Of course a baby offered Winston all the appeal of a new project, albeit one that he could hand over to a professional at will. Whatever excitement he may have derived from becoming a parent, his career remained all-consuming. If Clementine believed she might change this by leaving him and PK behind, she would rapidly discover she was mistaken. Such was evident from his two fleeting visits to his wife in Sussex. He urged her to recover quickly – specifically because he wanted her to be fit enough to ‘play a great part’ in an expected election in the autumn. He conceded that she was competing with politics for his attention but evidently intended to do little about it. ‘My darling, I do so want your life to be a full & sweet one,’ he wrote defensively. ‘I am so centred in my politics, that I often feel I must be a dull companion to anyone who is not in the trade . . . Still the best is to be true to oneself – unless you happen to have a vy tiresome self!’21
Clementine decided to prolong her absence and went on to visit her Aunt Maisie at Alderley Park, Cheshire, this time with Diana and her nurse. A Stanley gathering – plus effusive praise for her baby – helped Clementine to rally her competitive if not exactly maternal spirits. ‘None’ of the six other children present was ‘fit to hold a candle to our P.K. or even to unloose the latchet of her shoe’,22 she boasted to Winston. But she also recognised that she could never hope to wrest him away from politics by abandoning him. Her sole course of action, if she wanted their marriage to work, was to join him in his ‘trade’.
She began immersing herself in Winston’s social reforms. The newly confident and partisan tone in her 11 September comments on Lord Rosebery’s alternative to Lloyd George’s progressive Budget bears testament to her studies. Rosebery’s proposals, she wrote, would not help the poor, but then as a peer married to a Rothschild, she declared him unfamiliar with the ‘sordid consideration of how to make both ends meet’. Clementine finally rejoined her husband in London, determined to throw herself into his world. Her role was becoming clear.
Although Clementine had performed more impressively at Berkhamsted High than Winston at Harrow, she had still missed out on years of schooling and, of course, had not gone on to university. During his service in India as an Army subaltern in the late 1890s Winston had immersed himself in history and philosophy so as to compete with ‘silver-tongued’ graduates. Also accustomed to a well-educated American mother, he now set about improving his wife, sending her detailed bulletins on his political strategies and providing her with lengthy compulsory reading lists. She would detect a ‘note of indulgent criticism’23 from Winston if she were not completely in command of current affairs or political history, and this spurred her on all the more – although she did complain to Violet (of all people) that Winston was ‘force-feeding’ her books by the dozen. One of his set texts was Maeterlinck’s The Life of a Bee – an interminable work suggesting humans could learn from the orderliness and self-sacrifice of the hive. Bees were bores, in her view, just like mathematics.
Politics she found absorbing, however. Her letters now dealt only briefly, if at all, with Diana’s welfare before moving swiftly on to Winston’s career. ‘I see the Board of Trade Return states that English Industries have improved since last year,’ she wrote from the Crest Hotel in Crowborough, Sussex, where she reluctantly stayed for several weeks in October 1909. ‘I hope you will bring this out strongly in one of the speeches. The rascally Daily Mail lies in its throat when it says the contrary.’ Winston’s work was infinitely more alluring than being cooped up in a domestic bubble with a tiny baby. She particularly disliked the sewing (her time as a dressmaker had left her with a loathing for it). ‘My sweet Pug, I feel imprisoned here. I long to be in the thick of it with you.’ As for any maternal feelings, they seemed more focused on him than on her daughter: ‘I long to put my arms around you and kiss your darling cheeks and curls and lips.’ That was just how he liked it.
Their first wedding anniversary, in September 1909, saw them apart again, a sheepish Winston writing to her from Strasbourg that he hoped that after a year together she had ‘no cause – however vague or secret – for regrets’. Marriage clearly suited his needs: he felt more confident; able to be himself. Clementine never ridiculed his obsession with military matters, as others did, and he confessed to her: ‘I feel so safe with you & I do not keep the slightest disguise.’24 Her response was more circumspect: ‘The year I have lived with you has been far the happiest in my life & even if it had not been it would have been well worth living.’
