Such was his isolation, indeed, that MPs on both sides of the House would pointedly leave the chamber whenever Winston stood up to speak, considering his stream of warnings about Hitler tedious and absurd. The Times declared that his alarmist prophecies made even ‘Jeremiah appear an optimist’. Supported by five MPs at most, he was lampooned by cartoonists, shouted down by students, and looked ill and beaten. Although determined to ‘bugger on regardless’, he felt battered by the abuse from the evangelical voices of appeasement, and found public appearances an ordeal. As part of the wall of mockery, there were even sniggering doubts about his virility, not helped by admissions such as: ‘The reason I can write so much is that I don’t waste my essence in bed.’ Now coming up to sixty, he clearly appreciated the young, pretty secretaries who worked devotedly for him late into the night, but there was never a whisper of anything untoward. Certainly the once green-eyed Clementine no longer appeared perturbed by potential rivals; on one occasion, she invited his old love, the actress Ethel Barrymore, down to Chartwell to cheer him up.
Just how much even Clementine shared Winston’s obsession with the Nazi peril in those early days is not clear. She made sure to keep abreast of the news, and cut out articles on events in Germany for Winston that she thought might be of use. When she was away, he wrote to her frequently of his concerns, and detailed new evidence in support of his case, but in the early thirties she rarely addressed the subject directly in her replies. In fact, in 1931 she suggested it would be folly ever to engage the Germans in war again, as the last time they had not really been defeated but merely ‘stifled by numbers’.
Whatever the level of agreement on the German issue, in most other areas their marriage was turbulent. They were profoundly at odds over how to deal with what was now widely viewed as Randolph’s ‘pathological’ self-importance. Even Winston had finally recognised how his indulgence was spoiling his son, writing to him in 1929: ‘You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence.’ Calling Randolph insolent and self-indulgent, he continued: ‘I have tried – perhaps prematurely – to add to our natural ties those of companionship & comradeship. But you . . . give nothing in return for the many privileges & favours you have hitherto received. I must therefore adopt a different attitude towards you for yr own good.’20
Unfortunately, Winston’s tougher ‘attitude’ was short-lived and Randolph quickly reverted to his old sense of freewheeling entitlement. This became further inflated when, in June 1932, Winston threw a roast duck and champagne twenty-first birthday party for him at Claridge’s. More than sixty titled and powerful men and their sons sat down to a dinner at which Lord Rothermere hailed Randolph as ‘Britain’s Young Man of Destiny’ and Winston spoke of handing on the ‘sacred lamp’ of power. Randolph repaid his father’s devotion by bedding other men’s wives, appearing in the newspapers in drunken brawls, and on one occasion throwing the half-blind Bracken’s glasses into the sea out of jealousy.
Clementine rarely put pen to paper regarding her son at this time, but Mary recalled bitter rows and recriminations between her parents on the subject and a distinct chilliness in their relations. For the first time there were hints that their ever more regular separations might become permanent. Indeed, Pamela believed that the only subject that ever really came between Clementine and Winston was Randolph.
