The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  One immediate effect of the marriage was that Winston used Clementine as his sounding board, confidante and emotional support, which largely cut Jennie out of the picture. From his entry into the Army until his marriage, Jennie had been the biggest single influence in her son’s life (indeed, she had always been so if one counts the one-sided relationship of the child adoring the all-too-often absent mother). But though Winston remained devoted to Jennie and still consulted her about important issues from time to time, their once close relationship naturally tailed off.

  After the honeymoon the couple moved into Winston’s bachelor flat, which Winston had asked Jennie to redecorate as a surprise homecoming for his bride. But Jennie’s taste, ‘sateen and muslin covers trimmed with bows’, was too florid for Clementine – indeed, so was Jennie, whose lifestyle too closely resembled her own mother’s for Clementine to approve of her. For the moment, she made the new bride’s attempt to get on with her mother-in-law but privately, as she later told her daughter Mary, she thought Jennie’s taste vulgar (and the covers cheap and tawdry).4 In the early months of 1909, when they knew that Clementine was to have a child, due in July, the Churchills bought a lease on a family house at 33 Eccleston Square. There, Clementine, only ever called ‘Clemmie’ by her intimates, was careful to insist upon choosing her own interior design.

  While Clementine created their new home, Winston was working harder than ever. At the Board of Trade he had succeeded Lloyd George (who had gone to the Exchequer), and he intended to carry on with his predecessor’s programme of welfare – the forerunner of the welfare state, in fact. Among Winston’s immediate problems was a series of dock strikes in the main ports; he was also concentrating on legislation to standardise working hours in the ‘sweated labour’ trades of tailoring and dressmaking as well as stevedores. Later, it would remain a source of pride to Churchill that he had helped lay the foundations of state-funded old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, but at the time he and the Chancellor were pushed to fund these laudable aims. It was done by raising death duties and imposing punitive taxes on alcohol, tobacco and petrol, and an even more controversial ‘land duty’. Middle-and upper-class landowners were appalled at the harshness of these measures and Winston received frantic appeals from his closest relatives. ‘I suggest death duties should not be made retrospective but that past transactions, carried on in good faith under the law and often embodied in marriage settlements, should be respected,’ wrote his cousin Ivor Guest, who sent figures to prove that if he paid all the new taxes he would not be able to keep his estate; yet nor, by the law of entail, was he able to sell it. So angry was Ivor that Winston worried he might resign his parliamentary seat. Considering his social milieu, his remarks to his mother on these taxes are interesting: ‘I never saw people make such fools of themselves as all these Dukes and Duchesses are doing. One after another they come up threatening to cut down charities and pensions, sack old labourers and retainers, and howling and whining because they are asked to pay their share, as if they were being ruined.’5 Perhaps Winston’s crusade was even more difficult for Jennie, who spent all her time with those who would be most affected by the proposed land duty. Unfortunately, her response does not survive.

  Between selling the flat at Bolton Street and the completion of works in the Eccleston Square house, Clementine lodged at the Carlton House Terrace flat of Freddie and Amy Guest, spent the month of April at Blenheim, and visited her cousins the Stanleys at Alderney. She was at Blenheim when Winston was in the thick of a fight with the unions, and she wrote appealingly that she was missing him: ‘Do try & come down here tomorrow instead of Friday – it is perfectly lovely but I can’t enjoy it properly without you, whereas Lloyd George can quite well manage his Disestablishment Bill alone.’6 Their letters now began to be illustrated with cartoons of pug dogs and cats – appropriately pregnant in Clementine’s case.