Winston’s tender words did not banish all jealous thoughts of Violet – or of other women (known in their pet language as ‘cats’). ‘What was my Pug doing with Mrs Rupert Beckett??’ she demanded. ‘My Secret Police keeps me informed of his doings!’25 An exasperated Winston was reduced to insisting that he had ‘not spoken to a single cat of any sort except my mother!!!!!’26 His reassurance did nothing, however, to prevent what seems to have been a blistering row the next time they met. Winston found Clementine’s raging insecurity embarrassing: ‘Dearest, it worries me vy much that you should seem to nurse such absolutely wild suspicions wh are so dishonouring to all the love & loyalty I bear you.’ He urged her to raise her thoughts – ‘We do not live in a world of small intrigues, but of serious & important affairs’ – adding: ‘You ought to trust me for I do not love & will never love any woman in the world but you . . . Your sweetness & beauty have cast a glory upon my life.’27
Clementine regretted her jealous outbursts but was tormented by the idea that Winston would conduct himself like Hozier, or his own serially unfaithful father. Some women found Winston insufferable; equally, others, including the American-born Duchess of Marlborough, Consuelo, were charmed by his ‘boyish enthusiasm and spontaneity’.28 He would, however, prove himself a far more faithful companion than the previous dominant male figures in Clementine’s life – and she would eventually learn to contain, if not to laugh at, her fears of female rivalry. Indeed, the only whiff of sexual scandal in Winston’s life dated to his early twenties, long before he met Clementine, when a disgruntled fellow Army officer alleged that he had indulged in acts of ‘the Oscar Wilde type’. (The saga was swiftly ended by a hotshot lawyer and a libel suit. Winston won £500 damages and an apology, and the allegations were withdrawn.29)
As Winston grew accustomed to matrimony, he learned to live with his wife’s explosive temper. The slightest setback, such as cold soup or a late delivery, could send her into a fury. Happily, the storm would soon pass with the help of Winston’s understanding and patience; ‘cast care aside’ he would say consolingly. Perhaps witnessing his mother’s rages – Jennie was a great thrower of hairbrushes – had inured Winston to female fury. Maybe he saw that Clementine was a harsh self-critic; she would, after the event, frequently regret her loss of control. ‘When I am a withered old woman how miserable I shall be if I have disturbed your life & troubled your spirit by my temper. Do not cease to love me, I could not do without it.’ But then he too was often impossible to live with – even if he rarely directed his notorious temper at her. He was loving and fun, but also demanding, selfish and rash. Their marriage was never destined to be smooth, but they made a pact that lasted until the end: they would always try to make it up before bed. ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,’ he would say.
In marriage, at least, he was often the first to sue for peace. After a row in January 1913, he wrote: ‘I was stupid last night – but you know what a prey I am to nerves and prepossessions’,30 before adding in a postscript: ‘don’t be disloyal to me in thought. I have no one but you to break the loneliness of a bustling and bustled existence.’ In reply, pleading with him to spend more time alone with her, she explained that ‘I always say more than I feel & mean instead of less.’31
Other than Clementine’s jealousy, money was the most frequent flashpoint. Upon Winston’s appointment as President of the Board of Trade, Asquith had promised him ‘the same level, as regards salary & status as a secretary of state’.32 That shoul
d have entailed an income of £5000 a year, on which the family could have lived comfortably; in the event, he was paid only half that. Other investments and royalties from his books had already been spent (as had Jennie’s American fortune). This left the Churchills living an upper-class life on middle-class money. In a confidence shared with Violet – perhaps as a deliberate taunt – Clementine revealed how she had refused to continue buying Winston’s expensive pale pink silk underclothes from Army & Navy. He had won that battle, though, by protesting that he could wear nothing else next to his delicate skin. She hated the extravagance; he continued to live by it.
