Clementine rather disapproved of such boisterous antics – as well as the louche atmosphere at Blenheim since Sunny’s marriage to Consuelo had collapsed. She was also nervous about the future. Although his new hybrid job came with a handy £5000 a year (Cabinet pay had been restored to its pre-war levels), her antennae had already detected discontent about Winston’s bagging of two senior positions. The Daily Mail, that continuous critic, had dubbed the arrangement ‘grotesque’. It would be better to give up the ‘Air’ and focus on the War Office, she suggested, as such an act would be interpreted as a ‘sign of real strength . . . After all you want to be a statesman not a juggler.’1 He ignored her advice – on this occasion to his credit. Although he failed to drive it through at the time, Winston rightly saw the sense in establishing a single Ministry of Defence to encompass all the armed forces and his double appointment was a step towards its creation. Clementine’s unfailing eye for Winston’s own best interests could sometimes blind her to the bigger picture.
As before, his many duties frequently took him away to France and elsewhere, leaving Clementine behind. On one of these trips he bumped into the fiancée of his cousin Reggie Fellowes – the man-eating twenty-nine-year-old divorcée Daisy Decazes de Glücksbierg, beautiful daughter of a duke and heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune. She invited Winston to her room for afternoon tea to meet her ‘little child’ – and in the paternal glow following Marigold’s arrival he agreed. But upon turning up, he discovered the ‘child’ was Daisy, lying naked on a tiger skin spread over a chaise longue. When later relating the incident to Clementine, Winston insisted he had left immediately, and she appears to have been surprisingly relaxed about the encounter – perhaps because she believed such lack of subtlety rarely succeeded with her husband. In later life she even enjoyed repeating the tale to others.2
She was, however, extremely put out by his frequent absences. Perhaps that was why she ‘forgot’ their eleventh wedding anniversary in 1919. Given her fastidiousness in other matters, there must be a suspicion that she chose to overlook the day as a protest. It is likely, though, that her conscience was pricked – or her anger abated – by a loving letter from Winston that arrived on her breakfast tray that morning. Its contents had made her ‘very happy’. ‘I woke up and remembered suddenly the importance of the day,’ she wrote to him afterwards. ‘I love to feel that I am a comfort in your rather tumultuous life.’ The most revealing passage in her note offers an insight into what it was that kept her in such a challenging marriage: ‘My Darling, you have been the great event in [my life]. You took me from the straitened little by-path I was treading and took me with you into the life & colour & jostle of the high-way.’3 But in what was also surely another plea for him to invest more in their relationship, now that the war was over and she found herself in her mid-thirties, she went on: ‘How sad it is that Time slips along so fast. Eleven years more & we shall be quite middle-aged.’
Winston had also been in France in March 1919 when their Scottish nanny, Isabelle, had been struck by the influenza epidemic that killed 150,000 people in England alone during the winter of 1918–19. Delirious with fever, Isabelle had grabbed Marigold to take with her to her bed and Clementine had had to struggle to retrieve her child from the dying girl’s arms. Nor could she summon a doctor, as all were too busy with other cases. Sick with the flu herself, Clementine tried to nurse Isabelle through the night, but in the small hours the poor girl succumbed. Clementine was terrified that the tiny Marigold might have caught the disease too, and spent several anxious days watching to see whether the tell-tale symptoms emerged. Happily, none did, but even during the height of the crisis, with her husband’s interests always to the fore, Clementine had instructed Winston not to return home until she and the entire household were free of infection.
Winston was in any case immersed in his work and needed little persuasion to avoid family dramas. He had been appointed War Secretary after the great conflict had ended, of course, and some of his critics suspected he was spoiling to prove himself elsewhere. Looking east, Winston had been deeply troubled by the 1917 Russian Revolution and was implacably opposed to the Communist Bolsheviks. His romantic attachment to kings led him to view Tsar Nicholas II, who had been executed by the Bolsheviks, as a tragic hero, and the revolutionaries’ leader, Vladimir Lenin, as a barbarian.