  On 30 May there was family news to report. ‘Jack and Goonie have had a son,’* Winston wrote:

  …Jack like a little turkey-cock with satisfaction. ‘Alone I did it’, sort of air. It seems to have been a most smooth & successful affair. Goonie dined out, walked home [and] slept soundly until 2. Then felt premonitory sensations…and at 4 or 5 all was gloriously over…she hardly had any pain. My dear Bird – this happy event will be a great help to you & will encourage you. I rather shrink from it – because I don’t like your having to bear pain & face this ordeal. But we are in the grip of circumstances, and out of pain joy will spring & from passing weakness new strength arise.7

  Clementine replied confidently: ‘It is wonderful Goonie having her Baby so easily – I feel it is nothing now & only wish there was not another month to wait.’8

  The couple’s first child, Diana, who immediately became ‘the puppy kitten’ (and often ‘the P.K.’), was born on 11 July 1909. The healthy baby remained in London with father and nanny, while Clementine went to convalesce with her mother and sister and brother at a seaside cottage belonging to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. It was ‘wild, savage and altogether delightful’, she wrote, and ‘the Kat’ was being waited on hand and foot by her family and servants so that she was ‘purring loudly – occasionally she gives a plaintive mew for her Pug and PK (especially for her Pug) but except for that she is very happy’. In fact, although Winston had determined that his children would never suffer the neglect that he and Jack had experienced, Clementine would always put her husband ahead of her children in her list of priorities.

  In September Winston was invited by the Kaiser to attend German Army manoeuvres, which meant that Clementine was staying alone at Alderney with her Stanley cousins on their first wedding anniversary. ‘My darling,’ she wrote, ‘how I wish we were together – it is just 5 o’clock. This time last year we were steaming out of Paddington on our way to Blenheim – The Pug was reading an account of the wedding…aloud to the Kat! Then the Pug embraced the Kat, but unfortunately another train was just passing us quite slowly & its occupants caught him in the very act.’9 On the same day he wrote to her from Strasbourg: ‘A year today my lovely white pussycat came to me…my precious & beloved Clemmie my earnest desire is to enter still more completely into your dear heart & nature & to curl myself up in your darling arms. I feel so safe with you.’10

  These military manoeuvres could not be other than fascinating. Here was a man whose favourite toys had been armies of model soldiers which he had drilled and endlessly manoeuvred into the precise formations of the Battle of Blenheim and other set-piece conflicts fought by his ancestor the 1st Duke, and who grew up surrounded by tapestries and other images of John Marlborough leading his forces on a rearing horse with guns blazing. Winston was rapt by what he saw in Germany, especially when they visited the battle site of Blenheim (‘Sunny should make this pilgrimage,’ he wrote to Clementine). But more importantly he now saw at first hand the military might the Kaiser had created, and in view of his later career it is worth noting his reaction. ‘This army is a terrible engine,’ he wrote. ‘It marches sometimes 35 miles in a day. It is in number as the sands of the sea – & with all the modern conveniences…Much as war attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations – I feel more deeply every year…what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.’11

  Jennie’s fortunes looked up somewhat that month. She had been through a rough time during the previous two years. Her marriage to George was now punctuated by many arguments and several short separations. There are a number of notes extant from that period in which George apologises to her for misdemeanours that have upset her and driven him away. His sister, Princess Daisy, knew things were not going well for the couple; she wrote in her diary that Jennie was ‘uncommonly nice and still very handsome’ and that she loved George ‘immensely…but of course the difference in age is a sad and terrible drawback (no babies possible)’.12

  With Salisbury Hall still rented out to pay for its upkeep, Jennie attempted to economise after Winston’s wedding by renting the Asquiths’ London house i
n Cavendish Square, where she spent the winter trying to get a play she had written (called His Borrowed Plumes) on to the stage. She had tempted the legendary Mrs Patrick Campbell into producing it and playing the lead, but this was not enough to make the play a success. Not only was it a financial disaster but, to add to Jennie’s distress, Mrs Patrick Campbell (Stella) began a love affair with George. In the spring of 1909 there had been word of Charles Kinsky, who had been widowed. She had seen him several times since his marriage, and once he and his wife had been to stay at Salisbury Hall. Jennie wrote a letter of condolence, but Kinsky’s reply put an end to any secret hopes she might have nurtured that his wife’s death would reopen their once passionate relationship.13

  In August 1909 Jennie made a large profit on a house she had bought, redesigned and redecorated, then sold on. Although Clementine did not admire Jennie’s taste in decor, she was in the minority; most people liked her ability to present a house in the manner of a modern show home. Winston, who had just helped to resolve a major coal strike, wrote cheerfully:

