With no intimacy permitted, Sunny’s temper became increasingly erratic. Gladys sought help from the Church on the grounds that his conversion had caused her husband a ‘physical crisis’. She was advised, unhelpfully, that this often occurred after a conversion and would eventually resolve itself. One positive benefit from the Catholic remarriage was that Sunny was now totally rehabilitated in Society and could once again be received in royal circles, from which he had been excluded since his separation from Consuelo twenty years earlier. In 1928, Gladys organised a famous leap year’s eve ball at their London home in Carlton House Terrace,* arguably one of the most prestigious non-royal addresses in London. It was the Society event of the year, attended by the Prince of Wales, and everyone of note turned up wearing fancy dress. Winston wore a Roman toga. Sunny was so delighted that Gladys reported to friends, ‘For quite 3 days I was allowed to express several opinions a day and no taunt…was forthcoming.’
The only thing the couple shared with any enthusiasm, now, was the five-year construction project of the water gardens at Blenheim. But their rows had long been legendary, and at one dinner when Sunny was holding forth about politics Gladys shocked guests into silence by shrieking: ‘Shut up! Shut up! You know nothing about politics. I’ve slept with every Prime Minister in Europe, and most Kings. You are not qualified to speak.’ At one luncheon she arrived with a newly injured eye which slowly turned black during the meal. She took to sleeping with a loaded revolver on her bedside table in case Sunny should decide upon a night-time visit, and even occasionally placed it on the table at dinner parties. When one guest asked why she needed it there she replied that she might decide to shoot the Duke.
By 1931 Sunny could stand it no longer. He decided that his wife really was mad after she chased him around Blenheim with her gun when he demanded she leave. She refused to go, but since she hated the place her reaction appears to have derived from pique and a desire to annoy. One of the things that most distressed Sunny was Gladys’s pack of spaniels which, apart from living in her rooms and sleeping on her bed, were allowed to eat, defecate and urinate wherever they liked in the palace. Watching the irreplaceable old carpets being thus damaged became a source of horror and revulsion to Sunny, who used to tour the house looking for new stains and other depredations such as small flaps cut into the great mahogany doors of the state rooms so that the dogs would not be impeded as they roamed the great building at will. Clarissa, daughter of Jack and Goonie, recalls visiting the palace as a child of ten or eleven in the early Thirties and finding dog cages in the Great Hall, which at that time smelled so pungently that one guest was reported to have fainted.
Why did Gladys not simply leave Blenheim and return to the bohemian life she clearly adored? After all, she was far happier in Paris. But it was not simply a desire to infuriate her husband that kept her at Blenheim. The most likely explanation is the 1929 crash. Gladys had been supported in luxury all her life by a trust fund set up by her father, which provided her and her sisters with up to $30,000 a year (about $350,000 today). But the trust fund had dried up in 1929 and from 1930 onwards Gladys was without private means – she was therefore wholly reliant on Sunny for even her simplest needs. As time went by Sunny refused to countenance this additional expense on his purse, and in an attempt to shame him into giving her an allowance Gladys took to wearing old court dresses that had been stored for years in Blenheim’s huge cupboards. She would appear at dinner, and in public, in these or her oldest clothes, sometimes fastened with safety-pins.
The last time they were seen together in London was at Diana Churchill’s wedding reception on 12 December 1932, held at the Marlboroughs’ Carlton Terrace house. Gladys avoided having to stand next to Sunny by not attending the marriage service. Sunny sat in the church alone, dressed in a brown overcoat with a velvet collar, looking haunted and sad, next to Diana Guinness and her baby son. Gladys organised the reception with Clementine, but after that event was forbidden ever to come to the London house again. Finally, unable to stand Blenheim under Gladys’s management, the Duke moved out of the home to which he had given his life and into Carlton House Terrace. When he visited Blenheim on business he stayed and ate at the Bear Hotel in Woodstock village. One can only guess what local people made of all this.
