First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  Determined to avoid the mistakes of the previous Quebec conference, Clementine stayed on her best behaviour, and made a strenuous effort to ensure that Winston was on his. There were new stresses at this summit caused by Roosevelt’s fading health. His doctors were especially keen to deter him from taking part in late-night drinking sessions with Winston, and even the Americans realised the best way of achieving this was by enlisting Clementine’s help. One evening, after the two parties watched a movie together, she duly took her husband firmly by the arm and steered him to bed. It was 10.30 p.m. ‘Aren’t I a good boy,’ a biddable Winston muttered.94

  On 17 September the Churchills left to spend a few days in Hyde Park, where Clementine was introduced to the ‘high-spirited’ Anna (the only Roosevelt daughter, whom she decreed to be ‘much the nicest’ of the brood). Judging that Franklin’s frailty meant his mind was no longer ‘pinpointed’ on the war for more than four hours a day, and hoping to reintroduce some sparkle to the Anglo-American relationship, Clementine made sure to spend as much time with Anna and Eleanor as possible. Yet for all the ‘blaze of friendship’ described by Winston the second Quebec conference achieved little. On 20 September, their main strategic differences with the US still unaddressed, the Churchills boarded the Queen Mary for home. The Americans’ success on D-Day, their greatly superior forces (three million in Europe by the end of the war compared to Britain’s one million), confirmed that they were now top dog. Roosevelt put on his old charm for Winston, but proceeded blithely to ignore his fears about the Soviets’ expansionist advances.

  Two days later, from her cabin on board ship, Clementine sent Eleanor a letter that was quite out of character in its gushing familiarity and one that demonstrated her diplomatic sensibilities. ‘I shall always remember my delightful visit to Hyde Park,’ she wrote, ‘the picnics, sitting near the president, & my two long walks with you through your woods.’ She also made sure to praise Anna, whom she described as a ‘wonderful combination of yourself & the President . . . Please (though the acquaintance is short!) give her my love.’ She closed by forecasting that in the forthcoming election, which she knew Roosevelt feared he was going to lose, ‘your great country will honour itself by yet again returning its great leader – great in Peace & great in War’.95 Now was not the time for any further cooling of relations; Britain had become dependent on her former colony, not only to help bring the war to an end but to help her survive economically in the peace thereafter.

  When the Churchills arrived back in Britain on 26 September, they had a tremendous row. The subject is not recorded but Winston seems to have made the error of contradicting Clementine in public. His apology was fulsome: ‘My darling One, I have been fretting over our interchange at luncheon yesterday . . . forgive me for anything that seemed disrespectful to you.’96 Upon his departure shortly afterwards for Moscow, Clementine grabbed the opportunity to spend two whole days in bed. ‘My mother always seemed calm and serene, as if she were coping with everything,’ Mary remembered. ‘But she was a bomb waiting to go off.’97 Even in wartime, though, Winston was tolerant of her outbursts. Once when she flounced off, Winston declared: ‘I am the unhappiest of men.’ The statement was so patently untrue that staff who witnessed the incident burst out laughing.

  On 10 November, at the invitation of Charles de Gaulle, Winston and Clementine flew to Paris to celebrate the city’s liberation. The scenes were unforgettable: crowds on pavements, balconies and rooftops cheered their heroes, the General and Church-eel, under a dazzling blue sky and a protective umbrella of Spitfires. Unfortunately, as Winston and de Gaulle toured the streets in an open-top car, Clementine got caught up in the mêlée and was not at first allowed to enter the Quai d’Orsay, where the Churchills were staying in great splendour. The wife of one of the most famous men in the world was not recognised; the guards refused to believe she was who she claimed to be.

  The joy of Paris was not to last. Winston had largely stopped talking about Hitler and was becoming obsessed instead with the dangers of Communism; the impending peace worried him as much as, if not more than, the war. He believed the Red Army was spreading across Eastern Europe like a ‘cancer’. Of particular concern to him was Greece, where the guerrilla group ELAS was intent on establishing a Communist one-party regime. Angered by reports from British troops of atrocities (including the butchering of ‘bourgeois’ elements) committed by these so-called ‘freedom fighters’, he saw it as imperative to prevent Greece falling under Soviet influence at a time when it was already too late to save much of Eastern Europe from the same fate. Clementine saw all too clearly, however, the dangers of Winston’s intemperate assault on ELAS in favour of the exiled and unpopular Greek king; many regarded the guerrillas as a heroic liberation army and the US needed little excuse to dismiss Winston as a monarchist reactionary.