  Dear Mama

  I am so glad to hear of your excellent stroke of business. The utility of most things can be measured in terms of money. I do not believe in writing books which do not sell, or plays which do not pay. The only exceptions to the rule are productions which can really claim to be high art, appreciated only by the very few. Apart from that money value is a great test. And I think it very creditable indeed that you should be able after two or three months’ work, which you greatly enjoyed, to turn over as large a sum of money as a Cabinet Minister can earn in a year…[He urged her to repeat the project]…your knowledge and taste are so good and your eye for comfort and elegance so well trained, that with a little capital you ought to be able to make a lot of money and if you sell a few more houses, you will be able, very nearly, to afford to produce another play. I am sure George admires your great cleverness over this house as much as I do.14

  He, Clementine, Jack and Goonie and the babies, he told her, were all off to Blenheim for two or three weeks. Jennie, meanwhile, set off for France on a spending spree. Buying new gowns always cheered her up. At the end of the family vacation Winston had to go to Dundee to deal with some constituency matters. His speeches were coming under pressure from suffragettes and it was clear he was still being targeted by them. Winston was not opposed to women’s suffrage, as already noted, and he never voted against it. But he could not bring himself to support the movement because he despised the tactics and behaviour of the militants, which seemed to him to be beneath contempt. There can be no question where Clementine’s sympathy lay, confirmed in a letter Winston wrote to her in October 1909:

  I hope you will not be very angry with me for having answered the suffragettes sternly. I shall never try to crush your convictions [but] I must claim an equal liberty for myself. I have told them I cannot help them while the present tactics are continued. I am sorry for them. The feeling here is vy hot against them. The women’s meeting I addressed later – 1500 – absolutely orderly & enthusiastic – was unanimous against the rowdyism. The Women’s Lib[eral] Association has doubled its membership in the last 12 months. They were full of solicitude for you: & I told them you would be at their head on the day of battle. My sweet cat – my heart goes out to you tonight. I feel a vivid realisation of all you are to me; & of the good & comforting influence you have brought into my life. It is a much better life now.15

  That their marriage was a success is evident from the affectionate remarks that peppered his letters: ‘I would so much like to take you in my arms all cold & gleaming from your bath…Sweet Kat – I kiss your soul.’16 Yet the short separations began to tell on Clementine’s imagination and – perhaps understandably, given the world in which they moved – she tackled her husband about what he did during his frequent periods away from her. Winston was shocked and upset by her ‘wounding doubts’:

  Dearest, it worries me vy much that you should seem to nurse such absolutely wild suspicions wh. are so dishonouring to all the love & loyalty I bear you, & please God will bear you while I breathe. They are unworthy of you and me. And they fill my mind with feelings of embarrassment to which I have been a stranger since I was a schoolboy…they depress and vex me – & without reason. We do not live in a world of small intrigues, but of serious & important affairs…you ought to trust me for I do not love & will never love any woman in the world but you…your sweetness and beauty have cast a glory upon my life.17

  Soon after this letter was written, in mid-November, the couple had just alighted from a train at Great Western Station in Bristol when a suffragette wielding a whip leapt out of the crowd and attacked Winston. She grabbed his coat and hit him in the face shouting, ‘Take that you brute. I’ll show you what Englishwomen can do.’* Brandishing the whip again, she drove him backwards on the platform in an attempt to force him on to the line in the path of an oncoming train. It happened so quickly that both Winston and the men in his party were taken by surprise, but Clementine – her senses sharpened at the imminent danger to her beloved Pug – jumped over a pile of luggage and pulled him away from the edge of the platform to safety.18

  In the early months of 1910 a general election was in the offing, and perhaps because she was able to assist him in a practical way at last, Clementine felt happier than at any time since their marriage; in any event, there were no further expressions of doubt in her letters. Against the national trend Winston held his seat, and in the new government he was appointed Home Secretary, the youngest holder of that post since Sir Robert Peel.* So much did Clementine enjoy electioneering that when another Guest cousin, Henry, stood for Parliament in East Dorset and Winston could not be spared from his ministerial duties, Clementine went down to Canford to help Henry’s campaign. Although she had made it her job to provide a home that was a place of refuge for Winston, Clementine was not a natural stay-at-home woman. Quick and intelligent, she too felt strongly about political matters and, like Consuelo, was strongly in favour of women’s suffrage; but, like her husband, she could not support militant tactics. When a pompous article appeared in The Times opposed to giving the vote to women on grounds of psychological and physiological differences, Clementine’s dry wit was shown to best advantage when she replied through the letters page, signing herself ‘CSC’:

