The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  Meanwhile, the Conservative Party remained livid at Randolph’s damaging and divisive attempts to win a seat as an Independent. Only at Norwood would the official Tory Party candidate, Duncan Sandys,* survive (although Randolph carved heavily into the majority there, too). The personable young Sandys had resigned a very promising career as a diplomat in the Foreign Office to enter Parliament. During the run-up to the election he had often met Diana and Sarah, who had been easily dragooned into working for their brother’s campaign as an antidote to boredom at home. Diana, miserable in her failed marriage, fell headlong in love with Sandys and her feelings were reciprocated. Within a year she was divorced and on 16 September 1935, less than three years after becoming Mrs John Bailey, she married Duncan Sandys. Belonging to a generation that regarded divorce as a last resort, the Churchills could not be happy for their daughter. But although Winston had been prepared to dislike his new son-in-law, in fact Duncan Sandys supported him and shared the same political ideology; subsequently, their rapport was to excite Randolph’s jealousy.

  But Diana’s emotional problems and the difficulties with Randolph were not the only worries that Winston and Clementine faced when she had returned home in May. Nellie was still distraught about Esmond. His espousal of Communism had begun when he wrote to his Uncle Winston requesting some information about Russia so that he could attack Russia in the school debate on the subject. Churchill replied that he was too busy to be of much help, but advised Esmond to consider that Russia had murdered millions of people during the Revolution. Blundering around, confusing pacifism with Communism while he researched the matter, Esmond came across the Daily Worker on his way to Dieppe to visit his mother. He was so intrigued with this new world, so different from the one he and his family inhabited, that he became a subscriber. He then began his own magazine called Out of Bounds, which when it was found and read by a master at Wellington was banned. This was enough to make it a bestseller, much sought after in other boys’ schools as well as his own. After that his school career plummeted and he became a confirmed rebel. His bad behaviour and truancy caused him to be expelled, so he went on the run and lived rough until picked up by the police. Naturally, the newspapers got on to the story of this nephew of Churchill’s to the distress of most of the family, especially Clementine. She blamed Nellie for not being firm enough with Esmond, but in fact nobody knew quite what to do with him.

  At this point a crisis occurred closer to home that distracted Clementine’s attention from Nellie and Esmond. Sarah’s training at the discreet dance school run by two spinster ladies had unexpectedly led to her attending an audition for a role in a West End revue called Follow the Sun. The producer, C.B. Cochran, knew who Sarah was – he had known her grandmother, Jennie. ‘Does your father know you are here?’ he asked her. She replied disingenuously that he probably didn’t because he wasn’t especially interested in dancing. Clementine was shocked at the thought of her daughter being ‘on the stage’ as a dancing girl, and the fact that she would be appearing as one of C.B. Cochran’s famous ‘Young Ladies’* did little to soften the blow for a woman raised in the reign of Queen Victoria. Churchill, however, in reply to C.B. Cochran’s letter requesting parental consent, remarked mildly that he hoped Cochran would give Sarah any role for which she seemed suited and that she was to be judged on her own merits. She was to have used a stage name, but since the press caught on immediately such a ploy would have been pointless. In his autobiography Cochran recalled Sarah’s audition, at which she did some tap, ballet and modern dancing: she was so good, he said, that ‘had she been merely Miss Jones or Miss Brown, or far less good to look at, she would have been engaged’.19 But the name Churchill did no harm to her prospects.

  Clementine was won round by Cochran’s praise of her daughter’s ability, and while she was a guest at the Christmas party at Blenheim that year she went to Manchester for the opening of the show. She wrote to Winston who was in Tangiers that Christmas, working on his Marlborough biography and painting: ‘You really would have been proud of Sarah. The dancing performed by the chorus was difficult & intricate & she was certainly in the first flight. She looked graceful & distinguished. Blenheim was delightful & you were much missed. Tender Love to you my Darling. How is Vol: III & have you painted some lovely pictures?’20