Gradually the number of servants at Blenheim dwindled to six, and at one point Gladys claimed that all she had in the world was £9. In May 1933 the Duke’s solicitors served her with a formal notice to leave, advising unequivocally that the palace was to be closed down at the end of that month. Her own solicitors, Withers & Co., who also looked after the affairs of the royal family, protested at this ‘unfair’ treatment of the Duchess – where did the Duke expect her to go without any money? But as the appointed day drew near she had no alternative but to hire a removal van and some men, and move out with most of her belongings. Even that was made a more harrowing experience than necessary. Marlborough’s agent, loyal to the Duke, of course, was determined to ensure that Gladys took nothing that belonged to Blenheim. He asked to inspect everything as it was loaded onto the van, and was so offensive to Gladys that she telephoned Withers & Co., for help. They hastily dispatched a man to Blenheim to protect their client against further ‘insolence’.
When the Duke regained his palace he invited friends to inspect the physical damage that had been inflicted upon it. The stench was such that it was impossible to breathe comfortably in some of the rooms, and it was hard for anyone witnessing the squalor to side with Gladys. She sold or loaned out some of her dogs and stayed at the Carlton Hotel in the Haymarket for a few months, referring all the charges to Marlborough until the Duke publicly refused to pay any further bills incurred by his wife. Acting on the advice of her solicitors, while Sunny was visiting Blenheim Gladys moved into No. 7 Carlton House Terrace and squatted there. And there she stayed, behind locked doors and windows, while Sunny stormed and tried ineffectively to find some way of having her removed. She allowed a few visitors in to give the lie to Sunny’s stories that she was insane.
Among these visitors was the twenty-two-year-old former Diana Mitford, Randolph’s first love. When Diana had married Bryan Guinness in 1929, the couple had seemed ideally matched. Then, in 1932, Diana met and fell deeply in love with the enfant terrible of the Tory Party, Oswald Mosley – later the leader of the hated ‘Blackshirts’ – who was married to Cynthia Curzon. A few months later, to the distress of her husband, her family and Society in general, Diana took her two small sons and left the marital home to live in a rented house in Eaton Square as Mosley’s mistress. Diana Guinness and Gladys Marlborough were frequent visitors to each other’s houses in those months; it was, as Diana remarked, a case of ‘one social pariah visiting another’.10 Harold Nicolson also mentions meeting Gladys at that time, on 21 June 1933. His diary entry reveals that he found her very easy to talk to. They discussed Proust and she recounted some personal recollections of him. There is no hint in this account of mental instability.
Sunny was forced to set up London headquarters at the Ritz while he found a way to evict Gladys. Eventually he sent three detectives to the Carlton House Terrace mansion to cut off the gas, electricity and telephone. Before locking themselves into the basement rooms which included the larders and pantries (where they lived off the food supplies), the men erected a barricade around the house to prevent friends visiting and supplying her with essentials. After four days Gladys was effectively starved out.11 She returned to the Carlton Hotel in the Haymarket with no means of paying her bills, and there, between long stays at the houses of friends, she remained for almost a year. It is not entirely clear who did pay her Carlton Hotel bills; perhaps a friend stumped up, or Marlborough felt forced to pay for the sake of appearances. And Gladys was to have the last word, for Sunny’s days were almost up. Less than a year later, in June 1934, he lay dying at Carlton House Terrace from cancer of the liver.
He had spent much of those last months of his life pitifully shrivelled, yellow-skinned and obvio
usly seriously ill. His worry about the cost of overseeing the restoration at Blenheim and repairing the damage inflicted by Gladys was an added stress, but he worked feverishly to complete it. He succeeded so well that he was able to invite the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson to a weekend party there, which also included Duff and Lady Diana Cooper. But it was the final trump for this lonely and troubled man. Even before he was diagnosed with cancer he had contemplated handing Blenheim over to his heir Bert (Lord Blandford) and his wife Mary, and retiring to a monastery. He had only just learned of the death of his hated old adversary Alva, Consuelo’s mother, after a stroke in January 1933* when he was told that his own illness was terminal. On the last evening of his life he held a tea party for his closest friends. Among them at his bedside was a desperately sad Winston. On 30 June the sixty-two-year-old Duke died painlessly, having slipped into a coma. Winston wrote enigmatically that his cousin had ‘sacrificed much – too much – for Blenheim’.12
Gladys’s life thereafter, and it was to be a long one, was marked by poverty, loneliness and increasing eccentricity. Sunny had cut her out of his will, leaving her penniless, and she was reliant on the generosity of friends, who gradually drifted away. Like Consuelo she had dropped the title ‘Duchess’, and this woman whose beauty and wit had once captivated the salons of the capitals of Europe slipped into obscurity, out of the society of those who might have assisted her. Somehow she managed to exist, for a time, but eventually she became unable to look after herself. In 1977 at the age of ninety-six she was in a care home, forgotten by all but a few ancient acquaintances who visited out of curiosity and pity, and a young biographer. She died on 13 October that year in her sleep.