  Sir, After reading Sir Almroth Wright’s able and weighty exposition of women as he knows them, the question seems no longer to be, ‘Should women have votes?’, but ‘Ought women be abolished altogether?’ I have been so much impressed…that I have come to the conclusion that women should be put a stop to. We learn from him that in their youth they are unbalanced, that from time to time, they suffer from unreasonableness and hyper sensitiveness…and…later in life they are subject to grave and long-continued mental disorders, and, if not quite insane, many of them have to be shut up. Now this being so, how much happier and better would the world not be if only it could be purged of women?…Is the case really hopeless?…Cannot science give us some assurance, or at least some ground of hope, that we are on the eve of the greatest discovery of all, ie: how to maintain a race of males by purely scientific means?19 *

  The end of the Marlborough marriage did not signal the end of Sunny’s and Consuelo’s troubles. Following the separation order the Duke was formally advised by the courtier and equerry Lord Knollys, writing on the instructions of the King, that henceforth neither he nor the Duchess should attend any form of entertainment where the King and Queen were likely to be present. In top circles this meant they were launched into the sort of social limbo that had stultified Jennie’s and Lord Randolph’s lives for so many years. Sunny felt the effects of exclusion more keenly than Consuelo, especially in his role of Knight of the Garter: now, after attending the occasional chapter meetings of the order at St George’s Chapel, he had to slink away early while his companions went on to dine with the King. Seeing how much this depressed his cousin, Winston eventually used his influence to alleviate it. He wrote to the King: />
  I venture to write to Your Majesty upon a private matter. It concerns my cousin the Duke of Marlborough. Owing to the fact that he and his wife are living apart neither is invited to the regular ceremonies of Your Majesty’s court…But the Duke of Marlborough is a knight of the Garter. He has been summoned to attend the Chapter of the Order to be held at Windsor…

  On the last occasion when he obeyed this summons he was alone excepted and excluded from the entertainment in the Castle which followed the Service. Your Majesty will I am sure see that an incident of that character is wholly different from the general exclusion from Court functions…[and] the base press of the United States was filled with insulting references to the Duke and highly coloured accounts of his treatment at the Castle and a great deal of unkind comment was excited in London…20

  The King agreed with Winston in the matter and an invitation to luncheon at the Castle was issued to the Duke. But, Lord Knollys wrote, ‘he is sure the Duke of Marlborough will understand that in taking this step it must not be supposed that His Majesty proposes to abrogate the general rule, which affects him in regard to his coming to Court’.21

  In the United States the Duke of Marlborough had become the epitome of caddish behaviour, a reputation that had even penetrated the White House. Theodore Roosevelt opined that ‘the lowest note of infamy is reached by such a creature as this Marlborough, who proposing to divorce the woman when he at least cannot afford to throw any stone at her, nevertheless proposes to keep and live on the money she brought him.’22 All public sympathy was with Consuelo. Her friends, her parents and their new spouses, and even Goosie her mother-in-law and Sunny’s sisters, rallied round her at Sunderland House to bolster her. Although she could not attend any royal functions, she was not short of invitations. In her diary (kept at the suggestion of Prime Minister Asquith) in 1908 she wrote: ‘Every night one is bidden to three or more balls. Today there were six parties.’23 But since leaving Sunny, a more serious side of Consuelo’s nature had come to the fore. She threw herself into philanthropic ventures aimed at helping poor women, and by 1907 she had become deeply committed to women’s suffrage – though she too was in favour of a conservative approach to gaining the vote, ‘rather than in the distressing exhibitions of martyrdom…typified by Mrs Pankhurst in gaol being forcibly fed’.24 She believed that such behaviour demeaned women and could ultimately cost them the possibility of success in England.