The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  But there was another element to the remarkable transformation in Randolph, and that was the realisation of his great ambition. One day after Natalie had kissed him goodbye, she had started to drive off when he came tearing out of the house after her, waving a telegram. She stopped the car. ‘He’s asked me!’ he panted. ‘He’s asked me, at last.’ He was so out of breath he could not continue, but Natalie knew what he meant. Winston had asked his son to write the official biography, as Winston had once written his own father’s story. Nothing else he could have done or said could have pleased Randolph half as much. He wrote to his father about how proud and happy the commission had made him: ‘Since I first read your life of your father, 35 years ago, when I was a boy of 14 at Eton, it has always been my greatest ambition to write your life.’28

  By mid-summer 1958 Brendan Bracken was dying of a particularly painful cancer which caused him virtually to starve to death. He and Winston had met nearly forty years earlier, in 1923, and it was a considerable blow to Winston to lose another of his oldest and closest friends. Overcoming his intense dislike of hospitals, he visited Brendan twice, and was very distressed by his old friend’s emaciation and intubation. For many years, Clementine had disliked Brendan, had mistrusted him (especially when it had been widely rumoured that he was Winston’s illegitimate son, and Brendan had done nothing to contradict this). But during the difficult war years she came to recognise that he was a true and loyal friend to Winston, and thereafter she was always happy to welcome him as one of the most frequent visitors to their various homes. She was as upset as Winston when Brendan died, on 8 August.

  The next weekend they stayed at Blenheim, where family celebrations were held to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their engagement. The Golden Wedding day, three weeks later, was spent quietly at La Capponcina with Max Beaverbrook. Randolph and Arabella were the only family members able to spend that day with them. Randolph arrived with a bouquet of fifty gold roses, and presented the family gift – a collection of gold rose bushes, these to form an avenue at Chartwell,* together with an album of rose paintings, each individual flower painted by a leading artist of the day. Before she returned to England, Clementine – unwilling to part from Winston at such a happy time – paid one of her rare visits to La Pausa (she went there only four times); but she could not enjoy it, and found the life claustrophobic, according to Mary. Winston fell into his well oiled routine there: he worked in bed all morning, painted or rested in the afternoon, and in the evenings he dined, chatted and played bezique until bedtime. The grounds were too steep for Clementine to take walks on her own, and to go further afield she had to ask for a car and a driver. So she felt that she was ‘really the prisoner of kindness, and of other people’s plans’.29 Despite the smiles and pleasantries she felt she had very little in common with her hosts. Realising that Winston had all he wanted there, including a devoted Wendy to grant his every wish, she decided that she would far rather be in England and leave him to enjoy himself. Her life, still devoted to Winston, involved keeping his homes running smoothly, ready for him to occupy whenever he wanted to; standing in for him in the constituency; and carrying on with her own work (she was in great demand to open hospitals and other public buildings).

  During November and December 1958 Randolph published six articles in the Daily Express about the Suez crisis and Eden’s handling of it. They were noticeably vindictive, and probably imbued with Randolph’s old jealousy of Eden. He dismissed Eden’s part in the abortive invasion of Egypt, calling it ‘ill-planned, ill-timed…tragedy on an almost classical scale’.30 The book he wrote soon afterwards, The Rise and Fall of Sir Anthony Eden, was liked by few politicians, and statements were made against it in the House – which only helped its sales. Clarissa, furiously protective of Anthony, was livid; even Evelyn Waugh, no particular friend of Eden, described Randolph’s attack as contemptible.31 In November Randolph gate-crashed a dinner at the British Embassy in honour of Winston, who was in Paris with Clementine to receive the Croix de la Libération from President de Gaulle. Randolph had not been invited and the other guests held a collective breath when he arrived, for it was known that Clementine had not been on speaking terms with her son for two years. However, all went well, and Clementine even referred to him as ‘dear boy’.32 After dinner, Winston sat in an armchair in the Blanc et Or salon and the ladies ranged themselves around him, some sitting at his feet. One friend described him as ‘a pasha in heaven’.33

