First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  Neither had Winston been physically fit for the election. During the campaign, he had finally returned to his constituency (formerly Epping, but now redrawn and renamed Woodford), but as he was touring the streets Clementine had realised he was on the point of collapse and had to rush him into a church to rest. On other occasions she had campaigned successfully without him, addressing six hustings on the eve of polling day alone while he travelled up and down the country. This was not the aloof pre-war Clementine with that distinctive glare, but a formidable and skilled politician. Warm and spontaneous, she tried to make amends for Winston’s Gestapo gaffe by insisting that he would introduce ‘great reforms’, and would work ‘harmoniously’ with the other parties. Dressed in a striking flame-red chiffon turban, she beseeched the crowd to reward their wartime hero with ‘a great solid magnificent vote!’2 But despite garnering cheers aplenty she came away unconvinced they would translate into support for Winston in the ballot box.

  Polling day had been set for 5 July but the results were delayed for three weeks to allow for the arrival of postal votes from troops overseas. ‘I hear the women are for me, but that the men have turned against me,’ Winston remarked with surprise during the long wait. Clementine quickly reminded him how bitterly he had once opposed female suffrage. ‘Quite true,’ he conceded.3 After a brief holiday in south-west France, he set off for the final Big Three conference at Potsdam. He had pleaded with Clementine to accompany him to meet Stalin again, as well as the new American President, Harry Truman, but she had refused. She blamed, implausibly, the need to report on her Russian trip to the Women’s British Soviet Committee and a desire to press on with plans to reopen Chartwell. More likely she wished to conserve her energies for the electoral verdict she now privately dreaded. Mary went in her place. On 25 July father and daughter flew back, mid-summit, in time for the result the following day.

  By the time Clementine arrived in Woodford to attend the count, on the morning of the 26th, Winston’s only opponent (a ‘crack-pot’ Independent, as Mary dubbed him) had already amassed surprisingly large piles of votes. As news began to come in that Labour was taking Tory seats by the dozen, Clementine deserted her post and fled back to the Annexe to find Winston staring blankly at the wall of the map room, where the results were being posted on a special chart. His seat was safe but every minute brought word of fresh reverses elsewhere – Sandys OUT, Randolph OUT, Bracken OUT.4 At six o’clock that evening he ordered drinks and cigars for the staff and set off to Buckingham Palace to resign. By then Winston knew he had fallen victim to one of the greatest landslides in British electoral history. His belittled deputy, Clement Attlee, had become his Prime Minister.

  After retreating to bed for an afternoon rest, Clementine returned in the evening and was ‘riding the storm with unflinching demeanour’,5 while others tried and failed to hide their tears. She even suggested that the result might prove a ‘blessing in disguise’, although Winston clearly did not think so. Mary and Sarah attempted to lift the gloom by donning their smartest evening dresses for a special dinner prepared by a crestfallen Mrs Landemare. But within hours, wearing a previously unseen look of exhaustion and despair, Clementine was already packing up. ‘My mother was out of Downing Street quicker than lightning,’ recalled Sarah.6 Number 10 and the Annexe had already become ‘hateful’.7

  The result could not have been more painful, but it did not change the respect Clementine felt for Attlee. To her great credit, she now went out of her way to help Violet Attlee move into Downing Street,8 while the Labour leader made sure to return her kindness. He most unusually offered the Churchills a last weekend at Chequers, and later temporarily released Jock Colville from his private office to work at Claridge’s on tying up their affairs. Having spent a weekend with the Attlees by this time, Colville inevitably found himself making comparisons. He judged Clement and Violet to be charming, but their food nowhere near as good and their lifestyle more formal. Mrs Attlee was welcoming, a onetime beauty but, Colville sighed, Clementine’s ‘sometimes caustic comments and unflagging perfectionism were missing’.9 No one could match how she looked and acted the part of First Lady. At a grand dinner three years later, Clementine’s mere presence, even out of power, was considered by Chips Channon so ‘distinguished’ that she made other women present seem ‘almost naked’.10

  The shock at the election result was felt around the world. From Potsdam, the British ambassador to the USSR, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, reported to Clementine that the Russian delegation was left ‘gibbering and bewildered’ at the news. Molotov, whom she had got to know well in Moscow, was ‘grey in the face and clearly much upset, throwing up his fat hands and asking why? Why?’11 ‘The leader in The Times today summed it up best when they said “Gratitude belongs to history & not to politics”,’ Pamela explained to an equally astonished Harriman. She believed Winston was taking the news ‘wonderfully’, but added: ‘Poor Clemmie I feel very deeply for her.’

