She was right to urge caution on his agricultural adventures but her natural tendency to worry made her too negative about some of his other pursuits. Winston’s devotion to painting was literally paying off. When he had begun writing about his hobby in 1921 – receiving the enormous sum of £1000 for two articles in the Strand magazine – she had warned that the professionals would be ‘vexed & say you do not yet know enough about Art’. In fact, his articles, entitled ‘Painting as a Pastime’, were an enormous success and eventually became a book.
Nevertheless, the prospect of financial ruin continually shadowed their lives. Clementine knew their future relied on his ability to churn out books and articles at a ferocious rate – and he constantly sent her drafts for her ‘deeply interesting’ suggestions. Many assumed that the Churchills had a cushion of family money like other upper-class British politicians; they certainly appeared to live extremely well. But by the late 1920s the Irish inheritance had been exhausted by the cost of rebuilding and maintaining Chartwell, True, he made some money out of libel damages – he was frequently excoriated in print and as an experienced litigant he always won. From time to time the elder children would also be told that ‘Papa and Mummie are economising’, a notice that would be followed by lectures about the need to turn off lights and reprimands for long telephone calls. But overall their life of luxury continued largely intact, all the while that they ‘lived from book to book, and from one article to the next’.
Moreover, the largesse would swiftly creep back. Hospitality was a great source of joy for Winston and sometimes the Churchills would host a grand garden party, ordering a marquee of olive green and yellow for the grounds, and laying on music (usually of the Gilbert & Sullivan variety favoured by Winston). Clementine would fret about the cost but would partly assuage her worries by taking out insurance against rain, with the payouts related to the scale of the deluge. Winston liked not only to offer guests the best food, Pol Roger champagne (or ‘panya’ as he called it) and Romeo y Julieta Cuban cigars, but to show off his latest Chartwell project. With such immoderation came bills, and visits from angry local tradesmen in search of payment. The Churchills acquired a humiliating reputation for tardiness in settling accounts, reminding Clementine of her childhood. Sometimes she would lose her temper with Winston over his extravagance, which would inevitably lead him to become doggedly defensive. As one of his political colleagues once aptly put it, reasoning with Winston was like arguing with a brass band.23 On one such occasion she got so frustrated that she shied a plate of spinach at him. She missed, but it left a mark on the wall.
Within the household, their quarrels were the stuff of legend and as she grew older Clementine became increasingly forceful. ‘When her nerves were stretched, she sometimes turned on Winston with vitriol in her voice and the flashing eyes of a Fury,’24 remarked one senior staffer. Her raised voice would sometimes be heard from behind a closed door, only for Winston to emerge afterwards head down and muttering miserably, ‘She called me a bloody old fool!’
Only rarely would lack of money prevent them going on holiday, as both considered time away one of life’s essentials. But their disagreement as to the joys of the British seaside – Clementine relishing the very simplicity and ruggedness that so horrified Winston – meant they seldom travelled together. His celebrity made him a trophy guest for the likes of Maxine Elliott, an ageing American actress who owned the modernist Château de l’Horizon at Golfe-Juan on France’s Côte d’Azur. She competed for his presence with Lord Rothermere at Cap Martin, or Lord Beaverbrook at La Capponcina near Nice. On the odd occasion that Clementine accompanied him to these resorts she was horrified at what she considered their vulgar displays of self-indulgence. ‘God,’ she wrote to her daughter Sarah, ‘the Riviera is a ghastly place.’ She scarcely ever stayed long, which one fellow guest attributed to the fact that the ‘Churchills simply hadn’t a bean.’ Winston cared little, but being relatively poor among the super-rich brought back painful memories for her. ‘Clementine worried dreadfully,’ the guest surmised, ‘and used to feel that the others were laughing at her behind her back because of her clothes.’25 As well as disliking the company she did not paint, write or gamble, and so she felt excluded. She also worried about Winston losing money in the casino – which he did – although once when she was with him his luck on the tables improved; she woke up to find her bed layered with banknotes from his winnings.
