Only one thing lack these banks of green –
The Pussy Cat who is their Queen.
By this stage in their marriage, Winston rarely reproached his wife – he knew it to be counter-productive – and he was genuinely anxious when she was displeased. Her antipathy to Chartwell disappointed him and her absence wounded him (although less so when the holiday was his). His physical comfort was provided by a host of staff, but only Clementine’s presence engendered deeper feelings of security; he depended on her constant attention and advice. Sometimes when she was away he would climb into her unmade bed just to feel close to her,5 and would even claim to be ‘frightened’6 without her. During one of her escapes, this time to Lou Seuil, Winston forgot his pride altogether and simply pleaded: ‘Do not abridge yr holiday if it is doing you good – But of course I feel far safer from worry and depression when you are with me & when I confide in yr sweet soul . . . You are a rock & I depend on you & rest on you. Come back to me therefore as soon as you can.’7
The sad truth was that Clementine found his dependency on her draining; like a child, he was petulant, moody and demanding. This was to be a tortuous time in their marriage and they spent long stretches apart. As everyone in the household discovered, being out of office made Winston exceedingly grumpy and ‘a kicker of wastepaper baskets, with an unbelievably ungoverned bundle of bad temper. It is better to stay away from him at such times and this his family seeks to do.’8 Staying away was something Clementine would resort to more and more. In response, Winston would not change himself but he would try to make Chartwell more agreeable to her – including installing a tennis court and later a croquet lawn. Her imminent return after a lengthy absence would prompt a frenzy of smartening-up – on one occasion dozens of seedling sycamores and elders had to be frantically dug out after he spotted them from his bedroom window and judged them likely to displease her.
He did, however, take advantage of her periodic flits. During one such – to compete in a tennis tournament in Cromer – he built a treehouse in an old lime by the front drive. In common with his sandcastles, this elaborate structure unleashed his inner child. It stood two storeys high, and twenty feet above ground; the children adored it, whereas Clementine’s much-mocked fears for their safety – not entirely unfounded – merely made her feel excluded from the rest of the family’s fun.
The more childlike he was, the more she felt duty-bound to play the responsible adult. In the summer of 1924, while she was away with the children on Anglesey, he seized the opportunity to build another lake. It proved more difficult – and messier – than he had anticipated. Two years later, when she went to stay with Consuelo at Lou Seuil, work was still going on. Inspired by Capability Brown’s creations at Blenheim, Winston was consumed by ostentatious water works. He tried to compensate for the mud and expense by also building a swimming pool, as Clementine and the children loved to bathe. Some giant gunnera plants – donated by her once whip-happy Aunt Mary Hozier – disguised the filtration works and an oak tree concealed the boiler said to be big enough to heat the Ritz.
When Clementine took to the water she did so in an elaborate skirted bathing costume (one guest mistook it for a dress), with her hair coiled under a stylish sunhat. Swimming was a regular feature of her disciplined exercise and dietary regime, as part of which she would also sometimes resort to a strict ‘tomato diet’ to lose weight. She made the most of her slender form (and limited budget) with a fashionable pared-down wardrobe of muted greys and blues that was to become much admired. Her beauty – particularly her ‘natural-looking’ eyebrows, ‘wonderful’ bone structure and china-white teeth – was deemed intrinsic and unaffected (although she had regular manicures at Harvey Nichols in London). Because she distrusted hairdressers, she fastidiously arranged her hair herself – in neat curls around her face – and washed it, to her family’s alarm, with neat benzene to give it shine. Without fail immaculately presented, whether in town or country, she appeared, to her admirers, to be growing more beautiful with age. Perhaps Winston was the only one not to notice.
He was, as usual, engrossed in his career – but Chartwell, if not a rival to politics, at least provided a sufficiently all-consuming distraction. He wanted the kitchen garden to produce a huge range of fruit and vegetables, whereas Clementine yearned for flowers. She expected a constant supply of scented hyacinths, freesias and sweet peas to put in vases; one year alone she also ordered a thousand tulip bulbs. Such activity made Chartwell a major employer, with twenty full-time staff. The male employees included three gardeners, a chauffeur, butler, farmhand, ‘odd man’, groom and carpenter, in addition to estate workers, and there were also researchers, two secretaries and a valet for Winston. Clementine’s domestic staff included a lady’s maid, two housemaids, a cook, nanny, nursery maid and a parlour maid. Such an army of retainers sounds excessive, but the house had five reception rooms, nineteen bed- and dressing rooms, and what was then a daringly numerous eight bathrooms.
