First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  She did not mention grief in her letters, nor indeed her feelings as to whether Lady Blanche really had been a model of self-denial or a ‘true mother’. But, shopping in the Brompton Road in London a few days after the funeral, an evidently distracted Clementine was hit by a bus. She took a taxi home without assistance, but her doctor prescribed her six weeks’ rest in Venice to recover. Her physical wounds were the least of it; emotions were running high and she desperately wanted Winston to make the effort to be with her. Although a year later he was to permit himself a ten-week stretch away from the office (to finish a book and take a long Mediterranean holiday), now he pleaded expense and things to do as reasons for staying behind. He also claimed that ‘Every day away from Chartwell is a day wasted.’

  That was a sentiment she simply could not share. Indeed, theirs was now a marriage in which they disagreed on a great deal, including politics, holidays, gambling and even their own son.

  Chapter Eight

  Temptation and Redemption

  1929–39

  As the results flowed into 10 Downing Street on the evening of 30 May 1929, Winston was in a terrifying rage. He was swearing profusely and sipping whisky. As his head lowered, like a bull’s before a charge, his face flushed to crimson. His chance had come and he had blown it. Once a hope for the future, he was now a disappointment from the past.

  This was the so-called ‘flapper’ election – for the first time, women were allowed to vote on the same basis as men. Clementine, Diana and Randolph had helped Winston to fight and hold his Epping seat – albeit with a severely reduced majority. But his record as Chancellor was in no small part to blame for the drubbing being delivered to Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government in the country as a whole. For all Winston’s fury at the verdict, within days the Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald would form its second administration. Baldwin would be back in power within two years – when the Labour Cabinet split in 1931 over its response to the Great Depression, it was he who led the Tories into a National Government with the embattled MacDonald. By 1935, Baldwin would even be restored to Downing Street as Prime Minister. By contrast, unlike after the Dardanelles disaster, or the loss of his seat in Dundee, any remaining hopes of a way back for Winston gradually faded. He was to be out of office completely, and miserable about it, for a decade – the period frequently referred to as his ‘wilderness years’. During this lengthy ‘Siberian exile’ he relied on Clementine to comfort him and stand by him no matter what; the effort this time would test their marriage to breaking point.

  Winston had lost favour with the people as well as with his party. His Gold Standard decision in 1925 had been blamed for the economic slump of the late 1920s (he himself came to regard it as the greatest mistake of his career) and his confrontational handling of the Great Strike of 1926 had made him look cold-hearted and trigger-happy. Ministerial colleagues, tired of his egotistical interference in their own departments, had been only too keen to join the general criticism; as Neville Chamberlain protested about working with Winston: ‘You never get a moment’s rest!’1 Overall, it was clear that his post at the Exchequer had not played to his strengths and the consequences had reinforced his reputation for poor judgment. The back-biting, meanwhile, did nothing to help reconcile Clementine to his return to the Conservative fold.

  The election result also deprived the Churchills of their London home. At a time when others in their circle were settling into opulent middle age, Winston and Clementine were reduced once again to living out of suitcases in short-term lets, staying with friends, or stints in hotels. Three years would elapse before their finances were sufficiently robust to allow them to buy another place in the capital. Even then, 11 Morpeth Mansions, occupying the upper two floors of a red-brick mansion block close to Westminster Cathedral, was certainly not the grand London villa they might once have expected. The study and kitchen were tiny, the spiral staircase narrow, and at the time flats were generally seen as rather lower class. But the views over the Palace of Westminster offered some compensation, and Clementine transformed the place with her usual magic.

