Others she simply disdained, including some of Winston’s relations – notably Ivor, brother of Freddie Guest, who once lost his temper during a bridge match and threw his cards at Clementine’s head. Despite his contrite apologies the next day, she again swept out, this time with an embarrassed and reluctant Winston in tow.
Winston worked hard on repairing the bridges she burned. When Ivor Guest’s mother, Winston’s aunt Cornelia, invited them to stay again he urged Clementine to accept. ‘We have not too many friends,’ he pointed out. ‘If however you don’t want to go, I will go alone. Don’t come with all your hackles up & your fur brushed the wrong way – you naughty.’ She replied: ‘I will be very good I promise you.’ For Winston’s sake she even tolerated sitting next to Asquith, who was notorious for ‘peering down Pennsylvania Avenue’ as a woman’s cleavage was then known.
Now in her late twenties, Clementine was attracting many a lustful eye. After a day at the seaside with the Churchills, an artist friend, Neville Lytton, wrote about how ‘Clemmie came forth like the reincarnation of Venus . . . I had no idea she had such a splendid body.’ (Lytton was a convert, having previously been a critic – one of many – of her puritan streak.) Scawen Blunt not only admired her looks, but increasingly also came to think of her as ‘one of the nicest’ women in society.45
Clementine was beginning to appreciate that her allure was not simply a cause for personal pride; it was also raising Winston’s stock. That did not mean, however, that she would take the advice given by Alice Keppel, one of Edward VII’s mistresses, that if she truly wanted to advance her husband’s career she should take a wealthy, influential lover. Clementine turned down her offer to find a suitable candidate, an act Mrs Keppel viewed as ‘positively selfish’.46 It was clear that Clementine was not to be another lion-hunting Jennie.
In January 1910 there was a general election, triggered by the House of Lords’ rejection of the People’s Budget reforms. It was the first of fifteen campaigns Winston and Clementine would fight together, and she took an active role: after all Jennie had energetically canvassed for Winston in previous elections. He held his seat in Dundee – perhaps in small part helped by Clementine’s Scottish ancestry – but overall the Liberals scraped just two more seats than the Conservatives. The new government saw Winston promoted to become, at thirty-five, the youngest Home Secretary since Robert Peel; in charge of prisons, the police and the grisly duty of signing death warrants. The burden of deciding the fate of forty-three men and women who had been condemned to death by hanging was to weigh heavily on his emotional nature.
It was now that Clementine proved her worth. Winston would later tell his doctor, Lord Moran, how helpful it had been to talk to his wife during what he claimed were prolonged bouts of depression, a condition that famously became known as ‘Black Dog’. ‘Alas, I have no good opinion of myself,’ he would confess to Clementine. ‘At times I think that I could conquer everything – and then again I know that I am only a weak fool.’ Certainly, his temperament was not suited to his new position, but even his daughter Mary raised questions about whether his mood swings really amounted to depression. Black Dog seems to be treated by members of the Churchill family today as largely Winstonian hyperbole, and Mary thought in any case that the Dog was ‘kennelled’ by his love for Clementine and the confidence she now brought to him.47
Winston’s workload was nevertheless onerous, as Asquith would also often delegate to him the job of winding up major debates – especially after dinner when ‘Old Squiffy’, as the Prime Minister was known, was frequently incapable. So Clementine would sometimes be sent to the ‘fighting front’ to deliver speeches on her husband’s behalf. Pushing the boundaries of what was considered strictly proper for a gentlewoman, she energetically toured labour exchanges and prisons, and gave away prizes at police sports days. When she was at home with Winston, however, he was no longer his ebullient self.
