First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  After Winston resumed his full duties as Prime Minister in October 1953, a disapproving Clementine fled from him yet again. Although he was stronger, he found her absence troubling. During a short flit to Paris, he wrote to her about his loneliness three times: ‘One night I had dinner in bed as I did not want anyone but you for company,’ he pined.47 It seems he preferred the attention of his new kitten Jock to the presence of other humans.

  Even news that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature failed to lift his mood. In any case, he was prevented from receiving the award in person, as the ceremony in December clashed with the rearranged conference with Eisenhower. So Clementine flew to Stockholm in his place, staying with the King and Queen of Sweden at the royal palace. Here she was welcomed not as a mere substitute for her husband, but as an honoured guest in her own right – Queen Louise described her presence as nothing short of ‘queenly’.48 The Swedish press followed her closely, writing enthusiastically about everything she wore, said and did. At a banquet for nine hundred people, she was ‘quite overcome’49 when the band suddenly struck up ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’.

  Winston’s other great honour that year came when Queen Elizabeth made him a Knight of the Garter, the highest Order of Chivalry, which is restricted to just twenty-four living recipients at any one time. Some, such as his private secretary Anthony Montague Browne, thought he should have declined the title, going down in history as ‘the Great Commoner’, like Pitt the Elder (at least until he unexpectedly accepted an Earldom). Clementine, though now styling herself Lady Churchill, was widely thought to share this view.

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  Clementine still loved attending big occasions, it was organising them that she found so draining; she had had her fill of playing hostess during the war. But she continued to drive herself and those around her extremely hard; adamant that every event should be flawless, she exploded at staff for the most trifling lapses in standards. Sometimes before yet another Downing Street dinner she would work herself up into a state of near-hysteria, only to reappear shortly afterwards, immaculate in jewels and finery and smiling gracefully at the guests as if she had not a worry in the world.

  Winston remained difficult, of course, and could also be brusque and petulant with his staff. But his sense of fun and loyalty on other occasions made him easier to forgive. When he went to greet the Queen on board the royal yacht Britannia upon her return from Australia in 1954, one of his servants was ‘overcome by the splendour’ of the celebrations and became ‘incapacitated’. Although cross at this indiscretion, Winston worried that if Clementine found out she would insist on instantly sacking the poor man. The evening ended with the Prime Minister ‘surreptitiously undressing the servant . . . and . . . tucking him up with many admonitory remarks. Nothing was heard of the incident . . . again.’50

  It was not only the staff with whom Clementine could be intolerant. She was becoming increasingly ‘aggressive’ with Winston. Mary thought he tolerated her outbursts only because he realised he had imposed another term of office on her against her wishes; Clementine in turn fretted afterwards that she had been unkind or too touchy. Usually, though, it was Winston who would be first to sue for peace, asking for absolution for imagined slights or, as Clementine put it, sweeping her ‘into the waste paper basket’.51 There is a sense during his second stint as Prime Minister that Winston took ever greater pains to placate Clementine. As he weakened, she became more dictatorial. During dinner at Chartwell one evening in July 1953, not long after his stroke, he leant towards her with: ‘You will not be angry with me, dear, but you ought not to say “very delicious.” “Delicious” alone expresses everything you wish to say.’ Eyes blazing, she rounded on him ‘with a discourse on manners in which’, Moran observed, ‘Clemmie did all the talking and Winston took in every word.’52

  She refused to accept his failing health as an excuse for rudeness. When on one occasion he slumped in a chair, yawned widely and made no effort to talk to a visiting relative, Clementine rebuked him by administering a sharp tap on the knuckles with a fork.53 Her mood was not eased by her neuritis. By the spring of 1954 she was wearing a surgical collar (she hated being seen in it). The treatment favoured by her doctors – and by Clementine herself – seems as before to have been to escape from Downing Street, and so in May she packed her bags for a three-week ‘cure’ at Aix-les-Bains. Her health improved – as it invariably did once away from Winston and the family – but the condition would not subside entirely for the rest of her husband’s time in office.