  Even while at the Treasury, Winston had continued to write books at a prodigious rate to bring in extra money, sometimes churning out two thousand words a day during the parliamentary recess. Now his output increased still further in an attempt to plug the £5000-a-year hole left by the loss of the Chancellor’s salary. His advances and serialisation payments, plus the proceeds from the sale of American publishing rights, amounted to a handsome sum, giving him the unusual and welcome feeling of a cushion of wealth – at least until the Wall Street crash in October 1929. Winston was on a three-month American lecture tour at the time and in New York he witnessed a ruined investor throw himself to his death from the fifteenth floor. Without Clementine’s knowledge, Winston too had been using his own funds (and borrowing more) to speculate heavily in American stocks and lost £10,000 (over half a million pounds in today’s money). Although he tried to keep the bad news from her as long as he could, when he arrived back at Waterloo station on 5 November he buckled, confessing all before they had even left the platform.

  By the end of that year, they were on the edge of bankruptcy. Only Winston’s monumental day-and-night productivity as a writer kept the creditors at bay. As it was, with no money to pay for heating or servants, Chartwell had to be mothballed for the winter, while Mary was moved into a butler’s cottage with Moppet. Even holidays were cancelled; as a result, when Winston attempted to boost the family coffers with another US speaking tour towards the end of 1931, Clementine made sure to accompany him. The money should have made good his Wall Street losses – £10,000 had been promised for forty bookings – but after delivering just one lecture in New York, he was knocked down late one evening by a taxi on Fifth Avenue, and rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital with frightening head, chest and thigh injuries. Clementine was summoned so quickly from her room at Waldorf Astoria Towers that she forgot to put on her shoes. She stayed at his bedside overnight until he was out of danger, but the tour had to be postponed.

  Their parlous financial state allowed little time for convalescence, however. Winston had to write an article about his injuries for the Daily Mail to cover his medical costs, and within a few weeks he had pushed himself back to work to deliver at least some of the lectures. News of their latest misfortune travelled home, and as would happen so often in their lives, wealthy admirers clubbed together to help them. When Winston arrived back at Paddington station in March 1932 (Clementine had travelled on ahead), there was a gleaming new Daimler waiting for him by the platform, a gift from 140 disparate benefactors including Charlie Chaplin, the Prince of Wales and his former arch-critic John Maynard Keynes. It was a magnificent gesture, but not one that would pay the bills.

  These years also marked the beginning of a long period of brittle health for Clementine. In the immediate aftermath of the 1929 defeat a tonsil infection led to a serious case of blood poisoning and she was sent to Preston Deanery Hall nursing home at Northampton, where a near-starvation ‘curative’ regime caused her to lose six pounds in five days and drop to eight stone six. Unsurprisingly she felt ‘giddy & prickly’ and one day, after a visitor left, she panicked, thinking she was about to have a ‘fainting fit’ or even a heart attack. Although she pleaded with Winston to come and ‘hold her paw’, she conceded he was probably ‘too busy’. In the absence of her husband, a medicinal brandy would have to suffice.

  This illness was followed by bouts of mastoid disease, a potentially fatal infection of the air cells behind the ear. So severe was the pain at one point that her doctors were forced to operate twice in a day. But as usual in a real crisis, Clementine rose to the challenge and ‘astonished’ them with her courage. The drama drew the best out of Winston as well: he took the trouble to sit by her bedside, patiently reading her psalms. Clementine was so touched that he had spent time alone with her, that she actually welcomed her illness ‘for it has brought you so close to me . . . you are always deep in
my heart and now your tenderness has unlocked it’.2

  By contrast, he was less attentive during her increasingly frequent bouts of non-specific nervous exhaustion. Despite his much-hyped Black Dog, in truth he had no understanding of real depression, whereas at times Clementine’s was acute – a condition someone would later describe as her ‘high metal fatigue’. Few on the outside would guess but she would spend the rest of her life trying increasingly invasive and unorthodox methods of overcoming it. Even as a child her niece Clarissa had thought her ‘neurotic’. ‘Aunt Clementine was always going to bed instead of coming to lunch,’ she recalls. ‘Obviously living with Winston was quite a business; overall she must have been a tough cookie to take it . . . [But] she was always conscious of her health. It was accepted within the family that she was a hypochondriac and she was definitely hysterical, no question . . . Maybe she felt in some way inadequate, although Winston just doggedly went on when this happened and didn’t pay much attention. True, I never saw her not completely self-controlled. But when people are trying to control themselves all the time in public, they find it too much and need to go to bed.’3 So frequently did Clementine absent herself from her guests that the painter William Nicholson (another Chartwell regular) took to sending her illustrated notes addressed to ‘Mrs Churchill in bed’. The challenge of being married to Winston did not always command the respect it deserved.