Sunny and Consuelo’s elder son Bert now succeeded to the title of 10th Duke, and with Duchess Mary took over the running of Blenheim. Consuelo had been forbidden to visit her former home for twenty years, but now she was welcomed back and was curious to see what changes had been made. Without Sunny’s presence she found the palace less formidable and was touched when local people welcomed her with affection and made her feel wanted. She admired the wonderful water gardens that Sunny and Gladys had created, but mostly she enjoyed the change in ambience: ‘How rewarding are my memories of Blenheim in my son’s time,’ she wrote later. ‘His life [there], with Mary and his children, was all that I wished mine could have been.’13 Thereafter, Winston, Clementine and Consuelo all made regular visits to Blenheim and would spend the occasional Christmas there.
By the mid-Thirties Randolph had fallen in love with another Mitford cousin, a girl in fact, with the same blue eyes, fair hair and Madonna-like calmness as Diana (and also, incidentally, as Randolph’s mother). This was Clementine Mitford,* and it was to her that Randolph poured out his political hopes and his despair when he was continually defeated at elections and thrown out of Chartwell by his mother, who had told him never to return because she could no longer tolerate the rows he caused. Clementine Mitford loved Randolph, but not as a potential husband: ‘He was the first clever grown up person that I met,’ she wrote. ‘He was full of scintillating talk – quoting poetry and prose, and so funny and brave as a lion. All this, and added to it a great capacity for true affection, which he did not mind demonstrating. I think…that I filled a gap for him; he talked to me a lot about his relationship with his mother and father…the quarrels with Winston were so sad and both sides were upset.’14
When he was older Randolph could almost accept that his behaviour as a headstrong young man had often been inappropriate. He was always fired by an ambition to emulate his father and his grandfather; he once told Clive Irving, managing editor of the Sunday Times, that this was triggered by the realisation that he shared his birthday, 28 May, with the Younger Pitt. ‘If he could be Chancellor of the Exchequer at twenty-three and Prime Minister at twenty-five I saw no reason why I shouldn’t do the same,’ he said.15
Randolph’s rude, sometimes obnoxious, behaviour won him no friends. When the Conservative Party turned him down as a candidate he stood as an Independent Conservative, backed financially by the multimillionairess Lady Houston. He stood three times between 1933 and 1935 at Wavertree, Norwood and Cromarty respectively (‘More stags than Tories in Cromarty,’ Brendan Bracken, Winston’s staunchest supporter, had warned in a cable). Each time Randolph stood, he managed to split the Conservative vote between himself and the official Tory candidate so that Labour reaped the benefit, which made him a hated figure on the Tory benches. This odium spilled over on to Winston so that now, when he rose to his feet to address the House, he was often shouted down by irate men who should have been – and probably would otherwise have been – his supporters.
All this resulted in a bitter quarrel between Randolph and Clementine who blamed her son for endangering his father’s career. Furious, she actually told him she hated him and would never forgive him. Randolph also quarrelled with his father when Winston refused to support him because he saw his son’s course as perilous and because he saw how much it had upset Clementine. However, when Clementine was away on a cruise in 1935 and Randolph contracted jaundice, Winston forgot all the disagreements and rushed to the aid of his son, who was ‘holed up’, he reported, at the Ritz. Then he made excuses for him, writing to Clementine that in fact rather than having failed at the Cromarty election Randolph had done well to get as many votes as he had, because he had done it all alone without the backing of a party election machine. This was something of an exaggeration, since he had drawn heavily on Lady Houston’s generous coffers and had been better-funded than Winston had ever been in his life.
