First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  By the late 1930s the Spanish war was to prove a turning point more widely for public opinion in Britain. For many it demonstrated that bloodshed was almost certainly the only way to halt the spread of fascism beyond the German Reich, Italy and now the Iberian peninsula. Groups of unlikely allies increasingly haunted by the idea that Britain could eventually suffer the same fate began converging on Chartwell under the banner of the only man seen as capable of stopping the madness of appeasement.

  One of Winston’s recruits – the defiantly odd Professor Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) – started to provide much-needed scientific data for his speeches. Soon this Professor of Physics at Oxford University became one of the Churchills’ most frequent visitors. Unlike the Three Bs Clementine welcomed his presence and willingly accommodated his many idiosyncrasies – including a dietary regime that consisted almost entirely of egg whites. In a house where she was so often ignored, he took the trouble to converse with her as well as her husband, despite his hostile attitude to most other women (including his own sister, with whom he was not on speaking terms). He also played tennis with Clementine – albeit insisting on wearing long shirtsleeves, even in hot weather, apparently with the aim of discouraging women from regarding him as a ‘sex object’.

  The ‘Prof’ was just one member of what was fast becoming an alternative intelligence network devoted to gathering information on Hitler’s plans. Now the nerve centre for British and European opposition to Nazism, Chartwell provided the venue for covert meetings between military officers, civil servants, journalists and industrialists, as well as refugee Germans, and later Czechs and Austrians. Clementine’s ‘country basket’ took on the bustle and tempo of a government department, as messengers constantly arrived and the telephones continually rang. Once again, Winston had become a magnet for powerful and influential visitors and Clementine could not help but find herself welcoming and hosting them all – often in great secrecy. Gradually drawn into the frantic activity, she became universally trusted for her tact and discretion, although some of those who put themselves in danger to pass on information were concerned that Winston’s volubility would lead him unwittingly to betray them. It became part of her role to ensure he remained appropriately discreet.

  She also now helped develop a network of informants on Germany’s massive rearmament – including a cousin, Sheila Grant Duff, a journalist who fed vital details back from Prague. Fortunately another mole, Desmond Morton – head of the government’s Industrial Intelligence Centre and reputedly the model for James Bond’s ‘M’ – lived just across the fields and could come and go easily without detection. Others – such as Ralph Wigram, who risked his Foreign Office career and even his liberty by passing secret files to Winston that revealed the shortfalls in Britain’s defences – were unable to take the strain of deception. After telling his wife in December 1936 that he felt a ‘failure’ for not being able to goad the government into action, he mysteriously died at the age of forty-six, some believe by his own hand. Winston’s single-minded reaction was that the unduly ‘sensitive’ Wigram had taken his government’s ineptitude ‘too much to heart’.58 It fell to an ever more vigilant Clementine to insist he pause a moment to comfort a brave man’s grieving widow.

  In May 1937, Baldwin retired as Prime Minister to be replaced by Neville Chamberlain, who quickly dashed Winston’s hopes of office once again. Under Chamberlain’s leadership, the division between supporters of appeasement, like himself, and critics such as Winston became if anything even more personal and bitter. Most of the leading figures on either side had known each other for years and some were related. Many had attended the same schools (over a third of Tory MPs had been at either Eton or Harrow) and universities. The rebels were socially shunned and scorned and branded traitors to their government, class, party and even country. Wigram was not the only one to suffer; others also broke down under the strain of finding a room go silent every time they walked in.