  Even without the neuritis she would have had reason to seek solace. Sadness tinged virtually every aspect of Clementine’s life in the 1950s. Devastated by her husband’s flamboyant womanising, Diana had suffered a nervous breakdown around the same time as Winston’s stroke. Clementine was dismayed to see her daughter in such agony, but their relationship had never been strong and at this point it appears to have collapsed altogether. There were several harrowing scenes when wounding accusations were made on both sides. Randolph later recounted finding Diana armed with a carving knife and threatening to kill her mother.54 Clementine’s secretary Chips Gemmell also remembers Diana coming to visit when she was ‘off her head’. ‘It was terrifying,’ she says. ‘I was asked to make sure she got into a taxi safely afterwards.’55 Diana, by Sarah’s account, nursed a sense of being ‘greatly wronged’ (although by no one specifically) and complained of a ‘lack of recognition’.56 She found some comfort in her father, who talked to her about Black Dog, but such was Winston’s own health, and the demands on him as Prime Minister, that this was as much as he could offer.

  Sarah tried to help, but her own marriage was in trouble, with Antony bedding a series of actresses. From 1955 they lived apart and by August 1957 she was on the brink of filing for divorce when Clementine phoned her with tragic news: Antony had taken his life by an overdose of sleeping pills. Yet again a man Sarah had loved had committed suicide – and all the self-recrimination that had attended Winant’s death came flooding back to her. In January 1958 she was arrested outside her Malibu Beach home and charged with drunkenness. Humiliating pictures of her were splashed across the newspapers, followed by accounts that she had behaved so violently in her police cell that it had been necessary to restrain her with a straitjacket.

  Clementine quickly arranged for Sarah to fly out to the south of France away from the press pack. She joined her for a few days, and during her long, non-judgmental talks with her daughter the two women drew much closer. Sarah then went on to a Swiss clinic, of which her only memory was being probed about whether her drinking was linked to her loving her father more than her mother. Upon her return to Britain there were more tussles with the police over the next few years, and even a ten-day spell in Holloway Prison. It was Clementine who largely bore the burden of instructing solicitors, dealing with the newspapers and trying to persuade Sarah to undergo more treatment. Inevitably, Sarah’s beloved career suffered. Clementine was relieved when she found her daughter sober enough to be ‘pleasant’, but there was now a persistent fear that Sarah too would succumb to a breakdown, or even kill herself with booze.

  Clementine had few confidantes to turn to, for she had also lost her sole surviving sibling to cancer. Nellie died, aged sixty-six, in February 1955, little more than six months after her diagnosis. Clementine’s staff of that time remember her nursing her sister in her final days, and being left utterly bereft by her death. ‘There was an even greater loneliness about her now,’ said one. One of Nellie’s last outings had been to Winston’s eightieth birthday party in November 1954, which had also not been the joyful occasion Clementine would have wished. Parliament had decided to mark the occasion by presenting him with a portrait by the fashionable artist Graham Sutherland. Clementine took immediately to the debonair and charming painter, describing him as a ‘wow’ (the highest Churchill accolade) even though she thought many of his modernist paintings ‘savage’ and ‘cruel’. Winston agreed to several sittings, and a fortnight bef
ore the big day he was shown the final work. Clementine was initially intrigued by the untraditional treatment, but Winston’s reaction was one of instant loathing – and she too came to resent how it presented an ancient, grumpy figure in depressing greys and browns, colours he detested. ‘She thought it made him hideous,’ Grace Hamblin recalled.

  This was not the heroic legacy either had envisioned, but Clementine spent the next two weeks reminding him that the hated gift had been born out of the affection and respect of his colleagues. The 23,000 birthday telegrams and cards that poured in from around the world helped to lift both their spirits so that by 30 November itself, they were able to receive the painting in good grace. As Parliament welcomed them in Westminster Hall with a deafening ovation, Clementine glowed.

  Afterwards the portrait was hidden away in the basement at Chartwell, until one day Clementine asked Grace for her help. ‘Lady Churchill was very much exercised. [She asked] “So now, what do you suggest?”’ Grace offered to destroy it, and with the help of her brother sneaked it out of Chartwell ‘in the dead of night’ and took it by van to his home several miles away, where they lit a bonfire in the back garden out of the sight of passers-by. ‘It was a huge thing so I couldn’t lift it alone,’57 Grace revealed in an extract of a taped interview closed to the public for twenty years. She threw the painting on the fire and watched it burn, telling Clementine the next morning what she had done.

