The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  When Clementine, thinking about Winston’s health and the stress under which he had been working, voiced her opinion that ‘it may be a blessing in disguise’, her hurt and disappointed husband growled: ‘At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.’34 He was feeling the pain of being rejected by a people to whom he had directed his every thought for the last five years. The Labour Party campaign had cleverly presented him as ‘a great war leader’, with the emphasis on war – with abilities not needed in peacetime. The war in the Far East was still unfinished. But Winston was now seventy, and he felt that from being one of the most powerful men in the world, all that lay ahead for him was a slide into a useless old age.

  Clementine, sensibly, had considered what might happen if the Conservatives were not voted in. Months previously she had earmarked a possible future London base for them, at 28 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington. Winston had seen it and liked it. For her a period of frantic work would now begin to rebuild a normal home life for her shattered and weary husband. All Winston had to do was to make a final broadcast to the nation, to thank them for ‘the unflinching, unswerving support which they have given me during my task, and for the many expressions of kindness which they have shown towards their servant’.35

  24

  1945–51

  The Aftermath

  Traditionally, an outgoing Prime Minister must vacate 10 Downing Street within twenty-four hours. Not truly expecting to have to leave, the Churchills had not started packing, and on the morning after the result was announced there was much activity. But for Winston the most noticeable thing was the removal of the paraphernalia of power. ‘The Map Room was deserted; the Private office empty; no official telegrams, no “red boxes”.’1 Jock Colville, in his capacity of Private Secretary to the Prime Minister (and now as much Churchill family friend), had been obliged to attend on the new PM.

  Apart from Clementine, other family members attempted to offer love and support: Mary, Sarah, Diana and Duncan, and Jack – who looked wan and ill. Close friends and allies Anthony Eden and Brendan Bracken called in. But the fact was that Winston’s career had come to a juddering halt; it was almost as shocking and grievous to him as when he was forced to quit the Admiralty during the Great War. Later, former staff, senior civil servants, chiefs of staff, secretaries, typists, cipher clerks, detectives, who had virtually lived with Churchill throughout the conflict, called to say their farewells. And it could only enhance the sense that this was a wake. The stream of callers continued at Chequers that weekend. Most were stunned and silenced by the events of the last few days, hardly able to find words of comfort. Fifteen people sat down to the final dinner at Chequers, and afterwards they all signed the visitors’ book. Winston signed last of all, and under his signature he dramatically wrote the word ‘Finis’.

  He did not spend much time licking his wounds, and never did he do so in public. Everywhere he went he was still cheered and clapped, and when he and Clementine attended a Noël Coward play, at which he was noted in the press as ‘roaring with laughter’, he was given a prolonged standing ovation. There was no doubting the public affection for him, but he felt deeply the hurt of not being considered capable of running a peacetime government. The impish twinkle, which his friends knew preceded his famous sallies, was temporarily extinguished, but he always acknowledged the acclaim with a smile, if sometimes bleak, and raised his hand in the V-for-victory sign.

  On 1 August he took his seat on the Opposition benches and prepared to oppose. He was back in the wilderness and with only occasional flashes of the old Churchill – which should, nevertheless, have warned his foes that the old man might be down, but he was not out. He consistently opposed what he considered were the excesses of the ‘welfare state’ being introduced despite the country being almost bankrupt; ‘strength through misery,’ he called it. ‘What is the use of being a famous race and nation if at the end of the week you cannot pay your housekeeping bills?’ His successor Attlee, whom he did not personally dislike although his meekness frequently irritated him, he described as ‘a modest man, and I know no one with more to be modest about’. Of Sir Stafford Cripps, who filled the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position Churchill had once held, he quipped: ‘There but for the grace of God, goes God.’