The exception to Clementine’s horror was Lou Seuil, where she found in Consuelo an understanding of the peculiar pressures of being married to a Churchill. She also felt in tune politically there. Now that Winston was drifting back to the Tories, his loathing of Bolshevism seemed to have hardened his heart against the poor. Many of his Riviera cronies were even less sympathetic and so Clementine treasured Consuelo’s social conscience all the more.
By the mid-1920s Winston was convinced that only the Conservatives were capable of countering the Labour Party. Clementine felt duty bound to follow his re-conversion – at least publicly – taking the spitting, brick-throwing and booing alongside him, but as Mary related, she never made ‘a good Tory’, and occasionally her ‘natural radicalism would burst through the layers of reasonable compliance like a volcanic eruption, often to people’s astonished bewilderment’.26 Even Violet recognised Clementine as a true ‘natural Liberal’27 who never ceased to promote to Winston what she saw as Liberal values. Her feelings about Tories, whom she described as variously stupid, inefficient and revelling in ‘slaughter & the Army’,28 were doused with suspicion. ‘Do not . . . let the Tories get you too cheap,’ Clementine warned Winston, as he pondered a return to his old party. ‘They have treated you so badly in the past & they ought to be made to feel it.’29
Winston nevertheless decisively split with the Liberals over the reunited party’s decision to support Labour after the 1923 election, a move that shut the Conservatives out of power even though they had won the most seats. He tried to justify his ‘re-ratting’ to her by arguing that certain senior Conservatives now harboured more agreeably moderate and progressive views. She conceded that the Tory leader, Stanley Baldwin, was showing a ‘genuine feeling’ for working people, but all this hardly compensated for Winston’s readiness to compare the Liberal Party’s association with Labour to ‘missionaries assisting cannibals’.
Such political inconsistency over the years on Winston’s part had left the couple with few real friends, particularly mutual ones. They did not move in fashionable or intellectual circles, and neither did they meet new people on the country house circuit, as Winston disliked spending weekends away. Most Chartwell guests in the early days were therefore relations or Winston’s political colleagues and hangers-on. In the first year, they entertained Nellie’s husband Bertram Romilly, then Goonie and later Nellie herself. But there were sometimes tensions between the two Hozier sisters. Clementine’s sole surviving sibling spent much of her time caring for Bertram, an invalid from his Great War injuries, but was by nature a garrulous and easy-going character, known for wearing long strings of pearls over her somewhat threadbare clothes. Clementine could be critical of her for getting ‘up to mischief’ when she had the chance. But what was considered ‘feckless’ by some was seen as fun by others. ‘If you couldn’t like Nellie,’ recalls one former member of Clementine’s staff, ‘you couldn’t like anyone.’
Winston too was very fond of ‘Nellinita’; as well as helping her financially he had taken an interest in her increasingly wayward sons. Esmond, her youngest, shared a passing resemblance to his uncle (as Esmond’s future wife Decca Mitford was to point out) and that, together with Winston’s kindness, prompted speculation that the boy might be his natural child. He was, however, a born rebel; a leftie who would run away from his public school, Wellington College, in January 1934 to launch a popular Communist teenage magazine, Out of Bounds, and live as a squatter. In the absence of much help from her disabled husband, Nellie washed her hands of Esmond, and he was subsequently sent to a
remand home before making off for Spain to join the International Brigades and fight in the Civil War. Headstrong and idealistic, he also had charisma and charm; so while he infuriated his uncle, he was too likeable for Winston to give up on him entirely. Clementine, by contrast, was harsher both on Esmond for misbehaving, and Nellie for not controlling him.
Goonie’s son Johnny was another Chartwell regular who attracted rumours about his paternity. Indeed, Johnny encouraged the talk that he might be Winston’s son, which thoroughly annoyed Clementine. A successful artist in adult life, he once sent his aunt a painting as a birthday present; she secretly tried to dispose of the unwanted gift although promptly gave it away instead when she was caught by a member of staff. If he asked after it, she said it was hanging on her bedroom wall.30 Few, if any, who knew Winston and the family well, however, give credence to the idea that any of Winston’s nephews was actually his illegitimate son. The rumours were most likely the product of prevailing assumptions about the sex lives of powerful men, as Clementine in her heart of hearts no doubt knew. What hurt was that Johnny and others gleefully spread the gossip and that Winston declined to quash it. She desperately wanted the Churchill family to remain united and untainted by the sexual intrigue that had dogged her own youth.
