First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  British women struggling with severe clothing rations warmed to Eleanor’s lack of ostentatious chic; some were taken with the idea that her hat and coat looked as if they had been made over. She came over as more homely than Clementine – more believably of the people – and she was refreshingly informal. She instantly called Clementine’s secretary Grace Hamblin by her first name – an unimaginable familiarity in the Churchill household until that point – and thereafter Clementine (but not Winston) followed suit. As ever, Eleanor drowned her insecurities in a punishing work schedule that included touring the capital with the Queen, dozens of trips up and down the country, and – like a surrogate mother – a promise to sort out the unsuitable thin cotton socks issued to American soldiers stationed in London. (She made sure American commanders ordered 2.5 million woollen replacements.)

  Like her compatriots, Clementine was bowled over by Eleanor’s boundless energy, as well as her flattering curiosity about every detail of life on the Home Front. Her enthusiasm never seemed to flag, and she soon outpaced not only the posse of ‘saggy-kneed’ reporters who trailed her every move but also Clementine. On one visit Mrs Churchill was left to sit and rest on a marble staircase while Mrs Roosevelt ran up four flights to chat to more workers. The American First Lady went out of her way through mud and rain to meet the former hairdressers, typists and housewives who were now digging ditches, servicing planes and driving tractors. She was also impressed by the legions of female volunteers who had stepped up to staff hostels, mobile libraries and canteens, or to spruce up shelters and distribute the thousands of tons of clothing and other supplies collected from America and the Commonwealth. The huge and unconventional role of British women in wartime had become the norm through necessity, but Eleanor’s praise lent it dignity, even glamour. She talked enthusiastically about transplanting many of the ideas she saw in action in Britain back to the US. (On her return home, she hired a dancer to develop a programme for entertaining children in case bombing raids started in America, for instance, explaining that she had seen ‘similar activities’ in the shelters Clementine had shown her in Britain.64) It was all enormously gratifying for her British counterpart, who had done so much to bring women into the war both by organisation and by her own example; almost the entire female population was now taking part in the struggle in some way.

  Their contribution, in a country whose attitudes had previously seemed so conservative, appears to have struck many Americans – and helped to convince them that Britain really might prevail. ‘It was not just the occasional woman who was operating a machine or scrubbing a floor,’ Winant noted. ‘It was all the women. And it wasn’t just the women who were used to hard work, but frequently those who lived lives of comparative leisure.’65 Harriman wrote to a friend: ‘It is the spirit of the women that is carrying this country through the frightful experience of the bombing.’66 He told his wife that ‘the women are the mainstay of England’.

  Harriman’s assistant, Robert Meiklejohn, was similarly ‘astonished by the absence of fear or panic’ during even the most ferocious bombing raids. When, as a result of one attack, the department store Selfridges caught fire, his female neighbours ‘acted as if the bombing were like a thunder storm . . . A couple of women came up on the roof about three-thirty AM in their bathrobes and weren’t at all frightened.’67 The US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau later noted in his diary: ‘What the women in England were doing was just unbelievable . . . If it were not for the women, England would cave in today.’68

  Apart from that early call to arms in Manchester, however, Winston rarely acknowledged the part being played by women. His doctor later recalled that in all the years he had spent by Winston’s side he had only heard him mention women in conversation once, concluding: ‘He is not interested in them.’69

  Hence Winston was blind to Eleanor’s popular appeal, whereas Clementine observed how Madam President was a celebrity in her own right, prompting spontaneous outbursts of cheering wherever she went. In Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast and Edinburgh, she received standing ovations. In London, people loitered around the American Embassy just to get a glimpse of her. She was no silent shadow to her husband but a fully fledged public figure; someone who used her fame and popularity to aid others, or to raise morale. In what was probably her first direct letter to the President, Clementine described in gushing terms the effect his wife’s presence was having ‘on our women and girls. When she appears their faces light up with gladness and welcome.’70 She paid tribute to Eleanor’s handling of the press: ‘I was struck by the ease, friendliness and dignity with which she talked with the reporters, and by the esteem and affection with which they evidently regard her.’ Even the enemy took note of the sensational coverage she received: the Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels issued an order to German journalists to play it all down.

