by Erik Larson
Mary knew how desperately her father wanted to launch offensive operations against Germany, beyond merely bombing the country. Churchill’s initial instinct to cancel the operation, after his visit to the RAF operations center at Uxbridge a week earlier, had been a good one, but he had allowed himself to be overruled by the confident dissent of senior commanders. In her diary, Mary rose to her father’s defense: “I don’t see how in the course of having to make endless decisions one can avoid some mistakes.”
Within the Churchill household, the failure of Operation Menace was perceived to be sufficiently grave as to pose a threat to Churchill’s government.
“O god—somehow this minor reversal has cast a shadow over everything,” Mary wrote. “I do hope the government will pull through—All my feelings are so mixed. Of course I want Papa to pull it off but not only for personal reasons—but also if he went WHO IS TO COME??”
The next day, Friday, September 27, was no better. “All today seemed overcast with the gloom of the Dakar affair,” Mary observed. “It certainly does seem that there was misjudgment somewhere. Oh I am so anxious for Papa. He loves the French so much, & I know longs for them to do something grand & spectacular—but I fear he will take rather a bump over this.” She was shocked by the vitriol from the press. The Daily Mirror, in particular, seemed to have gone mad over the episode. “ ‘The Gallipoli touch?’ ” Mary wrote, quoting the paper. “Oh—how unkind.”
On top of it all, compounding the suspense that already pervaded the house, her pregnant sister-in-law, Pamela, was feeling ill, sick on Thursday, sicker on Friday. And the ministrations of Pamela’s doctor, Carnac Rivett, including his apparent obsession with keeping her on her feet and walking, were becoming suffocating, prompting Mary to exclaim in her diary, “Why can’t Mr. Rivett let the poor girl alone.”
* * *
—
DESPITE THE FACT THAT the baby was due any day, on Tuesday, October 8, Pamela and Clementine set out from Chequers for London, to attend the swearing-in of Pamela’s husband, Randolph, as a new member of the House of Commons, a post he would hold while also retaining his commission in the 4th Hussars and continuing as a correspondent for Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard.
They drove to London knowing full well that the Luftwaffe would likely pound the city again that night, as it had done every night since September 7, and despite the fact that invasion fears remained high. As Churchill told Roosevelt on Friday, October 4: “I cannot feel that the invasion danger is past.” Referring to Hitler, he wrote, “The gent has taken off his clothes and put on his bathing suit, but the water is getting colder and there is an autumn nip in the air.” If Hitler planned to make his move, Churchill knew, he would have to do it soon, before the weather worsened. He told Roosevelt, “We are maintaining the utmost vigilance.”
Pamela and Clementine carried a tank of laughing gas in the car, to administer to Pamela if she happened to go into labor. But it was to Mary, who remained behind at Chequers, that the day would yield the greatest drama.
* * *
—
AT CHEQUERS THAT NIGHT, Mary found herself the guest of the officers of the Coldstream Guards unit assigned to defend the house. She loved the party and the attention—until the Luftwaffe intervened.
The dinner was in full sway when she and the others heard the unmistakable whistle of a falling bomb. They all ducked, by instinct, and waited what seemed an inordinate amount of time for the detonation. When the explosion came, it was oddly muted; it left the guests “rather breathless but intact & morale on all sides good,” Mary wrote.
Her hosts rushed her outside into a deep air-raid trench, whose base was full of mud, which destroyed her beloved suede shoes. Once the raid was judged to have ended, the men escorted her home. “They were all sweet to me,” she wrote in her diary, “—and I was feeling terribly excited & rather breathless—but thank god—not all white & trembly as I so often feared & imagined I would be.”
She added: “Damn those Bloody Huns for breaking up an enjoyable party.”
The next day, Wednesday, October 9, Mary discovered that the bomb had left a huge crater only one hundred yards from the guards’ mess, in a muddy field. The mud, she reasoned, probably explained why the explosion had sounded so muted.
In her diary she wrote, “I am not feeling so ignored by the war.”
* * *
—
EARLY ON THURSDAY MORNING, at Chequers, Pamela, attended by the fearful and ever-present Dr. Rivett, gave birth to a son. A young nurse was present as well. Pamela was just coming out of an anesthetic haze when she heard the nurse say, “I’ve told you five times that it’s a boy. Will you please believe me?”
Pamela, dazed, needed reassurance. “It can’t change now,” she said. “No. It can’t change now.”
She was assured that indeed the baby’s sex would not change.
Clementine entered the news in the Chequers visitors’ book. “October 10th 4.40 A.M.—Winston.” This was the first birth in the house in over a century.
“Winston Churchill Junior arrived,” Mary wrote in her diary. “Hooray.”
She added:
“Pam weak but happy
“Baby not at all weak & only partially happy!”
Pamela’s husband, Randolph, newly minted member of Parliament, missed the birth. He was in London, in bed with the wife of an Austrian tenor, whose monocled image appeared on cigarette trading cards.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, in London, Churchill, working from his bed at 10 Downing Street, learned that two bombs had fallen on the Horse Guards Parade adjacent to the house but had failed to detonate. He asked Colville, “Will they do us any damage when they explode?”
