A few days later, Roosevelt, exhausted by Winston’s late-night discussions, left the Churchills in temporary occupation of the White House and fled to Hyde Park for a rest. Winston summoned generals and politicians to the Presidential residence, while Clementine threw a party for the wives of British and Commonwealth officials in the grandeur of Edwin Lutyens’ British Embassy; the event was so elegant and convivial it remained a talking point for months. Field Marshal Dill of the British Joint Staff Mission, who was, of course, not invited but heard all the chatter afterwards, wrote her what he called a ‘serious FAN letter’, reporting that she had given ‘infinite pleasure’.34
Clementine was proving herself a public triumph in Washington. But she had always been accident-prone when stretched, and this was no exception. On her last day in town, she fell down some steps in a bookshop and cracked her elbow. She left the capital with her arm in a sling and in considerable pain. It seemed little on this trip was destined to go their way.
On 12 September, the couple travelled on to Hyde Park for their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, before returning to England. Winston infuriated her by not being ready when their train pulled in at the station; Roosevelt, who had come down to greet them in person, was kept waiting as a result. Eventually a humiliated Clementine accompanied the President up to the house alone, although he returned to the station to resume his long vigil for the Prime Minister.35
Winston made amends later when he told Clementine how much he loved her. His spirits had been lifted by being back at the Roosevelt family home. Springwood, the Hyde Park mansion, was a gentleman’s house, enlarged piecemeal over the years, and with thirty-five rooms was of comparable size to Chartwell. Somehow, in its antiques, military memorabilia and rambling passageways, it also created a similar ambience. The President mixed them cocktails by the fireplace in the large panelled library, and the two parties dined together, but the Churchills did not stay the night. Instead they were to board another train to take them to their waiting battlecruiser, HMS Renown.
There were high emotions on both sides during the farewells, with Roosevelt promising to visit Britain the following year and Clementine eager to get away. On the train, Winston thanked his ally in another rhapsodic letter: ‘I cannot tell you what a pleasure it has been to me, to Clemmie and to Mary to receive your charming hospitality . . . You know how I treasure the friendship with which you have honoured me.’36 The President replied less effusively some time later, sending ‘my best to all three of you’. Suckley wrote in her diary that she had detected something new in the President’s manner towards the Churchills: the ‘first very definite chill of autumn’.37
A brisk departure from the harbour at Halifax was crucial for security reasons, but there was a problem: Winston was ‘running amok’ and refusing to board. He had received news that British forces landing at Salerno, at the head of his personally planned assault on southern Italy, were meeting unexpectedly savage resistance from the Germans. His reaction was as irrational as it was explosive: he must be flown to Italy at once to see the fighting for himself. The sudden arrival of the Prime Minister would no doubt have proven a disastrous distraction, but nothing General Ismay or the other generals and officials said could deter him. So they enlisted Clementine. ‘Leave it to me, Pug,’ she smiled.
‘I hear you’ve changed your plans,’ she said to Winston soon afterwards. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘You and Mary will be quite all right on the Renown.’ ‘Oh no, we won’t,’ she answered; she would not have it said that a whole battleship had been put at the beck and call of the Prime Minister’s wife and daughter. Refusing to board, she declared that she and Mary would return by convoy – a highly vulnerable mode of travel regularly picked off by U-boats. ‘We will be all right,’ she insisted, knowing full well the impact this standoff would have on him. An hour later Winston sent for Ismay and told him the expedition to Italy was cancelled.38
Having been shut out of the Quebec conference, Eleanor made an early bid to accompany Roosevelt to the next meeting, in November 1943, at the Soviet Legation in Teheran. (This was the first of the so-called ‘Big Three’ gatherings with Stalin.) Roosevelt dodged her request by claiming that women were not allowed aboard warships. But then she discovered that Winston was bringing Sarah on the Renown and was livid.
