Perhaps Moyne thought nothing of it. Philip, the London director of Knoedler, the New York art dealers, had a reputation for passing flirtations and was in any case thought not to be that interested in women sexually. Or maybe their host merely enjoyed seeing Clementine so happy. There is no proof that anything physical took place between them during the cruise, but there was certainly no lack of opportunity, and Moyne had set a decadent tone by bringing along his mistress rather than his wife. Whether her relationship with Philip was adulterous or not, it seems that he was almost certainly not in love with her. Nevertheless, his open and ardent admiration shook Clementine to her core.
At first, seemingly oblivious to the threat, Winston churned out lengthy typed bulletins about events at Chartwell or Randolph’s latest antics. He confessed to feeling ‘unprotected’ without his Kat, that he had been ‘sometimes a little depressed about politics’ and that he would have liked to have been ‘comforted’ by her. But then she began to mention ‘Mr Philip’ – soon he was just ‘Terence’ – rather too often and too enthusiastically. She also wrote more explicitly than before. Early on in the cruise, she had railed against the ‘indecency’ of a Jean Harlow film, but within weeks she was enthusing about the Balinese dedication to sex. Perhaps goaded by her account of their trip to the desert island, Winston sent an expensive pair of new earrings for her birthday; some ‘really lovely “twinklers”’ she had long coveted. Gratifyingly, the gift elicited the response: ‘wow – I love it’. The earring retrieved by Philip had been a cheap fake.
The children too began to wonder about the drift in their mother’s affections. Back in January Sarah had written: ‘DARLING DARLING Mummy. I imagine you . . . gaily chasing after butterflies and dragons with Mr Terence Phillips [sic].’43 A month later she pleaded: ‘Don’t forget to come home some time. Papa is miserable and frightfully naughty without you! Your children however are model in every way.’44 Finally Winston wrote that although he had not grudged her this ‘long excursion’, as he called it, ‘now I do want you back’. He was not displaying jealousy as such – Winston never did – but he was becoming a little impatient.
When she finally returned to him – and real life – on 30 April 1935, Clementine was a revitalised woman with a model’s physique that she showed off at George V’s Silver Jubilee celebrations a few days later. Of course she soon came crashing back down to earth. She discovered that Randolph, Mary and Sarah had all been ill; that Randolph’s antics had become so acutely embarrassing they had elicited the sympathy of the Prime Minister (Baldwin had remarked to Winston on how ‘one’s children are like a lot of live bombs. One never knows when they will go off, or in what direction’); and that Winston had spent more money on Chartwell, redecorating the drawing room, re-turfing the orchard and installing new bookshelves.
In short, nothing had changed – certainly not Winston nor his obsession with the Nazis. Hitler had recently announced that his air force was already as strong as Britain’s – completely contradicting Baldwin’s previous misleading assertions. Yet this vindication of Winston’s position had done little to shake the general atmosphere of apathy and denial that clouded British foreign policy. In truth, the Luftwaffe was actually superior in strength and still rapidly growing. ‘How discreditable for the Government . . . to have misled Parliament upon a matter involving the safety of the country,’ Winston informed Clementine bitterly.45
Little wonder she was reluctant to let go of her life on the Rosaura altogether. Over the next two years Philip came to Chartwell to visit Clementine a number of times, and they may well have met elsewhere. But in the late thirties he seems abruptly to have moved away to work at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York, where he would die a few years later. Whatever the nature of their relationship, like many another sunlit holiday fling, it fizzled out under the grey skies of England. A coral-pink dove that she had brought back from Bali in a wicker cage also survived only a couple of years. She had it buried under the sundial in the kitchen garden at Chartwell with lines around the base from a poem by W.P. Ker:
It does not do to wander
Too far from sober men,
But there’s an island yonder,
I think of it again.
It was ‘very nice’ to be back, Clementine wrote to her former secretary Miss Street in August 1935, but ‘Oh Dear I want to start out again very badly! Mr Pug is very sweet but now he says “NO”.’46 Her only real option was to throw herself back into family life. Tortured by what she saw as her failures with her elder offspring, she resolved to do better with her youngest child. Until her adolescence, Mary was much closer to Moppet – or Nana as she called her – than to Clementine and quite open about it. If Clementine suggested doing something, Mary’s instinct was to consult beloved Nana first. Mama was beautiful and clever – but she was, in Mary’s own words, more of a ‘deity’ than a parent. In Clementine’s absence, Moppet had performed the maternal role brilliantly, creating a stable home for Mary in which she had thrived. Now that Mary was fast growing up, though, time was running out for Clementine and, with painful regret, she knew it.