  Winston’s pressing sense of mission turned many of his remaining followers and staff into devoted accomplices, their working hours often stretching to two or three in the morning. So unceasing were his demands that in the summer of 1936 his long-standing secretary Violet Pearman suffered a stroke brought on by overwork. Every moment of the Churchill day, including mealtimes, was now feverishly devoted to proving to a disbelieving nation the horrifying scale of the Nazi threat. Talk of fighter planes, bombers, troop movements, tank production, weapons development and the full-scale ruthlessness of the Third Reich shaped almost every waking minute. (The little time left over, Winston spent churning out books and articles to pay the bills.) His endless gloomy prophecies of global cataclysm drove some of the less politically inclined guests to distraction. The painter William Nicholson, for instance, complained that it all made him feel ‘quite sick’. Clementine too sometimes felt overwhelmed, once exclaiming to her nephew Johnny in the car on her way up to London, ‘I can’t stand it any longer.’59

  Other upper-class British families were still happily sending their daughters to Berlin to be ‘finished’ in what they considered a more polished and disciplined culture than that of Paris. Society ladies even wore bracelets with swastika charms in tribute to the Führer. Many admired how Hitler was putting a muscular pride back into a defeated country; creating a power that, in acting as a bulwark against the Communist hordes in the east, deserved not fear but to be hailed as Europe’s saviour. The stories of atrocities emerging from this civilised nation of art and music lovers were scarcely to be believed. Nancy Astor hosted frightfully smart pro-appeasement gatherings at her mansion, Cliveden, overlooking the Thames, and members of Clementine’s own family – including her beloved niece Diana Mitford – were ardent admirers of the Nazis. Diana married her second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, in Josef Goebbels’ drawing room in Berlin in October 1936 with Hitler as guest of honour. Although Winston remained obstinately outspoken, as the decade wore on and life in Britain remained much the same, most people were ‘keener on hearing what Hitler said about peace than what Churchill said about war’.60 Part of the problem was the messenger himself: Winston had been wrong about so much else.

  As if he knew the race was over, his mood turned fatalistic. In February 1937 he told Clementine that money was so short that ‘no good offer’ for Chartwell ‘should be refused’ as ‘our children are almost all flown, and my life is probably in its closing decade’.61 No such offer was forthcoming and their finances continued to worsen over the months that followed. When Clementine returned from another excursion to Zürs, she discovered that her sworn enemy – and Winston’s supposed friend – had brought them still closer to the edge of financial ruin. The pro-appeasement Beaverbrook had cancelled Winston’s lucrative fortnightly column in one of his newspapers, the London Evening Standard (worth some £100,000 in today’s money). Max had taken exception to Winston calling on Britain to rise ‘in its ancient vigour’ against Germany’s March 1938 annexation of Austria, or Anschluss. Winston thus lost a crucial platform to warn about the Nazis (although he was later taken on by the Daily Telegraph) while the monetary blow was compounded by news that another £12,000 had been wiped off the value of his US investments. He had no choice but to put Chartwell formally on the market. Still worse, its value had sunk to £20,000 in the 1938 recession, down from £30,000 the previous year; but even at this price there were no takers.

  Clementine may have come back to him – at least for now – but in his frustration Winston was genuinely considering giving up on politics to dedicate himself to books and other money-making ventures. Then, at the eleventh hour, the Churchills – and Winston’s political career – were saved by the striking generosity of an outsider. The naturalised Austrian Sir Henry Strakosch, who had been briefed on the crisis by Brendan Bracken, stepped in to cover Winston’s losses in the American markets. Strakosch, a committed anti-Nazi, had been providing Winston with detailed and authoritative data about German rea
rmament. Now he saved the Churchills’ all-important base at Chartwell, which was withdrawn from the market, and helped Winston to continue his vital work. (Moreover, on his death in 1943, Strakosch left them a further £20,000.)

  After the Anschluss, with Austria incorporated into a Greater German Reich, Winston warned that Czechoslovakia would be next. Indeed Hitler was soon demanding control of those parts of the country with large German populations, stoking fears that war was now inevitable. The British Fleet was mobilised and air-raid trenches were dug in London’s parks. But on 29 September 1938, Neville Chamberlain packed his beloved umbrella and went to meet Hitler and Mussolini in Munich, in search of peace. Instead, he was comprehensively duped, effectively sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s demands in a naive belief that by doing so he could avert war. When Chamberlain returned to Britain claiming ‘peace with honour’ he radically divided political opinion. The Munichois – as they became known – hailed him as a world hero. The Churchills – and their growing band of supporters outside the ruling elite – saw his capitulation as a final act of foolish betrayal.