  Winston and Clementine went to Morocco, staying at the Mamounia Hotel in Marrakech during the first weeks of 1959, before boarding the Christina for a three-week cruise. Afterwards, Winston went on alone to La Pausa to spend a month with the Reveses. In March, while he was there, Sarah hit the headlines again when she was arrested for drunken behaviour in Liverpool, where she had been playing the lead in Peter Pan. Winston tried to make excuses for her, but clearly her parents recognised by now that Sarah was a fully fledged alcoholic, for Clementine reported that her doctor had begged her, as soon as she finished her present theatrical tour, to ‘do a serious cure’. Sarah replied that she would rather die.34

  It is difficult to know what part these constant barbs of worry about his children played in Winston’s state of health. He had just returned to London in April when he suffered another slight stroke, but against Moran’s advice he insisted on carrying on with a planned trip in May to Washington. It was his first flight in a jet, a de Havilland Comet,* and despite his obvious frailty he refused to allow Lord Moran to accompany him because, he said, he did not want to look like an invalid. He had his trusted Private Secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, as essential support. After a taxing visit to Washington, where Eisenhower devoted a presidential address to him, he toured Gettysburg, then flew on to New York where he stayed with his old friend Bernard Baruch. He was so exhausted when he arrived at Baruch’s apartment that he went straight to bed. A statement was made to waiting journalists that Sir Winston would not be seeing anyone else until his departure. However, on the day he was due to leave for home he somehow mustered the energy to visit Consuelo in her New York home for tea. Winston was now eighty-four and Consuelo was eighty-two; both knew that it might be their last meeting – perhaps Consuelo recalled the opportunity she had missed with Ivor.

  Clementine, now in her mid-seventies, had dared to hope that Winston would not stand for Parliament in another general election, but in October 1959 she could not bring herself to suggest retirement. She knew what his role as an MP meant to him; it was virtually all he had left, and he made sure he was always kept au fait with political developments. So she turned out again and fought alongside him in what was to be Winston’s last campaign. It was the fifteenth election they had fought together, and he was re-elected as the Right Honourable Member for Woodford. He achieved a resounding majority, though slightly smaller than that of the 1955 election. Clementine secretly believed that young people must have felt they were not properly represented.

  That winter of 1959–60 Emery Reves suffered a heart attack, so Onassis suggested that instead of paying his usual early spring visit to La Pausa, Winston and Clementine should both come cruising in the Caribbean aboard the Christina with him and his wife Athena (‘Tina’). They embarked in March at Tangiers and cruised for a month in the West Indies. Clementine much enjoyed this holiday, especially showing Winston around the islands she had first seen aboard Lord Moyne’s yacht, years earlier. Ari and Tina were generous hosts and could never do enough for them. Ari almost worshipped Winston, and once, when he asked him what he would like to be in another existence, Winston replied, ‘A tiger. What about you?’ Ari smiled and replied, ‘I would like to be your budgerigar, Toby.’

  The two couples got on well because Clementine especially liked Tina. But not long after this trip Onassis and Tina would part, after Tina had boarded the Christina unexpectedly and discovered Onassis and his most famous mistress, the soprano Maria Callas, having sex in the saloon beneath an El Greco. Tina divorced Ari the following
year, 1961, but although the Churchills no longer met her aboard the Christina, they were not to lose touch. On 23 October 1961, after her divorce, she married Bert’s son Lord Blandford (another Sunny Marlborough), who became stepfather to the Onassis children.* On hearing this news Churchill is said to have smiled and said, ‘So, Ari and I are now related.’

