The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  Clementine went home in April 1931, and the following December she, Winston and Diana returned to New York, to which Randolph was already referring as his ‘spiritual home’. Two days after their arrival Winston was hit by a car while crossing Fifth Avenue on his way to meet his friend Bernard Baruch.* Doctors told Clementine that had he not been so muffled up against the cold in a heavy fur-lined overcoat, he might have lost his life. As it was he was badly injured and was hospitalised, then bedridden for almost a month. It was another low point for Winston. In great discomfort, he had plenty of time to brood on his financial losses, his stagnant career and his son’s problems, until Clementine took him to the Bahamas to recuperate for some weeks in the sun. He always revived in the sunshine. By February 1932 he was in Chicago writing to Bob Boothby† that he was lecturing every night despite discomfort following his accident, and a sore throat.29 He met Kay Halle and her father and liked them both, but Kay firmly declined Randolph’s frequent proposals of marriage, and wisely opted to remain a lifelong good friend.

  Randolph, with his matinée idol looks and his considerable reservoir of charm (when he chose to exert it), had already realised that there were few women who could resist him. He was already on his way to becoming a womaniser, even in one instance getting a young woman invited to Blenheim without a chaperone by giving her the impression that there would be a house party there. To her dismay the party consisted of Sunny and Gladys (who were by then living apart within the great palace), herself, Randolph and his schoolgirl cousin Anita Leslie. Sunny must have realised what was afoot, for when Gladys asked where the young woman was he told her that Randolph had taken her into the garden to seduce her. Anita Leslie recalled colourfully in her biography of Randolph how she and his intended victim had huddled under an eiderdown one night, in cold cream and curlers, while he sat on the bed endlessly talking after failing to bribe Anita to ‘clear off’ to her own bedroom. She remembered only that the phrase ‘when I am Prime Minister’ featured frequently in his long discourse before he gave up and returned to his room.30 Anita, who was Leonie Leslie’s granddaughter, also remembered her mother telling her that, in her time, she had known of young women who were so bored and so cold while staying at Blenheim that they hiked into Woodstock village to send themselves telegrams urging an immediate return home.

  The next time she met Randolph, Anita was a debutante herself, dining with a party at Quaglino’s, the fashionable restaurant in Bury Street. It was the evening of the day Tilly Losch had lost her divorce case and Randolph, who was fortunate not to have been named as one of her lovers, was there with Tilly to celebrate and console. As he comforted a tear-stained and indignant Tilly ‘in public’, the other diners and even the waiters too enjoyed the spectacle. ‘Alcohol – cigars – money – and Tilly Losch,’ Anita wrote. ‘Being nearly three years younger I could not say a word. I just admired.’31

  In 1930 Winston had thrown a memorable coming-of-age dinner for Randolph at Claridge’s. Most of those invited were in a position to be of use to the young lion: they included Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty, twenty-four-year-old Quintin Hogg, the Duke of Marlborough and Sir Oswald Mosley (then regarded as a possible Prime Minister in waiting).

  It was hardly surprising, given the people to whom Randolph was continually exposed and the attentions he received, that great things were expected of him. Certainly, his estimation of himself knew no bounds.

  19

  1932–7

  Changes at Blenheim

  The first of Winston and Clementine’s children to marry was Diana. This eldest child of theirs was always something of a misfit. She was well aware that Randolph was her father’s favourite, that Sarah was her mother’s, and that she came first with no one. She was timid in society, unlike her contemporary Diana Mitford, who ‘took’ immediately when the two girls came out together, Diana Mitford rapidly receiving a proposal from the Guinness heir. The latter’s successful launch made Diana Churchill gloomy, and she was unhappy at home. Like most teenagers, she blamed her discontent on her parents and her home life. It was more in an attempt to get away from all this than from any sense of vocation as an actress that Diana badgered her parents until they agreed to allow her to apply for a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she spent five terms. She never shone on the stage, and when she acquired a suitor in the form of John Bailey, the son of Sir Abe Bailey, a rich South African who had been a friend of Winston’s for many years, she accepted his proposal without any regret for her chosen career. Clementine was unhappy about the marriage; she thought Diana was far too young and immature, but the wedding went ahead at the end of 1932. Sunny loaned his London house for the reception.

  Randolph was working as a journalist for various Rothermere publications, and Sarah was spending the obligatory few months in Paris learning French before ‘coming out’ in 1933. Mary, regarded as still in the nursery, now attended day school, but she was cared for virtually exclusively by a cousin of Clementine’s, Maryott Whyte.* Known as ‘Moppet’ in the family and ‘Nana’ by Mary, she was a trained Norland nursery nurse, the crème de la crème of English nannies. Cousin Moppet was with them for twenty years, arriving soon after Marigold’s death, and it was she who provided stability for the Churchill children when Clementine and Winston made their several long trips abroad every year, often solo trips because they demanded different things of their leisure time. Winston had played his last game of polo in Malta in 1927, and though he still rode and occasionally hunted after that date, by the age of sixty his main interest, outside his almost never-ending projects at Chartwell and his writing, were painting, good conversation and playing cards.

