A Chartwell family Christmas saw a brief improvement in her condition, but in January 1956 Clementine was admitted to hospital for three weeks. Winston had already returned to the south of France to stay at La Pausa, a luxurious stone villa built in 1927 by Coco Chanel and now owned by his literary agent, Emery Reves. He wrote to her every couple of days, and at one point planned to return. Clementine preferred him to stay put and, upon finally being discharged, ignored his entreaties to convalesce with him at La Pausa and set off instead on an eight-week cruise to Ceylon. In need of undemanding company, she had planned to take the sweet-natured Heather Wood, but Wood had decided to leave to create a life of her own. (Winston tried personally to persuade her to stay, to no avail, although she felt the ‘parting’ from her ‘second mother’ ‘very deeply’. Clementine gave her a leaving gift of a V for Victory lapel brooch in rubies, diamonds and sapphires.) Instead Clementine took Sylvia Henley. The two cousins enjoyed themselves but Winston became irritated when Clementine failed to write for long periods. Whenever he tried to persuade her to stop at La Pausa on her way home she countered with an unconvincing excuse, such as not having the right clothes. His secretary Anthony Montague Browne interpreted Clementine’s avoidance of her husband as her way of enduring a life lived ‘on the brink of a nervous breakdown’. Yes, she ‘shied away’ from the enormous ‘stress of [Winston’s] gradual but perceptible physical and mental decline . . . [But] It was never neglect; it was exhaustion.’71
She returned to Britain in better spirits on 12 April but departed after only a month to stay with Lewis Einstein in Paris. In August she again hooked up with her attentive ‘crony’ – as her family began to refer to him – back in St Moritz. If Winston felt any jealousy towards this innocent liaison there is no evidence of it in his letters or behaviour. In fact, the Churchills had re-established a mutually viable pattern: short periods together in London or Chartwell, between often lengthy trips apart.
For his part, Winston was now back in France with Reves and his Texan girlfriend, the former model Wendy Russell. Clementine’s dislike of Reves and Russell was clear, and was another reason she dodged La Pausa. She suspected them of parading Winston as a trophy and disapproved of how they indulged him. Having returned home after one of his trips there, Winston made the mistake of ordering sauce with his fish. Clementine flared up immediately. ‘This is not the South of France!’ she declared pointedly. ‘We are not vulgar, rich people!’72
Reves and Russell would invite selected guests for Winston’s entertainment. One such was Noël Coward, who visited La Pausa for lunch in June 1956. Coward certainly amused Winston but he also observed that the former war leader was ‘absolutely obsessed with a senile passion for Wendy Russell. He followed her about the room with his brimming eyes and wobbled after her across the terrace.’73 There are indications that Clementine herself suspected Winston had a crush on Russell (although she feared for his dignity rather than for his fidelity). In any case she finally persuaded Winston to spend some time away from Reves, in the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, by promising to visit him if he did. But it was not until he took up with the Greek ship owner Aristotle Onassis that Clementine extended her stays. Onassis was a charismatic charmer and his wife Tina was kind and engaging; here was a couple that appealed to them both.
The Onassis yacht, the Christina, was itself a wonder and at the end of September 1958 Winston and Clementine were invited to join a Mediterranean cruise. They boarded on a high, having just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary together at La Capponcina. In one of his rare flashes of generosity, Randolph had arranged for an avenue of golden roses to be planted in the walled garden at Chartwell to commemorate the occasion, and had engaged a number of well-known artist friends, including Augustus John and Cecil Beaton, to paint pictures of the flowers for a leather-bound album to be presented to his parents on the day. For once Clementine was simultaneously astonished and delighted by her son.
Even better, Reves and Russell were out of the picture and peeved; Clementine had vetoed them from the Christina guest list, declaring she would bail out if they too came on board. Onassis indulged her and subsequently invited the Churchills on four more cruises. He proved himself a perfect host, gathering agreeable guests and choosing routes around the Greek islands and the West Indies that he knew would appeal to her. She had adored sea journeys ever since her cruises on the Rosaura in the 1930s, and life aboard the Christina brought out the best in her; now it was Clementine, rather than Winston, who held court over dinner.