In 1935 Winston spent Christmas away from his family, on a luxurious stint in Morocco with Lord Rothermere and Lloyd George, so Clementine seized the opportunity to spend more time alone with her youngest. Their skiing trip to Zürs in Austria, which Mary remembered as a ‘great thrill’, was their first proper holiday together. Indeed, it was the first occasion Mary, now thirteen, had spent ‘any period of time’ with her mother without Nana.47 Clementine’s decision to take up skiing for the first time at the age of fifty was her way of reaching out to her daughter – and perhaps also a device to separate the girl from Moppet. ‘Clementine was jealous of Moppet,’ recalls her niece Clarissa, ‘because of her good relationship with Mary. But that was Clementine’s fault. She wasn’t much of a mother as you can imagine.’ There are reports of painful rows between the two women, with Clarissa confirming that Clementine’s jealousy ‘made it an awful job for Moppet’.48
She became a stylish if not especially speedy skier, but at least she now shared a hobby with Mary, and she made plenty of time for them to chat and read together in the evening. Only now did Mary come to know and understand her hitherto distant mother as a ‘person’. The experiment was such a success that it was repeated the following winter, and the next. (Winston, disliking both snow and exercise, never joined them.) The more intimate relationship was not without its stresses, though. ‘I dreaded her displeasure, and the emotional, electric storms that could brew,’ wrote Mary later.
But the trips established a companionship between them that never really faltered. Thus Clementine’s belated efforts with her last child were amply repaid – further highlighting her disappointments and differences with Diana, Randolph and Sarah. ‘She didn’t mean to neglect the others – they were beautifully provided for,’ Mary once claimed, insisting their mother was not a bad parent. ‘But she didn’t give to the others as she gave to me.’49
While Clementine was away with Mary, Sarah informed her father that she was in love with an older Austrian-born comedian by the name of Vic Oliver. The pair had met in October 1935, while they had both been appearing in impresario C.B. Cochran’s theatrical revue, Follow the Sun. Before leaving for Zürs, Clementine had gone up to Manchester to see Sarah’s first night and was impressed by her twenty-year-old daughter’s dancing, even if it was performed scantily clothed and was not exactly ‘respectable’. Oliver was the show’s principal star, although at the time he made little impression on Clementine. Despite the fact that he was eighteen years older, divorced and with a devoted mistress in New York, Sarah had nevertheless set her heart on becoming his wife.
From the slopes, Clementine professed ‘horror’ at the news, but decided to leave the matter to Winston and even to extend her skiing trip for a couple of months after Mary returned home for school. In her absence, Winston ignored her appeals to him not to be ‘severe’. All guns blazing, in February he summoned Oli
ver and Sarah to Morpeth Mansions, deliberately omitting to shake hands with a man he dismissed as ‘common as dirt’, with a ‘horrible mouth and foul Austro-Yankee drawl’. Winston told the comedian that, should he dare to persist with the engagement, he would issue ‘an immediate public statement’ that would be ‘painful to them both’.50
Oliver gave way, agreeing to Winston’s terms of a year’s separation before marrying. But her father’s aggression – including addressing her ‘like a public meeting’ – made Mule all the more determined. After she promised not to marry Oliver, Winston claimed triumphantly to Diana: ‘I think I have put her off.’ ‘On the contrary,’ replied the perceptive Diana. ‘I think you have chased her away.’