  After their West Indies cruise the Christina returned to Monte Carlo. Emery had recovered his health, and he and Wendy confidently expected Winston to ask to come and stay. He did not; instead he stayed in a suite at Ari’s Hôtel de Paris in Monaco, after which Ari had him flown back to London in a private plane. Winston was now an old man. The small strokes he had suffered sometimes made him tire easily, and at such moments he became confused. Probably not realising how much his condition had deteriorated since his last visit, the Reveses took offence at what appeared to them a serious slight. It was the second – the first had occurred not long before when Clementine had refused to accompany Winston on the Christina if Emery and Wendy were fellow guests. Even though the Reveses had already accepted the invitation, Ari had had to ask them to withdraw because Winston so much wanted Clementine to join him. The hurt was bad enough the first time, but they found it quite unacceptable the second. When Winston cabled them in August proposing to visit La Pausa in October and saying how much he wanted to see them both, Emery replied bitterly that his dismissal of them earlier in the year made them feel that they ‘had done something, or behaved in a manner which prevented you from returning to us’.35 Someone had intrigued against them, he believed, and he virtually accused Winston of totally disregarding their feelings. In any case, he said, the affair had made Wendy ill, and they were leaving in October for the USA.36 Winston was shocked and upset, and asked Clementine to write and explain that ‘there were no intrigues; and we are all deeply grateful for the hospitality we have enjoyed with you’.37 When Winston wrote to Wendy, apologising and telling her that the times he had spent at La Pausa were ‘among the brightest of my life’, she too informed him that she felt he had treated them badly.38

  There were no further visits to the Reveses after that; there were letters about literary matters and very occasional lunches and dinners at Cap-d’Ail and London, but it was friendship at a distance. Instead of ‘Pausaland’ Winston and Clementine stayed at the Hôtel de Paris in Monaco that autumn, and all Winston’s future visits to the Riviera would be spent there in the luxurious suite that Onassis always made available to him, with his own private staff laid on.39 Clementine thought it might be easier there for her than at La Pausa, but one visit convinced her that she still disliked the Riviera: it was ‘a ghastly place…fine if one was a florist or a waiter’. And she wrote to Mary: ‘I am suffocated with luxury and ennui, as you feared.’40 She also disliked Winston’s frequent visits to the casino, although he never gambled huge sums. On one occasion she woke in the night to hear a curious rustling on her counterpane. When she investigated she found that Winston had stolen quietly into her room and covered her bed with French franc notes – his winnings at the gaming tables.

  At the end of November, back in London, Lord Moran visited Winston on his birthday, taking a pound of caviar as a gift. He knew Winston was feeling low, for several people had reported that he had told them he wanted to die. But occasionally someone would say something that caught his attention, a light would appear in his eyes and he would join the conversation. Now, though, he was becoming increasingly isolated by his deafness. ‘I do not want to do anything any more,’ he told Onassis. ‘I have had enough of power, but I should not like to lose touch altogether.’41 Winston fell at Hyde Park Gate and broke a vertebra in his neck, but he was back in Parliament before the end of January 1961. In Monaco a few weeks later he was deeply upset when Toby the budgie flew out of an open window and was never recovered. This little creature had held a disproportionately large place in Winston’s heart, and although there were suggestions of another budgie, Winston refused. Toby could never be replaced.

  That winter he and Clementine went on another cruise in the Caribbean aboard the Christina, with Ari. In March when they reached the Grenadine Archipelago, the Edens came aboard for lunch. For about a year after Eden’s resignation, he and Clarissa had lived in a cottage with no phone and no electricity, at Friendship Bay on the delightfully remote island of Bequia in the Windward Islands, which notwithstanding the absence of any doctor had contributed to Eden’s long haul back to health. Despite Randolph’s attacks he retained much of his personal popularity and was created Earl of Avon in 1961, but he felt very acutely the stigma of the Suez shambles, for which he had been wholly blamed, just as Churchill had once shouldered all the responsibility for the Dardanelles. When in England, the Edens lived in Clarissa’s tiny cottage at Broad Chalke in Wiltshire, but they loved the Caribbean and would later own an old plantation house in Barbados for some years.* The Christina cruise ended in New York, where Winston met Bernard Baruch for what would be the last time. The party flew home in April, and Winston was in Monaco again in late May when he heard that Bert’s wife Mary, Duchess of Marlborough, had died of cancer. He returned to England in June for just four days to participate in the Garter Procession and to watch one of his horses run at Ascot; then travelled back to the Riviera.

