Perhaps this distance explains why Clementine, as if fated to follow in Lady Blanche’s footsteps, seemed only too eager to escape her maternal responsibilities. During one lengthy trip to Spain and Paris with friends in early 1914, a wistful tone entered Winston’s letters to his wayward wife with reports of ‘continuous complaints’ from Diana (now four) and Randolph (nearly three) about ‘your non-return’. A week later he worked on her guilt with: ‘I asked Randolph this morning whether he wanted you to come back & why & he said “Becos’ I lurve her”. So now you must come my sweet pussy.’62 He too was missing her – for one thing, the household did not run as smoothly ‘when the Cat’s away’. But there was another reason her return was required: the cost of running Admiralty House, as she had expected, was proving ruinous. ‘The expense of the 1st quarter . . . is astonishing,’ he warned her in 1914. ‘Money seems to flow away.’63 In truth, the overspending was, as usual, largely down to Winston’s extravagances; Clementine was doing ‘all I can to help to keep down expenses’. (Her longest jaunt had been funded for the most part by the ever-generous Sir Ernest Cassel.64)
Nor was money the only sore point. Winston had taken a fancy to flying, then still in its perilous infancy. When many other pilots he knew – including his instructor – died one by one in a string of crashes, Clementine, now pregnant for the fourth time, became almost hysterical with fear. She pleaded with him to stop; but he was enthralled. It was only when in June 1914 she had a dream that her baby had been born a ‘gaping idiot’ that he finally relented. He did not fly again for three years.
The following month Clementine took the children, their nanny and a maid to Overstrand, a then fashionable Norfolk seaside resort. There she rented the six-bedroom Pear Tree Cottage on the low cliffs overlooking the beach. By now five months into her pregnancy, she was unable to pursue her hobbies of tennis, hunting or even swimming for fear of suffering another miscarriage, and so was spending an unusually lengthy time with Diana and Randolph. She reported to Winston that she was ‘finding out a lot of things about them . . . You will be surprised to hear that they are getting quite fond of me.’ She was thrilled when Randolph called her ‘my darling sweetheart mummy’.65
It was otherwise a deeply worrying time. On 28 June, the gunshot in Sarajevo that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, had ‘rung around the world’. Fired by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip, it triggered the catastrophic series of events that would culminate in the outbreak of the First World War. Clementine was dismayed to be expecting in exile, removed from the feverish buzz of London as it prepared for the unthinkable. Winston came down by train one weekend, and on another occasion rowed ashore from the Enchantress, but mostly he was away engrossed with buttressing the nation’s naval defences. She envied how he was living a thrilling life ‘to the tips of your fingers’ and felt excluded and superfluous. She used a neighbour’s phone to try to keep in touch, but his line was usually engaged. Knowing that Violet was only yards from him in London she longed to be at his side in her place.
To appease her thirst for news, Winston occasionally took astonishing risks in sending her classified information by post. It was thus all too clear to her that on the Continent, war was inevitable. The Austrians had threatened the Serbs, Russia had set its sights on Austria, and with the exception of Austria, Germany was making hostile noises to all the other powers. Ultimata were issued and ignored. Navies were sent out to sea and armies mobilised. Spoiling for a fight, Germany then launched an attack on Britain’s ally France through the neutral territory of Belgium. On 4 August, with the great powers of Europe ranged against each other, Britain itself had little choice but to declare war.66
Overstrand was on open coastline, now vulnerable to attack. But while other holidaymakers were packing up, Clementine found her options curtailed when the local cinema screen flashed up the message: ‘Visitors! Why are you leaving? Mrs Winston Churchill and her children are in residence . . . If it’s safe enough for her, surely it’s safe enough for you!’ Whatever her inward fears, she could now only see it as her duty to stay put and appear calm. This defiance won her much credit and a wealthy Tory MP sent her an emerald and diamond ring in tribute. Assiduous as ever, she returned it, earning praise from Winston for her ‘high and inflexible principles’. But in truth she felt both exposed and rejected. Since the beginning of her marriage she had had to compete with politics – as well as with Violet – for her husband’s attentions. Now, not only was she pregnant again and on her own, but she also had to contend with the all-consuming preoccupation of war.