The rest of Europe, sick of bloodshed and devastated by war, lacked both the resources and the will to intervene and simply hoped the Russians might settle their differences themselves. But now that the Germans were defeated, the Bolsheviks’ proclamation of worldwide revolution aroused Winston’s natural aggression. ‘Kiss the Hun and Kill the Bolshie’ – avoid excessive punishment of Germany but use force against the Russian Reds – was how he described his viewpoint to Violet. It was not, however, a sentiment shared by the majority of his compatriots, who, after such a long war of attrition, were repelled by the idea of more slaughter but also wanted the ‘Hun’ to be taught a sharp lesson. At the Paris peace conference, Lloyd George consequently signed up to the punitive measures against Germany under the Treaty of Versailles, including the imposition of massive reparations and the surrender of a tenth of the country’s pre-war territory and all its overseas possessions.
With the Prime Minister preoccupied elsewhere, Winston was meanwhile given a largely free hand at home. He set about launching a dogged campaign in Parliament, the Cabinet and the press in favour of intervention on behalf of the Communists’ enemies, the White Russians. He was convinced the British public would support him as soon as they were made aware of the ‘foul baboonery’ of Bolshevik atrocities. As one historian has noted, this was just one of many subjects in his life on which Winston sounded ‘like a stuck record, more likely to turn listeners off than on’.4 He began providing the White Russian General Denikin with ‘surplus’ British war materiel, and repeatedly lobbied Lloyd George and even the Americans to support large-scale and protracted military support for the anti-revolutionaries. Incredibly, by mid-1919 Britain was on the brink of another war.
Tensions continued to mount over the next few months, but chaos among the White Russians and fading support for Winston at home prevented a full escalation of hostilities. Indeed, while newspapers were decrying MR CHURCHILL’S PRIVATE WAR, some on the Left were calling for him to be tried for treason for intervening against the Reds without public support or political approval. Clementine soon found herself facing the sound of angry mobs chanting ‘Arrest Churchill!’
To avoid any further military imbroglios, in 1921 Winston was extracted from the War Office (although not before he had been embarrassed by the discovery that his beautiful cousin, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, had been conducting an affair in Moscow with another Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky). An exasperated Lloyd George moved him to the Colonial Office, a reverse step back to the department that he had dominated at the beginning of his ministerial career. Winston, who had hoped to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, was bitterly disappointed by this turn of events, and by Lloyd George’s decision to entrust the Treasury instead to the less glamorous Sir Robert Horne (yet more evidence, in Clementine’s eyes, of the Prime Minister’s untrustworthiness). For all of his wife’s efforts to persuade Winston to recast himself as an advocate for peace, he had wilfully chosen a course that led him to be repainted as a warmonger. It was a perception that would prove almost impossible to change and was, for a long time, disastrous.
In early 1919 the Churchills were still without a permanent London home or the means to procure one. House prices had soared since the war, and unlike the Admiralty, neither the War Office nor Winston’s later appointment as Colonial Secretary brought with them official residences. With a newborn baby and three other small children, Clementine endured a merry-go-round of temporary and often unsuitable abodes mostly rented from friends or extended family for just two or three months at a time. In desperation, she even offered her impoverished younger sister four guineas a week to move out of her red-
brick house at 15 Pimlico Road, although Nellie seems to have rejected the idea. Clementine soon realised that the only way to restore the family finances was to get shot of Lullenden, now little used anyway, particularly in winter.
In March, the Churchills invited Sir Ian and Lady Jean Hamilton to the country for Sunday lunch, having already hinted to them that they were thinking of selling. Perhaps they were lucky with the weather – Lullenden was rather seductive in the spring sunshine – or maybe Winston and Clementine were simply at their most beguiling as hosts. In any event, the Hamiltons decided to rent the house, even though Winston quoted an outrageous £500 a year, and were subsequently induced to buy it; falling victim once again to a certain sharp persuasiveness, they handed over £9800 for the property and a small number of wildly overpriced livestock. (Sir Ian himself later admitted that its actual worth was closer to £3000.)5
The Hamiltons’ largesse, or perhaps gullibility, was the Churchills’ gain. With a great deal of luck, they would emerge from the Lullenden experiment having more or less broken even. But it had brought home to Clementine the folly of trying to live like a country squire without the matching income. By contrast, Winston seems not to have given their narrow escape from ruin much thought. Meanwhile, the sale, due to complete on 30 September 1919, would leave them without a roof over their heads. The search for a home in London appropriately grand for Winston and affordable for Clementine became ever more frantic.