Furthermore, both Churchills were exceedingly demanding. Winston in particular insisted on a rigid if eccentric regime, and Clementine ensured the staff complied with it fully. It was no easy task and her nephew Peregrine remembers that ‘for everyone except my uncle life at Chartwell was continual chaos’.9 Winston was treated like a pasha – his clothes were laid out (two shirts a day, cream in the morning, white in the evening) and his newspapers were meticulously folded and piled with The Times always on top. Order (three yellow and three green toothbrushes laid out in a row and used strictly by rotation10) and cleanliness were obsessions for each of them. Even Winston was forbidden to enter the house if wet or muddy, and would stand dripping outside until maids were able to place newspapers across the polished floors.
Winston took a bath twice a day, poured exactly at midday and again at 7 p.m. by his valet. The bath had to be two-thirds full and heated to precisely 98°F, rising to 104°F once he had plunged in. He ordered the overflow to be blocked up as he did not like to lose water, but was fond of somersaulting in the tub – an alarming manoeuvre that caused gallons of displaced water to seep down onto the coats of visitors in the cloakroom below. Rather than attempting to persuade Winston to change his habits, Clementine took the pragmatic approach of fitting a special drain in the floor of what amounted to a 1920s forerunner of a wet room. Following his ablutions, Winston’s valet would towel him dry, after which he refused to put on a dressing gown; if he wished to go to another room he would do so undressed. New members of staff would be shocked to see a very pink, sixteen-stone naked man with stooping shoulders scurrying towards them exclaiming ‘Coming through, don’t look!’
Nudity was not uncommon in the Churchill household. Clementine habitually summoned a secretary while in her bath, for instance. ‘Please order the car for eleven,’ she would say, while unselfconsciously sponging herself, or ‘Book me a doctor’s appointment for next week.’ If the instructions were numerous and complex, the heat and steam in her little bathroom could become overwhelming and on at least one occasion a secretary succumbed by fainting to the floor. Her lack of prudishness meant that it was also not unknown for Clementine to issue orders to workmen with her hair in curlers, face smothered in skin creams and wearing only a bath robe.
Clementine devoted herself to running the large house for Winston’s pleasure. The wood gleamed and smelt of beeswax, the glassware sparkled, cushions were puffed, the silverware polished, the paintings perfectly aligned in vertical rows. ‘She was a perfectionist, and at times, she sacrificed too much on the altar of that stern goddess,’ her daughter Mary later remarked.11 She never quite shook loose the tearful girl with a spot on her pinafore, but maintaining such standards, even with a large staff, took its toll on her nerves. Her maids learned fast – or left faster. The slightest imperfection could prompt a terrifying putdown: ‘You stupid goose!’ was one of Clementine’s milder outbursts. Yet she disliked having ‘people around her who were frightened of her’12 and could also deploy tact and gratitude to equ
al effect. One of her youthful smiles would reward a job well done.
Despite all the expense and effort, however, Chartwell remained a problematic house.13 The windows and roof let in the rain. The wiring was faulty and the drawing-room ceiling once collapsed, bringing a chandelier down with it. An embattled Philip Tilden wrote to a firm of surveyors that ‘Mrs Churchill who has very great influence over Mr Churchill has given it as her opinion that the house is falling down.’14 Another battleground was the subject of trees. Winston wanted to keep them all; Clementine was uncompromising about cutting undesirable ones down. Former members of staff talk in hushed tones to this day about the great ‘copper beech incident’. It was Winston’s habit to make mischief in her absence, but once when he was away she gave orders for a large copper beech to be felled. She had argued in vain that it darkened her sitting room and she disliked the purple-black of its leaves. On his return, he was incensed. But Clementine had won.
