First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  There were times, though, when she would not even attempt to conceal her disapproval of a guest. She took a principled if sectarian stance on many subjects and could ‘erupt’ at someone spouting the opposing view, particularly if the culprit were a brash and wealthy Tory. She was savage in her putdowns, and the fact that her target was a visitor to her house made scant difference. Only the shy were spared. As a finale, she might storm out of the dining room, leaving her family, including Winston, helpless with embarrassment at what they collectively referred to as one of ‘Mama’s sweeps’. And yet Winston harboured a secret pride at his wife’s feistiness – relating afterwards in awestruck tones how she had given so-and-so ‘a most fearful mauling’, or on one occasion with particular glee that ‘Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree.’ At other times – if she had already taken exception to someone – she would shut herself in her room before she lost her temper. The company would be informed that she was unwell.

  Absorbed in his own interests – politics, painting or landscaping – Winston left her alone for long periods, even when in the same house. He needed to know she was nearby and in constant attendance, but very often, when he was busy, he did not want her at his side. She learned over time when not to interrupt him; her life at home, however, orbited his all the same. His welfare and ambitions consumed her every moment. Much of her own time was spent reading history and biography to bolster her understanding of his world – in 1932 she remarked to Winston that her book on the American Civil War was ‘full of abuse of politicians who try to interfere with Generals in the field – (Ahem!)’40 – but she had few outside pursuits other than tennis and visits to art galleries.

  Nor did she have many friends of her own, especially at Chartwell. Her cousin Sylvia Henley, her old friend Horatia Seymour and Goonie would come to stay for occasional weekends, but even with these trusted women she rarely opened up completely. She found it difficult to make new friends – or get closer to old ones – while she was so absorbed with Winston. Unlike other politicians’ wives, such as Diana Cooper, she had no independent court of supporters – let alone lovers – of her own. The various spells of unpopularity that Winston had brought upon them both during his career had also cut her off.

  It is therefore no surprise that she sought companionship from some of the female staff – or that more than one found her need for intimacy overwhelming and left. ‘It was a bit like working with the royals,’ recalls one former assistant. ‘If they liked you they wanted you there all the time.’ Secretaries were chosen for their compatibility with Churchill family life and lack of competing outside interests (such as boyfriends) more than for their proven office skills. One newly widowed recruit did not last long as she was trying to rebuild her own life outside work and had a habit of answering back. After an argument with Clementine over the colour of a pair of shoes, in which the secretary refused to back down, she was ‘let go’.

  More pliable were the younger ones – some only seventeen or eighteen years of age and generally drawn from a similar social stratum to Clementine herself. They worked long and unpredictable hours – and at Chartwell were fairly isolated – so many ended up practically living with the family. ‘You will see warts and all,’ new employees were informed by a long-term staffer, ‘but you’re not to talk about it.’41 With a couple of them Clementine struck up enduring friendships – and frequently gave them affectionate hugs. Many more were to disappoint her by leaving without bothering to stay in touch. Margery Street, her secretary for many years, was one who reciprocated, but alas she too left, returning to her native Australia in 1933.

  The exception to this procession of well-bred gels addressed as ‘Miss’ was Grace Hamblin – or ‘Hambone’, as the Churchills called her. A gardener’s daughter who started work at Chartwell in 1932 and took over from Miss Street the following year, she faithfully remained with the couple until Winston died and was the linchpin of Clementine’s life. She ran Chartwell, employing the staff and dealing with the household bills. Beautiful, funny and astonishingly efficient, she had a knack of knowing what Clementine wanted even before Clementine herself. In the absence of other friends, Clementine depended heavily on Grace, who would over time become perhaps her greatest confidante and a favoured holiday companion. Sarah, Diana and Mary also came to rely on this selfless woman, whose dedication was such that she gave up all prospects of a family of her own. Always willing to serve, she was far more than a servant. Nevertheless, for her first few years at Chartwell Grace was expected to enter the house by the back door, something she did not appreciate.42 It would take another world war for the Churchills to review their outdated views on class.