“I shouldn’t think so, Sir,” Colville said.
“Is that just your opinion, because if so it’s worth nothing,” Churchill said. “You have never seen an unexploded bomb go off. Go and ask for an official report.”
Which reinforced for Colville the folly of offering opinions in Churchill’s presence, “if one has nothing with which to back them.”
* * *
—
CHURCHILL MET HIS NEW grandson that weekend when he again traveled to Chequers, bringing with him, as always, numerous guests, including Pug Ismay and General Brooke. Churchill was “utterly delighted, and he used to come and watch the baby, feed him, and was just thrilled to death with him,” Pamela said.
While baby Winston was the main attraction, Churchill’s attention also was drawn to the crater left by the bomb that had interrupted Mary’s dinner party. After lunch, he and Ismay, along with Colville and other guests, gave it a close inspection, and debated whether the bomb’s proximity to the house was mere accident. Colville judged it a chance event; Churchill and Pug disagreed, and posited that it might have been a deliberate attempt to strike the house.
“Certainly there is a danger,” Colville mused in his diary that night. “In Norway, Poland and Holland the Germans showed it was their policy to go all out for the Government, and Winston is worth more to them than the whole Cabinets of those three countries rolled into one.” His colleague Eric Seal, principal secretary, reiterated his own concerns in a private letter to the new chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, who replaced Cyril Newall. “We have established a Military guard there which should be adequate for all emergencies likely to arise by land,” he wrote. “But I am not at all sure whether he is really safe from bombing attack.” Emphasizing that he had said nothing about this as yet to Churchill, Seal added, “I should myself be much happier if it were possible for him to have several other retreats which could be used irregularly so that the enemy would never know where he was.”
Chequers was too valuable an asset for Churchill to abandon entirely, but he agreed that spending every weekend at the house might pose too great a security risk, at leas
t when the sky was clear and the moon was in its fullest phases. He himself had expressed concern about the safety of Chequers. “Probably, they don’t think I am so foolish as to come here,” he said. “But I stand to lose a lot, three generations at a swoop.”
Simply staying in the city, however, was not a consideration. Churchill needed his weekends in the country, and believed he knew of a house that was ideally suited to the role of moonlight surrogate.
He invited its owner, Ronald Tree, to his office. Tree was a friend of long standing who had shared Churchill’s prewar concerns about the rise of Hitler. Now he was a Conservative member of Parliament and parliamentary secretary to Minister of Information Duff Cooper. From a financial standpoint, Tree needed neither post: He had inherited great wealth as a scion of the Marshall Field’s empire in Chicago. His wife, Nancy, was American, a niece of Lady Astor. They owned Ditchley, an eighteenth-century house in Oxfordshire, about seventy-five miles from 10 Downing Street.
Churchill was direct. He told Tree that he wished to spend the upcoming weekend at Ditchley, and that he would be arriving with a number of guests and a full complement of staff and protective guard.
Tree was delighted; his wife, thrilled. Whether they quite knew what they were in for is open to question. Churchill’s descent upon the house had more in common with one of Hitler’s blitzkriegs than a tranquil arrival for a weekend in the country.
“It is quite a business,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary, after taking part in one such Ditchley invasion. “First come two detectives who scour the house from garret to cellar; then arrive valet and maid with much luggage; then thirty-five soldiers plus officers turn up to guard the great man through the night; then two stenographers with masses of papers.” Next, the guests arrive: “The great mass of the house is dark and windowless, and then a chink in the door opens and we enter suddenly into the warmth of central heating, the blaze of lights and the amazing beauty of the hall.”
The decor of the house was by now legendary, and was fast becoming the model for a style of country home decor that emphasized color, comfort, and lack of formality. Its popularity prompted Mrs. Tree to create a home-design firm around the concept. Her future business partner would later describe her aesthetic as one of “pleasing decay.”
The Trees did not mind the sudden siege of their home. Far from it. “I have always been one of your greatest if most humble admirers,” Mrs. Tree wrote to Churchill after his initial visit, “—and I meant to tell you how delighted and honored we all were to have you come to Ditchley. If it is convenient for you at any time to use no matter how short the notice—it is at your disposal.”
It was indeed convenient. Churchill came the following weekend as well, and over the next year or so, he would occupy the house on more than a dozen additional weekends, including one of the most momentous of the war.
One advantage became immediately apparent to Churchill: Ditchley had a home cinema, which the prime minister so enjoyed that in due course, to the dismay of fire inspectors who later deemed it a “grave fire risk,” he ordered one installed at Chequers. Beaverbrook arranged it, and made sure Churchill received the latest movies and newsreels. “Max knows how to do these things,” Churchill said. “I do not.”
Two projectionists joined the weekly Chequers entourage.
