SIX

‘THIS WILD COUSIN OF MINE’

If the political family was under strain, Churchill’s wider family had troubles of its own. Even as he was waving goodbye to Clementine on the Riviera, his mother was bidding farewell to her beloved only niece, the daughter of her elder sister Clara. Tall, lithe, and graceful, at age thirty-five Clare Sheridan was bound for Liverpool, the Cunard liner Aquitania, and New York. Behind her she fled a scandal that left London society sniggering and Winston fuming. Most families have at least one black sheep within the fold, and Clare was the Churchills’. For that reason, she has been excluded from most mainstream Churchill biographies. Yet her exploits bring into sharp focus Churchill’s continuing obsession with the Bolsheviks, as well as the too often understated importance of family in his life.

Clare was his only female cousin, a satin-gowned bridesmaid at his wedding. The Jerome sisters kept their families close. Jennie played the role of family matriarch and took a special interest in Clare, who had suffered an unstable childhood marked by chronic parental neglect. Her parents flitted between various homes in London, Sussex, and Innishannon in County Cork, Ireland, where her father Moreton Frewen owned a landed estate on the banks of the River Bandon; his speculative financial ventures frequently crashed, bankruptcy always threatened, and not for nothing was he mockingly dubbed ‘Mortal Ruin’.

Unlike her two brothers who were privileged with an Eton education, Clare suffered the usual home schooling reserved for girls of her class and ended up at a convent in Paris and a finishing school in Germany. At age seventeen she was taken to London to ‘enter society’. The three Jerome sisters were living together in a cluster of houses on Great Cumberland Place, and every morning Clare would cross the street to visit Jennie and read out loud to her The Times’ editorial while she took breakfast. Lady Randolph also coached her on becoming a debutante. ‘My Aunt Jennie became my second mother,’ Clare remembered, ‘I was a wild animal being tamed . . .’1

She saw her cousin Winston regularly at family events. But he was a full decade older and often seemed distant and intimidating. The cousin she felt closest to was John Leslie, the son of her aunt Leonie and Sir John Leslie of Glaslough in County Monaghan, Ireland, who owned an estate of almost 50,000 acres. Born in the same month and year as each other, the cousins shared an artistic and rebellious streak. In his twenties, John declared for Irish Home Rule, changed his name to its Irish variant ‘Shane’, and formally embraced Catholicism. It took Clare longer to find herself. Her literary ambitions received scant encouragement, and unfulfilled as a social butterfly, at age twenty-five she married William (but always known as ‘Wilfred’) Sheridan, a London stockbroker and descendant of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan – of whom, revealingly, she had never heard. In 1912 she gave birth to a daughter. Another quickly followed but was sickly from birth and soon died of meningitis. A year later her husband was killed at the Battle of Loos only days after the birth of their third child, a son. Clare was now a war widow with two small children to support.

At this point she turned to her cousin Winston. Once before, from the dismal convent in Paris, she had written to him about her misery and received a sympathetic if patronizing response. ‘My dear Clare,’ he wrote, ‘Do not be low-spirited. It is something after all to be fed and clothed and sheltered: more than most people in the world without constant and unwearing [sic] toil. Cultivate a philosophical disposition; grow pretty and wise and good . . .’² Now she asked her cousin to find out the details of her husband’s death. Winston had liked Wilfred, whose body was missing in German-held territory, and did his best to find out more but without success. Dressed in her black widow’s weeds and with her baby boy and small daughter accompanied by a governess, shortly before Christmas 1915 Clare travelled to London. Churchill was with his regiment on the Western Front and for a few nights she stayed with a sympathetic Clementine at Jack and Goonie’s Cromwell Road house. ‘My darling,’ reported Clementine to her husband, ‘I don’t know how one bears such things. I feel like I could not weather such a blow – she has a beautiful little son 8 weeks old but her poor “black puss” [Wilfred] sleeps in Flanders.’3

Clare was also broke. On his return to London, Winston did what he could to help. Her problem was that widows of men who had volunteered for service did not qualify for pensions, Wilfred’s parents lived on a fixed income, and her own father, as usual, was in a financially fragile state. Eventually the War Office gave her a pension of £250 pounds a year. Together with support from her aunts Jennie and Leonie, this was just about enough to live on.⁴