  Parental approval slipped when within weeks twenty-one-year-old Sarah announced that she had fallen in love with the star of the show, who was eighteen years older and married. Vic Oliver was a multitalented Austrian Jew who had lived and worked in the USA for some years and had an estranged wife in Austria. Since separating from his wife many years earlier he had been in a long-term live-in relationship, so in effect he now had two failed relationships behind him. Mr and Mrs Cochran both remonstrated with Sarah; everyone in the cast tried to make her change her mind. Her mother shied from actual dissuasion, cautioning Winston to write to Sarah, ‘but not severely’. She reminded him of the effect the heavy-handed letter he had written to Randolph had produced five years earlier, as a consequence of which she feared their son had come close to marrying Kay Halle.

  But Winston did not agree with Clementine. He decided to invite Vic Oliver for an interview, which he duly reported to her. ‘He did not impress me with being a bad man; but common as dirt…a horrible mouth:…a foul Austro-Yankee drawl. I did not offer to shake hands.’21 Oliver told Winston that he loved Sarah, but that he would not rush things. However, as he and Sarah were now openly seen to be in a relationship it might be better for them to be formally engaged while he obtained his freedom. After a difficult interview Winston conceded that if they would not see each other for a year and were still of the same mind at the end of that time he would withdraw his objections, provided that Oliver obtained American citizenship. Otherwise, he threatened, he would do everything he could to try to change Sarah’s mind. He would tell her of their conversation, he said. At this stage, Winston related to Clementine, Oliver ‘got up with gt emotion, not without some dignity, & said, “you don’t need to do it. I will do it myself.” Sarah [standing in the passage outside the door] followed him downstairs & I have not seen her since. But I put Diana on to her & I learn that the idea of an engagement is off…I don’t think there is immediate cause to worry.’22

  Clementine, who was on a skiing holiday at Zürs in the Arlberg Mountains of Austria when she received this letter, replied that it had ‘riveted me with renewed horror at the possibility of such a marriage – Sarah must be more than stage-struck – In the middle ages it would be thought she was bewitched…. I agree with your diagnosis of Mr Oliver – not a bad man, but common.’23 She had met Vic Oliver on the opening night in Manchester before the affair happened and had hardly noticed him, but now she found herself ‘surprised at Sarah’s lack of taste’.

  After that the family trod carefully and concentrated on trying to encourage her to ‘take time to think’, and to Sarah’s secret amusement Clementine ensured there was a regular supply of suitable young men invited to Chartwell whenever she visited for the weekend. When this had no effect, Clementine went so far as to privately offer Sarah a flat of her own in London, so that she ‘could develop freely’, as she put it. Sarah, who had been strictly brought up, was astonished that her prim mother was obviously prepared to accept her having a secret sexual liaison with Vic rather than contemplate her marrying him.

  When the show ended, Vic Oliver returned to New York and Churchill summoned his daughter to the family’s London flat, 11 Morpeth Mansions*:

  He told me [Sarah wrote], in robust and ringing tones, as if he were addressing a public meeting, what a mistake I was making: to have worked so diligently at my chosen profession and then throw it away in marriage to a – er – to an ‘itinerant vagabond’ with whom I could not and should never hope to share in stage performances…my father then seized his British passport, and waving it dramatically in front of me, said, ‘If you marry this man who is not a British subject and he does not take American citizenship, in three or four
years you may be married to the enemy and I shall not be able to protect you once you have lost this.’24

  Diana, now in the ninth month of her first pregnancy, was at the flat that morning, and though she did not know what was said in the interview she recorded that soon afterwards her father bounded from the room, and ‘changing from the stern parent to the cherubic innocent announced, “I think I have put her off.”’ But Diana had seen Sarah’s face as she left, and she told him: ‘On the contrary, I think you have chased her away.’25

  Diana was correct; the interview had awakened Sarah’s rebellious instincts, and when she heard in October that Vic’s application for a British work permit had been refused she made her plans accordingly. Vic sent her a first-class one-way ticket to New York on the SS Bremen. On the day she was to sail (Mary’s fourteenth birthday) Winston was abroad, so she confided in Mary, asked her to break the news to their parents, and left a letter for them with a friend before she bolted. The friend broke her confidence and told reporters, and Sarah soon discovered that her elopement was known about.