  Clementine devoted her whole life to Winston, yet as her future daughter-in-law, who would later live with them and come to know them both intimately, once calculated, she may have spent up to eighty per cent of their marriage without him.4 In part this was because Winston was away with work or pursuing his other interests. But as Pamela later noted, Churchills ‘expect their women to understand them totally. And they don’t spend much time trying to understand their women . . .’ Pamela would also observe a lack of ‘tenderness’ on Winston’s part despite the pet names and their idiosyncratic ‘wow wow’ greeting. ‘I think in his heart, he adored her, or I assumed it, but I don’t think it ever occurred to him that she might need perhaps a little more.’5

  Winston does appear to have sensed that the demands of being married to him were in large part to blame for Clementine’s nervous condition, but as his own doctor noted, he scrupulously avoided ‘anything depressing’ – including visiting hospitals6 or discussing his wife’s seemingly intractable problems. Nor, as Clementine knew all too well, did he enjoy the company of any but the most optimistic people; he tolerated her frequent absences in search of a cure because there was a chance she might return in a better state of mind. There was no question of a change in him, however. Even out of power, Winston continued to thrive on ceaseless rush and bustle, and was miserable without it. His staff could stand the commotion for only so many years (three or four seems to have been the general limit) before they left, completely spent. But the option of resigning for a calmer life was not open to Clementine. Following his ejection from office he continued to take for granted her undivided attention and support, apparently oblivious to the extent of her growing detachment. She took to reciting out loud a couple of lines from an elegy written for an overworked governess:

  Here lies a woman who always was tired,

  For she lived in a world where too much was required.7

  As well as politics, painting and writing, Winston devoted much time during these years to his ‘cronies’. Clementine disapproved of many of these ever-present hangers-on, whom she likened to ‘dogs round a lamp-post’.8 Rather than scions of ancient noble families, like himself, Winston was drawn to a collection of self-made buccaneers, of whom the most favoured by him (and disliked by her) were known as the ‘Three Bs’. Clementine had long since proved herself a better judge of character than her husband and waged a constant battle to prevent these adventurers from taking advantage of him – or from excluding her. As her erstwhile rival Violet put it: ‘His cause was her cause, his enemies were her enemies, though (to her credit) his friends were not invariably her friends.’9

  One of the Bs, Brendan Bracken, was an unmarried loner who had cast off his own family back in Ireland. He would let himself into the Churchills’ home and overnight on her sofas without warning, cut articles about Winston out of her scrapbook without permission and, worst of all, once promised to take an excited twelve-year-old Randolph to the zoo and then nonchalantly failed to turn up. She was also furious when Bracken had the cheek to call her ‘Clemmie’10 – a privilege she jealously reserved for the very few. She made her feelings clear in withering putdowns or icy stares that prompted another guest to brand her ‘the coldest woman I ever met’.

  Most of all Clementine took exception to the rumours that the mysterious Bracken was Winston’s illegitimate son. Bracken fanned the flames by mischievously addressing Winston as ‘father’, and Winston in turn enjoyed the resulting sexual frisson otherwise so absent from his life. Naturally, her husband’s delight in the ruse – and the fact that even her own children began to believe it – only deepened Clementine’s dislike for Bracken. When she finally confronted Winston as to whether the red-haired ‘reprobate’ really was his son he teasingly replied: ‘I’ve looked the matter up and the dates don’t coincide.’