Nevertheless, the boy continued to worship his father; if Winston failed to indulge him quite as before it was his distant mother he blamed. Randolph became notoriously misogynist, most pointedly in his attitude to women in politics. On one trip with Winston to the US, a female reporter from the Toronto Star quoted him as saying that he thought women ‘simply did not fit in’ with British political life and that their presence caused a lamentable ‘lack of dignity’.21 No doubt it caused Clementine even greater dismay when Winston began to seek Randolph’s advice on his speeches – her husband was thrilled with his son’s suggestion that he should be more ‘garrulous’.22
Although Winston would now rebuke Randolph when he was rude to his mother, and send him from the room when he refused to apologise, his inclination was still to relent. He clung to the idea that he could salvage the relationship; whereas Clementine felt she had no option but to break any remnants of a bond between mother and son. ‘He was so badly behaved – Randolph would get possessed by the devil in drink – that Clemmie couldn’t handle it any more,’ recalls John Julius Norwich, a Churchill family friend. He believes to this day that she really did ‘hate’ her son, and that he in turn held her in equally low regard. ‘I remember [Randolph’s] passionate admiration for his father . . . He never mentioned his mother at all.’23
The tragedy was that on the odd occasion they did spend time together away from Winston and Chartwell, Clementine and Randolph enjoyed each other’s company. In October 1930, when he was just nineteen, Randolph dropped his studies at Oxford – against her advice – to take up an exciting invitation to give a lecture tour in the US. Word soon came back that he had met a young woman named Kay Halle, from Cleveland, Ohio, and was planning to marry her. Clementine hurriedly set out for New York in February 1931 to try to persuade him that he was too young to settle down. Given their history of antagonism, it was a risky strategy, but the prospect of her first trip to America was too exciting to pass up. The fact that she was to travel solo by luxury liner – which she exploited to the full by ordering manicures, pedicures, massages and dinner in bed – was especially thrilling. ‘Papa is amused & rather outraged at the idea of me going to America without him,’ she wrote to Randolph. ‘But I think I should prefer to go alone & not as the appendage of a distinguished man!’24
Upon reaching her son, Clementine was surprised by his reception of her and sat talking with him long into the night. ‘His joy at seeing me was really sweet & I felt much moved.’ Away from the pressures of being Winston Churchill’s heir, she saw her son in a new light. Randolph ‘is a darling. He has quite captivated me . . . & he seems to enjoy my company . . . It is quite like a honeymoon.’25 Not only did she successfully scotch his wedding plans, but she also spent six enthralling weeks with him touring the country. Randolph escorted his mother to the louche delights of Prohibition-era speakeasies as well as to the more formal charms of lunches with senators, ambassadors and members of the great political dynasties. They also swam in warm waters, played golf and took a look at the White House, if only from the outside. The US fashion for heavy make-up and obsession with face and figure was her sole disappointment: American women were in her view ‘clothes pegs & painted masks’ who were lovely to look at but ‘inane & dull’.26
Previously both Clementine and Winston had been known to be ‘hostile’ to America as a result of President Coolidge’s crushing announcement in 1928 – when Winston had still been in charge of the national purse-strings as Chancellor – that he would not forgive Britain’s crippling debts from the Great War. Clementine had been hawkish, too, in her attitude to American ambitions to supplant Britain as a world power, advising Winston that it was ‘no use grovelling or even being civil’ to the US.27 She had railed about Coolidge’s ‘coldness, smugness, self-sufficiency, boastfulness, Pharisaicalness & cant’ and had even described Americans as ‘Swine’28 who intended to ‘do us in’. (It was also a common belief among upper-class Britons of the time that Americans were somehow less civilised and less educated than themselves.) Now Clementine had mingled so enjoyably in American society, her whole conception of the Land of the Free was dramatically altered. She found she loved the sights of Washington and the shopping in New York, and realised that many Americans were ‘extremely nice!’29 She particularly relished attending a ‘wonderful club for women’ called the American Women’s Association, which introduced her to the novel concepts of networking and female leadership.
Sadly, when she and Randolph returned to Winston and life in England after this harmonious interlude, their relationship plummeted to new depths of distrust. Randolph successfully took up journalism, but his earnings failed
to sustain his wanton lifestyle. He swanned around in a chauffeur-driven Bentley, lived in the best suite in the May Fair Hotel, acted obnoxiously in nightclubs, and when he could not pay his bills ran back to his parents for money. To Clementine’s horror, in 1934 Winston was, on one occasion alone, obliged to settle pressing gambling debts of £1500, wiping out a tenth of his entire earnings for the year. He later confessed to feeling ‘overwhelmed with work’30 trying to pay for it all, once drawing himself as a pig loaded down by a ten-ton weight.
Randolph’s visits, usually marked by a request for yet another sizeable cheque, would inevitably herald horrific rows. His cousin, Peregrine Churchill, recounted how family dinners at the time were not for the faint-hearted: ‘All those overpowering egos!’31 Sometimes Winston refused to see Randolph; more than once Clementine banned him from the house completely. Relations deteriorated to the point where Clementine, although never intimidated by her husband, began to fear her son. After a time, she instructed her staff never to leave her alone with him.