The happy set-up changed, however, when Onassis began an affair with the opera singer Maria Callas. Celia Sandys joined her grandparents on the Christina in July 1959 when Callas was also there and remembers that ‘we watched events unfolding, and met each evening in my grandmother’s cabin to gossip’.74 Onassis and Tina separated soon afterwards and divorced in 1962. Winston travelled with Onassis on three more occasions, but Clementine, out of loyalty to Tina, never did so again.
Winston’s final cruise with Onassis, in 1963, took him to the Adriatic. By his side were his faithful secretary Anthony Montague Browne, young Winston and Jock Colville and his wife. Against his better judgment, he had also been persuaded to include his son. Over dinner one evening Randolph attacked his father verbally in front of other guests, making ‘violent reproaches’ about how Winston and Clementine had encouraged Pamela to seduce Americans during the war. ‘What he said was unseemly in any circumstances,’ Montague Browne related, ‘but in front of comparative strangers it was ghastly.’75 Twenty years on, Randolph still could not forgive or forget.
Back home the ever-fragile Diana was also in torment. In 1960 her twenty-five-year marriage to Duncan Sandys had ended in divorce, breaking her heart. In early 1963 he brought her fresh pain and humiliation when he became embroiled in a notorious sex scandal. During the Duchess of Argyll’s divorce case, photographs were released in which the Duchess was shown wearing nothing but pearls while fellating someone whose face is out of view; it was widely speculated that Sandys was the ‘headless man’ in question. While Clementine never became close to Diana, she was sympathetic about this latest ordeal and mother and daughter now at least spent more time together.
Meanwhile a bright spot in the gloom was Sarah, who had managed finally to put unhappiness behind her when she married again in April 1962. Even Clementine took to Baron (Henry) Audley, a sensitive and engaging man, although of uncertain health. Now in her late forties, Sarah could barely believe her luck. They settled happily in Spain, until fifteen months later, in July 1963, Henry suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died.
Inevitably, not even the most luxurious existence could protect the Churchills from the depredations of old age. Since mid-1958 Winston had employed a male nurse, Roy Howells, and as he entered his late eighties he suffered further bouts of pneumonia. Especially troubling was his descent into deafness. Clementine badgered him to wear a hearing aid, but he resisted what he felt to be a fiddly imposition; he talked less and less, leaving her to fill the lulls in conversation. So far as she was able, she tried to keep his chin up, but Clementine was now carrying the burden of a husband who quite openly wanted to die.
Nor was she in fine fettle herself. After at last conquering her neuritis in the summer of 1958 she had developed shingles, which left her with a drooping eyelid and in need of yet more surgery. Recurrent flu dogged her winters, while she continued to suffer from periodic lows. In 1961, with Winston due to embark on a cruise with Onassis, she agreed to be admitted to hospital for a complete rest and check-up. There was no obvious physical cause of her severe fatigue but she was formally diagnosed with depression.
After Winston’s resignation as Prime Minister, he rarely made speeches in the Commons and even fewer in his constituency; once again, Clementine was obliged to act as his proxy. Her diligence minimised the mutterings against him among younger party members, but she herself remonstrated with her husband for relying on her too often to stand in for him. He ha
ted constituency glad-handing and did nothing to hide it, so she strove to keep him out of trouble by making ‘every visit . . . seem a great pleasure’.76 She was anxious in case the voters guessed (correctly) that his excuses were in reality mere covers for lack of interest.
Nevertheless, in the election year of 1959 he returned to Woodford to make it clear he would be standing again. So, that October, at the age of seventy-four, Clementine joined Winston on the trail to fight their fifteenth election together. Weary as she was, she understood that this remnant of a once magnificent public life was virtually the last stimulus left to him. That did not stop her thinking it was high time he gave up, and when Winston won back his seat with a reduced majority, it was apparent that others thought so too.