Sensing imminent disaster, Clementine finally returned from her holiday to try a less confrontational, woman-to-woman approach. Over breakfast at Chartwell, at a time when she knew Winston would not be around, she promised Sarah her own flat in London to use with ‘total freedom’, on the condition that she gave up Oliver. It was an offer that would have been unthinkable just a few months earlier and showed how Clementine’s attitudes had relaxed since her adventures aboard the Rosaura. It also revealed how desperate she was not to lose her daughter. ‘Sarah was the closest to Mummy,’ Mary believed. ‘She understood her . . . there was a chemistry.’51
The Churchills were not a family among whom sex had previously been discussed, so Sarah was shocked at what she saw as her mother’s ‘immoral’ suggestion – and at the way Clementine now speculated as to whether a man was ‘executive’ (her new term for ‘good in bed’). Sarah was not in any case tempted by the parade of eligible young bachelors her mother hastily invited to Chartwell, executive or not. She was star-struck and was all the while secretly in constant contact with Oliver, even though he had left for the US. She appreciated her mother’s conciliatory efforts, but her mind was made up.
In September 1936, with Winston safely out of the country in the south of France, Sarah bolted. Oliver had finally succumbed to her pleas for a lifeline by sending her a ticket to New York on the German liner, SS Bremen. After withdrawing her savings, amounting to just £4, Sarah told the unsuspecting Clementine that she was going up to Morpeth Mansions for the night to visit her hairdresser. And she did go to the flat. But from there she took a cab to the boat train at Waterloo. Guilty at betraying her mother’s trust, she handed a friend a letter to pass to Clementine in person after her departure. Alas, the so-called friend merely posted it and rushed to tip off the Daily Express. By the time Sarah reached the port in Southampton a newspaper photographer was waiting for her. The first Clementine knew of her daughter’s whereabouts was when she saw the next morning’s headline: MISS SARAH CHURCHILL ELOPES TO NEW YORK.
Sarah’s letter, when it arrived, implored Clementine to ‘Please make Papa understand’, and asked her not to worry. Clementine was distraught and also certain that Winston would not be mollified. His efforts to stop the marriage reached new heights of paternal belligerence. Randolph was dispatched on the next steamer across the Atlantic, lawyers were instructed to erect legal barriers, and private detectives were hired to dig up dirt on Oliver. An increasingly panicked Sarah phoned Clementine to appeal for her help, but Winston was unstoppable. In the mêlée, Oliver appeared ever more a refuge from the intensity of Churchill life. ‘I had needed to get away from my happy home for it wasn’t a question of having one strong parent but,’ Sarah later recalled, ‘two great and strong parents.’52 She quickly and quietly married him on Christmas Eve 1936 with only a lawyer and a cleaning lady as witnesses. Not only had Winston waged an unsuccessful war against his daughter and her new husband, the whole world had watched him fail.
It was far from the only humiliation of the mid-1930s. Take India and his opposition to the most gradual moves towards self-government. Since the late twenties Winston had devoted energy – and much of his remaining political capital – to an imperial position that even his natural sympathisers recognised was futile, and that also served to exclude him from the MacDonald–Baldwin National Government of 1931. Curiously, Clementine’s instincts for Winston’s best political interests failed her on this issue, as she appears largely to have agreed with him on retaining the British Raj, and even made one of her now all too rare public speeches in support. The Churchills’ stance cut them off not only from the Conservative front bench, but also from natural anti-appeasement allies such as the rising MPs Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Duff Cooper. Cooper later wrote that Winston’s attempted blocking of dominion status for India was ‘the most unfortunate event that occurred between the two wars’.53 Certainly it was a position that would cost him dear. For all his efforts, the Government of India Act, which introduced limited self-rule, passed into law in August 1935.
Clementine’s judgment during the abdication crisis of 1936 put her back on the side of history. She and Winston fought like Kat and Pug over whether the new King, Edward VIII (George V having died in January), should be forced to renounce the throne if he were to marry his twice-divorced American mistress Wallis Simpson. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had bluntly informed the King that Mrs Simpson would be unacceptable as Queen, and that he would have to choose between her and his crown. Winston, though, again succumbed to emotion, displaying unwavering loyalty to Edward, who had personally turned to him for support. He rose to speak in the King’s defence in a debate in the House of Commons in December 1936, begging the government not to take an ‘irrevocable step’. Before he could utter more than a few words, however, he was ‘howled down’ in shame.