  Eleanor meanwhile found Clementine attractive, youthful and charming but constrained by her husband’s notion that women should stay in the background. ‘She has had to assume a role because of being in public life,’ Eleanor noted in her diary;71 ‘the role is now part of her, but one wonders what she is like underneath.’ She saw that Clementine worked diligently to support relief efforts for Russia and China, but also observed that she was ‘very careful not to voice any opinions publicly or to associate with any political organisations’.72 They enjoyed each other’s company and talked together a great deal, but Clementine was so guarded that Eleanor found it a challenge to discern what she really believed.

  By contrast, the First Lady’s vocalism sometimes risked undermining her husband. In July 1940 she had appeared to argue in her newspaper column against the military draft – which Roosevelt had just unequivocally endorsed. The very next day, after a forthright memorandum from Franklin, she had been forced to write that her comments had been misunderstood and that she was not, in fact, an opponent of the draft after all.73

  Yet there is no doubt that a bond formed between the two women during Eleanor’s visit, especially after a poignant trip via Canterbury to the port at Dover, where they could see the German-occupied French coastline across the Channel. As ever, crowds of excited women and children surged forward to see Eleanor, who beamed warmly back at them and talked to as many as she could. The next day, Canterbury was bombed by daylight; as Clementine wrote to Roosevelt, it was likely that some of those who had so happily greeted them were among the casualties. A clearly shaken Eleanor wrote to her husband that ‘the spirit of the English people is something to bow down to’.74

  Though it is possible she was simply displaying better manners in front of such an important guest, there were occasional flashes of tension between Winston and Clementine that might suggest she welcomed Eleanor’s willingness to challenge him. At a small dinner party held in Eleanor’s honour, attended by Brendan Bracken and Henry Morgenthau, the Prime Minister brought up the subject of Spain. Eleanor asked why it had not been possible to help the anti-fascists. Winston replied that they would have been ‘the first to lose our heads’ if the Spanish republicans had won; Eleanor, who recalled Winston being ‘quite annoyed’75 by the intervention, countered that she did not care if she lost her head. Incensed by a woman confronting him in public, Winston fired back: ‘I don’t want you to lose your head and neither do I want to lose mine!’ At this point, Clementine leaned across the table and said pointedly, ‘I think perhaps Mrs Roosevelt is right.’ An astonished Winston rose abruptly from the table, signalling that dinner was over.

  ‘I do not think Mrs Roosevelt ever really got my father,’ Mary said in an interview much later. ‘She was very suspicious of him. He loved jokes and stories and was never earnest – not her sort at all.’76 Sensing the antipathy between Eleanor and her husband, Clementine took pains to be her most charming and emollient with the President himself, writing: ‘On each occasion that Winston has been to America he has told me of your great goodness and hospitality to him & I only wish that I could do s
omething adequate to show you how I feel about this. I hope one day to meet you in person & tell you.’ It was perhaps the first time she felt the need to paper over cracks in the Churchill– Roosevelt alliance. It would not be the last.

  Shortly after Eleanor returned to America, a Gallup poll revealed that she was probably ‘the target of more adverse criticism and the object of more praise than any other woman in American history’.77 Nearly half thought it brilliant she did not stay at home and spoke her mind; two in five thought it terrible, wanting her to remain indoors ‘where a wife belongs’. Roosevelt was intensely proud of what she had achieved in cementing relations between the two powers at this crucial moment in the war and Eleanor herself was on a high. The trip had been met with unalloyed enthusiasm in the British and American press, one Newsweek reporter gushing that she had received ‘the greatest ovation ever paid any American touring Britain’. Meanwhile Clementine had watched and learned. For the rest of the war she was to push herself forward in a way that would have been unthinkable before.