  In those pre-terrorist days friends were allowed to embark with passengers on ocean-going liners to see them off and wish them bon voyage, and journalists habitually mingled with them. Sarah had to hide in the ship’s cinema to avoid cameras while in port in Southampton and Le Havre. She then had two carefree days steaming towards her lover, but only until she received a cable: IAMON THE QUEEN MARY. DO NOTHING UNTIL I ARRIVE. YOUR LOVING BROTHER RANDOLPH.26

  The Queen Mary had departed Europe two days after the Bremen, but she was a larger, faster ship. When the Bremen ran into a hurricane and was forced to heave to, Sarah feared Randolph might overtake her and arrive in New York ahead of her, before she could speak to Vic. But the Queen Mary was also affected by the hurricane, and the Bremen arrived a day ahead, at which point Sarah faced a storm of publicity. Afterwards she angrily told her mother that this would never have happened had not Randolph been sent chasing after her. It would have been more tactful to ask one of their American cousins to meet her, she wrote, ‘but Randolph’s departure confirmed all the rumours and gave them a five day story’. As a result Vic had been pursued mercilessly before her arrival, and all sorts of speculative stories had been written under banner headlines such as ‘Dash Across the Atlantic’ and ‘Brother Chases Cupid’.

  Vic was allowed aboard before she disembarked, and he gave her an engagement ring. He had arranged for her to be transferred with as much privacy as possible, hoping to protect her from reporters, but instead Sarah took advice from fellow passenger Lady Astor, whom she knew well and who counselled Sarah to meet the press on her own terms and give them a prepared statement. Otherwise, the older woman warned, she would be hounded for weeks. So Sarah held a press conference in Lady Astor’s huge state room, then left the ship to find her cousin Raymond Guest (son of Freddie and Amy) and his wife waiting at the bottom of the gangplank to take her to their Long Island home. ‘We will look after you,’ Raymond told her.

  This was enough to rouse Sarah’s Churchill fighting spirit. She had no desire to be ‘looked after’, she told them firmly. She was going to stay at the Waldorf Astoria and would visit them at the weekend. Next day, ‘with a sisterly glint of satisfaction in my eye, at having arrived first’, she fought her way through crowds of reporters waiting to meet Randolph as he disembarked. He soon saw that Sarah was determined to go her own way, and having done what he considered his fraternal duty he set off to cover the presidential election which was anyway the real purpose of his trip to the USA.

  From then onwards Sarah and Vic saw each other every day, as discreetly as possible. She visited the Guests at Long Island at weekends, and Vic arranged a work permit for her so she could join him in his new show Follow the Stars. Although her part in the show was a minor one, because she was headline news – dubbed ‘The Dancing Debutante’ – her name went up in lights, which caused some hostility amongst fellow cast members (‘Is she a princess or something?’). Churchill tried through lawyers to find some legal hindrance to the marriage, but there was nothing he could do. Vic eventually obtained both a divorce and his American citizenship, but while they waited for all this to be finalised Sarah wrote some very bitter letters home which hurt her parents a good deal.

  On Christmas Eve 1936 she and Vic were married, and immediately boarded the Aquitania to return to work in England. They spent their first weekend in England at Chartwell. Winston was away in the sunshine, but Clementine had agreed they could visit as she had no wish to be estranged from Sarah. In order to entertain the newly-weds she delayed her departure for a planned skiing holiday with Mary, Goonie, Clarissa, her cousin Venetia Montagu* and Venetia’s daughter Judy. Curiously, when she reported to Winston she wrote that Sarah looked ‘as virginal and aloof as ever’.

