When the married couple finally emerged from the church, mounted policemen held back the cheering throngs along the route to the reception back at Portland Place. There, guests were treated to a display of the wedding gifts: twenty-five silver candelabra and a large collection of wine coasters, pepper pots and silver inkstands paraded alongside a gold-topped walking stick sent by King Edward VII, and £500 in cash from the fatherly figure of German-born financier Sir Ernest Cassel. Clementine’s Aunt Maisie had given a chain set with ‘myriads’ of sapphires, opals, amethysts and topazes; Winston’s Aunt Cornelia a diamond necklace. Alongside these treasures were a fresh turbot with a lemon stuffed in its mouth – a gift from Mme Villain of Dieppe – and a manual entitled House Books on 12/- a Week.
The crowds had been won over by Clementine’s grace and beauty, and so had the press. In one of the next day’s papers a cartoon of a grinning Winston holding a stocking appeared over the caption: ‘Winston’s latest Line – Hoziery’. ‘Undoubtedly,’ proclaimed The Times, the event had ‘captured the public imagination’. The Daily Mirror hailed it as ‘The Wedding of the Year’.
They spent their first evening as husband and wife at Blenheim – the palace having been tactfully vacated by Sunny, the duke. It can only be guessed as to who was the more nervous. Both were almost certainly virgins and at nearly thirty-four, Winston’s manly pride was at stake. He had been worried enough beforehand to seek advice from an expert – his mother. By the time they left Blenheim a couple of days later for Baveno on Italy’s Lake Maggiore, it appears the young couple had got the hang of things, though. On 20 September, Winston was able to report to Jennie that they had ‘loitered & loved’,2 and with surprising candour he described sex to his mother-in-law as ‘a serious and delightful occupation’. Perhaps Winston applied the same energy and attention to detail to lovemaking as he did his other ‘occupations’. Within a month of returning from the honeymoon Clementine was pregnant.
While the newlyweds were busy loving in Italy, Clementine’s cousin Venetia had travelled to Slains Castle to stay with Violet Asquith. A week after the wedding, Venetia burst into the dining room to announce that she could not find her friend, who had last been seen at dusk, book in hand, on a cliff-top path. Guests, servants and villagers were summoned to search the sharp rocks at the foot of the sixty-foot drop, shouting ‘Violet!’ into the moonless mist as the sea crashed angrily about them. It was treacherous work lit only by lanterns and towards midnight hopes started to fade. Her father sobbed into his wife Margot’s arms. She started to pray.
Shortly thereafter, cheers went up from some fishermen; Margot’s prayers had been answered. Violet had finally been found unhurt on soft grass near the house, and was already regaling her rescuers with thrilling tales of having slipped on the rocks and knocking herself unconscious. News got out and reporters quickly descended on the castle, demanding photographs and interviews. Sensational headlines such as MISS ASQUITH’S PERIL and HOUSE PARTY’S THRILLING SEARCH followed, but Violet’s eagerness to oblige the press led Margot to suspect that the ‘accident’ might not have been altogether accidental. Doctors could find no evidence of a blow to the head and the more Margot tried to avoid publicity, the more thrillingly near-fatal Violet’s story became. Some even began to speculate that Violet had attempted suicide, although it seems almost certain that she had merely intended ‘to cause [Winston] a pang’.3 Either way, Violet was becoming a spectre at Clementine’s feast.