  For years, rumours circulated about the portrait’s fate, and various theories were expounded as to the circumstances of its disappearance. ‘I destroyed it,’ Grace confessed on the secret tape before her death, ‘but Lady C and I decided we would not tell anyone. She was thinking of me.’

  The birthday applause had been genuine, but so were the growing concerns about Winston’s ‘twilight’ powers. While he chose to remain in office Clementine never hinted beyond their inner circle at her own feelings, and treated sniping in the press with contempt; she had no desire to ‘hound’ him into resigning, and was implacably opposed to others forcing him out, which she feared would literally kill him. But there were signs of brewing unrest in the Cabinet that could be ignored no longer, and given her unique influence over the Prime Minister, it was inevitable she would be somehow drawn in. One morning in July 1954, Harold Macmillan, then Minister of Housing, visited her alone in Downing Street. He told her Winston no longer commanded the support of all his Cabinet colleagues, and would have to step down. She listened and agreed to convey his arguments to her husband.58 But then, most unusually, her courage failed her. Clearly shaken, she sent for Colville as soon as Macmillan had left the room and arranged for him to join her and Winston at lunch.

  Clementine was still agitated when the three met shortly afterwards in the white-panelled dining room; however she finally summoned up the resolve to relate the morning’s events. Winston reacted surprisingly well, merely summoning Macmillan that afternoon to inform him that he intended to ‘soldier on’. Clementine, though, never forgave the man she now considered the leader of an anti-Winston cabal. Still, it was now clear that politically the Prime Minister was living on borrowed time. In the New Year, after four years of Tory government, thoughts inevitably turned to the next general election and he at last conceded that he could no longer postpone setting a date for his departure. Early April was chosen but Clementine’s relief was tempered by fears for his morale. Her neuritis returned with a ‘vengeance’59 and in March she spent two weeks at Chequers. Winston joined her at weekends but during the week he was alone, with only dark thoughts for company. This time his majestic career at the top table of politics was really at an end. ‘It’s the first death – & for him, a death in life,’60 Clementine explained to Mary.

  First, however, they were to hold one of their famously good parties. The first day of April had been dominated by gossip about Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two Foreign Office officials who had disappeared four years previously, and were now suspected of passing Western secrets to the Russians. The mood quickly lifted, though, as guests climbed the Downing Street stairs for after-dinner drinks – or rather the forty-six magnums of Pol Roger champagne ordered by Grace. The invitation cards stated merely that Sir Winston was ‘At Home’ to celebrate Lady Churchill’s seventieth birthday, yet there were distinct undertones that the event also marked the end of an era. Clementine’s Labour friends were present among the convivial crowd, and she made a point of greeting Mrs Attlee with a kiss. Winston’s old loves Violet and Pamela Lytton were also in attendance, mixing with Sylvia Henley and the surviving Romillys and Mitfords. Her secretary Heather Wood and the other staff mingled amiably, wearing specially bought evening dresses. (Anthony and Clarissa Eden were absent, however, and the way in which Winston’s successor as Prime Minister subsequently seemed to distance himself from the Churchills hurt both deeply.)

  In the throng, Cecil Beaton noticed that for once all eyes were on Clementine rather than Winston. For most people her face was almost as familiar as his – ‘her Grecian profile, the deep-set pale-blue eyes . . . These two faces have together travelled through many epochs in our personal history. Tonight was a private goodbye.’ She was dressed in black lace with embroidered orchids at the waist; ‘her eyes were focused to other distances.’ Beaton heard that she was in agony (she confessed to Violet, she was ‘doped’ up to ensure she was ‘gay as a lark’) but he also noted that there was still ‘fire and dash in the consort of the old warrior’.61

  With the newspapers on strike, the reaction was surprisingly muted when Winston resigned a few days later on the afternoon of 5 April. The following day the Churchills hosted a goodbye tea party for the Downing Street staff and Winston departed for Chartwell, cheers ringing in his ears as he walked the long corridor from the Cabinet Room to the front door for the last time. Clementine stayed in London to orchestrate the move, joining him a few days later for Easter but spending most of the time in bed. Shortly afterwards, with Colville and the Prof, they set off for a holiday in Sicily. Sadly they came back early – the weather was cold and grey and Clementine was in constant pain.