  There had been other matters besides Sarah, Diana and Randolph diverting Churchill’s attention during that year when Sarah fled to New York. King George V died on 20 January 1936 and the Prince of Wales, whom Churchill had known and liked for twenty years, ascended the throne. By the autumn, when Churchill returned after holidaying at Consuelo’s chateau Saint Georges-Motel and at Château de l’Horizon,† he found himself embattled on many fronts. Sarah had left five days before their first grandchild, Diana’s son Julian Sandys, was born, on 19 September. The new King Edward VIII, who had also been a guest at Château de l’Horizon, had gone on to holiday aboard a chartered yacht, the Nahlin, taking Wallis Simpson with him. Although British papers held back from reporting this royal holiday, the rest of the world was agog at the romance, which had been developing for almost four years, but until 1936 in a reasonably discreet fashion. Among the guests on that voyage were Duff and Diana Cooper, who watched in astonishment as the King dropped to his knees to release the hem of Wallis’s evening gown from under the leg of her chair. It seemed to them a blatant declaration of his feelings for her. By the end of that trip the King had begun telling his friends and advisers that he intended to marry Wallis or abdicate. To Winston, such an outcome was unthinkable; in his mind the King was, symbolically, England. This and his romantic nature led him to support the King in the ensuing imbroglio.

  There was bizarre news, too, of Diana Guinness, the Mitford sister of whom Winston had been so fond when she was a teenager and with whom Randolph had been besotted. Having left her husband Bryan Guinness (son of their friend Lord Moyne) in 1932 to become the mistress of Oswald Mosley, when Mosley’s wife died from peritonitis, Diana had now married Mosley. In the intervening years Mosley had formed his own extreme right-wing party, nicknamed ‘the Blackshirts’ by reason of their uniform, and as leader of the British Fascists had become very unpopular. To avoid unwelcome press attention the couple had married abroad. The wedding had been held on 6 June 1936 in the Berlin apartment of Josef and Magda Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as guest of honour. It was the second (and last) time that Mosley and Hitler met; the first had been merely an introduction at a diplomatic reception a few years earlier, and they had no private conversation together at either meeting, but Churchill would not have known this. Any meeting between Mosley and Hitler would have appeared extremely sinister to him.

  Churchill was increasingly concerned about events in Europe. In March 1935 Hitler had brought in conscription, which broke the terms of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, but none of the countries involved in the treaty made a formal complaint. That summer the German Ambassador in London, Ribbentrop, negotiated an Anglo-German naval agreement which gave Germany the right to build submarines; again, it was in breach of the Versailles Treaty. Finally, in 1936, having seen no opposition so far, Hitler denounced the Versailles Treaty outright and marched his troops into the Rhineland. The reaction of most French and British politicians was that the Germans were merely entering their own backyard. Churchill and a few others, however, regarded it as the opening move towards war. In Spain in 1936 General Franco received massive support from Hitler and Mussolini, which enabled him to launch an attack on the newly
elected left-wing Popular Front government – an action that led to the Spanish Civil War. A few long-sighted commentators suggested that this was a rehearsal for another world war.

  Churchill nagged away at this theme, but his fellow parliamentarians were so used to hearing his warnings that they no longer listened, and he simply gained for himself the reputation of a warmonger. Nor had his support of the King in his marriage difficulties been any more successful than had his opposition to Sarah and Vic Oliver. He suggested several alternative plans such as a morganatic marriage, which would make Wallis Simpson the King’s legal wife without providing her with regal status. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin would have none of it.

  On 7 December 1936, a week after his sixty-second birthday, when Churchill rose to his feet in Parliament to request that ‘no irrevocable step should be taken with regard to the King’, he was howled down and forced to resume his seat without completing his speech. The blatant hostility of the House was a terrible blow to him; he had met with many objections to his policies in his forty-year parliamentary career, but never at this level. Brendan Bracken recalled: ‘Winston stood there with folded arms, very pale but quite resolute. He was not going to give in to bullies. I went with him to the smoking room. Members pushed away from him…He was miserable beyond belief; to be howled down in the House of Commons was a disgrace.’27 Winston not only felt totally humiliated, he was made to realise that he could not save the King; so in the midst of all their family problems he and Clementine were particularly distressed when, on 11 December, the King abdicated. It is generally believed that Churchill finessed or edited the moving abdication speech broadcast over the wireless.