First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  Once Winston was back at work, the management of Lullenden fell to Clementine. Now she saw it at close quarters she was horrified at what she considered the brutality of farming. She disliked the life of constant pregnancy and milking that the cows had to endure, and the slaughter they faced when no longer productive. Meanwhile, in a desperate bid to cut costs she brought in three German prisoners of war to work the fields. Their presence alarmed the neighbours, and with good reason: one even attempted to poison the water supply. She had to send them away, and so the hay crop rotted on the ground, the brambles and thorn bushes rioted and the ditches became clogged with undergrowth and dank water.

  Just caring for the house and gardens cost £450 a year. The farm, which Winston had foreseen as a generator of income, was actually costing even more. Yet he was still swept up by a romantic vision of playing the country gentleman – even if he was never around to see it through. He spent an enormous £1000 on expanding the vegetable garden, improving the cowshed and pigsty and increasing their livestock. He even bought a horse and cart for local trips and to pick up coal from Lingfield station.

  One day, when Clementine was five months pregnant and alone at the reins, the horse bolted at the sight of a steamroller. The cart overturned, throwing her out and shaking her badly. Thoughts of her miscarriage never far from her mind, she was terrified that she would go into premature labour, but happily it was only her knee and the cart itself that were damaged. The incident did nothing to endear the country to her, though. She felt ever more a townie.

  Her cousin Madeleine Whyte rented a cottage nearby for a month to help out, but Clementine – whatever her public demeanour – was in reality succumbing to anxiety and exhaustion. With Winston away so often, she became even more agitated when he neglected to write, failing to disguise her true feelings with vague attempts at humour. ‘I would have enjoyed a letter from you these last days, but I am not fretting or pining for you, but just think you are a little pig. “What can you expect from a pig but a grunt?” . . . But I haven’t even had a grunt from mine.’8 Feeling abandoned, she decided to make contact with an old schoolfriend from Berkhamsted, only to make the haunting discovery that the woman had just died giving birth to twins.

  Clementine had already been frightened to be with child again in the spring of 1918. As even her daughter Mary has noted, it was hardly ‘her moment of choice’.9 As it had last time, pregnancy exhausted her, made her feel neurotic, and threatened to strand her in the country, preventing her from participating (albeit in a supporting role) in Winston’s high-powered and enthralling world. One of a growing number of young women who wanted to take control of their bodies so that they might be able to do more in life than simply produce babies, she urged Winston to read a controversial new booklet entitled Married Love, lent to her by the sympathetic Goonie. Written by the pioneering birth-control campaigner Marie Stopes, and dedicated specifically to husbands, it aimed to ensure that men took their fair share of responsibility for contraception by spelling out the practicalities and benefits. It was a message that Clementine was keen for Winston to take on board. ‘I can’t think why this pamphlet was not written years ago,’10 she told him emphatically, and it appears Winston was sufficiently taken with the notion that he discussed it at a dinner of the Other Club, a male-only political talking shop.

  Contraception at the time was still surprisingly primitive, almost taboo. The main options were withdrawal, the hugely expensive and little-known Dutch cap, or abstinence; none was exactly satisfactory and only one was reliable. It seems, however, that Clementine’s efforts with Winston may have paid off. This was to be her last pregnancy until a point in her life when she was actually ready for another child.

  In the meantime, she despaired at the thought of another baby on the way when she already found her existing children so challenging, Randolph in particular. Since her early excitement at having produced a son, her feelings towards him had cooled, making her doubt her abilities as a mother. Although the children all had loving nicknames, this concealed the fact that she found it difficult to bond with any of them, and even Margot Asquith liked to observe that she had ‘little or no maternal feeling’. Now she feared that she might (like her dead friend) be carrying twins – with all the expense and worry that would entail. She also knew that after ten years, Winston’s father had tired of her mother Jennie and divorce had been under serious discussion. It lingered in the back of her mind that, a decade on from their wedding, she also would be found wanting by her husband; she knew too well how often men exploited their wives’ pregnancies as ‘excuses’ for conducting affairs. Perhaps worst of all was the idea that Winston’s political resurgence and the restrictions imposed by her condition might make her redundant as his counsellor-in-chief.

  It is then a little surprising that she did not abandon her canteen work at this stage. She continued to drive herself extremely hard. One society hostess was amazed that, although obviously worn out, she insisted on leaving a dinner party at 11 p.m. to make her night visits to the factories. But then the canteens were the only part of Clementine’s life that was her own. She knew she was good at her job and thrilled in the praise she received from others. And at the end of 1918, in recognition of her efforts, she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). It was a great honour and gave notice to all those doubters and critics that, given the chance, she could be much more than a powerful man’s ornament.

  While laborious and challenging, the work was of course unpaid, and so did nothing to solve the Churchills’ growing financial crisis. Around the time she found out she was pregnant, they had had to re-let Eccleston Square – to the Labour Party – as they needed the income to meet the bills for Lullenden and Winston’s way of life. Winston was back in the Cabinet but he was not earning as much as before. They could not afford to buy another London home and Cromwell Road was no longer available as it too was let out. If Clementine went down to Lullenden, Winston sometimes spent the night at the Munitions Ministry in the old Metropole Hotel just off Trafalgar Square (now the luxury Corinthia Hotel). For a while, when both were in town, however, the Churchills were reduced to camping out in friends’ spare rooms. And the choice was limited – the Dardanelles had seen to that.