Inside, her style was in evidence almost everywhere, whether in the porcelain blue of her sitting room or the primrose yellows of the drawing room. The carefully positioned mirrors to lighten the rather gloomy interiors were her inspiration, as were the colourful curtains at the windows. The principal chambers were graced by a sprinkling of good (but never quite top quality) antiques and there were fine French glass (not crystal) chandeliers. She regarded the services of an interior designer a gross extravagance and liked nothing better than to find an attractive piece of furniture going ‘for a song’. ‘She was very frugal,’ remembers Shelagh Montague Browne. Nothing was thrown out ‘until it was completely falling to bits’.15
Flowers from the gardens were placed in every room and arranged in her signature style. ‘Grab them by the necks and just drop them in the vase, dear,’ she would instruct staff. She could be furious if she found fussy arrangements, and on formal occasions would only countenance white. ‘Once someone put coloured ones in too,’ remembers a former member of staff: ‘You would have thought there had been a major international incident.’ (Clementine was aware of, if powerless to alter, her habit of overreacting, acknowledging to Winston that ‘it is a great fault in me that small things should have the power to harass & agonise me’.16)
By such means, though, she made the best of a challenging house and the results of her perfectionism were admired, even copied. Yet some visitors thought even her considerable flair unable to conceal Chartwell’s many drawbacks – the place reminded Harold Macmillan of a government department and others of a male Oxbridge college.
Winston too had certain set ideas about interior design, even if he left the graft to others. He penned a lengthy ‘dissertation’, for instance, on the necessary characteristics of dining-room chairs: there should be no fewer than twenty, they should have arms and be both fairly narrow and comfortable. Those shown in William Nicholson’s painting of the Churchills at breakfast, which now hangs in the Chartwell dining room, were specially commissioned to meet these exact specifications.
A gift for their silver wedding anniversary in September 1933, the Nicholson itself was meant as a conversation piece, and guests liked to exchange observations about its inaccuracies. Winston and Clementine did not breakfast together (he believed that ‘one of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to . . . see the loved one before noon’17) and it is most unlikely that a cat such as that depicted would have been allowed on the table in her presence. Never as sentimental as Winston, Clementine was a stickler for hygiene – although when they were without important company she would allow diners to eat cutlets with their hands to extract more of the meat.
Winston was indulgent of his cats, though, and over the years there were several, including Mickey, a tabby, Nelson, a grey, and the marmalade-coloured Tango, all of whom he would address as ‘darling’. (During the Second World War Clementine ordered Tango’s death to be kept from him until news on the fighting had improved.) In his wife’s absence he encouraged them to sit on chairs at table, poured cream from a jug straight onto the tabletop for them to lap up, and insisted that his poodle Rufus was served – albeit in a bowl on the floor – before his guests. Winston also had a penchant for describing Chartwell’s various varieties of fowl as his friends and addressing them by name. When he could not bring himself to carve one of his flock at table, Clementine would take over.
Winston, of course, preferred to dine on hearty English cooking. Heaven forfend the cook should he or she fail to provide a regular supply of such favourite dishes as clear soup (never creamy), oysters, pheasant, lobster, dressed crab, Dover sole, chocolate éclairs and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Clementine indulged her own lighter preferences only when she took her meals on a tray in her room – which she did more frequently as the years passed by. Although she never now cooked herself – she described herself as a ‘theoretical rather than practical cook’18 – she attended high-class cookery courses with such famous chefs as Marcel Boulestin (a celebrated West End restaurateur whose books popularised French cuisine) simply to ensure her kitchen stayed abreast of the best techniques. She had particularly exacting standards for a béchamel sauce and would quiz staff in detail on how they planned to prepare one. In truth, it was cheaper to pass on her knowledge and train a maid than to employ an experienced cook. Similarly, she took pains to devise menus that minimised unnecessary expense. This took time as even lunch involved three courses. Every morning at half past eight she would spend a full half-hour in her bedroom discussing the day’s meals with the cook (dressed in a spotless white apron) to ensure that all was to Winston’s taste.
