By the time Clementine was finally free from sickroom duties and fit to travel, Winston had already returned to London after nearly a fortnight away. She replaced him out in Cannes and it was now that Clementine’s suspicions were confirmed: she was pregnant again. Seeking consolation following the loss of Marigold, it seems that she had decided at last to try for another child. But she did not let her condition stop her from trying her utmost on the tennis court. She even won the mixed doubles handicap in the Cannes lawn tennis tournament. She returned to London in the spring revivified, but her extended holiday had done nothing to strengthen her maternal ties with her children, or to remedy their problems. Randolph was becoming increasingly obstreperous, Diana nervy and insecure, and Sarah still suffering from glandular tuberculosis.
Nor had Winston’s work at the Colonial Office been free of trouble. The devolution of powers to an Irish assembly had for decades been arguably the British government’s most pressing colonial issue. A Home Rule Bill had finally been passed by Parliament in 1914 but had never come into force due to the war. In response, radical Irish republicans had formed a volunteer paramilitary force and staged the failed Easter Uprising in 1916. The fiercely nationalist political party, Sinn Fein, had gone on to win a majority of the Irish seats in the 1918 general election and within a matter of weeks they had proclaimed an Irish Republic. A war of independence ensued.
The savage treatment of the nationalists by British forces – most notably the hated Black and Tans – had done nothing to suppress the sporadic violence in Ireland, a problem in which Clementine took a great interest. The solution was by no means simple – the massive support for Sinn Fein in the south was balanced by that for the Unionists in the north. Nevertheless, Clementine felt sympathy for the Catholics since they had helped the Churchills escape loyalist mobs during their trip to Belfast in 1912. She consequently pleaded with Winston to ensure ‘some sort of justice’ in Ireland, and to draw back from ‘iron-fisted’ or ‘Hunnish’ treatment of the Irish rebels, urging him to recognise that in their place he would not be cowed by harsh or vindictive British retaliation. And it appears that her pleas for moderation may well have softened his approach. He even invited Michael Collins, a key Sinn Fein negotiator, to his home in Sussex Square and devoted much of the second half of 1921 to Irish affairs. The resultant truce was followed by a treaty which, approved by the Dáil (the lower house of the Irish parliament) in January 1922, would eventually lead to independence for southern Ireland.
Yet this forward step did not halt the Irish Republican Army’s murder spree. When Sir Henry Wilson MP, security adviser to the Northern Ireland government, was assassinated on his front doorstep in London in June 1922, a hit list was found of other targets. Winston’s name led it and he was instantly assigned a security detail. When Randolph and Diana returned from roller-skating in Holland Park shortly afterwards they found the house surrounded by police, and several more conducting a thorough search inside. Winston announced he would sleep in the attic and erected a metal shield in front of the door. He stayed there until dawn clutching a revolver, and slept there every night for months, whereas the heavily pregnant Clementine remained as normal in her bed without protection of any sort.
In mid-August 1922, Winston decamped to the Duke of Westminster’s chateau near Biarritz. So it was that Clementine found herself without her husband for most of the last weeks of her final pregnancy. For all his sentimentality about the ‘kittens’, Winston was not one to endure the waiting and hard graft of labour and birth.
Clementine sought respite at Frinton-on-Sea on the Essex coast; this small town, with a grassy seafront and firm golden sand, had become fashionable with Londoners and was one of her favourite destinations for a bucket-and-spade holiday with the children. She chose to rent a large modern house called Maryland for the considerable sum of forty-five guineas a week (some £2300 today). It was near a smart tennis club, and although her condition stopped her playing, she entered Randolph and Diana to represent her. Alas, they had not inherited their mother’s application or talent and they won the booby prize for coming last. Ignoring their growing hatred of the sport, Clementine insisted they continue to play regularly. Giving up was not an option. All that had happened rendered success ever more essential. There were to be no excuses, no complaints, just the determination to carry on with life – however challenging it became.