Three years later, in the summer of 1962, Winston broke his hip at the Hôtel de Paris in a fall. He needed two operations and a lengthy period of recuperation. Clementine rarely felt able to leave his side as he was an obstreperous patient and a danger to himself when left unattended; he refused to stop smoking cigars in bed, but appeared oblivious when on one occasion he set fire to a napkin, valance and carpet. Even his professional nurse, Howells, found him exhausting. ‘He drained the people around him of every last drop of energy,’ he recalled. ‘Apart from the physical strain, the mental wear and tear was tremendous.’77 After one especially unproductive visit to her one-time idol, Violet finally conceded she would never have done as Winston’s wife. ‘It is as though you alone could reach him with comfort & amusement,’ she wrote to Clementine. ‘Your “private line” with him has remained intact . . . You have had so many years of . . . anxiety & strain with never a let-up – & now W needs you & claims more from you than ever before.’78
Virtually unable to walk, he wanted merely to sit silently gazing into the fire or, when at Chartwell, at the view. He got muddled when playing cards; he could no longer paint and, partly as a result of his deafness, would descend into long periods of complete silence. Even mealtimes passed with barely a flicker of the old Winston; Clementine had to shout to make herself heard. Sometimes he lay in bed all day doing nothing. He told Diana, ‘My life is over, but not yet ended.’79 A troupe of nurses tended him round the clock and the expense of it all frightened Clementine. To save money she started taking buses instead of the car, until Winston found out and made her promise to stop.
It now began to feel as if the Churchills were practically the only survivors from a former age. Roosevelt and Stalin (although both younger than Winston) were long since dead and Clementine was troubled to hear in October 1962 that Eleanor Roosevelt had fallen ill with a virulent strain of tuberculosis. She cabled the former First Lady with best wishes from them both and Eleanor wrote back, with a visibly shaky signature, to thank Clementine for her kindness. ‘The bug is still with me but I hope to win the battle shortly. With warm good wishes to both of you and hoping that you are both enjoying good health.’80 She died just three weeks later.
Finally, in May 1963, Winston accepted the realities of his own position. With great sadness he announced he would not be standing again as an MP and the Commons prepared to pay him a special tribute. But when Clementine received a copy of the proposed wording the following year, she reacted with cold fury, denouncing it as ‘mangy’.81 It was duly rewritten to her liking to include a reference to the House’s ‘unbounded admiration and gratitude’ for Winston’s services to the nation and the world, and above all his ‘inspiration of the British people when they stood alone’. Clementine was at Winston’s side when the reworded resolution, printed on vellum, was delivered by a delegation led by the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. After the brief private ceremony in the downstairs dining room at Hyde Park Gate, the politicians hurried back to the Commons and the present day.
Winston’s health appeared to rally over the summer, but by the autumn of 1963 it was clear that Clementine’s was deteriorating. David Montgomery, the Field Marshal’s son, remembers even his notoriously unemotional father remarking that ‘he was worried about the toll the strain . . . was taking from her’. ‘She struggled to be jolly . . . and to keep her equilibrium,’ recalls her assistant Shelagh Montague Browne. ‘She was very courageous.’ Sadly she became so overwrought that in early October she had to be sedated and admitted to Westminster Hospital, where her now severe depression was treated with electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). Montague Browne remembered being told that the shock treatment was for ‘a chemical imbalance in her brain’.82
Clementine was still in hospital when, during the night of 19–20 October, Diana, who had also been receiving ECT,83 took a huge overdose of sleeping pills and was found dead on the bedroom floor of her Belgravia flat by her housekeeper. She had recently been a great support to both her parents and had found fulfilment in her work helping many others through the Samaritans, a fast-growing charity set up ten years previously by a London vicar to help the desperate and the suicidal. She had lunched with her daughter Edwina that very day in seemingly good spirits and had also made plans to visit her mother in hospital and to dine with her father the following evening. Her death was therefore both ‘unexpected’ and ‘inexplicable’. Mary had to rush to the hospital, while still reeling from the shock, to break the news to her mother before she heard it on the radio. One small mercy was that Clementine was already heavily sedated, cushioning the blow. As both Sarah and Randolph were abroad, Mary had similarly to inform Winston, who was at Chartwell. ‘He sat the whole day in the studio without speaking or moving, in tears,’ recalls his then secretary Jane Portal. ‘I think he felt – I don’t know about Clementine, but I’m sure any parent would – what had he done to make this happen?’ Mary then had to phone the newly widowed Sarah at her home in Spain. Clementine was released from hospital only the day before Diana’s funeral and neither she nor Winston was well enough to attend – although they were both present at the memorial service the following week, which was held at St Stephen’s, Walbrook, the City of London church where the Samaritans had been founded. An air of immeasurable sadness now hung over the Churchill family.