Clementine also seems to have had regrets about missing the first Big Three, telling Winston: ‘I’m more lonely this time than ever before, because I have tasted of the excitement & interest of travel in War Time in your company.’39 Winston pined, ‘How I wish you were out here with me.’40 But it was perhaps fortunate she had stayed behind, for she was busy putting out fires in the Cabinet; among those in need of soothing was the Labour Party Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, who felt ‘battered’ by demonstrations over his decision – with Winston’s approval – to release the Mosleys. Clementine invited him to lunch and ‘comforted him as well as I could’ as ‘I think he is shewing political courage’. She similarly tried to placate Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour and National Service, ‘who seemed in a bit of a temper’ with Morrison.41 All the while, she reviewed reports on parliamentary debates, read the most secret telegrams, kept Clement Attlee informed of the Prime Minister’s progress, dealt with constituency matters, and sent back to Winston digests of public reaction to the war. And though absent from the conference, this did not prevent her from exerting an influence there too.
No less distrustful of Roosevelt than before, she counselled her husband to be wary in how he handled the President. In particular, she tried to assuage Winston’s fury over Roosevelt’s refusal to back a British operation on the Greek island of Leros (which had capitulated to the Germans just before the summit). The disagreement was yet another sign of growing American resistance to his strategic ideas. Winston’s health was sliding again, too. ‘Your cold must have made you miserable & . . . I know Leros must cause you deep unhappiness,’ she wrote. ‘But never forget that when History looks back . . . your patience & magnanimity will all be part of your greatness. So don’t allow yourself to be made angry – I often think of your saying, that the only thing worse than Allies is not having Allies!’42
Winston continued to devote his time and attention to Roosevelt, much in the manner of a love-struck suitor. On their way to Teheran they met in Cairo, where Winston took enormous trouble (including conducting a reconnaissance trip himself ) to arrange for the disabled President to visit the Pyramids. ‘I love that man,’43 he explained to Sarah with tears in his eyes, and wrote to Roosevelt: ‘Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart.’44 Winston was of course accustomed to casual cruelty from the previous object of his adoration, his father, and Roosevelt, too, was eminently capable of perplexing caprice. As Mary later characterised the relationship: ‘In love there is always one who kisses, and one who offers the cheek.’45 Indeed, the next occupant of the White House, Harry Truman, was to describe his predecessor as the ‘coldest man I ever met. But he was a great president.’
Clementine understood the strategic imperative of befriending Roosevelt (Britain depended on the US for food as well as military muscle, and would be financially sunk if the Lend-Lease aid programme was curtailed, let alone closed) but she also thought Winston sentimental and emotionally transparent. She had warned him to be more guarded. Now he was to discover the real nature of his ‘friendship’ with the President. The Big Three conference felt in fact more like the Big Two. Teheran was the moment Roosevelt clearly chose Stalin over Winston, finding it ‘amusing’ when the Russian leader bullied his British ally. The President even joined in the taunting, laughing at Winston for his ‘John Bull’ habits. The leaders Winston referred to as the Soviet bear and the American buffalo – in effect the new superpowers – enjoyed showing their indifference, even antipathy, to the poor little British donkey. Winston reddened and scowled (he told Clementine he found such behaviour ‘grim’ and ‘baffling’), but Stalin narrowed his eyes and guffawed. ‘My father was a
wfully wounded,’ said Mary. ‘For reasons of state, it seems to me, President Roosevelt was out to charm Stalin, and my father was the odd man out.’46
*
After six weeks with a heavy cold, at Teheran Winston asked his doctor: ‘Do you think my strength will last out the war? I fancy sometimes that I am nearly spent.’47 Yet despite the ordeal of the conference, he insisted on returning to Cairo afterwards for further talks with Roosevelt. By now Winston was also suffering from ‘gyppie tummy’; Clementine pleaded with him not to fly any more but to come home on a ‘perfectly good cruiser’.48
Moran also tried – and failed – to persuade him to abandon a subsequent flight to Tunis to see the American commander, General Eisenhower. By the time Winston reached Eisenhower’s white, cube-shaped villa near ancient Carthage, the sixty-nine-year-old Prime Minister was feeling so ill he went straight to bed. The next morning he was diagnosed with pneumonia again, and a seriously fibrillating heart. A terrified Moran urgently sent for a specialist back-up team. ‘We were at last,’ he realised, ‘right up against things.’49
Alarmed that Winston might die any moment, the Cabinet secretly requested Clementine to fly out to be by his side. Winston put it more meekly: ‘If you could come it would be lovely.’50 She packed to leave at once, knowing full well that the crisis she had so feared since January was finally upon them. But the London airfields were closed by thick fog, so she had to endure the agony of waiting as aides frantically phoned round to find an alternative way out. Eventually she, Grace Hamblin and Jock Colville made the tortuous drive through the blackout and swirling mist to RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire, only to discover that their designated plane had developed a fault. Nothing else airworthy was available except an unheated Liberator bomber, but with the news from Carthage still worsening Clementine could wait no longer. Fortunately the bomb-racks had already been removed, so a few RAF rugs were hastily spread on the floor while Clementine (never normally seen in trousers) was zipped into a flight suit ready for take-off. Colville remembered her seeming ‘gay and apparently unconcerned’; she later admitted to Mary, however, that she had been so frightened her knees had been knocking together.