When it came to food and drink as well as comfort, Winston was, as F.E. Smith once put it, ‘easily satisfied with the best’. He frequently announced at short notice that he was bringing home important people to dinner – including on one occasion the King of Portugal. If Clementine asked what she was expected to feed them, his answer was typically Irish stew ‘with lots of onions’; or for the grandest occasions, lobsters and roast duck. Although she tried to economise – for a house of its size, Eccleston Square was run on an unusually small staff of five – the shame of unpaid bills returned to her life. Worse, she discovered with horror that Winston (like her mother, brother and sister) was a gambler too. She would wave final demands at him in despair and he would simply ignore her, or suggest pointless schemes such as removing two phone extensions to save a mere £3 a year. Clementine’s ideas on balancing the books were more radical. On one occasion she sold Aunt Cornelia’s diamond necklace. Appalled and ashamed, Winston rushed to the jeweller’s to buy it back, but was too late.
Not that Winston was incapable of solicitude towards his wife. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was struck by the way he took ‘all possible care of her’ when they visited him in the country. Clementine was afraid of wasps; when one settled on her sleeve, Winston ‘gallantly’ took it ‘by the wings and thrust it into the ashes of the fire’.33 On 30 November 1909, Clementine organised a dinner party, complete with cake and candles, to celebrate Winston’s thirty-fifth birthday. A delighted Winston wore a paper hat while sitting on a sofa holding her hand – a rare public display of affection for the time that led one of the guests to note in his diary that he had ‘never seen two people more in love’.34
Although devoted to Winston, Clementine also began to revel in her power over other men. At a fancy dress party she dazzled Scawen Blunt, an inveterate womaniser, who now thought her ‘the most beautiful of women’. She was in ‘a kind of mermaid’s dress which looked as if she had no clothes at all underneath her outer sheath of crimped silk. She whispered to me that it was almost so.’35 Winston, however, rarely wrote in such physical terms, his letters seeking more maternal than sexual favours, though Clementine very occasionally referred to ‘wanting’ more from her husband than a kiss.
Nor did his growing intellectual esteem for his wife extend to backing calls for women to be given the vote. To his absolute fury, his prominence made him an obvious target for the suffragettes who regularly disrupted his speeches. On one occasion in late 1909 a suffragette lunged at him with a dog whip as he descended onto the platform at Bristol station, lashing out at his face and pushing him towards a moving train as it pulled out of the station. A small crowd watched in horror, but Clementine leapt in a flash over the piles of luggage and, just in time, pulled him back with all her might by his coat tails. She almost certainly saved her husband’s life – while endangering her own. She had shown herself to be braver in real danger than all the male dignitaries cowering nearby. And yet, despite the attack, Clementine’s belief in the cause of women’s suffrage never faltered and she attended several major court cases against members of the movement. Later she looked back on those years of violence as necessary, concluding that ‘the day would not have been won’ without women ‘with a passion’ that ‘exceeded constitutional and legal bounds’.36
The female vote was just the first of many issues on which she disagreed with Winston’s more conservative views. He promised that he would never ‘crush’ her convictions and even fretted about her reaction when he ‘answered the suffragettes sternly’.37 He knew what female suffrage meant to her; before their marriage she had often dressed in the suffragist uniform of collar and tie. Yet he went on to oppose bills in 1910 and 1912 supporting votes for women (both of which were unsuccessful), on the grounds that they were not ready for the vote and that the ‘mass of them did not want it’. Although he had some sympathy for the principle, he spoke for a lot of husbands when he said that he refused to be ‘henpecked on a question of such grave importance’.38 ‘The truth is,’ Winston informed a golfing partner, ‘we already have enough ignorant voters and we don’t want any more.’39
Women’s suffrage remained a sore point between them until the outbreak of war in 1914 pushed the subject into the political long grass. Winston believed that the husband must be the dominant partner. He was once outraged at a dinner party when Amy, the wife of his cousin Freddie Guest, took revenge on her husband for flirting with another woman by ordering a valet to remove his clothes and locking him out of her bedroom. ‘Clemmie, don’t you ever behave like Amy,’ Winston warned her. ‘If you do, I’ll leave you right away.’ He counselled Freddie that the honour of the entire family was at stake if he did not claim his conjugal rights. Amy (who was thought to be influenced by suspect American notions of female independence) did not relent, but crisis was averted when another door was found unlocked and Freddie entered the room by peaceful means.40
The macho pronouncement was an insight into Winston’s thoughts, if not his own deeds. Women were, in his view, lesser beings who were unjustifiably ‘cocksure’; he particularly disliked the sort of ‘young unmarried lady teacher’ that Clementine might have become if she had been allowed to go to university.41 Winston did not care for women – with the exception of Clementine (and perhaps Violet) – to venture their own views, merely to listen to his. As she learned how to manage him and drew closer to him intellectually, however, he softened a little. When the Reform Bill of 1918 went through Parliament he voted for women of property aged over thirty to be enfranchised (albeit partly on the grounds that they might shore up his vote). In 1928, though, he abstained in a bill granting women the vote on the same terms as men, thereby earning himself another rebuke from Clementine for being ‘naughty’.