Margot removed Violet and the family from the eerie atmosphere at Slains, a vast, ancient and reputedly haunted castle perched on the edge of a desolate headland, but for some time after the so-called ‘Rock Affair’ her step-daughter continued to show signs of ‘almost hysterical’4 behaviour. Violet’s father, the Prime Minister, feared more unhelpful attention, and had to intervene personally to stop her racing off to meet Winston when he arrived back in Britain. With time, her mood calmed, and she finally returned to London but Winston was still concerned, and in November he arranged for her to have lunch with him and his new wife. Violet behaved well, but the conversation was no doubt strained and the newly pregnant Clementine would not have been on her best form. Winston’s decision to catch a cab alone with his guest afterwards appears thoughtless, but according to Violet’s account he was eager to impress upon her that Clementine ‘had more in her than met the eye’. With what Violet herself described as ‘cloying’ self-restraint she responded: ‘But so much meets the eye.’5
Though mostly sensed rather than heard, the continuing criticism from certain quarters was wreaking havoc on Clementine’s fragile confidence. Violet and her family were at the centre of a snobbish circle of brilliant intellectuals with immense power and privilege. Her bosom pal Venetia, Clementine’s super-confident Stanley cousin, could finish The Times crossword without needing to write in a single letter. By contrast Violet thought Clementine ‘very nervous & excited in public’, and prone to ‘beginning her sentences over & over again & constantly interrupting herself’. Her eyes, reputedly her best feature, were actually ‘tired & pink’. But Violet also noted that her figure was ‘Divine’ and (rather condescendingly) that the content of her conversation was beginning to improve. Clementine, meanwhile, understandably enjoyed it when others turned a critical eye on Violet – although she would wisely refrain from joining in. She knew the esteem in which Winston held her rival, and could not help but be jealous. The sentiment was mutual.
Clementine’s pregnancy made Winston’s bachelor apartment in Bolton Street impracticable. Although fitted with electric lighting, it was tall and narrow with endless flights of stairs. Every surface – even in the bathroom – was covered with model soldiers, polo team photographs, tiny silver cannon or books. This was no place for Clementine to make her first real home, and by the time she returned from Italy, it was even less so. Jennie had given her bedroom a surprise Edwardian makeover, dressing it with sateen bows for the full boudoir effect. A natural minimalist, Clementine could barely conceal her horror; she now regarded her mother-in-law as a ‘trial’.6
For her part, Jennie had welcomed Winston’s choice of bride but this marked the beginning of a fraught relationship between the two women. Clementine saw how Winston adored his mother despite her faults. She had seemed a ‘fairy princess’ to him as a child, and later he had harboured somewhat Oedipal feelings for her. Aged twenty he had admitted in a letter: ‘How I wish I could secrete myself in the corner of the envelope and embrace you as soon as you tear it open.’7 Even now Winston often chose to walk arm-in-arm with her, leaving Clementine feeling like an intruder.
In recent years Jennie had marshalled her formidable intellect, contacts and womanly charms (although some argued not her critical faculties) to advance Winston’s career. Having pioneered the role first of active political wife and then mother, Jennie was a hard act for Clementine to beat. A flashing-eyed voluptuous beauty – once described as ‘more panther than woman’ – and one of the first American heiresses to marry into the British aristocracy, Jennie’s male admirers had included the King; but the bed-hopping that had lately benefited her son offended Clementine’s rigid moral code, as did Jennie’s marriage to the young and impecunious Cornwallis-West, which she viewed as ‘vain and frivolous’. When that marriage broke down in 1911, Clementine, according to her own daughter Mary, ‘resented the way [Jennie] leant so heavily on her elder son . . . They never had a classic falling out. It’s just that [Clementine] never joined in the chorus of praise for her mother-in-law.’8 She also railed at Jennie’s extravagance. Winston’s mother, a friend explained, was a woman for whom ‘life didn’t begin on a basis of less than forty pairs of shoes’.
Clementine blamed Jennie for Winston’s own excesses and was appalled too at how she – and her late first husband Lord Randolph – had neglected their elder son throughout his childhood. His mother, she felt, had only ‘discovered’ Winston when he became ‘famous’ and after his father’s death. While at school he had sent Jennie letter after l
etter, pleading with her to visit him, the crosses for his kisses so numerous they would fall off the page. At fourteen, Winston was still writing ‘I long to see you my mummy’ but Jennie considered him too ‘ugly’, ‘slouchy and tiresome’9 to bother with. Her selfishness and his lack of a settled home life made him feel ‘destitute’.10 For both Winston and Clementine a steady, loving childhood had been unknown.