The early 1930s also highlighted the Churchills’ parental shortcomings in preparing their elder daughters for adulthood. Diana had made her society debut in 1927, during the same season as her second cousin Diana Mitford. It was, of course, the latter who had taken London by storm and been pursued by dozens of bewitched young men. Both Diana Churchill and her parents had found the contrast with her namesake humiliating. It did not help that the Mitford girl hero-worshipped Clementine, whom she later confessed to having tried to emulate: ‘When people say Clementine was so cold, well, she was extremely kind to us as children and, to me particularly, wonderful.’32 Worse still was that even Randolph adored Diana Mitford and according to another cousin, Anita Leslie, her resemblance to his mother only added to his yearning: ‘She had the same beautiful features, and huge blue eyes that looked as if they had been carved out of sapphires.’33
Perhaps Clementine had forgotten her own pain at being eclipsed by her vivacious sister Kitty, for she took little care to hide her disappointment from her daughter. Sarah recalled a painful visit to the dressmaker with her ‘beautiful and elegant’ mother, during which Clementine had delivered ‘a near mortal blow’ to the slightly plump Diana by remarking that Sarah was ‘so easy to dress’.34 The unspoken comparison was clear. On another occasion, Anita found Diana in tears ‘because Mummy is horrid to me and I haven’t been a success. I have sandy-coloured eyelashes.’35 Diana sought consolation by pursuing a career on the stage but found she had little real talent, and as there was already an actress called Diana Churchill she could not even trade on her name. By the time Sarah, with her ivory skin, green eyes and auburn tresses, was preparing for her society debut, Diana was still neither working nor married; such a failure in an elder sister was considered ‘a terrible tragedy’.36
Salvation appeared to arrive in the autumn of 1932, in the form of a proposal from handsome John Bailey, the thirty-two-year-old son of a South African mine-owner. Winston ensured that the wedding, held on 12 December at St Margaret’s, Westminster, was suitably grand – so as to demonstrate that although he himself was down, the Churchill dynasty was by no means out. The King sent a blue enamel dressing-table set; Sunny, the Duke of Marlborough, lent the ballroom at his house in Carlton Terrace for the reception; the wedding night was spent at the Ritz. The trouble was that Bailey was in love with the romantic novelist and society beauty Barbara Cartland but, on discovering his ‘impossible’ drinking, she had sensibly run a mile. At twenty-three, Diana had been in such a desperate rush to ‘escape’ from home that she discovered her mistake much too late. The marriage broke down after just a year; another embarrassing failure to add to the Churchill tally. Diana’s poor choice hardly helped to raise her in her mother’s esteem.
Sarah’s future was also uncertain. Upon coming out in 1933, she found the round of society balls excruciating – often escaping into the ladies’ to play cards with her cousin Unity Mitford. Clementine also disliked staying out late and comparing notes with gaggles of super-competitive mothers, but thought it necessary. Sarah, though, wanted to follow her sister Diana into acting. She was considered more suited to the craft but neither Clementine nor Winston was any happier at the thought. Despite her own thwarted ambition to go to university, Clementine could summon no empathy for either daughter’s theatrical dreams, dismissing both girls as without ‘talent or even aptitude’.37 Yet Sarah had the inner steel Diana lacked. Her doggedness had long since earned her the family nickname of ‘Mule’ and her hopes would not be so easily crushed.
In truth, having received so little parenting themselves, Clementine and Winston were struggling to find their way. Only Mary, still safely ensconced in the country in the capable care of Moppet, seemed to be growing up largely trouble free. Moppet sent her upstairs to do her homework every evening like clockwork and consequently Mary did better than expected at school. The very success of this arrangement, however, would itself become a source of anxiety for Clementine.
In December 1934, the wealthy Guinness heir Lord Moyne, one of Winston’s former junior ministers at the Treasury, invited the Churchills on a four-month cruise to the East Indies. The aim was to try to capture a specimen of the giant lizard known as the Komodo Dragon for London Zoo. Too busy with politics and book-writing, Winston decided not to take up the offer, but Clementine was determined to go. Her various ‘cures’ had provided only temporary relief from the physical and emotional strains of her life, so an invitation to the palm-fringed southern oceans was opportune.