  On the day after the election defeat they woke up with nowhere to live, and Clementine knew it was up to her to sort out this problem. Diana came to the rescue. She and Duncan offered to move into a rented flat and lend Winston and Clementine their home in Westminster Gardens. This would enable the completion of the purchase of 28 Hyde Park Gate,* and for the necessary alterations and decorating to be done there. Meanwhile, with Miss Hamblin and Cousin Moppet, Clementine began on Chartwell, where to her annoyance they discovered that mice had nested and eaten their way through damask cushions and that moths had attacked the hampers of curtains and linen so carefully packed away five years earlier. She was furious to learn, Mary said, that while humans had been strictly rationed, these fifth-columnist mice and moths had ‘gorged themselves on our curtains’.2

  Despite the mask of acceptance that Churchill presented to the world, Clementine found him hard to cope with during those months. She begged Mary, when it was rumoured that her regiment, which was serving in Germany, might be disbanded, to get a transfer into the War Office and come to live with them at Hyde Park Gate. ‘I am very unhappy & need your help with Papa,’ she wrote. ‘I cannot explain how it is but in our misery we seem, instead of clinging to each other to be always having scenes. I’m sure it’s all my fault, but I’m finding life more than I can bear. He is so unhappy & that makes him very difficult…’3

  The Japanese surrender on 14 August, after the assault on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atom bomb, persuaded Churchill that he could now take a holiday. He went to the Italian Lakes with Sarah and they stayed in a marble villa with a few young officers as ADCs to keep them company. During this time Winston painted and swam and rested, never opened a newspaper, and within a few weeks this regimen seemed to put matters into perspective for him. As always, as soon as they were parted, Winston and Clementine missed each other. Sarah wrote that he frequently spoke of Clementine, and wished she were with them. His letters to her, in which he acknowledged that a great load had been lifted from him – ‘It may all indeed be “a blessing in disguise”,’ he finally admitted – were especially affectionate: ‘My darling I think a great deal of you, & last night…there came into my mind your singing to me “In the gloaming” years ago…. my heart thrilled w[ith] love to feel you near me in thought. I feel so tenderly towards you my darling, & the more pleasant and agreeable the scenes & days, the more I wish you were here to share them & give me a kiss.’4

  Clementine managed to get Hyde Park Gate ready for Winston’s return, and by some miracle she had also tweaked Chartwell into a semblance of pre-war life. Domestic help was impossible to find, with young people either still serving in the armed forces or working for better wages in factories, so this was no easy achievement. Rationing was tougher now than during the war years.* Churchill was appalled when first confronted with the weekly food allowance, for rationing had never touched him personally in the rarefied atmosphere of No. 10.

  It was the following year that Lord Camrose, an old friend, learned that Churchill was being forced to consider selling Chartwell because he could no longer pay the costs of running it. Appalled that the man who had saved Europe might be driven out of the home he loved, Camrose approached some rich businessmen who anonymously put up the money to buy the property. The fund was placed in a trust to enable Winston and Clementine to live at Chartwell until the end of their lives, when it would be handed over to the National Trust. This was a relief to Clementine, but though Churchill was grateful for this solution to his problems there was a small worm in the apple for him because he had always intended Chartwell to go after his death to Randolph, and then on to little Winston – like a mini-Blenheim. The trust put an end to that dream.

  I
ronically, within a year or so, by his own efforts Winston became a rich man. He was commissioned to write a six-volume history of the Second World War, for which he received a massive advance and which, together with world syndication rights for his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, meant that the Churchills from then on would be able to live in the sort of luxury they had never previously envisaged. His impressive command of the English language allied to his grasp of the course of the war, plus the details of his personal concerns as the war unfolded, made this highly engaging series a bestseller for which he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. His prose was especially readable because he did not set out to write great literature, but to inform and entertain. ‘Short words are best,’ he once said, ‘and the old words when short are best of all.’ There is a story that he was once asked to read the draft of a speech written by an American general. He told the general that in his opinion there were ‘too many passives and too many zeds’ (such as ‘systemize’). Asked to explain further, he replied: ‘What if, instead of “We shall fight on the beaches” I had said, “Hostilities will be engaged with our adversary on the coastal perimeter”?’ There were some adverse criticisms, of course: in his war memoirs he was accused of presenting a one-sided view of some incidents, to his own advantage. One wonders how many writers of memoirs do not present incidents from their own perspective. And anyway, surely anyone who bought Churchill’s book wished to read about his experiences first-hand, rather than the accounts written by some of his contemporaries, who jumped into print to write history as they saw it from the sidelines?