Such culinary exactitude masked an ulterior motive. Feeding Winston well was her way, she once confessed, of ‘managing’ him. ‘You must give him a good dinner,’ she explained to a riveted Lloyd George.19 Sometimes her food was so good, Winston would refuse to enter the conversation at table and she would have to take over. No wonder then that Winston, who unlike his wife took little exercise in middle age, was straining the buttons on his waistcoat. (She made her concerns about this clear by prominently placing scales in his bathroom.)
Her efforts to manage his wardrobe had also proved less than successful. At the time of their marriage, he had been widely regarded as the worst-dressed member of the Asquith administration, a Conservative MP once apparently mistaking his curious garb in the Chamber for a pair of pyjamas. Even now his bow tie was often wilfully askew. At Chartwell he favoured a ragged coat or paint-splattered jacket and battered hat; his work attire still consisted of an old-fashioned winged collar and black frock coat. A barber came to visit once a month but in truth there was little to work with. What he lacked in hair, though, he more than made up for with a large and theatrical collection of hats. He was perhaps one of the few men in Britain whose wardrobe was more playful than his wife’s.
At least twice a day Clementine’s lady’s maid laid out an entirely fresh outfit (including underwear) on her bed while she bathed. Her children remembered her smelling ‘delicious’ and being dressed in the softest fabrics – attributes that in their eyes added to her already goddess-like status. She was an early riser – waking around five or six – and would put her hair in curlers while she dealt with her correspondence, before breakfasting on her own in her room at eight. As she grew older she frequently took an afternoon nap. However brief this was, she expected her pillowcases to be changed for fresh ones immediately afterwards.
Winston was no less particular, but many of the servants preferred working for him as they found he forgave more easily. Ultimately, though, these exalted expectations – and the fact the Churchills were notoriously ungenerous payers – meant the turnover of staff at Chartwell was rapid. Only the most dedicated (for instance, the cook Georgina Landemare) or eccentric (such as the tipsy valet David Inches) lasted the course. Clementine constantly fretted about finding and training new staff – a preoccupation that Winston, unburdened by such concerns, airily dismissed with the observation that ‘servants exist to save one trouble and should never be allowed to
disturb one’s inner peace’.20 ‘Do not worry about household matters. Let them crash if they will,’ he once advised. It can be said for certain that Winston would have been the first to complain if they had.
The only corner of the house immune to Clementine’s signature style was her husband’s bedroom. A swashbuckling shrine to military memorabilia with a single bed, it was, like all his other bedrooms – even those at Admiralty House and Number 10 – relatively humble; a bolthole adjoining his vaulted study, where the windows were sealed with putty because of his terror of draughts and noise, particularly anyone whistling. Some distance away was Clementine’s far more splendid sky-blue, barrel-domed boudoir, with its imposing four-poster bed dressed in red moiré silk. In summer white roses from the garden graced her desk, and her windows would be thrown open to capture the fresh air. ‘There was never any question of them being in the same bed, or same room or even in the same part of the house,’ recalls their niece Clarissa Churchill, who spent her holidays at Chartwell. ‘They were nowhere near each other.’21
It was a grand life. Even Winston occasionally became alarmed at the cost of it all – at one point in 1926 expenditure rose to £477 a month (equivalent to £25,000 today).22 He would then send Clementine unintentionally ironic memoranda on economy. Savings to be made, he decreed, included fewer holidays (his tended to be infinitely more expensive than hers), selling livestock (on which he himself had lavished money) and inviting fewer guests outside family (although they had invariably been selected for his pleasure). Purchases of cigars, champagnes and wines, dress shirts, and even boot-polish should be cut, he pronounced, although there is little evidence that the chief culprit in these areas observed his own edicts.
Once or twice he suggested letting Chartwell, although he quickly dropped the idea when Clementine jumped at it. Far more worrying was his suggestion of ‘going into milk’ – just one of a stream of money-losing ventures. As she often did when hell-bent on winning an argument, she set down her case in writing. All previous such schemes, she pointed out – across no fewer than seven pages – had been disastrous. Winston had invested in English Shorthorn cattle, Swedish Landrace pigs, sheep, chickens, geese, turkeys and ornamental Australian Black Swans, but Chartwell had not thrived as a working farm. For Winston could not bear to have an animal slaughtered once he had said good morning to it.
First Lady Page 19