On 29 October 1924 another general election, precipitated by the collapse of the Labour government that Winston had so despised, saw the Tories restored to power and secured his return as MP for Epping (a seat he was to represent for the following forty years). His immediate but unexpected appointment, just before his fiftieth birthday, as Chancellor of the Exchequer – Clementine initially thought he was teasing when he told her – mercifully furnished them with a grand London residence again, and effectively completed his homecoming to his old party (albeit under a temporary Constitutionalist flag of convenience). Clementine grew fond of 11 Downing Street – then a spacious family home – and would work tirelessly in Epping so that Winston could focus on his demanding task at the Treasury. But the fact remained that her husband was now the second most prominent member of a government whose politics were anathema to her.
‘The Tories don’t want to be made to think!’ was one of her private complaints. Certainly they could never provide her with the thrilling pride she had taken during Winston’s reforming partnership with Lloyd George. Local constituency Tories may have regarded her ‘as a fashionable beauty’ with a ‘model-like carriage’, but most of all they noticed an unnerving ‘direct gaze’.31 She had so obviously disliked accompanying Winston to Conservative rallies preceding the 1924 election that he had felt compelled to offer an explanation: ‘She’s a Liberal, and always has been. It’s all very strange for her. But to me, of course, it’s just like coming home.’32 Clementine later told her closest staff that she did not vote Liberal again – out of loyalty to Winston – but she was never to overcome her ‘latent, almost subconscious, hostility’33 to the Tory Party.
His defection had left her politically high and dry. No longer sharing the same vision, she felt unable to pursue a role of her own on the national stage with any conviction. As long ago as 1920 she had told him that the one time she had ploughed her own furrow – her admirable work in the munitions canteens of the First World War – already seemed like a ‘dream’; even then she had believed that if she had genuinely possessed ‘real organising ability . . . it died with the War’.34 Now, by contrast, Winston had secured his highest position yet. As Clementine wrote in September 1926, he was having ‘an anxious but thrilling . . . time with power & scope which is what the Pig likes’.35 ‘Pig’ liked it so much, in fact, that he desired an upgrade in his pet name, informing Clementine that he now wished to become a ‘Lion’.
An economic brief did not play to his strengths, however. Despite Clementine’s efforts to encourage him to help the poor and widows (which he did through modest rises in state pensions), his first Budget in 1925 was widely attacked. Many pundits deemed it ill-judged – John Maynard Keynes deplored Winston’s decision to rejoin the Gold Standard, which tied the pound to gold at unsustainably high pre-war levels (and in turn led to soaring unemployment). Others thought it a wealthy man’s charter by way of its tax cuts for high earners. As the son of Queen Victoria’s ex-private secretary once put it, Winston’s ‘sympathy for the poor was eloquent; his sympathy for the rich was practical’.36
During his time at the Treasury Winston had to contend with a period of intense social and industrial strife, much of it arguably of his own making. Clementine may have felt estranged from her husband’s politics, but her skill in creating an elegant home with exceptional food nonetheless made her an asset in his attempts to defuse the various crises that arose. Winston was never a man who spent a lot of time at the club, as he loved his home comforts too much; thus Chartwell was to provide the setting (as, to a lesser extent, did 11 Downing Street) for some of the most difficult meetings of his Chancellorship. Both sides in the 1925 pre-Budget debate on whether to return to the Gold Standard were bidden to discuss the issue over the Churchill knives and forks, while during the miners’ strike of 1926, the Labour opposition leader Ramsay MacDonald sat at the round Chartwell dining table beside the owners of the coal mines – a gathering pretty much unthinkable anywhere else. Flawless hospitality became part of Winston’s surprisingly inclusive political style, based on the principle that good food, wine and Clementine’s charm (when she was around) made almost anything possible. ‘It is well to remember that the stomach governs the world,’ he once wrote.37 It was an approach he would re-adopt at a time of even greater crisis.