Though Clementine was exhausted once they were in the air, the fears inside her head made sleep impossible; no doubt she revisited many times her decision not to tell Winston about his heart condition. But her only option was courage: she dug into her luggage and produced a backgammon board. Draped in blankets to keep out the perishing cold and sustained by black coffee, Clementine and Colville played at least thirty games during that long, slow flight. Normally a fiercely competitive player, she struggled to focus and lost a total of £2 10s.51 Meanwhile, Sarah was at her father’s side counting down the hours and trying to sustain his morale by reading aloud from Pride and Prejudice until Clementine could reach them. Fortunately, Winston was enthralled, observing to his daughter that her mother was ‘so like’ Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Austen’s sharp-witted heroine.52 Even so, his condition was still deteriorating and privately his doctors wondered whether his wife would be able to arrive in time.
The bomber finally reached Carthage, after refuelling in Gibraltar, on the afternoon of 17 December. Winston ‘received the news of her arrival with considerable emotion’, Moran noted, ‘but when I told her later how pleased he had been, she smiled whimsically: “Oh yes,” she said, “he’s very glad I’ve come, but in five minutes he’ll forget I’m here.”’53 Her presence had an extraordinary effect, however, and Winston was soon able to send Mary a soothing message: ‘Your Mother is here. All is joyful. No need to worry. Tender love. Papa.’54
For her part, Clementine was shaken by Winston’s forlorn appearance, even though Sarah and Moran reassured her that he looked much better than he had two days previously. She tended to him at his bedside for a couple of hours before retiring herself.
Later that evening they dined in his bedroom. Winston was reluctant to allow her to leave him and in the night he asked for her again. She returned to his side, sitting with him until he fell asleep once more. Breaking with a lifetime’s habit, she even breakfasted with him the following morning, when Moran informed her that Winston had suffered another, milder attack of fibrillation in the small hours. He was ordered to avoid excitement – and cigars – and Clementine set to work on a treatment she knew would make an instant difference. The meals being supplied by Eisenhower’s staff (‘one a mere man’) were, as she put it, ‘vurry American’. ‘Your poor father literally cannot eat the food,’ she wrote in horror to the family back home. ‘Last night we had a partridge for dinner which Sawyers informed us was cooked for an hour and a half! The result was concrete!’55
With Clementine now on hand, Winston was soon able to work in bed, summoning assistants and giving orders almost as normal. John Martin, one of his private secretaries, observed just how important she was to his ability to go on. ‘Above all, Churchill was sustained in storm and stress,’ he judged, ‘because his life was rooted in such a happy marriage.’56 He did not, however, respond well to being told to take things easy and there was a lot of shouting. ‘He is very difficult,’ grumbled Moran, ‘on two occasions he got quite out of hand.’57
Winston was not the only one. After being all but absent for two years, Randolph had flown in from Cairo and was ‘causing considerable strife in the family and entourage’.58 Winston enjoyed playing bezique with his son, so he was allowed to stay, but there was a palpable tension in the air. Although Randolph’s lack of consideration for her was evident to many of those present, Clementine smiled reassuringly, and tolerated his misbehaviour for Winston’s sake. But privately her nerves had been stretched to breaking point. Convinced that her husband’s decline was irreversible, she told Lady Diana Cooper, who joined the party shortly afterwards, that even if he survived this time his days were running out. ‘I never think of after the war,’ she revealed. ‘I think Winston will die when it’s over . . . He’s seventy and I’m sixty.’ The war, she said, ‘will take all we have’.59