  By the late 1920s, it was clear that regular escapes from Winston were essential to Clementine’s health. As she said to Mary, ‘it took me all my time and strength just to keep up with [him]. I never had anything left over.’43 When later asked how her husband had managed to pack so much into his life, she explained that he ‘never did anything he didn’t want to do, and left someone else to clear up the mess’.44 If she ran out of fuel, though, she would flee. A favourite excuse was taking the ‘cure’ for fatigue (exacerbated by low blood pressure) at any number of Continental spas, and as life at Chartwell grew ever more exhausting so her absences grew longer and more frequent. Even when she was in Britain, she spent little time with her children. Winston demanded more of her attention than they did – and got it. As Mary recalled, ‘Father always came First, Second and Third.’45 And as one of Winston’s more astute biographers explains: as Clementine ‘was primarily interested in Winston and so was Winston, their relationship to each other was always closer than with their five children’.46

  When she was at home, Clementine was in Mary’s words a ‘mixture of tenderness and severity’,47 although Sarah called her ‘an authoritarian figure with whom you could not argue’.48 It certainly took courage to speak to their mother, and the children, who when young were most of the time confined to a nursery wing away from the rest of the house, felt a constant need to be witty and clever in her presence, so as not to be boring. Winston would occasionally raise concerns about whether they should be wearing vests; Clementine appears to have left such details to others. She was also plainly incapable of the same unselfconscious play as her husband. As Mary noted, although they ‘loved and revered her’, Clementine’s children did not find in her a ‘fun maker or a companion’. There was, however, one occasion when Clementine created a magic for her family all of her own.

  Every year she spent months planning Christmas so as to create a golden spectacle that would live on in her children’s and grandchildren’s fondest memories. Randolph came back from Eton; Jack and Goonie would arrive with their three children (known as the ‘Jagoons’) and Nellie and Bertram Romilly with theirs (Esmond and his brother Giles). The children would put on a play in the dining room; log fires danced in the fireplaces; holly, ivy, laurel and yew decorated the rooms; and if the weather obliged, Clementine would help the servants to make a snowman. In 1927, there was enough snow to build an igloo and it was cold enough to skate on the lakes. Upstairs, under lock and key, was the ‘Genie’s Cupboard’ containing neatly wrapped presents ready for the big day. With the house packed to the rafters, glorious food on the table, a hundred real candles twinkling on the tree, glorious scents of pine and wax, and champagne in silver ice-buckets, Clementine made Winston’s fairytale vision of Chartwell come alive. ‘My grandmother,’ recalls her granddaughter Celia Sandys, ‘organised the best Christmases I have ever known.’49

  Christmas was the one time of the year when Clementine could bring all her family together with little risk of outside distraction. It was a rare private moment in the family life of a public man and so it had to be perfect. Her unstinting pains were also in part compensation for her prolonged absences and what she knew were her shortcomings as a mother over the year as a whole. Sarah and Mary drew closer to Clementine as they grew older, but Diana’s prickly relationship with her
mother lasted for the rest of her life. Clementine took her eldest daughter with her to France in 1926 when Diana was seventeen, even lunching with her at Voisin’s in Paris as she had done at the same age with Lady Blanche. It was one of the first times they spent alone together, and Diana enjoyed the more relaxed atmosphere without Winston around. But, suffering from puppy fat and painfully shy behind a talkative exterior, she could never quite live up to expectations in the exceptional environment of Chartwell, even at Christmas. Some – including Clementine herself – thought Diana plainer than her sisters and she developed a protective habit of walking apart from the others, head down and singing tunelessly. Following her birth in 1909, Winston had written to Clementine that their first child ‘ought to have some rare qualities both of mind & body’, before presciently adding that ‘these do not always mean happiness or peace’.50 As it was, Diana grew up plagued by self-doubt and acutely emotional; maybe Clementine saw too many of her own vulnerabilities in her daughter to warm to her or appreciate her compassionate qualities.