Clementine was learning how to advance her views by subtle, but effective, means. She could not see eye to eye with Winston on female votes, but was thrilled by his work with the Chancellor, Lloyd George, on providing labour exchanges and workers’ pensions and on improving working conditions, including the introduction of the statutory tea break. As she threw herself into politics, Clementine developed an astute judgment of the characters involved, the goals to be achieved and the dangers ahead. Perhaps before Winston himself, she foresaw that Lloyd George’s radical ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 – which raised taxes on cars, petrol and land to pay for the foundations of the welfare state – would make politics ‘very bitter’. There were many in Winston’s own family who refused to speak to him over his support for Lloyd George; acquaintances would cross the road to avoid greeting a couple they viewed as class traitors because the Budget sought to redistribute wealth from the rich. One summer’s day, a Lady Crichton was shopping for china in South Audley Street when Clementine drove by alone in a ‘ravishing’ black and white striped dress. She waved gaily to Lady Crichton, who greeted her back before informing her nine-year-old daughter, ‘Poor Clemmie, so few people will speak to her these days.’
In truth, Clementine saw it as heroic to be denigrated for helping the poor and she exulted in watching Winston’s popularity with the working classes soar as a result. They ‘love & trust you absolutely’, she cooed after attending a political meeting in Bingley. ‘I felt so proud.’42 It was not so easy for Winston, who took great pride in his aristocratic family and was wounded by their hostility. But if he wavered, Clementine was there to stiffen his spine and act as his radica
l conscience. ‘Do not let the glamour or elegance . . . of old associations blind you,’ she warned. Real Tories ‘are ignorant, vulgar, prejudiced. They can’t bear the idea of the lower classes being independent & free.’43 Later in her life, she was to say that these reformist years were her happiest. This was when Winston’s political outlook (even if in part aimed at undermining the rise of the Labour Party) was most in tune with hers – although he did not entirely share her absolutist approach.
Clementine once stormed out of Blenheim, for instance, after her husband’s cousin Sunny had asked her not to use his ducal writing paper to write to ‘that horrible little man’ Lloyd George. Winston was not there to broker a peace, and so when she descended the staircase ‘like wrath itself’ shortly afterwards, she ignored Sunny’s pleas for forgiveness. Winston was undoubtedly distressed at the family rift this caused and a rare cross tone entered their correspondence at this point. A few days later, Clementine could no longer bear his disapproval. If Winston ceased to love her, she would be raw and unhappy inside and like a prickly porcupine outside, instead of his beloved cat with soft fur. As so often with ‘Clemmie’, Winston surrendered, replying that he only wished he were more worthy of her.
This prickliness was not purely a product of principle; Clementine was not an easy person to get to know and rarely felt it safe to share her private thoughts even with close friends. Her daughter Mary confirmed that ‘her inner reserve never left her, and throughout her life, she fended off attempts to make intimate relationships’.44 She had two allies from before her marriage – her cousin Sylvia and Horatia Seymour (the Liberal-supporting, unmarried daughter of Gladstone’s private secretary) – both liked by Winston. But his life, needs and social circle were displacing her own, and she spent much of her time with people she did not trust. These included the wily Lloyd George, despite her admiration for his achievements, and F.E. Smith. She not only disapproved of Smith’s Tory influence over Winston, but feared that her husband would be led astray by his drinking and gambling. Smith was Winston’s best friend, however, and Winston relished their trips away with the Hussars – including night-time bathes in a lake together – declaring: ‘No cats allowed. Your pug in clover, W.’
First Lady Page 7