On Christmas Day, she attended a service in an ammunition shed, arranged by the Coldstream Guards. There was a ‘dramatic culmination’, Colville recalled, ‘when, as the Padre said the Gloria in excelsis Deo, the bells of Carthage Cathedral pealed loudly from the hill above and a white dove . . . fluttered down in front of the congregation.’60 Winston now finally appeared to be out of danger and they soon left for a period of convalescence at Villa Taylor, near the Mamounia Hotel in Marrakech, described by Clementine as a ‘mixture of Arabian Nights and Hollywood’. Considerate as ever, she had made sure they delayed their departure until after Christmas so that the staff could celebrate all together.61
Meanwhile, she resorted to every conceivable ploy to boost Winston’s strength, even enlisting her old foe Beaverbrook to entertain him. They went on picnics in the Atlas foothills, and during the eighth and last of these trips, Winston felt sufficiently strong to climb up a large boulder. Diana Cooper observed that Clementine said nothing, ‘but watched him with me like a lenient mother who does not wish to spoil her child’s fun nor yet his daring’.62 She also invited General Montgomery to join the party for New Year’s Eve, although she objected to his typically imperious manner. ‘Mrs Churchill was the only person I knew who always succeeded in subduing General Montgomery,’ noted Colville. On this occasion, she asked Montgomery’s aide-de-camp, Noel Chavasse, to join them for dinner. ‘“My ADCs don’t dine with the Prime Minister,” objected Monty, tartly. Mrs Churchill gave him a withering look. “In my house General Montgomery, I invite who I wish . . .” Noel Chavasse dined.’63
Montgomery’s boastful swagger could cow even the most rugged Army officers but not, it would seem, Clementine. Nor was she awed by any of Winston’s other generals – even toughies like the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Alan Brooke, who at Chequers used to accompany her to church on Sundays. She happily spent time alone with them, on walks or over lunch, and encouraged them to speak candidly about their troubles. After a decent int
erval, usually around two years, some were even allowed to address her as ‘Clemmie’.
She noticed how many of them were unmarried, with no one to help them bear the immense strain of fighting the war. These lonely men drew comfort from the companionship and fine food given so freely at Churchill family dinners; while she made sure to be solicitous to the wives of those who were married, sending them her ‘love and thoughts’ when their husbands were about to embark on great battles. According to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, relations between the Prime Minister and the military ‘were infinitely better in the Second War than in the First’64 – and this was in no small measure a result of Clementine’s efforts. Sir Leslie Rowan, another private secretary, said the ‘most precious gift of all’ was the friendship extended by both Churchills.65 The question of whether such kindness was motivated by the strategic companionship of war, rather than by genuine affection, is less important than that the mistakes of 1914–18 were avoided. Although Pamela, at least, wondered who Clementine ‘really, really liked’66 for herself rather than for duty.
*
While Winston lay gravely ill in Morocco, a crisis had been brewing among his allies. Roosevelt had already demonstrated his readiness to tread roughshod over Winston’s loyalty, and Stalin’s hostility to Britain and her Prime Minister was evident from the start. As ever, the Free French leader General de Gaulle – whom Winston had the previous year considered placing under house arrest for ‘insubordination’ – was playing up, arranging and cancelling visits on a whim. Winston loved ‘France like a woman’67 and had done so much to fight her corner, despite Roosevelt’s obvious ‘loathing’ of de Gaulle and the Soviet leader’s indifference to the French as a whole. France for both Winston and Clementine was of special emotional significance; their shared love of l’Hexagone had helped to bring them together. But the prickly de Gaulle had caused Winston apoplexy with a ‘boorish’, and clearly unappreciative, message and now the Frenchman announced he was definitely on his way for what threatened to be a stormy encounter. ‘I am trying to smooth Papa down,’ Clementine anxiously reported to the family, although she was also lecturing him to avoid antagonising de Gaulle unnecessarily. ‘I hope there will be no explosions!’68
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