‘I’m getting very stationary & crawl even to the beach with difficulty. I long for it to be over,’ she told Winston that summer. ‘It has seemed a very long nine months.’ Exactly a year had passed since Marigold had started to fade, and Clementine wrote to Winston to remind him of the anniversary of her death. He replied: ‘I think a gt deal of the coming kitten & about you my sweet pet. I feel it will enrich yr life and brighten our home to have the nursery started again. I pray God to watch over us all.’22 Only a few days later he wrote again to reassure Clementine that ‘yes’, he had been thinking of the loss of Marigold, but that most of all he had been thinking of her.
In September Winston and Clementine were reunited in London for the birth. Duckadilly could never be replaced, let alone forgotten, but the new baby, ‘Mary the mouse’, would help Clementine to ease the pain. She arrived safely early on the morning of 15 September, to much celebration. Winston took advantage of the occasion. It was the one and only time in their marriage that he would betray her trust.
Chapter Seven
A Chandelier’s Life and Sparkle
1922–29
As he hurtled down Kentish lanes in the family Rolls, Winston chatted about a property he was thinking of buying. The three elder children were in the back enjoying a ‘mystery’ car ride, while Clementine remained at home recovering from giving birth. For Randolph, Sarah and Diana, it was a rare few hours alone with their father and they were all patently excited.
Presently, twenty-five miles outside London, he pulled up outside a large empty house, which seven-year-old Sarah at first thought ‘wildly overgrown’ and ‘untidy’. True, the house was smothered by ivy, but at the rear it commanded views right over the Weald of Kent towards the South Downs. Grassy slopes tumbled down to a secret valley with a lake fed by a busy little stream, and trees and shrubs offered tantalising opportunities for hide-and-seek. Soon Sarah felt quite ‘delirious’, and when Winston asked his children, ‘Do you like it?’ all three exclaimed, ‘Oh do buy it!’ Winston offered merely ‘Well, I’m not sure . . .’1
In truth, Chartwell was already his. He told them so just as they were pulling into Parliament Square that evening. They were, of course, eager to share the news with their mother, but if Winston were hoping the children’s enthusiasm would bring Clementine round he was mistaken. She was appalled and deeply hurt. Later she was to say that this was the only time in their marriage that Winston was less than candid with her.
Since the Gower windfall, Winston and Clementine had both been longing for another ‘country basket’, but the Lullenden experience had taught her bitter lessons on the fortune-crunching qualities of large unmodernised properties. She had stated plainly her fear that their Irish inheritance would be wiped out by a foolish indulgence and that they would again be reduced to skating on financial thin ice. And so she had set her heart on somewhere manageable. Winston, true to form, had always harboured more grandiose notions. He had spotted Chartwell – a former foundling house near Westerham dating back to the reign of Henry VIII – the previous year. The building itself was ugly, but Winston had been seduced by its seclusion and quintessentially English views.
Clementine, who had been staying nearby at a tennis party, had come over to view the house and was similarly entranced by its elevated position, which at a peak of 650 feet above sea level she compared to flying in a plane. Doubts soon set in, though. To the south lay that lovely vista, but on the other sides were a steep wooded bank and hordes of light-sucking rhododendrons and laurels. Even worse, the rhododendrons bore purple flowers, a colour she detested. The house itself, m
oreover, had suffered the most ponderous of Victorian makeovers. Downstairs the rooms were small, dark and mostly faced away from the view, and the upstairs was infested with earwigs. Ravaged by damp, it would be ruinous to heat. So that, she had thought, was the end of it.
Winston had allowed her to continue in this belief, while behind her back he negotiated a price (ultimately £5000, equivalent to about £210,000 today) for both the house and the surrounding eighty acres. He was accustomed, as Clementine wryly observed, to living his life exactly as he pleased; and here was another occasion when his unbounded ego blinded him not only to her greater wisdom but also to reality. Chartwell would become the Churchills’ principal residence for forty years – and their only long-term home – just as Winston had intended. But in that time it would drain their finances and sap her energy. From the very beginning she would escape whenever she could.