But she needed a life, and found it in art. Churchill was also just discovering its magic, and it brought them closer. Sculpture rather than painting was her salvation. Grieving over the loss of her infant daughter she had found unexpected comfort and pleasure in working with clay to make the child a memorial. Art schools and classes followed, and thanks to family connections and friends in high places she received tuition and advice from some of the leading sculptors of the day. Sitting for Jacob Epstein, she intently observed him at work and adopted some of his revolutionary techniques. Celebrities such as H. G. Wells, Hazel Lavery, and Lady Diana Manners – the wife of Duff Cooper – sat for her, as did the Canadian air ace Billy Bishop V.C.; it was a coup when his bust was purchased by the Canadian War Museum. An exhibition of her sculptures under the auspices of the National Portrait Society brought her more commissions and she splashed out by buying a Buick and hiring a chauffeur. She took a small studio in St John’s Wood in London, and here the up-and-coming society portrait artist Oswald Birley captured her wearing bright red lipstick and an artist’s smock. In her mid-thirties, she now blossomed into a vibrant and self-confident woman enthusiastically breaking Edwardian taboos and calling herself a pacifist and anarchist. Her biographer Anita Leslie, Shane’s daughter, who came to know her well, described her as ‘instinctive, emotional, devoid of logic, uncontrollable, blazing with love and indignation in turn’. Candle-lit dinner parties in her studio became a magnet for an upper-class Bohemian set thrilling to the jazz beat of post-war London.5

Events had brought her directly into Churchill’s orbit after Freddie Guest decided to collect the sculptured heads of celebrities who happened to be his friends. As Winston and Clementine were temporarily living with him at Templeton, Clare eagerly seized on her cousin as an obvious subject for a portrait. Freddie had generously converted a north-facing room of the house into a studio where Churchill happily spent his Sundays painting. Lord Beaverbrook turned her down, but another of his close friends was more than willing to sit for her.

Lord Birkenhead had been a spectacularly successful lawyer in Liverpool before emerging as an equally brilliant backbench Tory MP famed for his robust attacks against Home Rule for Ireland and reform of the House of Lords. Born in 1872 as Frederick Edwin Smith – and hence forever known as ‘F. E.’ – he was tall, darkly handsome, and athletically naturally gifted. Outwardly he had little in common with Churchill except for intense ambition, a gift for high-speed verbal repartee, and a lust for adventure and pleasure. Each quickly recognized in the other a kindred soul, and across the political divide they formed an unlikely bond that was to endure until Smith’s death in 1930. Together the two rising young stars ‘played soldiers’ in the pre-war Oxford Yeomanry, staying up late during the summer field exercises drinking and playing cards until the early hours. Smith was the first to hear of Winston’s engagement to Clementine when they were staying at Blenheim Palace together, and later the Churchills moved to live close to Smith and his family in Eccleston Square in London, where each man became godfather to the other’s son. ‘Our friendship was perfect,’ Churchill once said, and Smith reciprocated by saying that there was ‘no man in public life in England with a heart so warm, with a simplicity so complete, with a loyalty so unswerving and so dependable’.⁶ In 1919 Lloyd George had appointed Smith as Lord Chancellor with the title Lord Birkenhead (the place of his birth). Shortly afterwards, Birkenhead helped save Churchill from committing political suicide. In a fury over Lloyd George’s policy toward the Bolsheviks, Churchill had teetered perilously on the brink of resignation. Only Birkenhead’s strongly worded advice held him back from carrying out the threat.7

As well as being a heavy drinker and gambler, F. E. was a notorious womanizer and had long set his eyes on Clare. Over several weekends his car collected her from her studio and drove her to Templeton, where she spent hours sculpting the three male friends. Churchill was the hardest to do because he found it impossible to sit still and was impatient to get on with his painting. Sunday, he said, was the only free time he had. ‘I waited, I watched, I snatched moments, I did and undid and re-did, at times in despair,’ she complained. Sometimes Freddie would plead with him to give her a chance, and he would be contrite and promise to sit still. He managed to do so for three minutes and then began to fidget. As the day faded, she recalled, he would invariably turn excitedly to the window to paint the sunset. ‘His canvas had been prepared, the cedar tree in the foreground was already painted, he went straight for the colour. On one of these occasions he said to me, without looking round: “Sometimes I could almost give up everything for it.” ’⁸ One day Clare returned to Templeton about midnight to find the three friends still up and talking. Guest was wrapped in a bath towel, Birkenhead was wearing vivid strawberry-coloured pyjamas, and Churchill was clothed in a Jaeger dressing gown ‘borrowed’ by Freddie from a German prisoner of war. After they plied her with champagne, Winston announced fiercely: ‘In my next incarnation I mean to be a woman, I mean to be an artist, I shall be free, and I shall have children.’⁹