Clementine could also empathise with Winston’s pain at his father’s obvious preference for his younger, less troublesome brother Jack. Lord Randolph barely spoke to Winston unless to deliver a rebuke; some historians go so far as to suggest his father actively loathed his son. Winston was a disappointment to him: the poor results he achieved in his entrance exam consigned him to the bottom class at Harrow and he was considered not to have the brains for the Bar, let alone Oxford, although the more enlightened teachers recognised that he had unusual gifts. Even by upper-class Victorian standards Winston’s parents’ neglect was unusual. Friends and relations would urge them to ‘make more’ of Winston; one kindly soul, Laura, Countess of Wilton, even wrote to him as self-appointed ‘deputy mother’, sending him money and food. Jennie failed even to remember her sons’ birthdays.
As children both Winston and Clementine had relied on middle-aged women outside the family for emotional sustenance. In his case none more so than his nanny Mrs Everest, whose unconditional love was the only thing that made him feel safe. It was she who had ensured Winston was extracted from a prep school where the sadistic headmaster repeatedly flogged him. Mrs Everest had also tried to rein in his spending and instructed him to be a ‘kind’ gentleman. He loved her gratefully, but his upbringing nonetheless left him selfish and ‘emotionally insatiable’.11
Winston’s new wife was able to identify with his boyhood sufferings. A sickly youngster with a lisp and weak chest, he had been bullied at school – at seven he had on one occasion been pelted with cricket balls – while she too had been taunted in her early years by more rumbustious children. Both had eventually developed strategies for self-protection – in his case naughtiness, in hers reserve – in order to hide their inner insecurities from public view. But neither had lost an instinctive sympathy for the underdog.
They both also knew what it was to lose a father and to endure a mother’s ‘frantic sexual intrigue’. Just as there were stories that Clementine was not Hozier’s child, it was rumoured that Winston had been conceived before marriage. Witnessing Lord Randolph’s public decline from young political titan to raging invalid had been a further agony for his son. Only twenty when his father died what was a grotesque death (reputedly from the ‘Great Pox’) in 1895, Winston never established a connection with him, yet always felt in his shadow. The penetrating screams of Lord Randolph’s last days may have contributed to his own rejection of casual sex.
Thus Winston, like Clementine, craved comfort and security. Marriage allowed him to regress to the security of Mrs Everest’s nursery; to be folded like an infant within a woman’s comforting embrace. Since his Victorian upbringing deterred him from talking about sex in an adult way, he adopted baby talk instead. He began addressing Clementine as ‘Puss Cat’ or ‘Kat’, while he became ‘My Sweet Amber Dog’ or ‘Pug’, and there was much mention of lapping cream and stroking warm, furry coats. Respectable women were in any case at this period presumed unburdened by libido, and Winston took a particular dislike to overt sexual predators.
Nor, again like Clementine, did he form close friendships easily. Precocious and bumptious, Winston had been unpopular with his peers as a child, probably not helped by the fact that his contacts outside the immediate family before he went to school were primarily with servants. When he twice failed to get into the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, the elite training academy for British Army officers, the crammer he was sent to observed that ‘the boy has many good points but what he wants is very firm handling’.
These were, then, two insecure people with much in common. One crucial difference between them, though, was that while Winston had spent much of his childhood at Blenheim Palace, Clementine knew what it was like to live in cheap lodgings. Winston had always had servants, had never drawn his own bath or travelled on a bus. Just because he was now married and – as the son of a younger son – was far from rich, he saw no reason for this to change. Whereas she, a former habituée of the Dieppe fish markets, was terrified of spending money they did not have trying to live up to his exacting requirements.