Chapter Three
The Pain and the Pride
1914–15
No one could have foretold Clementine’s crisis but with hindsight it is astonishing that Winston failed to bring his family back to London as soon as war broke out, not least because he was the author of Cabinet briefings on the vulnerability of the North Sea coast to the enemy. It was indeed only a matter of months before the eastern seaboard of Britain – though further north at Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby – began to suffer German naval bombardment, and with it considerable loss of life. For the first time women and children as young as six months were slaughtered on a barbaric new Home Front; war no longer merely scythed through uniformed young men on foreign battlefields but crashed through homes, gardens and shops on British soil.
Perhaps Winston told himself Clementine was coping; outwardly she appeared as calm and determined as ever. Or maybe he thought it better that she was out of London, which was beset with fears of Zeppelin bombing raids – although the first such attack did not come until May 1915. He professed to being a ‘little anxious’ about her, but in truth he was finding the challenge of war, for all its death and destruction, exhilarating. He was engrossed in running the greatest fighting force of the world’s greatest empire; Clementine and the children were out of sight and mostly out of mind. It took the actions of her impetuous sister Nellie finally to reveal just how near to hysteria Clementine was.
Both sisters had considered it too dangerous for Lady Blanche to remain in Dieppe and so Nellie was dispatched to bring her back to Pear Tree Cottage. Lady Blanche arrived safely but exhausted just as ‘spy-mania’ began to afflict Overstrand, with several unproven sightings of enemy ‘agents’ on the cliffs. Already haunted by fears that these supposed Germans might be planning to kidnap her, Clementine was furious that Nellie had failed to accompany their mother. Once back in England, her sister had instead peeled off to Buckinghamshire to help the Astors convert their mansion into a nursing home, before travelling with a medical unit to the front line in Belgium as an interpreter. Clementine had relied on Nellie coming back to look after Lady Blanche so that she could finally slip away to see Winston. The family car having broken down, she was instead trapped with two little children and a ‘taxing’ mother, fearful of German attack, her hopes of rejoining her husband dashed. Unable to sleep and heavily pregnant, she became overwrought.
‘I feel disgusted with Nellie,’ Clementine raged in a scrappy note to Winston on 14 August. ‘I feel quite ill this morning, as I have had a very bad night & this on top of it has really upset me. I long to see you . . . You are always so sane and sensible my darling one, & you would calm my hurt and angry feelings . . . [I]n the midst of your work it is wrong of me to bubble over like this, but my heart is full & I can’t help it.’ Shortly after writing this, Clementine appears to have lost control and even to have attempted self-harm. ‘It is absurd to savage myself and to knock my head against the wall,’ she scribbled later in another heart-wrenching note. ‘I feel bruised all over and as if I had walked 20 miles and nobody loved me. I am just going to lie down for a little as I have now reached the stage of idiocy when all I can do is to cry feebly.’
Later still, she poured out her terrors of capture. ‘If I am kidnapped I beg of you not to sacrifice the smallest or cheapest submarine . . . I could not face the subsequent unpopularity whereas I should be quite a heroine . .
. if I died bravely and unransomed . . . If you do get a letter from me praying to be saved it will have been extracted by torture!’ And then finally she pleaded with him to let her come home. ‘I long to be comforted,’ she cried.1
Winston’s response to what appears to have been some sort of breakdown is not recorded. What seems clear is that Clementine needed to expel her demons – and grab his attention – before she could return to her cool and rational self. A little later she wrote to Winston: ‘I feel better since writing to you my Darling. Do not misjudge me for being so garrulous, Your loving very tired Clemmie.’
Perhaps her obvious distress also finally prompted Winston to summon her back, as Clementine returned with the children to London shortly afterwards for the last few weeks of her pregnancy. As soon as she was by his side in the thick of it again, she could happily devote herself to his welfare and career. She sent notes downstairs to his study, urging him to go to bed early as ‘you look weary from want of sleep’ and reminding him that ‘tomorrow you will need all your cool brain and judgment’. Almost immediately, it was as if she were an entirely different woman.
