packed her things, and, ignoring the duke’s pleas to stay, returned to London. After another occasion when Clementine turned on one of her husband’s associates, Churchill noted with some pride and even awe: “She dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree!”
During both world wars, Clementine translated her interest in reform into an active involvement in efforts to improve the living conditions of the country’s working class. In the Great War, she ran nine canteens for munitions workers in north London, feeding up to five thousand men and women a day. During the Blitz, she lobbied for government payments for volunteer civil defense workers and played an important role in the improvement of London’s air raid shelters. After receiving a flood of letters from people about the shelters’ abysmal conditions, she made a series of unannounced visits to several in different parts of the city to see for herself how bad the situation was. Her subsequent reports to her husband about the appalling lack of hygiene and basic comforts were, to a large degree, responsible for bringing about government improvements in the shelters. As word of her involvement spread, other examples of government inertia or inefficiency in helping the public were brought to her attention by, among others, MPs, clergymen, social workers, and doctors. She spent considerable time trying to help resolve these problems as well, often after discussing them with Winant.
FOR THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR, inclusion in the Churchill family circle brought an occasional respite from his crushing workload but, more important, it gave him a sense of belonging. A workaholic all his adult life, he had spent little time with his own family while serving as governor and as head of Social Security and the ILO. His daughter, Constance, was now married; his elder son, John Jr., was a student at Princeton, and his younger son, Rivington, attended Deerfield Academy, a prep school in western Massachusetts. Although Winant’s wife came to London periodically, the couple had a distant relationship. Abbie Rollins Caverly, an old family friend of the Winants, said the ambassador was “one of the loneliest men I’ve ever known. I think he sometimes desperately needed someone to talk to, and at home, there was no one to listen to him.”
While he enjoyed being around Clementine and the other Churchills at Chequers, Winant found himself gravitating more and more to the company of twenty-seven-year-old Sarah, the prime minister’s favorite daughter. Independ
ent and strong-willed like her father, the red-haired, green-eyed Sarah was known as “the Mule” by her family. Like both her sisters, she considered herself a daddy’s girl, yet she was the only one with enough mettle to stand up to him.
As was true of her siblings, Sarah was the product of an emotionally difficult childhood. In Britain, it was not uncommon for British upper-class children to see little of their parents, but the Churchill household carried that practice to extremes. “As children, we soon became aware that our parents’ main interest and time were consumed by immensely important tasks, besides which our own demands and concerns were trivial,” Mary recalled. “We never expected either of them to attend our school plays, prize givings or sports days…. When our mother did manage to grace any of these important occasions, we were ecstatically grateful.”
Churchill had delegated the raising of their children to Clementine; absorbed in his career and other interests, he was often absent from the family circle during school holidays and other important occasions. Left to handle their growing brood on her own, Clementine often opted out herself. She loved her children but, by all accounts, including her own, was never good at mothering. “A wife first and mother very distant second” was how one friend described her. She once told Mary that “it took me all my time and strength just to keep up with [Winston]. I never had anything left over.” Her pregnancies and the births of her children left her physically and emotionally exhausted—so much so that in 1918, expecting her fourth child and beset by money worries, she offered to give the new baby to a friend who was childless. The amazed woman accepted, but Clementine obviously thought better of her bizarre, spur-of-the-moment suggestion, and nothing more was said about the matter.
Two and a half years later, in August 1921, the Churchills left their four children, including Marigold, the baby whom Clementine had impetuously offered to give away, with a nursemaid in the south of England while Clementine took part in a tennis tournament and Winston tended to business in London. Two-year-old Marigold, who had been suffering from a throat infection since the beginning of the summer holiday, suddenly developed septicemia. Rushing to her bedside, her parents were with her when she died a week later. According to Sarah, her mother never fully recovered from her grief over Marigold’s death or her guilt at being absent during the child’s illness.
Nonetheless, Clementine continued her practice, established early in her marriage, of taking long sabbaticals from her family, often at health spas on the Continent. There, she recuperated from the frenzy of her life with her children and demanding husband, and regathered her strength to face them all again. When she was home, she was, in Mary’s words, “a mixture of tenderness and severity,” while Sarah called her “an authoritarian figure with whom you could not argue.” While both Sarah and Mary drew close to Clementine as young adults, Diana, the oldest child, had a problematic relationship with her mother that lasted for the rest of her life. Mary, who later wrote a sympathetic biography of Clementine, noted: “Although her children loved and revered her, they did not find in her a fun maker or a companion.”
Winston, on the other hand, was both. During the rare occasions when he spent concentrated amounts of time with his children, he was relaxed, warm, and fun-loving, much like a child himself. He played with them and recruited them for various expeditions and projects, including laying bricks for a wall at Chartwell. His daughters adored him, and he returned their love. But the real apple of his eye was Randolph, whom he outrageously spoiled and always forgave, no matter how egregious his behavior. Churchill and his son, whom he viewed as his political heir, would often engage in hectoring, high-volume arguments over dinner, with other guests chiming in, as Sarah and Diana looked on silently. Of the dinner conversations, Churchill’s nephew, Peregrine Churchill, said: “All those overpowering egos! All that endless talk on politics! After a certain age, I felt the need to get away from all those Churchills. Otherwise they would have squashed me.” Years later, Diana would tell her daughter that she married her first husband to “escape from all the endless talk around the Chartwell dinner table.”