  On 4 December 1944, Clementine made one of her bluntest interventions in a note hand-delivered by a trusted servant: ‘Please do not – before ascertaining full facts repeat to anyone you meet to-day what you said to me this morning i.e. that the Communists in Athens had shewn their usual cowardice in putting the women & children in front to be shot at – Because altho’ Communists are dangerous, indeed perhaps sinister people, they seem in this War . . . to have shewn personal courage . . . I am anxious (perhaps over-anxious).’98

  She observed that some of the more liberal American newspapers were already tarring Britain with the same brush as Russia: both were imperial powers seeking to impose their will on other nations. Her fears were borne out the very next day when the new US Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, publicly attacked Winston’s policy of deploying British troops to impose an all-party provisional government in Athens. Furious, Winston forgot Clementine’s counsel and dashed off an angry telegram direct to Roosevelt, probably ‘the most violent outburst of rage in all their historic correspondence’.99 Even his staff doubted his judgment at this point; certainly the gulf with Roosevelt was now wider than ever.

  When he took questions on Greece in the House on 8 December, the super-loyal Colville judged Winston’s performance ‘very bad’. Some say Winston’s consumption of alcohol increased at this time; among them Alan Brooke, who wrote in his diary that the Prime Minister ‘was very tired’ and had ‘tried to recuperate with drink . . . As a result he was in a maudlin, bad tempered, drunken mood . . . so vindictive [against the Americans] that his whole outlook on strategy was warped.’100 Brooke saw his own relationship with Winston as essentially one of playing ‘nanny to an infantile tyrant’; a tyrant he thought – perhaps even hoped –would not make it through to the end of the war.

  Clementine meanwhile had been busy with elaborate plans for a ‘cosy’ family Christmas, one that would finally bring the Churchills together after four long years. Following the success of D-Day and the liberation of Paris, there was much to celebrate. Late on Christmas Eve, however, Winston was to be seen sitting in the Great Hall at Chequers, reviewing secret telegrams and talking to Nellie, who was ‘most outrageously’101 reading the messages with him. Clementine, meanwhile, was upstairs in tears – all her hopes dashed, even if she was, as always, ‘resigned to the inevitable’. Winston was preparing to leave for Northolt, taking Sawyers, his two most attractive typists and Anthony Eden on a highly perilous mission to Athens. With only lukewarm backing from the Cabinet, and virtually none from the Allies, his audacious gambit was to attempt to broker a democratic settlement in Greece, and somehow prevent the dual threats of a Communist takeover and civil war.

  The negotiations were played out over Christmas in the freezing, semi-derelict Greek foreign ministry, punctuated by gunfire and shell explosions. Only supportive cables from Clementine – composure rapidly restored – prevented seventy-year-old Winston from feeling ‘lonely’.102 Some progress was made, however, and he also found himself surprisingly well disposed towards the Communist representatives, describing them as ‘presentable figures in British battle dress’. Although his Santa Claus diplomacy was
by no means an instant success, the civil war subsided not long after, and his presence certainly cheered the British troops in Athens, who were successfully able to hold the city. Furthermore, Winston’s engagement with the Communists, together with his distancing from the exiled king, served him well in terms of public opinion. We may never know for sure whether Clementine’s words of caution had any direct bearing on the talks but she certainly approved of his attempts at conciliation, writing on 28 December that she had been ‘moved and thrilled to read of all that has happened while you were in Athens’.