In early 1909, they bought a lease on 33 Eccleston Square, a cream stucco edifice in semi-fashionable Pimlico. This was to be their first family home and Clementine was finally able to decorate in her own simple style, although she let herself go in her bedroom where she appliquéd to the walls an Art Nouveau design of a large fruit-tree in ‘shades of orange, brown and green’.12 She never experimented so flamboyantly again, which is arguably just as well. A later tenant, the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, showed the mural to the French ambassador, who was reportedly struck with ‘horror’. (But Grey also wrote to her saying Eccleston Square was the ‘nicest’ house he had ever had in London and that it gave the ‘impression of belonging to nice people’.13)
Clementine insisted on having her own bedroom from an early stage. Indeed, after Bolton Street the couple would not share at home again. They kept different hours, she preferring to rise early and he to retire late. Moreover, it was not just the Sandhurst crammer who recognised that he needed ‘very firm handling’. Winston was quickly made to observe the ‘protocol of the bedchamber’: Clementine needed refuge from her husband’s ‘dominating brilliance’, so he was allowed entry to her room by invitation only, thus placing him in the position of supplicant, always hoping to ‘kiss her dear lips’ and ‘end up snugly’ in her arms. Occasionally, upon turning in, she would leave a note indicating that he might be in luck that evening. But he could never bank on it.14
Nor was Winston the only member of the family who needed ‘handling’. Jennie showed no signs of retreating gracefully, grabbing the chance to decorate her son’s new bedroom and insisting on choosing the colour for the front door. As Clementine’s pregnancy progressed and she went to rest in the country, however, Winston chose to defer more frequently to his wife. He dutifully reported on marble basins, bookcases, paints and progress in chasing up the builders. He commended her on her thrift, which saw old carpets being re-used despite the odd stain and shabby edges, while cheap lino was put down in the servants’ rooms.
Due to give birth in July 1909, Clementine was seven months into her pregnancy before they were finally able to move in and she passed some of the time at Blenheim with Goonie, the wife of Winston’s brother Jack. Goonie was also expecting and the two struck up a mutually supportive friendship; but Clementine could not shake off her fears about the birth. Goonie – whose real name was Gwendoline – had her baby first and Winston used her ‘smooth and successful’ delivery of a healthy boy to reassure Clementine. He insisted Goonie had suffered little, but was himself still nervous about the impending event: ‘I don’t like your having to bear pain & face this ordeal. But . . . out of pain joy will spring.’15
Not that his concern stopped Winston from leaving Clementine on her own while he pursued his love of politics, the Army and male society. At the end of May he went to Blenheim for the annual camp of the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, of which he was an officer. He greatly enjoyed it but Clementine could not face a large house party. In those days expectant mothers were rarely seen and their condition barely alluded to (most thought the word ‘pregnancy’ suitable only for medical books). So on 1 June she went to stay in relative seclusion with Lady St Helier’s daughter in Buckinghamshire. Now she was eight months pregnant and without Winston, Clementine’s old tremulous self returned to the fore. On her way she stopped for lunch at what looked like a ‘respectable’ commercial travellers’ hotel in Slough, only to become ‘terrified’ when she found it ‘infested by several dirty men’.16 On another occasion she locked
herself in a train lavatory for fear of cut-throats climbing through a carriage window.
Although anxious about her, Winston was unwilling to change his ways. Their frequent separations – a pattern that would last throughout their marriage – threw them into stark contrast with other political couples of the time, such as Stanley Baldwin and his wife Lucy, who spent only one night apart in their entire life together.
Diana was born at home on 11 July and, although it was not yet customary for fathers to attend the actual birth, Winston was at least nearby. Even now, however, Violet remained in his thoughts; he wrote to her three days later claiming (unconvincingly) that Clementine had invited her to ‘come back again to see the baby’. ‘After four almost any afternoon Miss Churchill receives,’17 he wrote proudly from his desk at the Board of Trade.
Winston was still visiting Violet regularly and she continued to behave possessively towards him. ‘I was with him heart and soul,’18 she wrote later and she certainly took any opportunity to have him to herself. One diary entry records a game of golf with him in ‘golden autumn sunshine with seagulls circling overhead’; ‘Winston,’ she crowed, ‘is very pleased with my swing.’19 Clementine, meanwhile, was feeling neglected and doubtful about her capacity to fulfil the ‘sacred’ role of being Mrs Winston Churchill. The minute she was allowed out of bed, she deserted her husband and newborn baby, fleeing to a cottage near Brighton for ten days with Nellie. It appears that in her distress she did not even consider breastfeeding Diana, a task delegated to a wet nurse sixty miles away back in London. Winston was left to supervise care of the baby – now referred to as ‘Puppy Kitten’ or ‘PK’ – and demonstrated an interest so unusual for fathers of the time that he suspected the nanny thought him a ‘tiresome interloper’.20 Clementine wrote back to Winston to ‘kiss my sweet PK for me’ and admitted to being ‘very jealous’ that he was going to give their daughter her bath.
First Lady Page 6