AS A CHILD, Sarah Churchill had been sickly, solitary, and dreamy. She doted on her father but was intimidated by his quick wit and his single-minded focus on work. “If I really wanted to say or ask anything important, I could not trust my tongue to get it right, and I would scribble him a note,” she later wrote. “It became the best way of communicating, and the least tiring and time-absorbing for him.” Yet underneath her sweet, shy, quiet facade was a streak of toughness and rebellion that neither Diana nor Mary shared.
When she made her debut at the age of eighteen, she became known as the “Bolshie deb” because of her outspoken dislike for what she saw as the luxurious but shallow lifestyle of Churchill’s rich friends—the same view held by her mother and one that greatly annoyed her father. She irritated him even further by getting a job as a dancer in a major London theatrical review when she was twenty. From childhood, Sarah had been far more interested in artistic endeavors than in the political milieu in which she had been raised. In her early teens, she began writing poetry, an avocation she continued for much of her life. Anxious to make her mark in the creative world, she persuaded her parents to let her take dancing lessons. She loved the experience, and when she was hired for the chorus of the review Follow the Sun, she recalled, “I walked out of that theatre feeling an inch taller. Suddenly life had a meaning…. The adventure had started at last.”
Winston and Clementine, however, were never reconciled to the idea of a daughter of theirs on the stage. When others, including her sister Mary, maintained that Sarah had real acting and dancing talent, they insisted otherwise. Having been influenced by his boss’s opinion of Sarah’s ability, John Colville, who went to see her act in a play in the London’s West End during the war, was amazed to find that she in fact “gave a good performance.”
Sarah upset her parents even more when, at twenty-one, she announced plans to marry thirty-eight-year-old Vic Oliver, a twice-divorced Jewish comedian from Austria and the star of Follow the Sun. Exploding in anger, Churchill refused to shake hands with Oliver when they met and pronounced him “common as dirt.” In his attempt to persuade Sarah to change her mind, her father, she later said, “addressed me like a public meeting” on the dangers posed by “this itinerant vagabond.”
Sarah, however, held firm. She followed Oliver to New York, where he was starring in a new review, and Churchill promptly sent Randolph in hot pursuit on the next transatlantic liner. Dubbing Sarah “the runaway debutante,” London and New York newspapers, not surprisingly, had a field day with the story, running such banner headlines as “DASH ACROSS ATLANTIC” and “BROTHER CHASES CUPID.” Her father hired private detectives and lawyers to try to stop the marriage but failed in his attempts. Sarah wed Oliver in late 1936 and brought him back to England, where they acted, first together, then separately, in repertory companies throughout the country and in the West End.
Notwithstanding the past rows with her parents, Sarah was regarded as the peacemaker in her family, the empathetic one who tried to mediate family quarrels and bring everyone together. She was close to both her sisters, and Diana’s young daughters, Edwina and Celia Sandys, adored her. She was, Edwina Sandys remarked, “a magical creature for me as a child. She flitted in and out of our prosaic lives like a colourful imp. She was beautiful and utterly charming.” Known for her “raucous, irreverent giggle,” Sarah was blessed with a highly developed sense of humor. “Some of the funniest moments of my life were shared with her,” Edwina added. “We laughed until we cried.” Of Sarah, a newspaper journalist would later observe: “More than anybody I have ever interviewed, she was a life enhancer, who made everything seem rosier, more entertaining, more glamorous. At the same time, she was vulnerable. She wanted you to like her and was touched if you did.”
As Sarah won better and more varied theater roles in the late 1930s, her confidence grew and her dependence on her charming but contro
lling husband lessened. At about the same time, she discovered that Oliver was having affairs with other young women. By the time Sarah met Winant in the spring of 1941, her marriage was all but over. In a letter to her sister, Kathleen Harriman wrote that “Sarah is a terribly nice girl, but I don’t think much of her husband Vic.” Harriman’s daughter added: “She seems desperately unhappy, but she’s got guts enough to stick with Vic on account of her father. Going on the stage is the one way she can keep from going mad.”
Unknown to Kathleen, however, Sarah had another solace: her growing friendship with Winant, with whom she was spending considerable time at Chequers and in London. As their relationship deepened over the next few months, she revealed her troubles to him, as well as her dreams and hopes for the future. Attracted by her warmth, wit, and sense of caring, Winant, in turn, lowered what Alan Brooke called “the iron curtain of his reserve” and confided in her in a way he had rarely done with anyone else.
In the midst of Britain’s greatest crisis in history, the American ambassador found himself falling in love with the prime minister’s daughter.
ON MAY 30, 1941, HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE LINED THE OBSERVATION deck at New York’s La Guardia Airport to welcome Gil Winant back home. They were there in response to a front-page story in that morning’s New York Times, reporting the ambassador’s unexpected, unexplained return for talks with the president and other leading administration figures. Discomfited by the crowd’s cheering and applause, Winant diffidently raised his hat as he strode from his plane to the terminal. Outside, he faced a battery of newsreel cameras. “This is worse than a bombing,” he muttered before politely but firmly refusing to comment on why he had returned to the United States.