Meanwhile, Birkenhead continued his pursuit at Clare’s St John’s Wood studio. Much taken with his sardonic humour, she tolerated his amorous pleadings and agreed to join him and Churchill on his yacht during the summer. Society was soon buzzing with gossip. Her Aunt Jennie, much concerned, urged her to be careful and pointed out that in her own affairs she had never taken on a married man. She riposted that it wasn’t an affair; she was simply enjoying a man’s company. Whatever the truth – and Birkenhead’s official biographer makes no mention of her despite acknowledging at least one other of the Lord Chancellor’s sexual affairs – Churchill demonstrated his usual tolerance and refused to be scandalized. So far as he was concerned, they were both special and whatever they did was fine by him. Clare particularly, after her wartime suffering, could do no wrong – or so he thought.10

*

One day Clare invited Winston to lunch at her studio with her brother Oswald, the portrait artist Ambrose McEvoy, and the gallery owner Colin Agnew, who had promised her an exhibition in the West End. The lunch came at the climax of Churchill’s crusade against the Bolsheviks. The Red Army had reached the gates of Warsaw but had then been dramatically turned back by the Polish Army in what history remembers as the ‘Miracle of the Vistula’. Boris Savinkov seized the moment to urge Churchill to release British war materiel for use in a ‘push’ across the Soviet frontier, collecting ‘a huge snowball of anti-Bolshies’ to crush the regime in Moscow. The Cabinet also knew from secret service intercepts that Leonid Krassin and Lev Kamenev, his fellow Bolshevik at the Soviet Trade Office on New Bond Street and Trotsky’s brother-in-law, had been carrying out propaganda contrary to all their promises.

This was exactly what Churchill had predicted. A keen reader of the intercepts, he had seen with his own eyes messages revealing Soviet duplicity and deception and on one of them, a telegram from Kamenev to Moscow, he furiously scribbled, ‘This is unmistakable avowal of mala fides [bad faith].’ But his demand for the immediate expulsion of Kamenev and Krassin was rejected by Lloyd George. As the Cabinet had already ruled out any military action against Russia, he was also compelled to reject Savinkov’s plea for military assistance.¹¹ Over lunch with Clare he let loose his frustrations at having his hands so firmly tied. ‘[Winston] said nobody hated Bolshevism more than he, but Bolsheviks were like crocodiles,’ noted Oswald in his diary. ‘He would like to shoot every one he saw, but there were two ways of dealing with them – you could hunt them, or let them alone, and it was sometimes too expensive to go on hunting them for ever.’¹²

Luckily for his enjoyment of their lunch Churchill had no idea what Clare was up to. While he raged about the Bolsheviks, she kept quiet about the sitter who had come to her studio earlier that morning – none other than the ‘crocodile’ Kamenev himself. Captivated by the notion of adding Bolshevik heads to her forthcoming show, and not a little thrilled by the forbidden lure of Bolshevism itself, only three days previously she had paid a visit to the Soviet offices on New Bond Street. Here, she was warmly received by a smiling Kamenev who assured her that, far from obliterating art as was widely rumoured, the Soviet government was anxious to surround itself with culture and that artists were its most privileged class. Promising to sit for her, he had turned up promptly at her studio three hours before her lunch with Winston. While she sculpted, Kamenev talked almost non-stop about the wonders of the new society in Russia. Not surprisingly given her family situation, he heavily emphasized its support for children whose parents were too poor to clothe, feed, and educate them. In turn, she enthused about her lifelong love of Russian literature, art, music, and dancing. ‘You should come to Russia,’ he responded. ‘You can come with me and I will get you sittings from Lenin and Trotsky.’ Thinking he was joking, she hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘Let me know when you are going,’ she said, ‘and I will be ready in half an hour.’ The next morning Churchill’s other Bolshevik ‘crocodile’, Leonid Krassin, also came for a sitting. ‘He has a beautiful head and sat almost sphinx-like, serene and expressionless most of the time,’ she noted. ‘He has no smile like Kamenev and his piercing eyes just looked at me impassively while I worked. It’s rather uncanny.’13