  Diana also wanted for her father’s affections; although his firstborn, she could never compete with Randolph. ‘Tender love to you my sweet one & to both those little kittens & especially that radiant Randolph,’ Winston had written to Clementine when Diana was just four. ‘I repent to have expressed a preference. But somehow he seems a more genial generous nature: while [Diana] is mysterious and self-conscious.’51

  The more independent Sarah had inherited some of her father’s toughness and seemed better able to cope with being a Churchill. Funny, beautiful and at ease with the rich and famous around her, she was a ‘daddy’s girl’ and, some say, half in love with her father. She, like him, enjoyed holding an audience – in her case as an actress – but being a Churchill set her apart from other girls her age and she realised early on that she was a ‘loner’.52 Her problem would be how to find a man of her own who could measure up to a titan.

  The most problematic of all the young Churchills, though, was Randolph. Winston took the traditional view that children (and their discipline) were the responsibility of their mother. Worse, though undeniably loving, he was a dilettante parent. All the children adored helping him build brick walls or caring for his menagerie of animals. With Randolph alone, much to Clementine’s consternation, Winston would use the front door of Chartwell for shooting practice, as can still be seen today. These brief spurts of paternal preferment were golden treats for his son; his approval god-like. But what Randolph, in particular, needed was a constant father figure who would upbraid him when necessary. In place of boundaries, Winston proffered indulgence.

  Randolph was unpopular at school and uncontrollable at home. Later on he would tell his first wife that Clementine’s dislike for him had been evident even in childhood, recalling an incident at his boarding school when he was just nine years old. ‘My mother came down on a Saturday to take me out and slapped my face in front of the other boys,’ he said. ‘That was the moment I knew she hated me.’53 One theory is that Randolph, thus deprived of maternal love, spent the rest of his life seeking out an alternative mother figure. His cousin Anita Leslie attributed his varying behaviour – he was capable of acts of great kindness as well as beastliness – to his ‘craving for affection’.

  Clementine’s already difficult position as sole disciplinarian of a bumptious and insolent child was aggravated by his habit of running to Winston for an instant reprieve. The most draconian sanction imposed by his father was banishment from his presence. Even this was rarely enforced. Hence Clementine imposed what little sense of order she could through exhortation, sometimes patrolling the area outside Winston’s study in person to ensure that all was quiet. It was a dispiriting task in a house overrun with high-spirited children – or as Winston put it, ‘all bunged up with brats’.

  Remembering his own sadistic treatment at school, when Randolph started at Eton at thirteen in 1924 Winston specifically asked for him to be spared corporal punishment. It made no difference; the boy was regularly beaten for being ‘bloody awful all round’. But Winston continued to disregard criticism of his precocious son from his teachers, and, worse still, encouraged Randolph to do the same. Randolph was a teenager who refused to get out of bed in the mornings and stayed up unreasonably late at night. Winston compounded his mistakes by treating his heir as an adult long before he had learned to behave like one. Having been put down and shut out by his own father all his early life, he actively encouraged Randolph to participate in dinner-table conversations with such eminent figures as Lloyd George and Lord Beaverbrook, as if he were their equals. To Clementine’s horror, Winston raised his cigar to signal silence even from Cabinet ministers so that Randolph could speak. She saw the damage being done to her son and also thought Randolph increasingly without self-restraint. For his part, Randolph observed the apparently contrasting views of his parents and decided to ignore what he considered to be his mother’s killjoy preaching.

  This is not to suggest that Winston was entirely blind to how his son was developing. In April 1928 he expressed concern to Clementine about how forcefully sixteen-year-old Randolph had argued in favour of a ‘rabid’ brand of agnosticism with a senior MP and his ‘brutal & sometimes repulsive’ remarks.54 Clementine tried to remain positive, but could not dispel the idea that in the future their son would remain ‘an anxiety’ and that his conduct might come between them.