*
In November 1964 Winston turned ninety. Clementine took great care over his birthday celebrations, beginning by singing him ‘Happy Birthday’ in his bedroom in the morning. ‘That was lovely,’ he smiled.84 Later she gave him a small gold heart for his watch chain, engraved with ‘90’, and gathered the clan for a candle-lit feast of all his favourite dishes. He beamed at everyone, but was obviously frail and somehow detached.
In the New Year, on 12 January, he suffered another stroke, and over the following days slid into a coma. Clementine brought in a priest to pray at his bedside, but mostly she just sat serenely, holding his right hand, his beloved marmalade cat asleep at his feet. He was deeply unconscious but clasped her fingers so tightly the nurses were convinced he was aware of her presence. It was as if he simply could not let her go. Slipping quietly into his softly lit bedroom, the family came to see these two great figures together for one last time. As Winston took his final breaths the cold winter morning of 24 January, they instinctively sank to their knees.
Later Clementine invited Violet – the woman who had loved but lost him – to say her goodbyes. She went into his room to spend ten minutes with him alone. Two days afterwards, Winston’s body was taken to Westminster Hall to lie in state until the burial on 30 January. Every day, often after dark, Clementine slipped in through a side door to watch the mournful but dignified queues of people coming to pay their last respects.
Winston had long ago declared that he wanted to be buried like a soldier and would not make do with what he scornfully dubbed the 1945 ‘farm-cart funeral’ of Lloyd George. Clementine was consulted on numerous aspects of the occasion to ensure that his wishes were carried out (he wanted military bands, for instance, of which he was given nine), but in any case the Queen had previously made it clear that he would be granted the honour of a full state funeral. Thus, with imperial ceremony, Winston’s coffin was drawn slowly through Londo
n’s streets from Westminster to St Paul’s Cathedral by one hundred and four ratings and officers of the Royal Navy. Hundreds of thousands lined the route on that bitterly cold day, while men and women from wartime resistance movements in France, Denmark and Norway raised a hundred flags in salute.
Clementine, with Sarah and Mary, followed in silence in the Queen’s horse-drawn town coach, equipped with lap rugs and hot water bottles against the penetrating chill. Sarah, although drunk at the time, remembered the creaking of the carriage, the sounds of the horses’ hooves, the distant ninety-gun salute and the drums ‘beating out the relentless precision of the slow march’.85 When they arrived at St Paul’s Cathedral, Her Majesty was already in her pew – an exceptional suspension of protocol on the part of the monarch – and the Churchills were told there was no need to curtsey. A gallant Randolph lent his arm to his mother and escorted her inside, where fifteen present and past heads of state including Presidents de Gaulle and Eisenhower were among the thousands waiting.
Another mourner, Cecil Beaton, thought age and grief made Clementine look more beautiful than ever. He found himself unutterably moved by ‘the face of Lady Churchill asking for instructions as to procedure, with small jerky little steps, yet marvellously dignified, a face in a crowd, another sample of selflessness and pure feeling’.86 Yet she still frowned upon ‘crying on parade’, and remained dry-eyed all through the day.
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