With the declaration of war came the need for a rapid and effective mobilisation of Winston’s Navy and a frenzy of patriotic flag-waving. Men of all classes volunteered to join up – and those not in uniform were soon looked upon as rather suspect. The Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, swept up by the excitement, promised young men that they would be ‘cleansed’ through ‘suffering’ and would find ‘beauty through blood’. For Clementine, like so many others, the reality was less than poetic. At the end of August, Nellie had been captured by the Germans in Belgium; her brother Bill was commanding the destroyer HMS Thorn; and Winston’s brother Jack was in France with the Army. There was precious little ‘beauty’ in the news coming in daily of so many young men already dead, or for the thousands of families grieving over their loss. Confident predictions that it would ‘be all over by Christmas’ were giving way to gloomy fears of a long, hard slog. And yet Clementine no longer nursed feelings of self-pity or isolation. She was back in partnership with her husband at what she called ‘the pulse of things’ where she belonged. How much more rewarding it was to contribute to Winston’s war effort than to shepherd small children to the beach or tend her mother. She was at her best in a crisis, and later she would look back at what she called those ‘wonderful’ opening weeks of the war when ‘we were so happy’. She thrilled at the initial success of Winston’s naval preparations and ‘the excitement of swiftly moving events’, and later felt ‘guilty & ashamed’ that even the appalling casualties of those early battles had had so little effect on her. Instead, she said later, ‘I wondered how long we should continue to tread on air.’2
As soon as she arrived back at Admiralty House, she had become intimately involved in the war. When the Navy won a major battle in late August 1914, it was Clementine who sent word to the War Secretary, Lord Kitchener, while her husband dressed for dinner. ‘Winston,’ she wrote, ‘thinks this is rather a Coup.’3 She also set a precedent by accompanying him to such male conventions as the inspection of battleships, and she would personally congratulate admirals on their victories, rewarding them with invitations to lunch. Winston briefed her so thoroughly on naval operations that she was better informed than most Cabinet ministers. Now that she was so bound up with his work, Winston wanted to be with her more. Asquith noted one evening that Winston ‘wouldn’t leave Clemmie’4 even to dine with him at Downing Street.
Clementine quickly identified an area in which she could provide Winston with particular support – assessing the weaknesses and insecurities of his colleagues and their capacity to make trouble. Perhaps her own anxieties sharpened her understanding of other people’s, but in any case her perspicacity contrasted with Winston’s rash emotionalism. He had a tendency to trample over others’ feelings, viewing them as immaterial to the overwhelming necessity of winning the war. He quickly moved, for instance, to replace an ageing Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, Admiral Sir George Callaghan, with a younger man, ignoring entirely the warnings from his senior advisers about the ‘disastrous’ consequences for morale. It was only when Clementine intervened that he finally listened. Hoping that Winston would not be ‘vexed’ at her views, she warned him that Callaghan needed to be handled carefully or his bitterness would ‘fester’. A mere medal would be insulting, but a seat on an Admiralty board would soothe his feelings and ensure that he was not seen across the Navy to have been ‘humiliated’. She also advised Winston not to underrate the ability of wives to cause mischief if they deemed their husbands to have been maltreated. Surely he did not want a ‘league of Retired Officers’ Cats’ blackening his name and making his task still more difficult? Winston saw sense and gave Callaghan a job as an adviser just as Clementine suggested.
Her success in what was perhaps her first major intervention encouraged her to offer further opinions. Although Winston took exception when others attempted to disagree with him, often frightening people into submission as a result, Clementine was never afraid of him. She became highly skilled at arguing her case, often opening with ‘If I were doing it . . .’
As First Lord of the Admiralty Winston was charged with winning the war at sea, but as a trained soldier with battle experience, he could not help involving himself in affairs on land as well. He began to make a habit of crossing the Channel to meet Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, to discuss the wider military picture. Although Winston seemed oblivious to the mockery and resentment provoked by such interference, Clementine sensed the danger. She knew that Winston always wanted to be at the centre of any major military decision, but that others found his ‘relish for warmaking’5 repellent. When he determined to meet Field Marshal French again at the end of September, she tactfully stepped in: ‘Now please don’t think me tiresome, but I want you to tell the PM of your projected visit. It would be very bad manners if you do not & he will be displeased and hurt.’ She also made sure her husband consulted the popular but solitary Lord Kitchener, so that he would view Winston’s trip as a legitimate fact-finding ‘mission’ rather than a disruptive ‘weekend escapade’. She observed that in the reverse situation Winston would be disgruntled if Kitchener visited naval commanders without paying him a similar courtesy.