A second election was called in December 1910 specifically to decide the issue of the reform of the House of Lords, and whether it should be prevented from blocking the government’s bills to help the poor. The result, which narrowly returned the Liberal administration, paved the way for constitutional legislation (the Parliament Act of 1911) to assert the supremacy of the Commons over the Upper House and enable it to force its finance measures through. After the poll, Winston decided on a short trip to Clementine’s Stanley relations at Alderley to recuperate. Now pregnant with her second child, she had caught a bad cold and regretted not being able to join him. Perhaps he felt a pang of guilt at this latest absence, as when Clementine woke up from a nap one evening she found her room transformed by his orders ‘into a Paradise of exquisite flowers’. ‘You are a sweet Darling Lamb Bird!!’48 she told him.
The new baby (whom she was convinced this time was a boy) was due in mid-May 1911 but kept his mother hanging on for another two long weeks. Always anxious during pregnancy, Clementine found the wait unendurable. She was prescribed Veronal – an early form of barbiturate used to treat insomnia ‘induced by nervous excitability’. When Randolph finally put in an appearance, he was immediately granted more attention than his elder sister. Clementine even breastfed him. Winston was delighted and although he swiftly left for the Hussars camp at Blenheim he could not help crowing. ‘Many congratulations are offered me upon the son,’ he wrote to Clementine.
Now that she had produced the requisite male heir – nicknamed the Chumbolly – there was no pressure on her to recover quickly. ‘My precious pussy cat,’ Winston soothed. ‘Just . . . enjoy the richness wh this new event will I know have brought into your life.’ The paternal pride was in full flow: ‘The Chumbolly must do his duty and help you with your milk . . . At his age greediness & even swinishness at table are virtues.’ Clementine was equally enamoured, writing of her happiness ‘contemplating the beautiful Chumbolly who grows more darling & handsome every hour . . . Just now I was kissing him, when catching sight of my nose he suddenly fastened upon it & began to suck it, no doubt thinking it was another part of my person!’49
While she recuperated, Clementine took Randolph and Diana out of London – not to the splendours of Blenheim or Alderley, but to the scene of her impoverished youth in Seaford. Randolph’s first holiday was spent in a low-key town of shingle beaches and suburban holidaymakers. Winston joined her briefly in the rooms she rented at Rosehall, an Edwardian semi-detached house in Sutton Park Road, although she had to remind him to bring his own wine. They were unlikely surroundings for a Churchill, and his first introduction to the concept of ‘lodgings’. But Clementine retained an affection for Seaford and its people – including an old boatman who had taught her to swim – and wanted her children to share it. She might be a Churchill too now but she was not willing to surrender all that she had been before. (Three years later she took the children to see her mother in Dieppe, and was annoyed with herself for overpaying for mackerel in the fish market when she should have known better.)
Clementine returned to London in late June 1911 for the coronation of George V, whose father Edward VII had died the previous year. For a time, she remained devoted to Randolph, a far cry from Diana’s first months, but once he was weaned she embarked on a string of child-free holidays, beginning with a jaunt with Goonie to Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps. Winston was to join them but was detained by the threat of food shortages following a series of strikes. Perhaps in retribution, she made sure to report having been leered at by a ‘grotesque hugely fat man in only bathing drawers’, claiming that she would have liked to ‘have him put to death’.
Yet in truth Clementine was becoming more accustomed to Winston’s absences and more tolerant of his work. Now that she had dutifully produced a son and joined forces with her husband in political battle, her self-confidence was growing. This new assurance impressed even Violet, who declared to an astonished Venetia that she had ‘conceived a sudden & great affection for Clemmie’.50 Moreover, Clementine’s new status, allied to her adequacy at bridge,
made her welcome, along with Winston, as a guest of the Asquiths in Downing Street. Margot liked to criticise Winston at these events, even to Clementine – leading to a number of sharp exchanges – but was nonetheless fond of them both. ‘I have a great feeling for Clemmy,’ she wrote to Winston. ‘She is so rare not to be vain of her marvellous beauty.’51 Clementine, however, never quite relaxed with the Asquiths – she was wary of Violet until the end and she disapproved of the Prime Minister’s intimate relationship, from 1912 onwards, with her cousin Venetia.