By contrast, she was bewitched by Kamenev’s charm offensive. He sent her a bouquet of roses, and throwing caution to the winds the two of them lunched openly at Claridges and strolled round the Tate Gallery. In Trafalgar Square they ran into a ‘Hands Off Russia’ demonstration. The speaker was George Lansbury, the editor of the socialist newspaper the Daily Herald, who was a staunch supporter of the Bolsheviks and bitter opponent of Churchill whom he regularly denounced as an imperialist and a warmonger. Lansbury quickly noticed Clare and Kamenev in the Trafalgar Square crowd. ‘Gangway please for Comrade Kamenev’ went up the cry and they were wildly cheered. But aware of the threat of expulsion hanging over him, Clare’s new-found Bolshevik friend prudently declined to speak. Then the couple visited Hampton Court and rowed on the Thames with Kamenev humming Volga boat songs. ‘Twelve hours with Kamenev,’ she noted ecstatically in her diary when she came home at midnight.

Meanwhile Churchill continued his high-level fulminations against ‘the crocodiles’. His campaign was given extra fuel by Sir Henry Wilson, the robustly opinionated Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who was convinced that the British Empire was facing an existential crisis and that Lloyd George’s tolerance of Krassin and Kamenev must have an explanation sinister enough to merit a coup d’état. Several times Churchill discussed with Wilson the stream of intercepts from the code-breakers proving Kamenev’s involvement with the revolutionary excitement sweeping the British labour movement, and encouraged him to put his fully documented case on paper. On the day after his lunch with Clare, he was sufficiently wound up on the topic to tell Lloyd George that ‘a veritable plot was being hatched against England and France’, and he sent him a damning intercept in which Kamenev talked of buying arms for the working class. But if Wilson was fantasizing about treason, Churchill trod a far more careful path and concentrated again on demanding the expulsion of the Russians. This time he suggested full publication of the intercepts to prove the extent of Bolshevik meddling. ‘Are we really going to sit still,’ he asked, ‘until we see the combination of money from Moscow, the Kameneff-Krassin [sic] propaganda, the Council of Action, and something very like a general strike, all acting and reacting on one another, while at the same time our military forces are at their very weakest?’ To add force to his argument, he also pointed out the political dangers of permitting the Russians to stay: it gave encouragement to Labour, which was a growing political threat, while at the same time alienating the Conservatives who were part of the Coalition. Less than ten days had passed since Kamenev’s visit to Clare’s studio. But Churchill’s appeal fell on deaf ears. Lloyd George was far less alarmist about the Bolsheviks and their impact on the British labour movement, and the Cabinet refused to publish the intercepts. He did, however, throw Churchill a bone. Krassin could stay, but Kamenev would be given his marching orders. After a stormy interview with the prime minister at 10 Downing Street, Clare’s favourite Bolshevik was told to pack his bags and leave Britain. This did little to appease Churchill’s fury. ‘As long as any portion of this nest of vipers is left intact,’ he fumed, ‘it will continue to breed and swarm.’14

Clare was sculpting in her studio when she received the news. Infatuated with her romance and seduced by the prospect of being able to sculpt the heads of both Lenin and Trotsky, she blithely abandoned the promised cruise with Birkenhead and Churchill, cashed a £100 cheque, purchased her ticket at Thomas Cook’s, bought a new hat, had her hair washed and cut, scribbled a few letters, hastily packed a couple of suitcases, and left the next morning with Kamenev for Moscow. Almost the entire Soviet trade delegation saw them off. Krassin, ever the gentleman, even presented her with a large box of chocolates tied up with a red ribbon.¹⁵ The only people she told in advance were Shane and her brother Oswald. ‘I’d rather she didn’t go,’ the latter confided to his diary, ‘but she has got “Bolshevism” badly . . . and I think it may cure her to go and see it. She is also her own mistress and if I thwarted her by telling Winston she’d never confide in me again.’ Shane also kept the secret and took the full brunt of Churchill’s anger during a massive family row over the escapade. ‘Clare’s in Russia with those filthy communists,’ he raged. ‘She’s mad, I tell you. Mad! It’s absolutely typical of Clare, but this time she’s really gone too far. I’ll not forgive her.’¹⁶