  People the Churchills had entertained in their home now cut them in the street. Some say their isolation at this point was more personally challenging than when Britain was fighting alone in 1940; it was social suicide to be seen with a man widely branded a warmonger and party traitor. ‘The gloom after Munich was absolutely terrific,’ recalled Winston’s nephew Johnny Churchill. ‘At Chartwell there were occasions just alone with him when the despondency was overwhelming.’62 Older and wearier than she had been when she faced the opprobrium heaped upon him during and after the Great War, Clementine felt the slights more deeply now. But since Munich she was becoming even more vehement than Winston in her views, haranguing even the mildest Chamberlain supporters for what she called ‘pussy foot’ or pacifist views. She once rounded on the redoubtable Eva, the wife of Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, for expressing pro-government views over lunch at Chartwell, reducing her to tears.

  In early October Winston rose to his feet in the Commons and delivered a spectacular denunciation of Chamberlain’s efforts to maintain a ‘friendship’ with Hitler despite all his ‘pitiless brutality’. The speech nearly cost him his seat. Elements of his local party, with thoughts of a more malleable MP, began to plot against him. Some within the constituency – and many outside it – branded him unstable, or worse an ‘agitator’ who deserved to be shot or hanged. Meanwhile, Winston was pacing back and forth at Chartwell late into the night, desperately churning out articles and books to keep paying the bills, all the while helplessly watching his country stagger blindly towards apocalypse, even as the Men of Munich went on ignoring or distorting the facts in the vain hope Hitler could be placated.

  Exhausted by all this tension and emotion, Clementine, now fifty-three, was also nursing a painful broken toe. An invitation from Lord Moyne to cruise to the Caribbean, leaving England on 25 November, therefore seemed too good to refuse – even without Terence Philip, and despite the mounting international crisis. It might strike us as incredible, or even reckless, that she left at this point, but she was evidently deeply distracted – to the point that she forgot Winston’s birthday, blaming the ‘lonely vast Atlantic’ for causing her to lose track of the date.

  Her state of mind clearly troubled him, and a couple of weeks later he wrote, ‘I send you telegrams frequently, but in yr answers you do not tell me what I want to know – How are you? . . . Have the rest & repose given you the means of recharging your batteries?’ His letter is that of a man who has lost so much but hopes he can reel his one remaining and greatest treasure back to him. ‘Do you love me? I feel so interwoven with you that I follow your movement in my mind at every hour & in all circumstances . . . Darling do always cable every two or three days. Otherwise I get depressed – & anxious about you & yr health.’63

  The Rosaura was the same beautiful boat, but little else resembled Clementine’s previous voyage. Lord Moyne was chairing a Royal Commission into social conditions prevailing in the West Indies and the purpose of the trip was investigation, not adventure or relaxation. As a result, Clementine witnessed the terrible deprivation of the British Empire’s Caribbean holdings. Not only did it horrify her, it provoked her to give vent to her anger at what she saw as Tory complacency, and she admitted finding much in common with the Labour members of the Royal Commission who travelled with her. (The resulting report was so critical that Chamberlain deemed it impossible to publish.)

  It was thus her sense of injustice rather than her longing for romance that was reawakened on this trip. But when she learned of the premature death of her hapless old fiancé, Sidney Peel, she nevertheless found herself, to her own surprise, sobbing uncontrollably. She remembered him having ‘made my difficult arid life interesting’64 but she also knew that a privileged existence of comparative indolence with him never would have done. Peel’s death perversely brought home what life with Winston had given her.

  In Jamaica, she told Winston that she was ‘thrilled’ when raucously cheered as the ‘wife of the future prime minister of England’.65 The crowd hailed Winston as an anti-fascist scourge and even a saviour. Such an unexpectedly enthusiastic reception after years of ridicule and scorn emboldened her. She repeatedly cast her thoughts back home and to the dangers that lay ahead, asking Winston at one point whether war was really now inevitable. In a reversal of her earlier lack of interest, she pleaded with him to write to her more often with all the news.