It was – as Clementine had warned him – a near career-ending misjudgment of the mood of the House. The normally supportive MP Robert Boothby compared it to a dog being sick on the carpet, and many thought Winston’s diehard championing of an unpopular monarch – even if rooted in the romantic ideals of the divine right of kings and the supremacy of love – had undermined his credibility for ever. Unlike his wife, he had woefully misread the majority view (at least amongst the political classes) that the King should put duty first. Worse, just when there were signs that others were beginning to heed his warnings about the rise of Germany and the need to rearm, he had laid himself open to the damaging charge that he had exploited the whole saga to undermine Baldwin. Only after the constitutional crisis was resolved by the King’s abdication a few days later did he finally see the error of his ways. At the coronation of King George VI in May of the following year, Winston turned to Clementine with tears in his eyes and said, ‘You were right: I now see the other one wouldn’t have done.’54
The saga had shaken even Clementine’s faith that Winston would one day reach Number 10. Some thought his reason so flawed that there were once again suggestions that he might be suffering from a form of insanity – or late-stage syphilis, like his father. Clementine had endured so much but this series of humiliations took her close to breaking point. Exhausted, depressed, without hope for the future, she started planning her way out. She went to see her sister-in-law Goonie at her house in Regent’s Park to say that she wanted a divorce from Winston.55 ‘There might have been many times, I’m sure,’ recounted Pamela, ‘in the twenties and thirties when she could have left him and nobody would have blamed her.’ Goonie, however, wisely advised her to go abroad to reflect before she finally made up her mind.
It was only when Clementine duly left for Austria that Winston appears to have realised that he was in danger of losing his wife as well as his daughter. When Sarah returned to Britain, he invited her to a reconciliation lunch at Chartwell. ‘I suppose we must call him Vic,’ he wrote to Clementine, who had decided to stay away. Now civil but still unconvinced, Winston pronounced: ‘She has done what she liked, and now has to like what she has done.’ Few were surprised when the relationship with the unreliable Oliver quickly began to unravel. Its demise left Sarah deeply unhappy, though, and by the end of the decade she, Randolph and Diana (who had embarked on another unsatisfactory marriage in 1935) were all drinking heavily. But at
least Winston’s efforts to broker a peace with his daughter won him favour with his wife; she returned from Austria some time afterwards a little pacified.
In October 1935 Mussolini had launched a brutal invasion of Abyssinia, but in Britain the Conservatives under Baldwin’s leadership had won the following month’s election on the pledge that there would be ‘no great armaments’. It had consequently been unsurprising – except perhaps to Winston – that as the most ‘belligerent’ exponent of rapid rearmament he had again been excluded from the new government. But Clementine now saw that his continued exile might prove propitious. It would, she argued, leave him untainted by the government’s continuing blunders. ‘I really would not like you to serve under Baldwin,’ she told him in January 1936, ‘unless he really gave you a great deal of power and you were able to inspire and vivify the Government.’56
From this point on, Winston changed his tactics, seeking to broaden his appeal and win support from a wider spectrum of public opinion (and indeed his own wife). Instead of directing his fire at Labour and the Liberals as well as the diehard appeasers in the Tory Party, he sought to woo his one-time opponents, together with progressive Conservatives, by integrating their beloved League of Nations and its doctrine of ‘collective security’ into his call for rearmament. This attempt to build an anti-Nazi coalition led Clementine to take a closer interest in Winston’s campaign, so that when she went away to one of her cures she now made sure to have copies of Hansard sent out to her to keep track of his speeches.
Events in Europe were in any case gathering pace. In March 1936, while Clementine was still in Zürs, Hitler again flagrantly defied the Treaty of Versailles by reoccupying the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland. Then in July, nationalist elements of the Spanish army revolted against the left-wing Republican government and a bloody civil war broke out. Despite the fig-leaf policy of non-intervention championed by the British and French, the Soviets moved to prop up the Republic while Hitler and Mussolini began supplying military aid to General Franco’s rebels – a contravention that if anything Winston actually supported as, in 1936 at least, he believed that it would be ‘better for the safety of all if the Communists’ were ‘crushed’.57 By 1938, however, as the civil war dragged on, Winston was radically changing his mind. He began to fear that a nationalist victory in Madrid would result in Spain falling under the influence of Nazi Germany and that therefore Franco’s fascists represented a real and growing threat to Britain. He even argued it was consequently in the national interest to seek a once unthinkable alliance with Moscow (a stance that did much to raise his standing with Labour MPs).
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