  Even before the Greek adventure, the days preceding Christmas had been far from free of anxieties. Clementine felt her estrangement from Randolph keenly, and fervently wanted him to be there. There had been a slight rapprochement in July 1944, when he had finally cooled down after a series of explosive rows with his parents over their encouragement of Pamela’s infidelities. ‘I know how difficult things have been for you,’ he had written to her, ‘and I do know that you have tried to understand my point of view.’ At that time Randolph was recovering from knee and spine injuries sustained when his military transport plane crashed on landing in Yugoslavia, and Winston had sensed that the thaw in relations was a fragile one. He had therefore decided against giving Randolph, whom he visited while he was recovering in Algeria, a forthright letter from Clementine because he did ‘not have the heart’. ‘He is a lonely figure by no means recovered,’ Winston argued, desperately hoping to keep the peace. ‘I am sure he would have been profoundly upset & all his pent up feelings would have found a vent on me. Please forgive me for not doing as you wished.’103

  Clementine’s response was unusually stern, and shows how family feuds can dominate even in the midst of war. She insisted that her letter had been ‘very mild & moderate’ and that she particularly ‘minded’ that Randolph had not allowed his son, young Winston, to stay on with them at Chequers while Pamela was in quarantine with scarlet fever.104 Winston eventually relented, and sent the letter on to Randolph as she had suggested.

  Perhaps Clementine’s instincts on this occasion were right, as the child and his nanny subsequently returned to Chequers. Unfortunately, she reignited the fire by inviting him and his mother to the Christmas celebrations, prompting an outburst from Mary, not normally Randolph’s staunchest defender. Disapproving of Pamela’s American liaisons, Mary argued that the invitation was disrespectful and Winston was convinced to withdraw the offer, which he did in a tactful note: ‘Some of the family are worried about the effect on Randolph ...Clemmie & I therefore with great regret suggest to you we fix another date for you to come.’

  Notwithstanding this hiccup, Grandpapa had already won the boy’s adoration.105 Young Winston wrote years later that his grandfather’s kindness during the war was ‘remarkable’; he cited as an example Winston’s gift to him of Aesop’s Fables that ill-fated Christmas. By contrast, he barely mentions Clementine, although it is almost certain that she chose and purchased the book. (It was she, too, who scoured London for a much-longed-for model steam train set.) Perhaps what Pamela described as Clementine’s occasionally ‘rather austere’ demeanour was to blame for the lack of juvenile appreciation. Taking young Winston to see her ‘was a production’ as ‘Clemmy was never cosy’106 and expected the best of manners.

  Whether in private or in public, it was not Clementine’s lot to attract recognition for her deeds on Winston’s behalf. When heavy snowfall resulted in a fuel shortage in January 1945 she also came up with the solution. ‘The radio announced this morning that coal distribution by Army lorries begins to-day!’ she told Winston. ‘It didn’t mention who thought of this.’107 This intervention in the coal crisis – and others – reflected Winston’s perennial lack of interest in the Home Front. Ministers complained that he did not read his briefs and was indulging himself by ‘talking on and on’.108 Part of the problem was Winston’s preoccupation with developments overseas. But in exercising greater powers than any other British leader of modern times, he had also become accustomed to unquestioning obedience. In early 1944 he had even entertained the idea of becoming Foreign Secretary as well as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence – until it rapidly became clear that Clementine was implacably opposed to the idea. Mackenzie King disapproved of the way he nevertheless bullied the capable and obliging Attlee, and likened his other ministers to ‘a lot of schoolboys frightened by the headmaster’.109

  As the war entered its final months, the Labour leader’s patience ran out. On a snowy Saturday in January 1945, with Winston restricted to Downing Street by a heavy cold, Attlee wrote him a 2000-word letter, typing it himself – poorly – so that none of his staff should see it (although Winston’s did). He protested about the Prime Minister’s ‘lengthy disquisitions’ in Cabinet on papers that he had not read and subjects that he had ‘not taken the trouble to master’. He railed about Winston’s ‘undue attentiveness’ to Bracken and Beaverbrook, whose views – ‘often entirely ignorant’ – were given more weight than the ‘considered opinion’ of Cabinet committees. ‘Greatly as I love and admire the PM I am afraid there is much in what Attlee says and I rather admire his courage in saying it,’ Colville, by no means a Labour man, noted in his diary.110 Winston, however, exploded with rage and drafted a viciously sarcastic reply in which Attlee’s intervention was denounced as a ‘socialist conspiracy’; his staff were meanwhile ordererd ‘not to bother about Atler or Hitlee’.111