Finally, in July they found a huge early Victorian property at 2 Hyde Park Street. It offered a respectable address and wonderful views across the park at an astonishingly low price that included a useful mews house at the back. The Churchills made an offer of £2300 for the lease and were so delighted with what seemed to be a bargain that they did not at first bother with a structural survey. Only in August, when the building’s state of health was thoroughly inspected, did the truth emerge. The whole building needed a huge amount of expensive and time-consuming work, well beyond what they could ever afford. In its current state, it was simply uninhabitable.
They tried hastily to backtrack but, alas, too late. The vendor, Lord Wellesley, the future seventh Duke of Wellington, threatened to sue if they did not proceed with the deal. Thanks to a mixture of naivety and Winston’s distaste for anything less than the best, the couple and their four children were now facing both homelessness and financial ruin. They could not afford to make the house safe, but nor could they pull out. Clementine’s natural hopes of finding somewhere secure to raise her family seemed to have been permanently dashed and all the insecurities of her childhood revisited her. Knowing that the family was now perilously close to having nowhere to go, she tried desperately to delay the sale of Lullenden, while also writing begging letters to London friends, asking to be put up in the capital for a few days at a time.
The Churchills’ lawyers were meanwhile still battling with Lord Wellesley over the frighteningly high cost of the repairs.6 It only exacerbated their parlous financial position when, at the end of the year, they agreed to buy another smaller home (now demolished) at 2 Sussex Square for around £7000. As if oblivious to Clementine’s mounting distress, incredibly Winston was also instructing agents (fortunately without success) to find him yet another ‘country basket’ in his favoured county of Kent. The crisis highlighted the difference between them: Clementine struggled to see a way out; Winston simply assumed there would be one. And at the eleventh hour, in January 1920, salvation duly arrived, in the form of their faithful benefactor Sir Ernest Cassel (who appears to have acted out of little more than generosity of spirit, loneliness and a certain political sympathy). He agreed to buy the Hyde Park Street lease from them for the original asking price while he looked for a long-term buyer. For the first time – but by no means the last – the Churchills had been bailed out by generous friends.7
In the spring of 1920, Winston took himself off with a group of other men for the south of France – the first in a pattern of separate vacations that would persist for the rest of their marriage. No expense was spared; as one historian put it, Winston liked to ‘travel in comfort and arrive in luxury’.8 He left Clementine behind to supervise the children’s school holidays and prepare Randolph for Sandroyd, a preparatory boarding school near Cobham in Surrey. Remembering how much she had enjoyed her own schooldays at Berkhamsted, she also took the relatively unusual step for her class at the time of enrolling her elder daughters Diana and Sarah at Notting Hill High.
Not until January 1921 – shortly after Clementine’s grandmother, Lady Airlie, died aged ninety – would she and Winston finally take their first holiday together since before the outbreak of the war. True, Clementine had never really loved her stern grandmother, but the old Countess’s death revived painful memories of her youth. Her escape with Winston a few days later to a hotel in Nice therefore came as a welcome tonic. By this point, although only thirty-six, she was neither physically nor emotionally robust and she increasingly questioned whether she had enough energy or strength to sustain her highly stressful lifestyle.
Yet even this was not to be an intimate break alone. They were joining Cassel and his granddaughter Edwina, the future Lady Mountbatten, and had barely unpacked their suitcases before Winston was called back to London. Perhaps these separations helped to keep their relationship fresh; Clementine certainly tried to adopt a philosophical approach when they occurred. But they also sometimes left her feeling isolated, even abandoned, and there are hints that she began to harbour doubts about the viability of her marriage at this point. Winston was so often engrossed in his work, but without a war there no longer seemed a need for her to help him. This was not what she had had in mind for their life together in peacetime.