  Some years later, Winston would make much of his pride in the fact that he had earned his living ‘by his pen’. His writing was to occupy him full-time during the immediate postwar years, and also saw him through many family dramas and traumas. Later, as neighbouring properties came up for sale, he was able to buy Chartwell Farm and Parkside Farm to the south of Chartwell, as well as Bardogs Farm on nearby Toys Hill, to increase his estate.

  In 1946, while on a three-month visit to the United States,* he and Clementine paid a visit to Hyde Park, the former home of President Roosevelt, who had died a year earlier. Churchill was showered with public honours and given a ticker-tape parade in New York. They spent some weeks in Palm Beach, where they had been loaned a house. When they visited Consuelo there, even the Churchills found the Balsans’ lavish French lifestyle astonishing after the grimness of postwar utilitarian Britain. And if Churchill noted the excess of it, it is certain that it was truly luxurious. When they returned home Mary had been demobbed and, to Clementine’s relief, had decided to come and live with them. Clementine was made a Dame Grand Cross of the British Empire in the Birthday Honours list, in recognition of her extensive work during the war.* She chose, however, not to use her title and preferred to be addressed as ‘Mrs Churchill’.

  Winston had recovered his confidence now, and was in attack mode in Parliament. With Anthony Eden as his heir presumptive, he prowled and threatened from the Opposition benches. The extremely able and thoroughly decent Eden had now become, to Randolph’s dismay, a sort of substitute son. Randolph had assumed he would succeed to his father’s position by ‘birthright’, he had let it be known, and now began to indulge in yet more displays of drunken excess, which caused Noël Coward to quip: ‘dear Randolph, utterly unspoiled by failure’. Although his childhood fantasy of becoming Prime Minister still prevailed, almost everything he did and said made such an event ever less likely. Even the widespread affection for his father could not prevent him being blackballed when he applied to join the Beefsteak Club (an after-theatre dining club). He had stormed out of the Paris Embassy when Duff Cooper slapped him across the face twice for an ill-judged remark. When he accepted there was no hope of gaining a parliamentary seat, Randolph returned to journalism – for which he had a flair – visiting Russia to report on the Red Army parade. He had not given up trying to persuade Laura to marry him, and he knew her marriage was in trouble when he wrote to her in May 1946:

  Laura darling,

  This is just to thank you for last night…Every minute was…sheer enchantment. I only wish I could do one tenth as much for you as you did for me. I know beyond any doubt that I would like to spend my whole life with you. Please think about this before you make any plans. I love you my darling, more than ever…Bless you, your devoted, Randolph.5

  In the event, Laura’s marriage to Lord Dudley would last in one form or another for a further ten years, but by then Randolph was not available and she subsequently married a young American, Michael Canfield. She would never have married Randolph anyway; she valued his friendship, and there is no doubt that she held him in great affection and was happy to sleep with him from time to time, but she told friends she was never in love with him and that he wanted and needed a mother rather than a wife. Yet eventually she would marry into the Churchill family.

  Pam was out of the country at this time, which had its benefits; allowing little Winston, with his new governess twenty-year-old Kathleen Gilbert, to spend time at Chartwell and Minterne so that both sets of grandparents saw a good deal of him.