CHAPTER 54
Spendthrift
AS IF THE WAR WEREN’T trial enough, Pamela’s marriage to Randolph grew increasingly strained: unpaid bills accumulated and his gambling and drinking continued unabated. He dined often at his club, White’s, and at various restaurants favored by London’s young and rich, and was always quick to pick up the dinner check, even when his companions were far richer than he. He bought tailor-made shirts and suits. Pamela begged Churchill for help. He agreed to settle the couple’s debts, but on the condition that no more bills would accumulate. “Yes,” Pamela assured him, “this is the end.” Many shops and department stores, however, allowed customers to buy things on credit and billed at three-month intervals or longer, causing a lag between the time of purchase and the arrival of the quarterly invoice. “Then, my God!” Pamela said. “There would be more and more bills.”
The couple’s expenses outstripped Randolph’s income, even though by the standards of the day he made a good deal of money. Between his army salary, lecture fees, the pay he received from Parliament and Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard, and other sources of income, he was taking in a robust £30,000 a year, or $120,000 (after inflation, incredibly, about $1.92 million today). Beaverbrook alone paid him £1,560 a year, or $6,240 (roughly $99,840 today). It wasn’t enough, and his creditors were losing patience. One day during a shopping trip to Harrods, the luxurious department store in London’s Knightsbridge district, Pamela was told, to her great humiliation, that her credit had been rescinded. This, she said, “was horrifying for me.”
She left the store weeping. Back at 10 Downing Street, she told the story to Clementine, who had no illusions about her own son. His spending had long been a problem. When Randolph was twenty years old, Churchill wrote to urge him to pay off his debts and resolve a conflict with his bank. “Instead of this,” Churchill told his son, “you seem to be spending every penny you get and more in a most reckless manner involving yourself in endless worry and possibly in some lamentable incident & humiliation.”
Randolph’s proclivity for insulting others and provoking argument was also a persistent source of conflict. After Churchill found himself the target of a particularly cutting remark, he wrote to Randolph to cancel a planned lunch together, “as 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.” Churchill tended to forgive his son, always ending his letters—even this one—with the closing, “Your loving father.”
Clementine was not so charitable. Her relationship with Randolph had been marked by outright hostility ever since his childhood, a rift that only grew wider with age. Early in Pamela’s marriage, during a difficult period, Clementine gave her some strategic advice for dealing with Randolph: “Leave and just go away for three or four days, don’t say where you are going. Just leave. Leave a little note that you are gone.” Clementine said she had done likewise with Churchill and added, “It was very effective.” Now, hearing about Pamela’s ordeal at Harrods, Clementine was sympathetic. “She was wonderfully comforting and wonderfully kind and thoughtful, but she was very nervous also,” Pamela said.
Clementine harbored a persistent anxiety that one day Randolph would do something to cause grave embarrassment to his father, and this fear, Pamela knew, was more than justified. Especially when Randolph drank. “I mean, I came of a family that was really teetotaler,” Pamela said. “My father was a teetotaler. My mother maybe had a glass of sherry and that was it.” Life with a drinker proved startling. With alcohol, the already unpleasant aspects of Randolph’s personality became amplified. He would provoke arguments with whomever happened to be at hand, be it Pamela, friends, or hosts; some nights he would leave the table in a fury and stalk away. “I was sort of challenged as to whether to remain or walk out with him and I found all this very unsettling and unhappy,” Pamela said.
Soon, she knew, she would have to face the inrush of bills by herself. In October, Randolph transferred from the 4th Hussars to a new commando unit being formed by a member of his club. He expected resistance from the Hussars but, to his dismay, got none: His fellow officers were only too glad to see him go. As a cousin recalled later, “What a shock it was to be told that the other officers disliked him, that they were fed up with his diatribes and could hardly wait for him to get some job elsewhere.”
Randolph left for Scotland in mid-October to begin his commando training. Pamela did not want to continue living at Chequers alone, on the Churchills’ charity, and hoped to find an inexpensive house somewhere, where she and Randolph and Winston Junior could be a family. Brendan Bracken, Chur
chill’s jack of all tasks, found for her an old rectory house in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, about thirty miles north of London, that she could rent for a mere £52 a year. To further pare costs, she invited Randolph’s older sister, Diana, and her children, to live there as well, and also recruited her own childhood governess, Nanny Hall, to help with the baby. She wrote to her husband shortly before his departure, “Oh! Randy everything would be so nice, if only you were with us all the time.” She was overjoyed to at last have a home of her own, and could not wait to move in. “Oh my darling isn’t it rather thrilling—our own family life—no more living in other people’s houses.”
The house needed work, which the war repeatedly disrupted. Her curtain installer disappeared before completing the job. His phone was dead, and Pamela presumed that his London home had been bombed. A carpenter hired to make cupboards got called away for a government job. He promised to find someone else to finish the work, but he had doubts as to whether his successor would even be able to find the necessary wood, a commodity made scarce by the war.
The house had nine bedrooms, and these soon filled. There was Nanny; Diana and her family; a housekeeper; several other employees; and, of course, soon, Pamela and the baby, whom she dubbed variously “Baby Dumpling” and “Baby P.M.” In addition, Randolph’s secretary, Miss Buck, had invited her own neighbors to stay at the rectory after their house was bombed. Miss Buck was very apologetic, but Pamela professed to be delighted. “It is a very good thing from our point of view,” she wrote in a letter to Randolph, “as the local authorities tried yesterday to billet 20 children on us, & Miss Buck was able to say we were full.”