Time, as she had written to him, was slipping by so fast and she was still struggling to reconcile herself to the fact that she was now approaching middle age. So, when Winston went back to London, Clementine stayed on to visit Lady Essex at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Freed of domestic or maternal duties – even of advising Winston – she played a great deal of tennis, having over the years become a notable amateur player. Winston became worried that her innate competitiveness would lead her to play too much and reverse any improvements in her health. He was particularly concerned, he admitted candidly, because he wanted her to help in the forthcoming election. ‘You will want to be fit for the political fights that are drawing near,’ he informed her.9 And in a later letter: ‘Do stay until you are really re-equipped to fight. I shall need you very much . . . you can render me enormous help.’10 She was so enjoying herself, however, that she ignored his pleas to take it easy and entered several prestigious amateur tournaments. It was exhilarating to feel free and young again, and she extended her stay still further. She even, uncharacteristically, unwound enough to allow herself a little flutter at the casinos, which were still illegal back in Britain.
Meanwhile, Winston was left in charge of the children. He visited Randolph a couple of times at Sandroyd (where the headmaster described the boy as ‘combative’), but sent Diana and Sarah to the seaside at Broadstairs with a maid to recover from a series of coughs and colds. Marigold, now nearly two and a half, was at home with Winston in London as he liked to have at least one ‘kitten’ in residence to brighten up the house. A merry little heartbreaker, she loved to run around the dining room, her face bright with laughter. Marigold’s other party trick was to sing the popular song ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’. She had a ‘sweet, true little voice’, as a member of the family described it, but was unusually prone to sore throats, which in the days before antibiotics were taken far more seriously. Infections were difficult to treat once they had taken hold. On at least one occasion during Clementine’s absence, Winston was sufficiently worried to call in the doctor.11
Winston also had news of another sort for his absent wife. At the end of January, a distant cousin was killed in a railway accident and as he was childless his Irish estate, known as Garron Tower, and a large pile of cash, were passed on to Winston
. This unexpected windfall had the potential to net him some £4000 a year, almost as much as the salary he received as a minister. Winston had long been supplementing the family budget with prolific newspaper and magazine articles – part of every holiday would be devoted to writing thousands of words in the face of impending deadlines – but now he could afford to be more choosy, perhaps turning down what Clementine considered to be unsuitably ‘trivial’ or ‘pot-boiler’ commissions that she feared might undermine his public standing, and his chances of high office. Even she, constitutionally insecure about their finances, now looked forward to a ‘carefree’ future. While Winston promptly celebrated by rushing out to buy a Rolls-Royce cabriolet, Clementine exulted in the security of knowing that bills could be paid; a delicious feeling she compared to ‘floating in a bath of cream’.
Characteristically, the Churchills also shared their good fortune with the impoverished Nellie, whose husband Bertram Romilly had been wounded in the war, leaving her to run their household and raise two small children on a modest disability pension. They lent her £500 to open a hat shop, while also giving Lady Blanche an additional income of £100 a year.
Winston’s appointment as Colonial Secretary on 13 February 1921 brought, too, the prospect of much exciting travel. One of the first trips involved a conference on Middle Eastern affairs in Cairo the following month and (perhaps aware of his wife’s restlessness) he suggested Clementine join him on board ship straight from her extended holiday in the south of France. She was thrilled at her first chance to accompany Winston on official business abroad and was ‘living in blissful contemplation’, she wrote to him, of ‘our smooth and care-free future’ without money worries.12 Before departing on their adventure, Winston made sure to summon Diana and Sarah back from the seaside to say goodbye and visited Randolph again at school. He disliked leaving them all for long stretches, but Clementine seemed undeterred by the fact that she had now not seen her children for nigh on two months. At least Jennie was on hand to keep an eye on them, reporting back that they were all ‘great darlings’.
First Lady Page 16