  So began the Churchills’ life outside the magic circle of power – and for the first time without hope of rejoining it. Winston descended into a ‘state of apathy and indifference’.62 Only when a furore over the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, and her hopes of marrying the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend threatened to spark another royal constitutional crisis in the autumn of 1955 was a flicker of interest sparked. Initially, Winston thought the princess should be allowed to have her way, and perhaps he intended to make his position clear. But, recalling how he had so nearly torpedoed his career by supporting Edward VIII’s plans to marry Wallis Simpson, Clementine reacted bluntly: ‘If you are going to begin the abdication all over again, I’m going to leave [you].’63

  Clementine’s daughters agreed that the adjustment to private life was worse for her than for Winston. He was still showered with admiring attention, had his cronies, his painting and writing, and, above all, Chartwell. By contrast, she had hoped to enjoy their liberation from high office by socialising in London and going to the theatre. But decades of devotion to Winston had left her with few friends, and Nellie’s death had robbed her of one of her few remaining sources of female companionship. Sometimes she became so desperate to talk that she unburdened herself to less than discreet or loyal acquaintances. On more than one occasion she had long heart-to-hearts at crowded parties with the notorious gossip Noël Coward – once she was ‘extremely trenchant’ about Randolph, for instance, and on another occasion she poured out her feelings about Diana’s illness.64 In 1958 she tried to contact some old Berkhamsted schoolfriends,65 and often she immersed herself in the light escapism of a Barbara Cartland novel. But mostly, in her loneliness, she turned to the young women she employed as secretaries. She took them to the royal box at Wimbledon, to the theatre, cinema and art galleries, and invited them for lunch, drinks or even just to watch television.

  One of these women w
as Shelagh Montague Browne (Anthony’s second wife), who before she married also lived in the flat above the Churchills’ Hyde Park Gate offices. She remembered how Clementine would ‘ring up and say “I see you’re in, dear, would you like to come and watch Emergency Ward Ten with me?”’ Clementine would then encourage her to stay for supper, although Montague Browne sometimes tried to plead a prior engagement. On other occasions, when Clementine spotted friends arriving at Montague Browne’s flat, she would telephone to say ‘They look interesting.’ ‘So I would invite her over for a drink and she would arrive in an instant. I thought how vulnerable she was and how she needed girlfriends.’66 Chips Gemmell remembers one poignant lunch with Clementine when ‘I saw her hand coming towards me very slowly so I took it. I think it was a sweet gesture.’67 In August 1955, she invited one of her favourites, eighteen-year-old Heather Wood, to accompany her to St Moritz for a month. Heather found herself listening to Mrs Winston Churchill’s ‘most intimate’ secrets68 and, for a time at least, became almost a surrogate daughter. Early one morning, there was a gentle knock on Heather’s hotel room door, and Clementine was standing outside ‘like a small, shy girl’. ‘I do hope you are not being worn out dear by this tiresome old woman,’ she said.69

  Winston worried about her deeply, but was either too miserable himself or too immersed in his own pursuits to help her. He rarely accompanied her on her chosen jaunts and it was another man, a friendly American widower called Lewis Einstein, who provided her with male company in St Moritz – as well as a large chauffeured car to take her on scenic drives through the mountains.

  Clementine returned to Chartwell from St Moritz in September 1955 in good spirits, only for her neuritis to flare up again within a couple of months. Regular self-administered injections of pethidine, a highly addictive opiate, brought only partial relief and added insomnia to her troubles. Her evident anguish was starting to frighten those close to her, prompting a Roman Catholic friend to give her a rosary. Worried that her mother was becoming desperate, Sarah wrote: ‘I wish all was better for you – When you hold your rosary at night – do not wish for sad things – . . . pray we can all yet be happy – I am powerless & incapable in front of your despair – but I thank you for sharing it with me – it makes me feel closer to you.’70