  The Hamiltons were one of the few couples to offer them a roof over their head, at 1 Hyde Park Gardens. The two couples had shared the experience of daily abuse over the Dardanelles, but their relationship was hardly warm. Clementine had of course not rated Hamilton as a commander of the operation and held him partly to blame for the disaster. In return Lady Jean Hamilton was among those who did not know Clementine well and found her rather aloof as a result. She did, however, feel some feminine sympathy for her, as she considered Winston to be an ‘awful, utterly unthinkable’ husband.11

  Clementine normally avoided casual female intimacy, and particularly those maternal exchanges on baby recipes, sleeping patterns – and especially husbands – which some other women find supportive. But when the Churchills came to stay in June 1918, it was quickly clear to Jean Hamilton that Clementine, then four months pregnant, was on the verge of breaking down and in desperate need of sisterly support. Perhaps Lady Jean’s kindness – and her own anguish – persuaded Clementine to open up. In any case, she waited until the two women were alone one evening after dinner before seizing her chance. Knowing that Lady Jean had long tried for children without success (and was on the verge of adopting), she begged her hostess for help. Greatly distressed, she explained how she had neither the money to pay her medical bills nor anywhere safe to give birth (considering Lullenden, which still had no mains water, too rustic and remote). ‘She asked if I’d like to have her baby,’ an astonished Lady Jean recorded in her diary. ‘I said I would.’ Lady Jean even offered to let her give birth at her house, and in return Clementine ‘said if she had twins I would have one’.12

  It was an extraordinary idea and one that begs many questions: even with the expenses of Lullenden, could they re
ally not afford the £25-a-week fee for a nursing home? Was Clementine’s pessimism getting the better of her or was she simply being realistic about their finances? Was it the prospect of twins that she found so overwhelming? In any event, it is at least arguable that this was another crisis when only some sort of outburst – such as her desperate plea for him to take greater care of her after her miscarriage – would force the ever-absent and distracted Winston to take her needs seriously.

  Whatever Clementine’s motives, the incident probably did finally prompt Winston to take action to help his wife. Soon afterwards his aunt Cornelia agreed to lend her house, 3 Tenterden Street, just off Hanover Square, for Clementine’s confinement. The immediate crisis passed and Lady Jean went ahead instead with her original adoption as planned. Aunt Cornelia’s generosity gave Clementine some peace of mind as well as a comfortable home. Moreover, she was able to stay in London and follow the progress of the war, thus making herself useful. Her astute comments on strategy and the need not ‘to waste our men’ as the war finally drew to a close undoubtedly impressed Winston. He was full of details of weaponry and destruction to the enemy, but she had the foresight to look to the future and the need for him to reinvent himself as a man of peace, as well as of battle.

  She often worried that his actions and publicly expressed views gave an impression that he was a lesser man than he really was. So she urged him to spend more time in Britain. ‘Darling do come home and look after what is to be done with the Munition Workers when the fighting really does stop . . . I should like you to be praised as a reconstructive genius as well as a Mustard Gas Fiend, a Tank Juggernaut & a flying Terror.’ She advised him to redeploy the workers into pulling down slums ‘in places like Bethnal Green, Newcastle, Glasgow [and] Leeds’ and replacing them with ‘lovely garden cities’.13 She was particularly keen to make sure that the women who had contributed so much towards the war effort would not now be abandoned but perhaps trained to make the furniture for these dwellings. With his public image at the forefront of her mind as ever, she perceived the need for Winston to rebadge himself a social reformer as of old and thus further diminish the stain of the Dardanelles on his record.

  Winston too was looking forward. Certainly, he had been struck by the role played by women during the war, recognising that it would change Clementine’s and other women’s lives. ‘I think you will find real scope in the new world opening out to women, & find interests wh will enrich yr life.’14 He was prepared to go only so far on female emancipation, however. There were male fortresses that should not be breached. In 1919, when Nancy Astor became the first woman to sit as an MP, she was blanked by men she had known for years, including Winston.15 When she asked him why he had been so rude he retorted: ‘Because I find a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom, when I had nothing with which to defend myself, not even a sponge.’

  The world outside, though, had changed for ever. Women had called off their suffrage protests during the war, depriving many former opponents of their chief objection to the female vote. True, many who had taken on tough, demanding and relatively well-paid jobs were to lose them again when the troops returned from the Front. But total war had brought about a social revolution. British society was never to be quite so unequal again and women, including Clementine, were no longer seen as hysterical weaklings. They led more of their lives outside the home than ever before; they were more visible and more demanding of respect.

  Earlier in the war, the Speaker of the House of Commons, James William Lowther, had chaired a conference on electoral reform that had recommended limited women’s suffrage. The result in early 1918 was the Representation of the People Act, which granted the vote to property-owning women over thirty such as Clementine. The majority of MPs – 385 to 55 – supported the legislation as recognition of women’s contribution to the war effort.