Nevertheless, Clementine accepted she was its new chatelaine with grace, if not enthusiasm, and set about transforming it into a haven. She would at least be granted her rose garden, and he would have fun damming the spring to create three lakes (thus topping the two at Lloyd George’s Surrey estate near the village of Churt). Clementine too competed with the Prime Minister, in her case over apples: each sent their rival ‘samples’ of the ‘goodness’ of their orchard, daring the other to concede the superiority of its fruit. Meanwhile, a new east wing was to be built, with a top-floor bedroom for her that (perhaps tactically on Winston’s part) was double the size of his. Directly below would be an elegant drawing room. And the floor beneath that would feature a large dining room with a line of arched French windows looking onto the gardens, as well as sisal matting and bleached oak furniture that still looks modern today. Visitors considered that this prominent wing lent the house the appearance of a large, brown galleon. Imposing, yes, but hardly stylish in the manner of, say, a Georgian rectory.
In September 1922, though, this was all to come. To realise their dream ‘country basket’, the Churchills first needed an architect. Unfortunately, the obvious contender, Edwin Lutyens, was unavailable. Instead they hired Lloyd George’s favourite, Philip Tilden, who not only shared Clementine’s concerns but quickly discovered dry rot. As a result, the works would eventually cost twice the original estimate and take eighteen months to complete.
The bills started to mount – along with Clementine’s anxieties – at the same time as the coalition government of which Winston was a member was falling apart. Conservative backbenchers were in rebellion against Lloyd George, deeming him incapable of curbing the mounting electoral threat from the Labour Party (whose support had been boosted by the economic downturn) or of solving the intractable unrest in Ireland. But on 19 October 1922, just days before a general election was called, Winston was rushed into theatre to have his appendix removed. Back then this was no minor operation and under doctors’ orders he was put out of action in a nursing home until mid-November.
It was an era when well-heeled new mothers were expected to rest for months. But now, a mere five weeks after giving birth, Clementine found herself assuming Winston’s place on the stump once again. Taking Mary – ‘an unbaptised infant’, as the Dundee Courier acidly recorded – she made the five-hundred-mile trip to his Scottish constituency for what was to be a bitter campaign. Her pluck garnered little sympathy from the constituents, many of whom were angered by what they saw as Winston’s warmongering, the government’s failure to help the unemployed and brutal repression of the Irish. At the hustings she was met by jeering crowds waving red flags and green IRA banners, while on one occasion someone caused a near riot in a hall where she was speaking by throwing sneezing powder into the audience.
Newly enfranchised women, as Clementine had privately predicted to Winston, were particularly hostile. Some even spat at her, although one onlooker described her ‘bearing’ under fire as ‘magnificent – like an aristocrat going to the guillotine in a tumbril’.2 On reflection, it may have been wiser if the ever-elegant Clementine had dressed down a little and not worn pearls, but no one could fault her courage.
She represented Winston faithfully, despite her private belief that his virulent anti-Labour line was ill-judged. A more heartfelt Liberal than her husband, she was genuinely moved by the deprivation she witnessed on Tayside and could see the appeal the Labour Party held for those who had so little. Winston’s ‘Smash the Socialists’ sentiments, as she referred to them, captured few votes while duly positioning him as the Left’s natural bogeyman. Yet he continued to ignore her pleas to take ‘a less hostile and negative’ attitude. As always in public, she defended him, trying in vain to present him as a ‘Cherub Peace Maker’ with ‘little fluffy wings round your chubby face’,3 but as she stood defiantly next to him at the count – he had risen from his sick bed to be present – her judgment was confirmed: he came an inglorious fourth, behind a Scottish Prohibitionist, Labour and even another Liberal candidate.
The 1922 election was, in fact, a pivotal point in the history of the country, as well as in Winston’s career: for the first time Labour won more votes and seats than the two wings of the now split Liberal Party put together, although it was still the Tories who formed the new government. Winston now lost patience with the Liberals’ leftward drift (and growing electoral impotence against Labour), and consequently soon found himself ‘without an office, without a seat, without a Party, and without an appendix’, as he drily observed. Being out of Parliament, where he had sat almost continuously since 1900, was to prove an ordeal that would tax his spirits and test his marriage for the next two years. Henceforth the Churchills’ politics were to pull ever further apart.