  Over time, as Randolph’s antics extended well beyond the school playground, anxiety gave way to anger, even on Winston’s part. When Bernard Baruch, an important American contact, came to Chartwell while Randolph was still a teenager, Winston recognised that his son’s behaviour was damaging the entire family. As Winston and his bespectacled guest were about to enter the dining room, Randolph started to play on the gramophone ‘Barney Google (with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes)’, a hit tune inspired by an American comic strip character. A livid Winston snatched the record from the turntable and smashed it to pieces on the floor.55 But rage after the event – combined with otherwise unqualified adoration – was not effective parenting. Evelyn Waugh, who later became one of Randolph’s drinking cronies, was damning in his assessment of Winston’s inaction, dubbing him a ‘most unsuccessful father’.56

  With Clementine variously absent or devoted to Winston, the Churchill offspring saw little of either parent, even by the standards of British upper-class families of the period. Mary recalls becoming ‘aware that our parents’ main interest and time were consumed by immensely important tasks’ and that by comparison their children’s needs were ‘trivial’. Winston and Clementine were simply not the sort of parents who could be expected to show up at school events, and if on rare occasions their mother did attend, the children were ‘ecstatically grateful’. Sarah remembered one school prize day when Clementine had, unusually, agreed to officiate, although sadly the school was unable to think of a single suitable prize that could be given to her daughter. ‘When my mother came . . . she looked so beautiful I was almost ashamed of her. She was not “mum-shaped”, and she made what was referred to as a rather racy speech.’57 The event underlined the pressure to match up to Clementine’s expectations, whether intellectually or physically – something Sarah was not alone in believing she failed to do: ‘I felt clumsy and awkward and wanted very much to be pretty.’58 Perhaps as a consequence Sarah was nearly expelled from school after developing what she herself called ‘certain rebellious instincts’.59

  Marigold’s death had, at least, persuaded Clementine that she could no longer rely on cheap, inexperienced nannies to care for her children, and especially the young Mary. In 1927, she hired twenty-seven-year-old Maryott Whyte, an impoverished cousin known within the family as Moppet. Trained at the prestigious Norland School of Nursing, she provided the steady and loving environment for Mary that her elder siblings had lacked. She took much of the load off Clementine and insulated Mary from the pressures of being a celebrity’s daughter. Clementine’s critics claim she relinquished her parental duties at
this point and that Moppet became a virtual foster-mother. But just as likely is that the appointment represented a well-meaning attempt not to repeat the failings of the past. ‘Moppet was a big, bundling woman who was terribly sweet,’ remembers Clarissa Churchill. ‘She was an ideal person to be brought up by.’60

  Clementine herself had enjoyed no such loving stability as a child. Lady Blanche had not always been kind to her, and as she started drinking too much in later life there were times when she was outright ‘malicious’. She had scarcely provided Clementine with a mothering role-model. True, the life of a woman on her own was far from easy in those days, and Lady Blanche had been disappointed by so much. Yet she had never made much effort to conceal the fact that Clementine remained too fastidious for her tastes. Then, in March 1925, came news that seventy-seven-year-old Lady Blanche was dying and that she needed her daughter in Dieppe by her side. Clementine loathed the town – not only did she blame its casino for luring her family into penury and her brother Bill to an early grave in the cemetery up on the hill, she also felt haunted by Kitty’s death from typhoid fever all those years ago. But of course she had to go.

  As Clementine nursed her mother through her painful last illness, Winston’s reaction was to send his wife an eloquent, if perhaps over-indulgent tribute (as well as a rare acknowledgment that his children were not pure Churchill): ‘When I think of all the courage & tenacity & self denial that she showed,’ he wrote from 11 Downing Street, ‘I feel what a true mother . . . she proved herself, & I am more glad & proud to think her blood flows in the veins of our children.’61 By contrast, on paper at least, Clementine was matter-of-fact, outlining holiday plans one day, describing Lady Blanche’s ‘agonising struggle’ a couple of days later. Death in the end came quickly, she wrote to Winston in a brief note, enclosing instructions for Moppet to send her some black clothes.