  This limited measure was not, however, the sole area of female advance. Women’s fashions were also becoming more liberating. The elaborate corseted outfits of the Edwardian era – perfected by the likes of Jennie – were out. Bras were becoming commonplace, and easier, looser and often cheaper and more practical outfits could be worn on top of them. A certain androgyny was in vogue, and Clementine’s slender, athletic figure, and taste for the unadorned, was to be right on trend.

  *

  By the autumn of 1918, when Clementine was enduring the final months of her pregnancy, it was clear that victory was in sight. Under the ‘Hundred Days Offensive’ the Allies were gradually pushing the Germans out of France and retaking parts of Belgium. With the rapidly improving military news, Clementine began to think more of family and the future and there are hints of her urging Winston himself to plan for a happier, more peaceful life.

  War had dominated the Churchills’ lives for more than four years. It had tested their marriage and their sanity. It had made them social and political pariahs. And it had driven them to virtual bankruptcy. But by its end Winston had proven himself a resourceful, innovative and driven minister, and had won the respect of many of his critics, not least by his courage in volunteering to fight at the Front. His reputation had undergone a remarkable recovery and his life and career were once again full of promise. Clementine had also done much to prove her worth, even to her most persistent detractors. Even though the birth of their fourth child was just days away, Clementine wanted badly to be with him when the glorious moment of the Armistice finally came. So, minutes before eleven o’clock on Monday 11 November, she ran excitedly into his office off Trafalgar Square.

  Outside there was a strange but expectant silence. Then, just as they heard the strokes of Big Ben, they saw through the windows a solitary office girl come down into the street. Soon there were hundreds pouring out of doors or leaning out of windows, cheering and waving. Within minutes the roads were full of smiling faces. Elated by the scene, Winston ordered a car, and as he and Clementine climbed inside they were surrounded by well-wishers, some standing on the running boards as the vehicle inched its way through the crowd.

  Slowly the car crept along Whitehall to Downing Street, where they intended to offer their congratulations to Lloyd George. It had been so long since Winston and Clementine had been cheered rather than booed – now at last they were experiencing together the joy of being hailed as heroes.

  Chapter Six

  Loss Unimaginable

  1918–22

  Four days later Clementine gave birth to a single red-haired girl, named Marigold but quickly known within the family as Duckadilly. The arrivals of Sarah and Marigold thus respectively marked the beginning and end of the Great War, and Randolph’s dominant position as the only son remained unchallenged. Despite the plush surroundings of Tenterden Street, and even without the feared complications of twins, it was a difficult delivery, and mother and baby both suffered.

  Marigold was just ten days old when Parliament was dissolved and a new election announced. Fortunately, for once, Clementine was not dragooned into electioneering. She was not really needed; the result was all but a foregone conclusion. Triumphant in war, Lloyd George’s coalition secured a massive victory at the polls. For all his bellicose reputation, Winston actually swam against the tide in speaking out against calls for harsh treatment of Germany, making Clementine very proud of what she considered a true manifestation of his liberal beliefs. But his stance against ‘Hang the Kaiser’ sentiments and vengeful demands for enormous reparations was hardly designed to please a victorious but war-shattered nation. He won back his seat in Dundee, but the Churchills once again felt the chill of disapproval.

  Now in his mid-forties, Winston was soon busy plotting the next step in his career. He fancied a return to the Admiralty – a backwards step but one that would solve the family’s perennial housing problems and, perhaps, help lay to rest the ghost of the Dardanelles. It is safe to presume that Clementine had had more than her fill of the Navy, however, and saw the folly in such a move. After a lavish Chri
stmas at Blenheim – their first with Sunny for many years, and one that heralded a rapprochement between the cousins – Winston in fact started work in January 1919 at the War Office. Lloyd George, now mostly away at the peace negotiations in Paris, had made him both Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air. His job ostensibly involved, in the first instance, demobilising millions of troops and preventing a collapse of morale, even mutiny, during the long wait to go home.

  In the meantime, Winston allowed himself to relax and enjoy the splendours of Blenheim at Yuletide. Clementine endured the overwhelmingly Churchillian celebrations for Winston’s sake, but she never enjoyed them as he did. Blenheim still offended her Liberal sensibility. The staff were numerous but invisible, and behind the forbidding splendour there was an overwhelming air of sadness. During another such Christmas a housemaid had gone mad, running through the staterooms screaming. Eventually she was cornered by four burly footmen, and that night dispatched to a lunatic asylum. On an even earlier occasion, the butler had drowned himself in an ornamental pond.

  Winston was oblivious, however, to Clementine’s discomfort. He was particularly delighted that F.E. Smith was also a guest; his old friend was the ideal sparring partner for the late-night political discussions that Winston so adored. With F.E. and his brother Jack, Winston could play at soldiering again, just as he had done as a child. He would line up the children in opposing ‘armies’ of French and English soldiers for a series of mock battles in the great hall. The rules were obscure except to Winston and Jack, and no one enjoyed them as passionately as the brothers themselves. Perhaps only Randolph joined them in the rougher elements of the game.