  He too missed her profoundly, writing at the time to his friend Lord Craigavon about ‘this time of trouble and misunderstanding in which I feel much alone’.66 He duly sent her detailed typed political bulletins marked ‘secret’ on the growing fears for France and the Chamberlain government’s woeful unpreparedness for war. She in turn became increasingly uneasy about just how isolated Winston must be feeling in her absence. Even on board the Rosaura there were those who opposed his views and still clung to appeasement. When, after listening to a radio broadcast from England on 24 January 1939, Moyne’s mistress Vera Broughton led attacks on her embattled husband for endangering Chamberlain’s so-called peace, it was like a call to arms. A revivified Clementine flounced out majestically, booking her passage on the first steamer home the very next day.

  Just six weeks later, on 15 March, Hitler’s troops invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia, followed soon after on Good Friday by Mussolini’s annexation of Albania. Now, at last, much of the press – even his old enemies at the Daily Mail – began to row in behind Winston, boisterously calling for him to be brought into the government. Around the same time he started to suspect that the Germans were genuinely out to assassinate him, so once again his security had to be stepped up and he re-employed his former bodyguard Walter Thompson. Her doubts and anxieties put to one side, however, Clementine was soon giving rousing speeches in his constituency – denouncing Hitler, calling for national unity and fearlessly blaming Chamberlain’s government for the crisis engulfing Europe because of its failure to act in time. ‘At any rate,’ she informed a sizeable crowd in Chigwell in July, ‘we have made up our minds to do our duty, whatever may befall!’67

  Chapter Nine

  World of Accident and Storm

  1939–40

  Clementine sat bolt upright in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery, eyes fixed on her husband in the Commons chamber below. For years the House had mocked Winston and his bellicose warnings about the Nazi threat. Now his predictions had come true and she saw how it was finally uniting with him in a ‘temper for war’. At dawn that fateful morning – 1 September 1939 – Germany had attacked Poland with brutal force. As the news grew worse by the hour, Neville Chamberlain had finally made a sombre and weary admission to Parliament that ‘the time has come when action rather than speech is required’. MPs were waiting feverishly for Winston to intervene, but he left without saying a word.

  The following day – a Saturday – Clementine was there again. Britain had at long last mobilised it
s forces; children were being evacuated from London, and anxious crowds were gathering in the streets. Some seven hundred miles to the east, the Wehrmacht was smashing the valiant but ill-equipped Polish army and laying waste towns and villages. Britain was honour-bound by treaty to defend Poland. Yet still the glacial Chamberlain failed to make the move. He rose to his feet at 7.44 p.m., nearly forty hours after the start of the Polish invasion. His brief, almost nonchalant statement about the government’s ‘somewhat difficult position’ prompted such bedlam in the House that two distraught MPs actually vomited. Once again Winston walked out of the chamber without speaking.

  At 10.30 that evening at Morpeth Mansions he and Clementine played host to a stream of grave-faced Members of Parliament including Anthony Eden, Bob Boothby, Diana’s husband Duncan Sandys, Alfred Duff Cooper and Brendan Bracken, all in a state of ‘bewildered rage’. Duff Cooper noticed how Clementine was ‘more violent in her denunciation of the Prime Minister even than Winston’.1 Chamberlain had led them all to believe he was finally going to take a stand against Hitler, but still no word had come and it was now clear that he was once more backtracking on his pledge. As rain pummelled the sixth-floor windows and thunder crashed angrily round the Westminster rooftops, the assembled men begged Winston to take a lead. At last he sat down to write, bluntly warning Chamberlain of the ‘injury’ done to the ‘spirit of national unity by the apparent weakening of our resolve’. Then a number of the MPs walked through the storm to Downing Street to deliver the letter in person.