Clementine was aware that she was now a woman of consequence and was intent on living up to the part. Her brother Bill confessed to Winston he held her in ‘an awe which no-one else can rival’.52 Her social cachet grew still further in October 1911, when Winston became First Lord of the Admiralty, in those days a position of imperial grandeur. She took up hunting, earning herself a fearless reputation in the saddle. She launched battleships with a regal grace. She also demonstrated extraordinary courage in her official duties. In February 1912, the Liberal-led government, needing to reward the Irish Nationalists for propping them up in the Commons, was intent on advancing the cause of Home Rule against fierce opposition from Unionists. Clementine became fearful for Winston’s safety as he prepared for a trip to Belfast – an act deemed ‘provocative’ by the Unionists – just as Ireland teetered on the brink of civil war. Although pregnant for the third time, she insisted on accompanying her husband, despite warnings that she would be putting herself at ‘considerable risk’; there were police reports that huge numbers of bolts and rivets had been stolen from railway yards and many revolvers ‘taken out of pawn’.
On the Churchills’ arrival hostile loyalist crowds pressed menacingly up against their car, lifting it from the ground and hurling abuse at its occupants. In the end the couple were whisked to relative safety in a Catholic stronghold and Winston was able to deliver his speech. Nevertheless, it was a terrifying episode and may have contributed to the miscarriage Clementine suffered the following month. Initially she appeared to make a swift recovery and went to ‘comfortable shabby lodgings’ at Oriental Place in Brighton in mid-March to recuperate. But when she returned home, she was still not well. Winston, needless to say, was away and so she had to tell him by letter that it was ‘so strange to have all the same sensations that one has after a real Baby, but with no result. I hope I shall never have another such accident again.’53 As it was, she made sure she did not conceive for well over a year and was from then on even more afraid of pregnancy.
Her natural sense of frustration boiled over into outrage at some of the more prejudiced attitudes of the day. In a letter to The Times, signing herself as ‘One of the Doomed’, she opened fire on a male correspondent who had opposed giving votes to women on psychological and physiological grounds. Even the Asquiths were impressed when, under the title ‘Ought not women to be abolished?’, Clementine mocked the biologist Sir Almroth Wright’s views that women were ‘unbalanced’ if not outright ‘insane’. ‘Now this being so,’ she wrote from her sick bed, ‘how much happier and better would the world not be if only it could be purged of women?’ Her putdown was hailed by Asquith himself as ‘the best thing I have read for a long time’ on what he called the ‘Woman Question’.54
Fresh from her triumph, she decided to seek company in Paris for a few days in April, staying at the Hôtel Le Bristol with Randolph’s godmother Lady Ridley. It was immediately clear to her companion (if not to her absent husband) that Clementine was, in fact, very unwell and a top French gynaecologist declared she needed a month in bed. Clementine returned to London, but Winston remained absent. There followed months of doctors, relapses and enforced exclusion from his flourishing career, during which Clementine’s spirits sank to an all-time low as she began to think she might become a permanent invalid. ‘I am a poor wrecked ship,’ she told Winston. ‘You must take me in hand as if I were one of your battleships.’ Winston finally acted, finding a new doctor who helped her recover, but she was never to retrieve her full physical strength.
When Clementine was once again on her feet, friends who saw her with Winston thought they still seemed like young lovers, full of affectionate banter. At one sociable lunch, the diarist and newspaper owner George Riddell recalled her laughing saucily about the number of ‘bastard’ children among the aristocracy before turning to Winston and saying, ‘I’ve got you. The real question is how to keep you now that I’ve made my capture.’ ‘Well my dear,’ Winston replied, ‘you don’t have much difficulty in doing that.’