Day visitors were not normally recorded in the book kept on the chest in the hall, but ‘dine & sleep’ guests typically were. The latter were to increase dramatically in number after Winston’s return to government, lending Chartwell the air of a frantically busy small hotel. Arrivals would crunch up the semi-circular gravel drive to the great front door, whereupon they would be shown into the drawing room with its dominating portrait of Winston, and sofas ranged companionably either side of the fire. The real Winston, who himself never liked to hurry from the bath, would rarely be ready to greet even the most distinguished visitors. That role would fall to Clementine. She would smile, and receive them gracefully in the hall, while surreptitiously sending up a string of messengers (including certain trusted guests) to bang on his bathroom door.
Lunch was timed to start at 1.15 on the dot, but Winston would still be splashing in the water at 1.20. Dinner was scheduled for 8.30 but it was unusual for him to descend to the drawing room, where Clementine would have long since finished her pre-dinner sherry, before 8.45. Perhaps in reaction to his poor timekeeping, she herself was obsessively punctual. Certainly she found his casual rudeness – and the inconvenience it caused to others – intolerable; she frequently made her anger clear to Winston, who would respond to her eye-flashing fury with: ‘Oh I’m so sorry, yes, yes, so sorry.’ Later he would say conspiratorially to the staff, ‘I’m afraid, Mrs C is very angry with me,’38 thereby recruiting their undying sympathy.
Clementine welcomed numerous British politicians to Chartwell over the years, among them Prime Ministers-to-be Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath. But she was also to play hostess to some of the world’s powerful and famous, including US President Harry Truman, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein, the actor Laurence Olivier and Lawrence of Arabia (who would arrive by motorbike but dine in the robes of an Arab prince). Members of many of the grandest dynasties, though, came only once. Clementine, although proud of her aristocratic lineage, made a point of showing indifference to the very elevated. Albeit not averse to her own comforts and retinue she was scornful of conspicuous wealth. Later her daughter Mary would even sometimes accuse her of ‘inverted snobbishness’.
An invitation to Chartwell was flattering, though, and as such it was usually extended for Winston’s sake rather than Clementine’s. Some guests were summoned to cheer him up when out of sorts; others to inform, advise
, help or stimulate him. Almost all, however, found Mrs Churchill an alluring hostess. One first-time visitor recalled an ‘almost physical shock’ that Winston had such ‘a life-force of a wife, someone so clever, opinionated and interesting in her own right’. Seated opposite her husband at dinner, visitors were equally surprised when Clementine occasionally admonished him with ‘Winston, I wouldn’t say that!’ or challenged him with ‘Winston, you have suddenly changed your mind about that!’ Her voice was young-sounding, crisp, quite high but confident without being particularly plummy for the time. She was charismatic – and, while there was an air of mystery to her, she had a knack of making guests enjoy the (usually false) impression that they were being paid the honour of being taken into her confidence. Few who were treated to her wide smile and big-eyed gaze did not succumb. Sarah compared her mother to a ‘chandelier’, an idea that also appealed to Mary as ‘she did give forth great life and sparkle’.39
A memory that lingered long after a stay at Chartwell was her full-throated laugh – ‘a sound of real joy’ was how one guest put it. ‘She would cackle like a hen,’ recalls an ex-member of staff. ‘It was very contagious.’ Like Winston, though, she found a play on words funnier than people’s foibles, including her own. She enjoyed it when they hired a chauffeur called Bullock, for instance, and Winston referred to the car as ‘the Bullock cart’, but the casual comedy of life’s ups and downs largely passed her by. Shelagh Montague Browne remembers that Clementine had more wit than humour: ‘She couldn’t really laugh at herself, as she took things very seriously . . . She had a razor sharp wit . . . she just would not get the amusingly absurd.’
First Lady Page 20