  Although Winston kept a team of five secretary/typists busy all day and well into the night (‘I shall need two women tonight,’ he would tell his Private Secretary), Miss Gilbert recalled her surprise at how ‘humble’ the former Prime Minister seemed when he met her, shook hands with her and welcomed her to Chartwell. There were other signs of innate ‘niceness’ – after one visit he gave her his autograph for her father, and for herself the gift of a five-pound note: ‘That was a fortune to me – like a hundred pounds today.’6 One day when she was walking with Sir Winston and little Winston in the gardens, a small boy appeared. ‘Hello, who are you?’ Churchill asked. ‘I’m the third gardener’s son, Johnny.’ ‘Well, Johnny, I’m Winston Churchill; pleased to meet you.’ And the great man solemnly shook the child’s hand.7 Little Winston, who used to help his Churchill grandfather bricklaying and pottering at Chartwell, and accompany his Digby grandfather – who was a dairy farmer – on a daily milk delivery round, claimed that had he ever been asked the occupations of his grandfathers, he would have answered that one was a bricklayer and one was a milkman.

  When not with his grandparents – in the absence of his mother, whose busy social life and frequent visits to the USA meant she was away from home a good deal – little Winston was cared for at Grosvenor Square by Kathleen Gilbert and the cook. Besides her maid who travelled with her, Pamela employed a dresser and a daily help. Averell Harriman sometimes loaned her his butler, and eventually the butler would come to work for Pamela full time. One of the first things Pam told Kathleen Gilbert about little Winston was ‘Don’t let him think he is important just because his name is Winston Churchill.’8

  That summer Sarah had a successful London run in the melodrama Gaslight, after which she received an offer to appear in a film in Italy. She was tempted because her entanglement with Gil Winant was still causing her some embarrassment. The affair was long over as far as she was concerned, but she felt unable to tell Gil because he was such a close friend of Winston and Clementine. She hesitated because the Italians had so recently been the enemy. When she sounded out her father on this point, he told her: ‘Go ahead, it is part of the victor’s job to help the defeated.’9 She had been there a month and had just completed ten days of shooting when she was struck down with a kidney infection. Her high temperature did not fall, and after a week the British Embassy notified the Churchills. Mary was asked to travel to Rome to care for her sister.

  Mary, now twenty-four, privately thought her sister might have been safer without the benefit of her limited nursing skills, but – although she was delighted at the idea of an ‘unexpected jaunt’ – there was a situation of which her parents were not yet aware. During a recent visit to the British Embassy in Paris when she had accompanied her father, Mary had met Christopher Soames, an officer in the Coldstream Guards who was Assistant Military Attaché. Th
ere had been an instant attraction, and they arranged to meet in London during his next leave. This leave coincided with the date of Mary’s departure for Rome, so Christopher offered instead to meet her in Paris, where she was to change trains. He put her on the Italian train and got into her compartment to chat, and to her confusion did not get out when the train began to move off. Confidently he told her that he was accompanying her to Rome. By the time they reached the Simplon Tunnel he had proposed – a curious re-enactment of the event in 1908 when, after becoming engaged to Clementine, as she left Oxford to go and tell her mother, Winston decided he could not be parted from her and jumped aboard the train.

  Sarah recalled: ‘When Mary arrived [in Rome], her flushed cheeks and excitement outdid what was left of my fever. She told me in breathless sentences that she had fallen in love.’10 Sarah was over the worst of her infection, but her recovery was slow and she spent most days in bed. Mary knew she would have to stay on with her for some time but Christopher had to return to Paris within a few days, so they had only that brief time to get to know each other. The magic of being in Rome (where no food rationing was in force), free of the conventions that would have inevitably applied in London, where she was instantly recognisable, clearly speeded up what might otherwise have been a much longer courtship. After the dutiful grind of the war years, during which Mary had never put a foot wrong, she was suddenly catapulted into days of wine and roses with a handsome young officer, who sent flowers to both sisters and wrote a poem for Sarah. By the time Christopher left for Paris all doubts had resolved themselves; Sarah was captivated and Mary was left with the sticky problem of writing to tell her parents that she was engaged to be married to someone they had never met, and whose parents they did not know. Sarah wrote to them too, in sisterly support.