  She was not the only one to worry about Clementine’s reaction; Montgomery was also concerned and offered to release Mary from her military duties to look after her. Many others, including Clark Kerr, wrote specifically to Clementine to thank her ‘for being so uniformly kind’. Winston’s chief of staff, Pug Ismay, wrote emotionally to both of them to say how much their ‘kindness’ had meant to him and described himself as their ‘devoted servant’. Members of the public sent messages stating how much the ‘nation’ was in her debt, recognising that Winston could not have achieved ‘a quarter’ of what he had done without her. Field Marshal Alexander (now Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean) had already written to the board of Clementine’s maternity hospital, Fulmer Chase, to say that it had made a ‘direct contribution to the winning of the war’12 by significantly raising officer morale.

  The president of the Toronto Star newspaper, meanwhile, compared the shock at the election result in Canada and the US to the reaction after Roosevelt’s death. Yet Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been relieved to relinquish her position as First Lady after her husband’s death, struggled to imagine the Churchills’ state of mind. She suggested that they were ‘probably very happy and look[ing] forward to a few years of less strenuous life’. She did concede, though, that ‘to those who lay down the burdens of great responsibility, there must come for a while a sense of being rudderless’.13

  In truth, neither Clementine nor Winston felt there was much to live for any more – no enemy to overcome, no government to lead, no people to inspire. ‘It would have been better,’ Winston told Moran in all seriousness, ‘to have been killed in an aeroplane or to have died like Roosevelt.’14

  Believing he lacked the strength to fight on in politics and that his health would soon fail for the last time, Clementine had fervently hoped to persuade Winston to retire in glory but only once the war was won. Earlier in the year she had taken the precaution of some quiet house-hunting and had found a suitable ‘little’ place at 28 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Now Winston had been forcibly ‘retired’, she sent in the builders. Unfortunately, the press managed to snatch a glimpse of the beautiful double-aspect drawing room, with its hundreds of leather-bound books and oil paintings of the Duke of Marlborough, and in the new less deferential climate the Churchills came under fire for redecorating to a level unthinkable for ‘lesser folk’ struggling with the legacy of six years of war and shortages of everything from paint to builders themselves.15 The rumpus merely added to their feelings of rejection.

  With Chartwell also being reconfigured, they were forced to brood in their suite at Claridge’s. Having been ‘hurled’ out of power, as she put it, Clementine found that ‘time crawls wearily along’. Even creating a ‘comfortable & happy’ home – her great forte – seemed beyond her: mice and moths had munched through the covers and curtains at Chartwell, but without the luxury of her ‘diplomatic rations’ she could not replace them. Aware that so many were in a far less fortunate position, she felt ashamed – particularly when offers of cottages, curtai
ns and help of all sorts started flooding in from the public. The sudden bump to earth had left her ‘dropping to pieces’. When she attempted to help her staff scrub and polish Chartwell back to its former perfection, she was sent away as ‘I am too old & inefficient.’16 ‘I blush to think that I who organised the Russian Fund, . . . [and] Fulmer [Chase] . . . am stumped by my own private life.’