  She was rarely wrong about people and seldom changed her mind, yet with Bracken she did. He was not, as she had feared, another charlatan, flexing his connection with Winston for his own gain, but possessed beneath his brash exterior a warm and generous nature. During Winston’s period as Chancellor, Clementine had tried to exclude him from their lives because she thought him bad for Winston’s image. But such was his undying fealty to her husband that by the early 1930s, her anti-Bracken ‘vendetta’ had thawed.11

  In contrast, she was never to change her view of F.E. Smith, who in 1919 became Lord Birkenhead. Here was a man for whom excessive alcohol consumption amounted to a virility test and she dreaded the idea of him leading her husband – and later Randolph – astray. Winston, contrary to legend, was rarely a hard drinker by the standards of his day; in truth, he disliked any loss of control. The Johnnie Walker Red Label whisky placed by his side as soon as breakfast was over was heavily diluted and sipped so slowly it lasted until lunchtime. But as a man unusually prone to tears he relished reports of his drunkenness, which lent him an air of machismo. Yet while Winston was indeed able, as he put it, to take ‘more out of alcohol’ than it took out of him, Clementine was right to fret about the arrogant Birkenhead’s influence over her son. Both Randolph and Birkenhead lacked Winston’s self-restraint and would suffer equally for it. Yet Birkenhead – who spoke of an ‘intimacy’ with Winston that had ‘a quality’ almost ‘feminine in its caressing charm’12 – was perhaps his greatest friend. When he died, from drink, in 1930, Winston broke down and spoke of feeling ‘so lonely’.13

  Clementine was, perhaps, horrified most of all by the hold over Winston of the third B, the Canadian Lord Beaverbrook – born William Maxwell Aitken – a rapacious wheeler-dealer of uncertain loyalties and shady business dealings, once described as twenty-five per cent thug, fifteen per cent crook and the remainder genius and goodness of heart.14 Winston accounted for his fixation with this latter-day Machiavelli by quipping ‘Some take drugs, I take Max’, but Clementine was appalled at the newspaper magnate’s manipulative power games, and she almost always (and often correctly) vehemently disagreed with his political advice. She also abhorred his neglectful treatment of his long-suffering first wife Gladys, who had died in 1927 aged just thirty-nine, and worried that the presence of his ‘close friend’ Mrs Norton would corrupt Diana’s and Randolph’s teenage minds. Hence she set out to counter his sway wherever she could, in what became a prolonged contest for Winston’s ear. If her husband were dining with Beaverbrook without her, it was not unknown for Clementine to escort Winston to the door pleading with him not to be taken in by that ‘microbe’.15 For his part, Beaverbrook appears to have regarded her dislike as a challenge, sometimes sending her fruit and flowers when she was ill, but at other
times deliberately trying to outsmart her.

  Even Max could not compete with Winston’s renewed preoccupation with foreign affairs, however. In 1932, he took a trip to Bavaria, where he toured the old battlefields trodden by his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough (about whom he was writing a book). While there Winston was struck by displays of what he considered to be a distinctly unhealthy militarism. Although widely mocked on his return to Britain, even by his few remaining friends, he sounded warnings about ‘bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for the Fatherland’.16 From then on ‘Germany’s card was marked in Churchill’s mind’17 and in turn he was soon viewed in Berlin as an ‘enemy of its “rightful” progress as a major power’. When Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933, Winston was swift to denounce both the man and his ‘pitiless’ ill-treatment of minorities, decrying the terrible dangers of the Führer’s grievances over Germany’s treatment by the Treaty of Versailles. A year later he was predicting in the Commons that air power – which he called a ‘hellish invention’ – would irrevocably alter the course of future wars and that therefore Britain needed to expand the RAF as a matter of the greatest urgency. He also informed the House of the ‘terrible’ news that ‘Germany is arming – she is rapidly arming – and no one will stop her.’18 And yet his words fell largely on deaf ears. ‘I was disgusted by the D.M. [Daily Mail]’s boosting of Hitler,’19 Winston wrote to Clementine in dismay in August 1934.