In any case, she argued, why could he not content himself with running the Admiralty? It made her grieve to see him so gloomy and dissatisfied with the high position he had reached, when at thirty-nine he was the only young and vital member of the Cabinet, and someone on whom the Prime Minister leaned more and more. The Army accounted for only ‘1/8 of the allied forces – Whereas you rule this gigantic Navy’, she concluded masterfully, ‘which will in the end decide the outcome of the war’.6
She had argued her case well. ‘She has got him tighter than a cleverer woman would have got him,’ Margot Asquith observed in her diary. She still underestimated Clementine but confessed to being fascinated as to what Winston’s wife ‘could do with him’.7 Winston did indeed write to Kitchener, asking whether he had any objection to him having a general talk with French. A (temporarily) placated Kitchener replied that he did not. ‘How right you were,’8 an impressed Winston wrote to Clementine on 26 September 1914 from HMS Adventure,‘at full speed’ on the crossing to France.
This respect did not, however, prevent him from embarking on other reckless escapades before she had the chance to stop him. One notable example was his spur-of-the-moment decision to leave for Antwerp, a strategically important port and, as the stronghold of the King and Queen of the Belgians and their government, the centre of resistance to the Germans. On 2 October, the day the baby was due, news had come in that the battle to hold Antwerp was all but lost, and that the royal couple were now planning to flee the besieged city with their ministers. Winston could not resist the call of romantic heroism in the thought of being sent over to shore up their resolve, and quickly volunteered for the task. Within hours he was on h
is way with his entourage, dressed bizarrely in cloak and yachting cap, and in possession of a fleet of armoured Rolls-Royces.
Not only was Clementine aghast at the danger in which her husband was placing himself (in her view wholly unnecessarily), but she was also concerned by how the thrill of conducting his own mini-war had gone to his head. After just a couple of days in Antwerp, Winston telegraphed Asquith for permission to resign his Cabinet position as First Lord of the Admiralty to take formal charge of British forces in the port. His lust for action met with a ‘Homeric laugh’9 from his colleagues – Asquith called the request a ‘real bit of tragi-comedy’ – and he was permitted to stay only until a professional Army general could relieve him on 7 October. Antwerp in any case fell a few days later, tarring the entire escapade (and therefore Winston) with embarrassing failure.
Clementine was sufficiently astute to see that while his courage was commendable, his conduct in Antwerp had made him vulnerable to accusations of adventuring. She remained troubled by these fears as she went into labour late on the night of 6 October. She gave birth in the early hours of the following morning, not to another boy as she had fervently hoped, but to a red-haired daughter, who was named Sarah Millicent Hermione. Nellie wrote from Mons to congratulate her, but also felt the need to warn her not to ‘neglect Randolph and Diana for the newcomer’.10 In fact, Clementine’s first concern appears to have been Winston’s safe return, which was not until later in the day.
She was worried too about his likely reception, and in this she was not alone. Violet, still taking the closest interest in Winston’s fortunes, also believed that the escapade had done him ‘great’, if ‘undeserved’, harm. Clementine’s cool analysis – albeit coloured by a natural desire to have her husband close by when she was about to give birth – compared tellingly with his dangerous impulsiveness. Just seven weeks after her breakdown in Overstrand, she was now thinking more rationally than Winston. War had helped Clementine to rediscover her sense of purpose – and it was not as a mother. As she much later told her own future daughter-in-law, Pamela Digby, she had ‘decided to give her life totally’ to Winston. She would ‘live for him’11 and could only really be happy when it was clear that he needed her. With her husband – and her country – under attack she had a role, and despite the rival needs of her newborn baby and two other young children, she was not going to let maternal duties hold her back.
First Lady Page 9