  After Japan surrendered on 14 August, she rushed over to Parliament the next day to watch the House of Lords express its congratulations to the King.17 Alas, she never arrived. She could not push her way through the crowds to the gallery and was left forlorn and disappointed in the lobby outside. ‘How are the mighty fallen!’ noted Chips Channon.18

  A few days later she pleaded with Mary to return home from her unit near Hamburg, in Germany, ‘because I am very unhappy & need your help with Papa . . . in our misery we seem, instead of clinging to each other, to be always having scenes.’ Clementine blamed herself, ‘but I’m finding life more than I can bear’ – in large part because Winston was being ‘very difficult’, not least over his food. Now restricted to standard rations, he was being served tiny portions of meat and vented his fury at the staff, as well as at Clementine. ‘I can’t see any future,’ she told her terrified daughter. ‘We are learning how rough & stony the World is.’19

  Nor could she face accompanying Winston on what she feared would be an explosively bad-tempered painting holiday in Italy in early September. It was a relief that Sarah agreed to go instead, travelling in the prime ministerial aircraft that Attlee had put at their disposal. From a commandeered marble palace on the shores of Lake Como, where he was royally fussed over, Winston frequently regretted out loud that Clementine had declined to join him. He recognised the blame was mainly his, and wanted her to know he was behaving himself. ‘He says I’m to say – he’s good. He really is!’ Sarah reported back, adding that she had been ‘so distressed’ to see her mother ‘so unhappy and tired’ back in London. ‘Six years is a long time to live at such a high tempo, knowing as fully as you did all the . . . decisions. You are bound to feel a reaction.’20

  When Winston returned in early October, Hyde Park Gate was ready. The rearrangement of Chartwell to cut housekeeping costs was nearly finished too. But with the Churchills’ wartime reprieve now over, even Clementine’s economies were not enough to forestall the inevitable financial reckoning and Winston was once again forced to consider selling up. It was this prospect that prompted an old friend, Lord Camrose, to marshal other wealthy admirers to buy Chartwell from the Churchills for £50,000 and present it to the National Trust, on condition that Winston and Clementine could go on living there for the rest of their lives. This generosity, and Winston’s lucrative return to writing, meant that for the first time in years the Churchills were to become satisfactorily well-off.

  In July 1947 Clementine organised a thank-you lunch for their benefactors (in a characteristic touch, she sent cards entitling their chauffeurs to a free meal at the Wolfe Café in Westerham). Winston celebrated by buying the farms adjoining Chartwell, amounting to some five hundred acres. He was now a country landowner of stature, Leader of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, a hugely successful author, and a worldwide war hero and celebrity. He threw himself into his new life and tried to put the hurt of July 1945 behind him.

  From helping to run the war Clementine was reduced once more to merely running houses. Feeling redundant and ignored, she longed for Winston to retire from politics altogether; for the ceaseless whirl around him to stop; to share a quieter, calmer life with him. But he pursued his own interests in the same old self-absorbed way, simply expecting her to be on tap whenever he needed her for comfort. Thus late 1945 was marred by bitter rows, and she began to doubt whether he had ever valued her at all. It did not help her low spirits that he could be dismissive of her in public. ‘Please don’t interrupt, Clemmie,’ Cecil Beaton heard him growl at a society dinner in December 1945, where Winston was enjoying being the star turn. And yet at the end of the evening she lovingly wrapped him up in coats and scarves before they headed off into the cold night. ‘I realised to what a degree,’ the fascinated Beaton observed, ‘all in his family circle must pay him due deference.’21

  Many marriages, strained by the traumas of war, fell apart around this time. Worried that her parents’ partnership might suffer the same fate, Mary tried to shore her mother up, writing to her that ‘despite all his difficultness – his overbearing – exhausting temperament – he does love you and needs you so much’. She acknowledged Clementine’s sometime yearning for ‘the quieter more banal happiness of being married to an ordinary man’ rather than the ‘splendours and miseries of a meteor’s train’ and alluded to what she described as the ‘equality of your temperaments. You are both “noble beasts”. Your triumph is that you really have been and are – everything to Papa . . . without surrendering your own soul or mind.’22 Clementine had continued to attend her Red Cross and other meetings, but now took doctors’ advice to cancel her forthcoming engagements. She spent time instead replying to the many letters of sympathy she received from friends, former staff and members of the public.

  Throughout 1946, Winston was festooned with honours from allies and liberated countries around the world. Early in the year Clementine joined him on a trip to America, where he was showered with honorary degrees and given a civic welcome in New York while he also held talks with President Truman. In March he dominated the news with his thunderous speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri in which he referred to an ominous ‘iron curtain’ behind which the ancient capitals of Central and Eastern Europe now lay under Soviet servitude. Although only a year, it seemed a long time since Clementine had been so fêted in Soviet Russia; all her hopes of friendliness between Moscow and the West appeared to have been dashed.