  In July Sarah was arrested again. It was the fourth time since Antony Beauchamp’s suicide four years earlier that she had been picked up by the police for being drunk and disorderly. On this occasion she was remanded in Holloway Prison for ten days for a medical report. Winston and Clementine bore the headlines stoically. ‘Never explain, never apologise’ was Clementine’s attitude, but privately they were both extremely upset. When the ten days were up Sarah appeared before a magistrate, was fined again, and released on condition that this time she would seek further help for her drink problem at the Maudsley Hospital.†

  For once she did as she was told, and when the therapy was over she decided to go and live quietly in Spain. At the end of 1961 she found a villa for rent in Marbella, at that time an insignificant beach village between Gibraltar and Malaga. There was a half-decent hotel there, where the handful of expats met for sundowners and socialising. It was there in early March 1962 that she met Henry, Baron Audley.‡ Six feet tall and red-haired, forty-nine-year-old Audley had served in India and the Far East during the war. His first marriage had not been a success, and he was divorced when Sarah met him. He was also disabled, having sometime earlier suffered a massive stroke during his sleep and woken up to find himself paralysed and blind. With time he had recovered his sight, and with treatment he was able to walk with varying degrees of success. He then travelled to Spain for the climate, and to her astonishment Sarah and he fell in love at first sight. (Members of the Churchill family seemed to fall in love in this way with an inexplicable regularity.)*

  Henry moved into Sarah’s villa within days, and almost as quickly they were discussing marriage. She wrote to Clementine to warn her parents before someone in Marbella alerted the press, and she seemed dazed by the delight of it all: ‘I never ever believed I would ever find anyone ever again who could make me take heart and believe that happiness & love were yet ahead of me.’42

  A week later they flew to London, where Randolph did a little research and established that Henry’s title was the fourth-oldest in England. ‘That puts the Marlboroughs in their place,’ he quipped. Then the couple drove down to Chartwell to meet Winston and Clementine and tell them of their intention to marry immediately in Gibraltar, because London held ‘too many ghosts’ for them both. Clementine took to Henry at once. Winston was too old to make new friends but, seeing joy back in her face after many years of unhappiness, he rejoiced for his favourite daughter. Diana flew back to Spain with them and acted as matron of honour when on 26 April they were married at the Gibraltar register office. After a wedding breakfast at the Rock Hotel, they set off on ‘an enchanted honeymoon journey’ touring Morocco. By the time the honeymoon was over and they returned to their new villa in Marbella,
Sarah had driven four thousand miles. Her old life, the stage and her drink problems were all behind her.

  In June 1962, Winston had been in Monaco for only two days when he had a dizzy spell which caused him to trip and fall, breaking a hip. In great pain, he was so worried that he might die there that he got an RAF Comet to fly him home. He was in hospital in England for almost two months, and Sarah and Henry flew to London to spend some time at his bedside.

  Winston had always made a point, whenever possible, of spending the big occasions such as Christmas, Easter and Whitsun with Clementine and the family at Chartwell, even if, in later years, he subsequently disappeared off to the sunshine within a day or so. The Churchills now had ten grandchildren (two Churchills, three Sandyses and five Soameses) and he enjoyed watching them all grow. When in England he still attended sessions at the House and each June he had always attended the Garter ceremony, but after 1962 this was no longer a date enshrined in his diary because he found the procession too tiring and hot and his mobility was affected permanently after the hip operation. He still enjoyed dinners at the Other Club; in fact this, and his occasional appearances in the House, were what he lived for. His frailty was concealed from the world by his personal courage; also, ‘All his outings and public appearances were carefully prepared and stage managed,’ Mary explained, ‘so that, impeccably attired, he gave a debonair impression.’43 Usually Mary’s husband Christopher gave him an arm, and Winston somehow summoned hidden reserves of energy and the inevitable quip – he never forgot how to play to the gallery. At home at Hyde Park Gate Clementine had arranged for a lift to be installed and his bedroom was changed, so that he had no stairs to climb. During the summer of 1962 Clementine never left Winston’s side as he recovered from his operation. But the job of carer took a toll on her own health – she was then seventy-seven and still insisted on supervising the running of the house around Winston. At Christmas that year she had four generations to lunch one day, and the next day took Mary’s children and Arabella to the circus.