  Clementine had been a good horse-rider in the early days of their marriage and had hunted avidly alongside Winston, but as she grew older she turned to tennis – at which she was an above-average player – and skiing. These interests were important to her for she often became nervous in the highly charged atmosphere around Winston, especially when Randolph was present, and she took frequent holidays away from the family where she could play tennis and ski and just relax.

  So for the children, and for Mary especially in these early years, no matter where their parents were, Cousin Moppet was always there providing loving care – to the extent that often, when Clementine made a suggestion Mary’s first response was ‘I must ask Nana.’1 It was probably no coincidence that Mary was the only one of Churchill’s children to evolve into a well adjusted adult. Her relationship with her mother she describes as ‘admiring and respectful’, until she reached the age of fourteen and was old enough to be taken on skiing holidays, when the two came to know each other better.

  Winston had long looked at events occurring in Germany with an inquiring and jaundiced eye. His correspondence proves that he had never been happy with the way the 1914–18 war had ended, and he was always concerned about Germany’s future direction. He had many contacts who lived in Germany or who visited the country, and he listened carefully to what they had to say. And in the early 1930s the sum of these reports was that the National Socialist Party leader, Adolf Hitler, was intent on revising existing treaties and rearming, contrary to the agreements that had been made at the end of the war.

  In March 1932 Hitler polled 40 per cent of the vote in the presidential election and in July that year his party received the majority vote in the Reichstag elections. Six months later Hitler was elected Chancellor of the German Reich. His financial policies appeared to have substantially improved the German economy, at a time when the British economy was still in recession and unemployment had reached three million. Hitler’s record was regarded with admiration by Lord Rothermere’s* Daily Mail. ‘I was disgusted,’ Winston growled in a letter written to Clementine while he was holidaying at Château de l’Horizon, the home of an old friend, Maxine Elliott,† in the Golfe-Juan on the Côte d’Azur, ‘by the D.M.’s boosting of Hitler. R[othermere] is sincerely pacifist. He wants us to be vy strongly armed and frightfully obsequious at th
e same time. Thus he hopes to avoid seeing another war. Anyhow it is a more practical attitude than our socialist politicians. They wish us to remain disarmed & exceedingly abusive.’2 However, he was relieved, he said, that the German people had at least the sense not to vote Hitler in as President for life after the death of Hindenburg.

  That this matter was under regular discussion in the Churchill household from the late 1920s onwards is evident by occasional comments in letters between the couple. For example, in February 1931 Clementine wrote to Winston: ‘I really do not think we must ever fight the Germans again – I’m sure they would win – Really we didn’t beat them in 1918 – they were just stifled by numbers.’3 She was already referring to Hitler in her letters as ‘that Gangster’, which was not the general perception of their class at that time. The name Hitler was yet to be associated with evil. There was admiration, albeit grudging in some quarters, for what he had achieved for the German people. Travel to Europe was generally restricted for reasons of cost to the middle and upper classes, and many who visited Germany wanted to meet Hitler. Churchill almost had the opportunity in summer 1932 when, together with Clementine, Sarah, Prof Lindemann and a few others, he decided to trace the route of the Duke of Marlborough’s march in 1705 from the Netherlands to the Danube, as research for his biography of his ancestor. Randolph had been in Germany for some weeks before his parents arrived, researching a piece on the Nazi Party. He had observed a great deal, especially Hitler’s charismatic influence on the populace, which he regarded as sinister: ‘Let us make no mistake about it,’ he had written in his Daily Graphic column on 3 March 1932. ‘The success of the Nazi party sooner or later means war. Nearly all of Hitler’s principal lieutenants fought in the last war…[and] they burn for revenge. They are determined once more to have an army. I am sure that once they have achieved it, they will not hesitate to use it.’

  Randolph was anxious for his father to see how things were in Germany, and it is almost certainly he who suggested that Winston should take a look for himself. The research trip, which had to be made anyway, was probably the result. The Churchill party spent one day at the town of Blindheim (from which derives the name of Blenheim), then most of the rest of that week at a Munich hotel where they were approached by Ernst (‘Putzi’) Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s foreign press chief public relations adviser cum propagandist. Hanfstaengl, a man of considerable charm and musical ability – he entertained the Churchill party by singing, accompanying himself on the piano – introduced himself as a friend of Randolph, to whom he had been introduced in London by Diana Guinness (née Mitford). Diana was also in Germany that summer, holidaying with her younger sister Unity and trying to persuade Hanfstaengl to introduce them to Hitler. The sisters were not successful in their ambition to meet the Führer on that first visit; Hanfstaengl eventually told them primly that they wore far too much make-up for him to even dream of presenting them to his leader.4

  However, following his meeting with Winston, Hanfstaengl tried hard to persuade Hitler to call on the Churchills at their hotel. At one point Hitler appeared in the lobby after attending a meeting there, while the Churchill party were having a meal in the dining room. Hanfstaengl asked his leader if he would go in and meet them but Hitler hesitated, then said he did not know what he would say and also that he had not shaved.5 The moment was lost, but when Churchill later recalled this incident he put Hitler’s reluctance down to a conversation with Hanfstaengl, in which he (Churchill) had asked: ‘Why is your chief so violent about the Jews? What is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?’6 He assumed Hanfstaengl had reported this to his leader and that that was why Hitler refused to meet him. In the late 1930s when Hitler was at the acme of his powers he invited Churchill to visit him. On that occasion it was Churchill who excused himself.