  Typically, she hovered in the background as Winston lapped up the attention. She was genuinely surprised if anyone noticed her at all. But in June 1946, two months after her sixty-first birthday and in the last round of honours awarded for wartime achievement, Attlee made her a Dame for her work on the Aid to Russia Fund and the ‘many other services which made so marked and brave a contribution’. She was thrilled that he thought she had been ‘able to help a little’23 (although she would never style herself according to the title she had received). Other awards were to follow. That same month Glasgow University granted her an honorary degree for her ‘womanly grace and. . . wisdom, a power to achieve, a faith to persevere, and a full measure of ...courage’.24 And, later in the summer, Winston watched her receive a Doctorate of Civil Law at Oxford University for being ‘the very Soul of Persuasion [and] Guardian Angel of our country’s guardian’.25 It was, however, another two years before she received the recognition that mattered most.

  On their fortieth wedding anniversary in September 1948, while they were staying at Cap d’Antibes in the south of France, Winston finally put it down in writing. Perhaps only now that others had honoured her did he appreciate how vital she had been during the war. Maybe only once he believed his own place in history was assured could he finally take stock of the sacrifices made by those around him. Arguably, he was also realising that it was thanks to her continued devotion that he was able to carry on in frontline politics in his seventy-fourth year. To Sarah, he proudly remarked that ‘At her best, no one can beat her.’26 In a house note to Clementine he wrote: ‘I send this token, but how little can it express my gratitude to you for making my life & any work I have done possible.’27

  Feeling appreciated at last, Clementine reverted to her old role of saving Winston from himself. At a dinner in the late 1940s, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed her reaching out to restrain him from drinking too much of the Connaught Hotel’s fine wines.28 On another tour of America in March 1949 – where Winston was again celebrated by everyone from the President downwards – he decided he was disinclined to bother with a mere university banquet that had been arranged in his honour in Boston. Clementine
was quick to tell him to go, sternly pointing out that ‘the country has been combed for the finest food and wines, and . . . many of the faculty did not have dinner jackets, or their wives long dresses, and they have bought them specially because you are coming.’ Winston did as he was told.29

  The war had undoubtedly changed the Churchills’ approach to others as well as to one another. Clementine had taken on some American customs: no longer outraged by the use of first names, she tolerated even ‘fringe friends’ calling her Clemmie; and they were both friendlier to their neighbours and staff, employees such as Grace Hamblin no longer being expected to use the back door. With financial worries finally a thing of the past, Clementine also became reconciled to living at Chartwell and ironically more enthusiastic than Winston about improving the grounds.

  Feeling equally secure in her marriage, she even encouraged Winston to flirt with old flames such as Violet or Pamela Lytton – as well as with new admirers, including the beautiful Odette Pol Roger, the grande dame of his favourite champagne house. Tactfully she would leave him alone with such women for dinner, taking the chance to go to the theatre with an assistant. ‘During the course of the evening,’ recalled one secretary, Heather Wood, ‘she would whisper with a twinkle “I wonder what is going on?”’30 The once jealous Clementine recognised that such harmless old-age dalliances stopped Winston getting bored, and made him more pliable. They also provided her with welcome free time.

  The war had left Clementine with a taste for public duty, but in want of a role. She could be forgiven for being envious of Eleanor Roosevelt, whose substantive career had, at the age of sixty-one, only just started. Far from sinking into gloomy obscurity following her husband’s death, Eleanor relished her independence, refusing to be seen merely as Franklin’s widow. In December 1945, President Truman had approached her about becoming a delegate to the United Nations, an organisation she viewed as her husband’s greatest legacy. During her stint at the UN, Eleanor would chair the commission charged with drawing up an international bill of rights and in 1952 was even touted as a possible Democratic candidate for the Presidency. ‘Her real life’s work began after FDR’s death,’ confirms her grandson David Roosevelt. ‘The Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] was her crowning achievement.’31