  The influence was not, though, entirely one-sided. When Eleanor got home, she did something completely out of character: she took an hour and a half out of her frenetic work schedule to have her hair and nails done.

  Chapter Eleven

  From FDR to Stalin

  1943–45

  It was an almost intolerable burden to bear alone. Winston’s doctor had met Clementine privately, sometime in January 1943, and what he had to say to her was devastating. Winston’s worsening heart condition meant he might suffer a critical coronary thrombosis at any moment. Flying long distances or at very high altitudes, Lord Moran explained, not only made such an occurrence more likely, it would also make it more severe. Knowing what this might mean for Winston’s capacity to continue conducting the war (even without such threats to his health, flying already frightened him), Moran had decided he must seek instruction from Clementine: should the Prime Minister be informed of the seriousness of his condition, or should he deliberately be kept in the dark?

  After talking it over with Mary – who agreed with her1 – Clementine took the decision that Winston must be allowed to carry on unencumbered by fears for his own life. Throughout 1943, he was to be almost perpetually in the air, shuttling between conferences in Europe, America, the Middle East and Africa, often flying over the most hostile terrain. When someone once spoke of the leaders of America, Britain and the Soviet Union as the Holy Trinity, Stalin quipped: ‘If that is so, Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies around so much.’2 Yet Clementine did not attempt to dissuade her husband from these travels; often (provided Moran accompanied him) she applauded them. She thought first and foremost of what was best for her country; she redoubled her efforts to care for Winston, but kept the awful truth of his condition to herself. It was arguably her most decisive – and courageous – act of the war.

  Apart from the particular risks to his health and the danger of enemy attack, air travel at the time was generally far riskier than it is today. Transatlantic flights were made in converted bombers or flying boats at an altitude of only 8000 feet (at which turbulence was often severe). Bombed-out runways, technical faults and primitive navigation systems meant that accidents were frequent. Virtually every conference Winston attended was marked by the death of one or more of the participants in a plane crash, and back home there was often an agonising wait until Clementine heard whether the Prime Minister had been on board as well.

  Once upon a time, her horror at Winston’s insistence on flying had threatened to drive her to hysteria, but in the thirty years since she had learned to maintain a cheerful façade. She would watch his plane take off and keep her eyes fixed on it until it disappeared into the ‘blackness’. The sheer willpower required for a woman of Clementine’s fearful disposition was, however, exhausting. ‘The effect she so often conveyed of serenity was an artifact of self-control,’ Mary explained, ‘and she paid a high price for it in nervous strain.’3

  Nor was sea travel without worry: ships were vulnerable to U-boat or aerial attack, and often a radio blackout was imposed to prevent the Germans finding out where Winston was, meaning that Clementine too was cut off from him. On one crossing to America, notices in Dutch were posted around the ship with the aim of starting a rumour that Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands rather than Winston was aboard. In wartime, he had come to hate the sea almost as much as the air, fearing drowning or, worse, being captured. Clementine slipped books into his luggage – classic novels or perhaps a biography of Napoleon – to take his mind off the danger. Not that he sought to avoid it: even at home he would put himself at risk, insisting that the cars in which he travelled should jump red lights and go the wrong way around roundabouts to save time. It was all a bit much for Clementine, who (as Asquith used to grumble during the previous war) preferred a stately pace.

  Winston began 1943 by flying 1300 miles in an unheated bomber to meet Roosevelt in Casablanca. Clementine, perhaps unsurprisingly given what she now knew, was especially affectionate during his absence. On 14 January, two days after his departure, she wrote: ‘My darling the Annexe and No 10 are dead & empty without you.’ Smoky, the Annexe cat, ‘wanders around disconsolate’. She reassured him that there had been no leaks about the meeting: ‘So far at this end “the secret” is water-tight.’4 Winston was equally solicitous – particularly after bombing resumed over London on 18 January. Using his codename ‘Air Commodore Frankland’, he cabled his private office: ‘Air Cde Frankland wishes you to ensure that Mrs Frankland and the servants go down to the shelter in event of air raids warning.’5