It was while sailing across these glittering seas on board Moyne’s sumptuous motor yacht, Rosaura, that Clementine was thrown into the company of Terence Philip. He was tall, rich, suave, an authority on art and unburdened by driving ambition – in fact, unlike Winston in almost every respect. He was also an entertaining gossip, seven years her junior, and complimented her lavishly on her beauty and brains while seeking little in return. Clementine met him as she approached her fiftieth birthday and, excited by the attentions of such a man, fell in love.
Apart from the crew, for the first three weeks there was only one other couple aboard – Moyne’s agreeable cousin Lee Guinness and his wife Posy. Clementine and Philip were then alone for a few days before Moyne himself, an amusing bon viveur, and his married long-term mistress Vera Broughton, joined them in Singapore. Clementine was known for frowning on adulterers and even for refusing to socialise with unmarried couples at all. On board the Rosaura, however, romance, sunshine and champagne soon swept her up onto a thrilling high, which made her forget such straitlaced strictures. The ever-growing gloom of European politics, Winston’s obsession with his faltering career, and her children’s troubles all rapidly retreated over the horizon. Her letters home became shorter and less frequent – mere hurried notes with only the odd tinge of regret. After years of isolation and anxiety, she had at last found companionship, as well as a release of tension.
Two days after Christmas 1934 the family had waved her off from Victoria station. On her way by train to Messina, where she was to join the Rosaura, she had written saying how much she loved her ‘sweet and darling Winston’, telling him not to be vexed with his vagabond Kat. ‘She has gone off to the jungle with her tail in the air, but she will return presently to her basket and curl down comfortably.’ Sunbathing on the scrubbed wooden decks of the Rosaura as it headed south in the early days of 1935, she was able to take stock of her life in that ‘basket’. After little more than a week, she wrote a letter that suggests she was now in pursuit of rather more than a Komodo Dragon. ‘Oh my Darling, I’m thinking of you & how you have enriched my life,’ she began, before continuing in the past tense with ‘I have loved you very much but I wish I had been a more amusing wife to you.’38 She concluded wistfully, ‘how nice it would be if we were both young again’. Winston replied that he would ‘always feel so overwhelmingly in your debt’, before plucking her heart strings with: ‘I hope & pray I shall be able to make you happy & secure during my remaining y
ears . . . & leave you in comfort when my race is run.’39
On a stopover in Madras in January Clementine was photographed dressed in a diaphanous white dress. She appears lean, glowing, relaxed and perhaps at her most beautiful, and stands almost touching Philip’s side despite the expanse of deck all around her. They look for all the world like two young lovers. She had already described to Winston, in rather breathless tones, her enjoyment at frolicking with this other man in the swimming pool that Moyne had had rigged up on deck. ‘We hang onto the sides & get beaten about by the waves,’ she had written, ‘& when there is a respite we turn the hose on to our faces & tummies.’40
Later, away from the other passengers, she went deep-sea fishing with Philip in the turquoise waters of the subtropical Bay of Islands off New Zealand. On board she noticed that the captain of their launch had only one leg. ‘“Bitten off by a shark?” I asked Terence in a frightened whisper. “Perhaps only the war” he whispered back – “Can I ask him?” “No, certainly not yet!”’ When relating how they landed a ‘lovely blue tunny’ that slithered out of their hands, her tone became yet more familiar: ‘we nearly fell over the edge with it. I nearly cried and [the captain] clearly thought we were the most awful muffs. I said I felt faint & wanted food. So we left the fishing grounds for an hour & got into a little bay & had luncheon – But I felt so sick I could only drink claret & suck some very strong peppermints.’41
On other solo jaunts they boated up a river in Sumatra and motored to a deserted coral island for a picnic. ‘When we got back I discovered that I had lost an ear-ring . . . I am lost without a fat pearl in each ear & they are my only pair,’ she recounted. ‘So we went back & Terence found it.’42 She fell under the spell of Philip’s admiration over these blissful weeks, conceding years later, even to her own family, that ‘he made me like him’.
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