  One rare incident showed Randolph in a more favourable light than usual. In the summer of 1932 most of London Society had moved to Venice, where Randolph attended a lavish party given by Emerald Cunard for Diana Cooper’s fortieth birthday. When one of the women guests was deliberately burned on the hand with a cigarette by a thwarted lover, Randolph ‘sprang to her defence, and a dreadful fight ensued…the wives all clinging to their men to stop them joining in’.7

  Sarah came out in 1932: she liked the business of being a debutante little more than Diana had. Her photographs show a rather solemn young woman, although Clementine found her far easier to dress than Diana had been. Unfortunately she told the girls this, which caused a family upset – Diana was hurt by the remark. Sarah attended as few functions as she could get away with. Clementine, having already been through the process once, was intensely bored at having to sit for hours on tiny gilt chairs with the other mothers and chaperones, through party after party, so she was probably only too happy to allow her daughter to skip as many events as she wished. Sarah had only one ambition, which was to dance professionally, and after a lot of unhappy lounging about, sighing, pleading and argument she finally wore her parents down and was allowed to enrol at a school of dance.

  It was Winston and Clementine’s silver wedding anniversary in 1933, and their letters show that they were as important to each other then as during the first years of their marriage. By contrast, the relationship between Sunny and Gladys had completely broken down by 1931. Gladys had converted rooms on the ground floor at Blenheim into her own apartment, while Sunny lived on an upper floor. They still encountered each other in the dining room, where Gladys would deliver endless cutting witticisms about Sunny and sometimes his guests, while he looked on alternately horrified, bored, scowling. Gladys was now engaged in the breeding of Blenheim spaniels and would eventually have up to fifty of them, all living in her rooms in the palace. Her arrival was always heralded, before she hove into view in the midst of her moving carpet of spaniels, by the clicking of a multitude of tiny claws on the polished floors.

  The main problem, touched on earlier, appears to have been that Gladys was not cut out for the solemn formality of Blenheim, nor perhaps to deal with the man Sunny became whenever he was in residence there. She loved the cheerful bonhomie and bustle of cities, a sophisticated circle of artistic friends and smart highbrow conversation. She came to loathe the cavernous rooms at Blenheim, which were hardly filled even by the regular injections of weekend guests who, she complained, only ever wanted to talk about hunting and shooting. However, it must have been somewhat more invigorating than that would suggest, for the guests at Blenheim were often the same whose conversation glittered at Chartwell. Winston and Clementine were now only occasional guests at Blenheim, but the visitors’ book reveals the presence there of the F.E. Smiths, Mrs Keppel, Shelagh Duchess of Westminster, Lytton Strachey, Edith Sitwell and Evelyn Waugh. And to these add top Hollywood stars such as Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. How was it possible for Gladys to be bored with such a guest list?

  The marriage had started to go seriously wrong in 1923 when Gladys suffered her second miscarriage after falling over a stool during a violent quarrel with Sunny. She had been rather pleased when she miscarried the first time at the age of forty because she had been depressed during those early weeks of the pregnancy, but later she thought she might like a child and so was unhappy when the second miscarriage occurred. She became pregnant for a third time and lost that baby also, painfully, in January 1925, at which point all desire to conceive again appears to have evaporated. After this it seems that Gladys only came to life when she visited Paris, on one occasion slipping away from Sunny the moment they arrived there in order to wander about alone, and ‘to…feel & hear…Paris itself’.8

  Her Parisian friends on the Quai Voltaire wittily designated Blenheim ‘Hyper-Boria’ and issued frequent invitations to her to come to Paris and ‘deBlenheimise’. There she transformed into the old bright, eager, fascinating Gladys. How curious that Sunny did not recognise that the minute she returned to Blenheim she lost her joie de vivre and slid into depression and i
ncreasing eccentricity. Today Gladys would almost certainly have been suspected of having bipolar disorder; even people who liked her increasingly regarded her as a little mad at times. Apart from her dogs the only pastime Gladys enjoyed was gardening – and that because it got her away from the house. Her low spirits, however, did not prevent her from holding her own with Sunny, and the house often rang with their loud quarrels, sometimes within earshot of visitors. One guest noted that Gladys was ‘more than a match for the Duke’, whom the writer ‘always thought a very poor creature’.9 Another factor in the deteriorating relationship was Gladys’s determination not to become pregnant again just at the time of Sunny’s conversion to Catholicism, when the Duke could no longer use contraception.