With builders at work on Chartwell and nothing to detain them in London, Winston and Clementine set off to the south of France. For the next six months, they rented a villa called Rêve d’Or in the wooded district of La Croix des Gardes above Cannes. Before the days of easy flights to the Caribbean, well-heeled Brits would congregate on the Riviera to escape the worst of the winter, transplanting the London social whirl to the Continent. Consuelo, Sunny’s former wife (now married to the Frenchman Jacques Balsan), wintered not far away at Lou Seuil, in what Clementine wistfully described as a ‘scented nest’; a light-filled, elegant and comfortable house surrounded by umbrella pines and mimosas. These months away from everyday politics were in many ways idyllic: Clementine was able to practise her tennis, Winston could paint, they celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday in style and he gave her a diamond brooch. Under the Riviera sun, that extraordinary Churchillian energy quickly returned, as did his appetite for work. Winston wrote the first volume of The World Crisis (which was serialised by The Times, netting him £20,000).The house was always bustling; not only did servants accompany them everywhere, but Winston’s secretary and researcher were present too. This may have been one of the longest periods they spent together in their marriage, but Winston and Clementine were still rarely alone.
Meanwhile, Chartwell was proving to be the money pit Clementine had feared. Sitting on the Boulevard du Soleil in Cannes, she tried to impose control on the works from afar by sending detailed written instructions. The oscillation between Winston’s ambitious whims and her paring back resulted in numerous flashpoints. Tilden also annoyed her with what she saw as unnecessarily fancy interior doors, firebacks and a weathervane. He even ordered, without consultation, a costly kitchen range (although admittedly the monogrammed copper saucepans were her indulgence).4 Just as she had at Admiralty House, she was constantly fighting to keep staff and other costs to a minimum. However grand a lifestyle her husband desired, they would have to get by, she decreed, with two housemaids at most.
When they returned at last from France, in mid-May 1923, Chartwell was still a mud-splattered building site. For a year they were obliged to rent a place nearby, putting further strain on their creaking finances. Winston begged his wife ‘not to worry about money or to feel insecure’, but he also had a confession to make. From the safe distance of Bayonne harbour in sou
th-west France, where he was luxuriating on the Duke of Westminster’s four-masted yacht, he wrote to her back in England with bad news. On top of the £5000 purchase price, he had already sunk three times that sum into the renovations, with no end in sight. Even complete the house was unlikely to be worth more than £15,000 (later, after the rebuilding bill had ballooned to £19,000, it was valued at less than £12,000), yet Winston seemed unconcerned. Chartwell was no Blenheim, of course, but he nonetheless viewed it as a dynastic seat, one that should never be sold and would eventually pass to Randolph. Clementine much preferred the culture and people of London, but they could no longer afford, even with the Irish inheritance, to keep two large residences. Her beloved Sussex Square would have to go. She had not wanted Chartwell, or the crushing cost of it, but she was now effectively trapped.
When the Churchills finally moved into the house, on Maundy Thursday 1924, Clementine was absent, having chosen to visit her mother in Dieppe. Normally she took solo charge of domestic arrangements; on the occasion of their move into Sussex Square, for instance, Winston had excused himself in favour of a luxurious boar-hunting excursion to France. This time it was she who was running away. Removing herself was always her most powerful weapon. Realising he had won the war but lost the final battle, Winston crafted a letter designed to wear her down and bring her back. First he enthused about how the children had worked ‘like blacks’ – as he put it in the language of the day – to help him. Next he claimed to be over-indulging – ‘I drink champagne at meals & buckets of claret and soda in between’. He then related how her bedroom was now a ‘magnificent aerial bower’ and that ‘genial weather’ was bringing the garden into glorious bud. He rounded off with:
First Lady Page 18