  In high dudgeon, Winston brought Attlee’s letter to Clementine expecting her comforting support. He was greatly surprised to find that she took Attlee’s side and thought the Deputy Prime Minister’s missive ‘true and wholesome’. It speaks volumes of the weight Winston attached to her opinion that the previous brutal response was discarded, and he sat down to write Attlee ‘a short, polite acknowledgement’.112

  At the time of Attlee’s protest, Winston was preparing for yet another conference of the Big Three and was fretting, somewhat ironically, that Roosevelt had not been reading the papers he sent him. The ailing President had also taken, rather dismissively, to calling Churchill ‘Winnie’. On their way to Yalta on the Black Sea – the spot of maximum inconvenience Stalin had chosen for the summit – Winston and Roosevelt arranged to meet beforehand on the Mediterranean island of Malta. By the time he landed on 30 January, the Prime Minister had already suffered another ‘serious alarm’ (now an almost habitual occurrence when he travelled by plane) and was ‘restless’. One morning on Malta, even though she was back in London, he just turned ‘his face to the wall . . . [and] called for Clemmie’.113

  Roosevelt’s own physical decline prompted Moran to wonder whether the President was well enough to hold office at all. The First Lady was now so infrequent a companion that she had failed to register his persistent cough or the gradual draining of colour from his face. But Anna, who accompanied her father to the conference, noticed his hands were shaking.

  At Yalta itself, a few days later, Winston, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed a joint communiqué proclaiming the Allies’ intention to strive for a peace in which ‘all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want’. ‘I hope you will like communiqué published tomorrow morning,’ Winston wrote to Clementine on 12 February 1945, although he knew full well that Stalin was acting out a lie. The Soviet leader had already installed a puppet government in Warsaw and the Red Army had occupied most of Poland, the very country for which Britain had so reluctantly gone to war in 1939. Winston told Clementine despondently that ‘the misery of the whole world appalls me’ and that he feared ‘new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending’. Although he had Sarah for company, he badly wanted his wife: ‘I miss you much . . . I am lonely amid this throng.’114

  Clementine advised him to ‘grapple close to the President’ as it had cheered him in the past. But in truth that was no longer possible. The Americans had made Stalin their main focus; it was clear that if the proposed atom bomb did not work, it would be Russian milit
ary support that would be needed to end the fighting in the Pacific.

  Post-Yalta, Winston’s mood sank lower still: the better the news from the Allied forces in Europe, the darker his fears for the future. He found the prospect of the end of the war, and all the challenges that would come with it, profoundly depressing. Nor was he the only Churchill to feel this way. On 1 April 1945, Pamela sent a letter to Harriman in the same spirit: peace ‘is something one has looked forward to for so long that when it happens, I know I am going to be frightened’.

  Winston’s pessimism was affecting his work. Even the dedicated Colville was infuriated by constantly finding the Prime Minister’s ministerial boxes full of unread papers. Conversely, his opinion of Clementine never ceased to rise. He accompanied her on a tour of YWCA clubs in Brussels in March 1945 and pronounced that ‘Never can the welfare of the troops have been so lavishly and painstakingly cared for . . . Mrs C could not have done her job better or spoken more effectively . . . She looked ravishing, was always interested and never condescending.’115

  Indeed, Clementine’s star was rising fast – and she was about to embark on her most independent and exciting venture yet. Invited by the Soviet Red Cross to visit Russia in April to see the results of her fundraising, it also transpired that Stalin (who had so belittled her husband) wanted to honour her by thanking her in person for her work. But with relations between Britain and the Soviet Union – over Poland in particular – becoming increasingly icy, Winston hesitated to let her go. Some biographers of Churchill, such as Roy Jenkins, have criticised her for accepting the invitation, but this was a singular and rare personal honour, and the trip might also reap diplomatic dividends. In any case she had already learned some Russian and had a Red Cross uniform altered so that it did not make her ‘look like an elephant’.