Clementine had left Chartwell the week before Christmas 1934 to cruise around the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) aboard Lord Moyne’s* yacht the Rosaura, which she joined in Sicily. Lord Moyne wanted to collect one of the indigenous ‘dragon’ (monitor) lizards for London Zoo. It was a relief to Clementine to miss the usual family get-together. The previous Christmas most of her family had been at odds – her daughter Diana’s marriage had failed within a year, and she was now as unhappy as ever; this had been forecast by Clementine, but it gave her no satisfaction to be proved right. Winston and Randolph were at loggerheads most of the time; the house rang with their disagreements. Nellie’s son Esmond, now fourteen and rebellious of any authority, was proving more difficult than Randolph: he insisted on wearing a huge black wide-brimmed hat every waking minute and refused to dress for dinner, which annoyed Winston. But what really alarmed the family was that Esmond had espoused Communism (which annoyed Winston even more); and having run away from school several months before Clementine set off on her cruise, he was still missing at the time of her departure. All these troubling undercurrents submerged the arrangements Clementine had made for the usual Chartwell carol singing, tree lighting and present giving.
A few days after Clementine departed, Esmond was discovered living rough in an empty shop in London where a close friend visited him, describing him thus: ‘He was at the height of his intolerant fanaticism, a bristling rebel against home, school, society…the world…He was dirty and ill-dressed, immensely strong for his age: his flat face gave the impression of being deeply scarred, and his eyes flared and smouldered as he talked.’16 Esmond would spend Christmas Eve of 1934 in court, having been arrested after being found drunk in his dingy squat, where he was busy producing Communist propaganda. At the hearing Nellie told the judge that her son was ‘uncontrollable’ and he was committed to a six-week term in a remand home for delinquent boys, in what would prove to be a vain attempt to bring him back into line.
Winston, who was not keen on cruising and was anyway busy working on his Marlborough biography, had declined Lord Moyne’s invitation. Seeing Clementine’s disappointment, he had suggested she go without him. The letters written between Winston and Clementine during this long parting, now published, do not detail the fact that Clementine developed a romantic attachment for a fellow passenger, Terence Philip. Initially there were only four aboard the Rosaura: Mr and Mrs Lee Guinnes
s, Terence Philip and Clementine, and these four were alone for three weeks until joined by Lord Moyne and his long-term mistress Vera Broughton.
Clementine’s only extramarital romance occurred during those three weeks of sybaritic sailing in tropical seas and visiting islands such as Bali, when there were no letters from Winston to remind her of home and the stresses there. The milestone of her fiftieth birthday came and went without any special notice. Sometimes she and Terence Philip picnicked alone on deserted islands while their fellow guests went deep-sea fishing. Clementine was still slender and desirable; Philip, who worked in the art world, was seven years younger, debonair and charming, and he became very fond of Clementine. Mary would relate in her biography of her mother that Clementine never stopped loving Winston, but for a few months she had surrendered to a romantic dream world far removed from the tumult that always surrounded her husband, and more specifically her son.
Many years afterwards Clementine admitted the relationship to her daughter, telling her that Terence Philip ‘had never really been in love with her’ before adding, ‘But he made me like him.’17 After her return – and her letters to Winston during the separation show that before the end of the cruise she longed to be reunited with him – Terence Philip visited her at Chartwell for a while and then went to live in the USA, where he worked until his death early in the war. It was an interlude about which she could feel tender and nostalgic during dark times. There was never any danger to her marriage, for Clementine belonged to the school that regarded marriage as a lifetime commitment, and it is impossible to believe that she was ever physically unfaithful to Winston. But perhaps the episode served to soften the attitude of a woman who had hitherto been a severe critic of those who strayed. There is certainly more than a hint of Winston beginning to worry about his wife’s prolonged absence. ‘I have not grudged you yr long excursion,’ he wrote, ‘but now I do want you back.’ It is just possible he half-suspected his Kat might be having a romantic adventure of her own. ‘Oh my darling Winston,’ she replied from the Suez Canal on her way home, ‘I send you this like John the Baptist to prepare the way before me, to tell you I love you & that I long to be folded in your arms.’18
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