With Winston’s new job came a splendid eighteenth-century official residence in Whitehall. Admiralty House had two thirty-five-foot drawing rooms, a library and seven bedrooms, but after four years in Eccleston Square Clementine was reluctant to leave her first real home. The Admiralty was not only a stone’s throw from the garden door to Number 10 (and Violet) but required a dozen servants, whereas she could afford no more than nine. She was so concerned about slipping standards and unpayable bills that she delayed moving for more than a year, and even then never took full possession of the staterooms on the first floor. The fireplaces were tiny, the rooms huge, most of the furniture unspeakably ugly. Naturally, Winston revelled in the grandeur of what he called ‘our mansion’, his one concession being to promise to watch his spending. ‘I am afraid it all means vy hard work for you – Poor lamb,’ he wrote. ‘But remember I am going to turn over a new leaf! . . . The only mystery is “what is written on the other side!”’
More to her liking was the Enchantress, a 4000-ton yacht with a 196-man crew – all at the First Lord’s disposal. Leisurely cruises to sunny places could be enjoyed at least partially at the taxpayer’s expense, provided they were combined with naval inspections. Free of the maternal and domestic duties that burdened her at home, Clementine grew to love life on board, although Violet’s frequent presence was a strain. In May 1912 they travelled by train to join the Enchantress in Genoa, and while Clementine rested, still recovering from her miscarriage, Violet took the opportunity to monopolise Winston, their laughter drifting back to Clementine’s sleeping compartment. No wonder that after a stopover in Paris, ‘poor Clemmie was in tears of nerves & exhaustion’. On another cruise a year later, Violet was still accusing her of various ‘lacunae’, including being ‘completely impervious to the “point” of places and situations’.55 Yet she could hardly fail to notice how Winston now relied on his wife. If ever he returned from a jaunt, his first question would be ‘Where’s Clemmy?’ and if he could not find her, he would be ‘quite gloomy’.56
Clementine began to sense her value to him. Even when he was away she would, if well, attend social events on her own, speaking to the right people (for him) and – usually – saying the right things. She had not won over everyone – the diehard man-of-action Admiral Beatty, who saw her on the Enchantress, dismissed her as an ‘amiable fool’57 – but Clementine was learning fast, and when on form she was an operator on her own terms, albeit always on Winston’s behalf. She knew how Winston liked to conduct business over the dinner table – at which he excelled – and thought carefully about whom to invite. When she met Lord Kitchener (then a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence) at Lady Crewe’s house, for instance, she knew he could be useful and she ventured his name. ‘By all means ask K to lunch,’ Winston replied. ‘Let us be just à trois. I have some things to talk to him about.’58
With time it became quite normal for her to sit in on his most important and sensitive discussions; he trusted her fully. She also got into the habit of checking over his speeches before he delivered them, sending him a handwritten reminder in early 1914, for instance, that she was waiting for ‘a little visit with the Speech. Miaow, but sitting tight.’59 Sometimes she suggested cutting passages she considered elaborate or harsh, advising ‘I would not say that Winston.’60 Equally, he was thrilled when she found much to praise, such as when he allowed himself to show emotion and sympathy. She patiently coached him through his speech impediment,
which caused him to pronounce s as sh and made him difficult to understand at times of stress. Often she would sit in the public gallery at the Commons, smiling encouragingly if he struggled. Lloyd George noticed that she was no ordinary politician’s wife, telling Winston that Clementine was his ‘salvation’, He was ‘full of your praises’, Winston later informed her, remarking that ‘your beauty was the least thing about you’.61
In summer 1912 Clementine decamped to a grand beachside house in Sandwich, Kent, lent by Nancy Astor. She entertained Winston by writing him vivid tales of Randolph’s tantrums – he would roar with rage if his meals were too milky – but merely mentioned in passing how Diana was saying her prayers ‘so sweetly’. Parliament was sitting, so Winston could come down from London only every now and then, but his arrival was more often than not swiftly followed by an excursion to the beach to make ‘a nicely bevelled fortress’. Clementine would be entrusted with finding the best sand in advance for these elaborate fortifications, and to have buckets, spades and, of course, cigars at the ready. As Winston happily immersed himself in a reversion to his childhood, she could only look on, watching him play boisterously with his children in a way that seemed beyond her reach.
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