  Afterwards, when he flew on to meetings in Cairo, Turkey, Cyprus and Algiers, Clementine tried to keep their spirits high with word-play, punning on his next codename, ‘Mr Bullfinch’. ‘I am following your movements with intense interest,’ she wrote. ‘The cage is swept and garnished, fresh water and hemp seed are temptingly displayed, the door is open and it is hoped that soon Mr Bullfinch will fly home.’ An amused Winston replied: ‘Keep cage open for Saturday or Sunday. Much love.’6

  The Roosevelts’ correspondence, on the other hand, was concerned almost entirely with practicalities.7 Indeed, Winston’s thoughts on FDR were markedly more emotional than the First Lady’s. When the President’s plane took off at the end of the conference, he remarked: ‘If anything happened to that man, I couldn’t stand it. He is the truest friend . . . [and] the greatest man I’ve ever known.’8

  Clementine made a point of waiting, beautifully dressed and smiling, to welcome Winston whenever he arrived home from his travels, and his return from North Africa on 7 February was no exception. Even while he was still in transit, she had been unable to conceal from him that her ‘anxiety & tension’ were ‘severe’. Yet she praised his decision to extend the trip: ‘What an inspiration was the visit to Turkey,’ she cabled him. ‘And how glad I am you did not allow yourself to be deviated from that extra lap of your journey. I’m thinking of you flying thro’ the tenebrous dark & pray you make a good land-fall.’

  She was then informed of the dreaded news that his plane had developed a technical fault. ‘Thank God engine trouble discovered before you started. I shall come to station to meet you. Please let me get into train before you come out – I like to kiss my Bull-finch privately & not be photographed doing it!’9

  Their reunion did little to quell her unease. Winston returned unwell – with a nagging cold and a look of utter weariness – and less than a fortnight later, during one of the rare occasions when they ate alone together during the war, he became seriously sick. The next day he was diagnosed with pneumonia, which, for an exhausted man in his late sixties, was a life-threatening illness. Clementine kept a brave face, but that Sunday she prayed at the Royal Military Chapel in Wellington Barracks, a gilded refuge across St James’s Park from Downing Street. In under a week Winston was feeling better; only then did Clementine tell Mary, now her most trusted confidante, how worried she had been.

  The doctors packed them
both off for ten days’ convalescence at Chequers, but it was not much of a ‘rest cure’. The Churchills received the King in the White Parlour (as Winston was not yet strong enough for his weekly audience at the Palace), and Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, and a variety of other ministers – often with their wives and children in tow – also descended on the house. In between, Clementine rushed off to fulfil her own official duties.

  Two years earlier she had become president of the YWCA’s Wartime Appeal, her introduction to large-scale fundraising. The Young Women’s Christian Association provided hostels, clubs and canteens for women war-workers and the rising numbers of servicewomen. Clementine had started making broadcast appeals for donations on the BBC, at first sticking rigidly to someone else’s script but over time gaining in confidence and putting more of herself into the message. In pursuit of her cause, she now found herself holding forth in such intimidating all-male bastions as the Stock Exchange, prompting a remark from the Queen in 1943 that she was a ‘brave woman’. ‘Don’t be shocked,’ she felt obliged to tell Winston, ‘I didn’t force my way in. I was invited by the Chairman . . . I was terrified, but I think it all went off very well . . . I wore my best hat and made myself up to the best advantage I hope!’10

  Following Eleanor Roosevelt’s dictum that ‘you must do the thing you cannot do’, Clementine was at last defying her instinctive reserve. Her one-time critic Jock Colville (now returned to the Churchills’ staff) marvelled at her newly confident popular touch. In March 1944 he accompanied her to a ‘Back to Work’ exhibition for disabled servicemen, and was finally ‘impressed’ by the way she ‘talked to all the men there and did the whole thing with real thoroughness’.11