*

Clare’s stay in Moscow was an artistic triumph. In the freezing cold of a makeshift studio in the Kremlin she sculpted all the top Bolsheviks including Trotsky, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky, and even Lenin himself. The Soviet leader was taciturn but ventured the opinion that Russia’s greatest enemy was the sculptor’s cousin, Churchill himself. ‘All the forces of your Court and your Army are behind him,’ he pronounced, thus revealing a cartoonish view of British politics that was to bedevil other Soviet leaders as well. By contrast, Trotsky was flirtatious and kissed her hand. ‘Even when your teeth are clenched,’ he whispered seductively, ‘vous êtes encore femme.’ ‘I will tell them in England how nice you are,’ she replied. ‘Tell them,’ he murmured back, ‘that when Trotsky kisses he does not bite.’17

But socially the venture was a disaster. News of her departure quickly leaked out and, although aunts Jennie and Leonie loyally defended their niece, London society was scandalized. Clare’s return in late November was a press sensation. The Times, under the banner headline ‘WITH LENIN AND TROTSKY’, published daily extracts from the diary she had kept in the Soviet capital. ‘There is a certain piquancy in the mere event,’ it noted in an editorial, ‘which is not lessened by the fact that Mr. Churchill’s cousin is a lady, and that her sympathies appear to be rather with her Russian hosts than her kinsmen.’ This was true. ‘I love the bedrock of things here, and the vital energy,’ she wrote on the eve of her departure from the Soviet capital. ‘I am appalled by the realization of my upbringing and the futile viewpoint instilled by an obsolete class tradition.’¹⁸

For Churchill, the timing could hardly have been worse. It was barely two weeks since the Albert Hall had echoed with cheers at the image of him being hanged from a lamp post, so it was no surprise that she quickly received word that he would refuse to meet her. A similar message came from Birkenhead and others who rapidly ostracized her. Instead, new friends of a very different ilk came forward. Many were members of the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign, such as William Coates, its secretary, Cecil Malone, the Communist MP who had conjured up the lamp post image, her cousin’s nemesis George Lansbury, and William Ewer, the Daily Herald’s foreign editor. ‘I like my new friends,’ she noted happily, ‘I talk heart to heart and soul with them.’¹⁹ Early in the New Year, while Churchill was painting happily on the Riviera, Ewer and Lansbury took her out for lunch, and before the meal was over she agreed to sculpt Lansbury’s head. Yet the company and sympathy of her new-found friends was not enough to guarantee her financial future. She needed wealthy patrons. The London Times extracts of her diary had also appeared in the New York Times – Churchill family news was always good copy in the home of the Jeromes – and when she received the offer of a lucrative and all-expenses-paid speaking tour of the United States, she leapt at the chance.

*

It was this domestic wrangle and social scandal that, at 8 a.m. on the icy morning of 22 January 1921, brought Lady Randolph Churchill to the platform at Paddington Station, bidding farewell to her tempestuous niece as she boarded the train for Liverpool. As if deliberately flaunting her notorious Moscow escapade, Clare was wearing a Cossack hat and a Siberian ponyskin coat. As the family matriarch, Churchill’s mother was in protective mode. ‘If you are not happy,’ she said, putting her arm affectionately through her niece’s as they walked down the platform, ‘come straight back. You have a powerful family who love you and we are all here to open our arms to you.’ But she also offered a blunt admonition. ‘Remember,’ she wrote in a farewell letter, ‘that you are the nearest thing to a sister that Winston ever had, and apart from the embarrassment you can cause him when your unusual doings are associated with his name – he can be deeply wounded. So don’t do that again.’20

Clare was thankful for their loyalty. But she, too, was wounded and felt badly let down by her cousin’s refusal to see her. Although they were at loggerheads over Bolshevism, she genuinely admired his qualities of boldness and bravery. In Moscow, she had even discussed them with Trotsky and noted afterwards in her diary: ‘Winston is the only man I know in England who is made of the stuff that Bolsheviks are made of. He has fight, force, and fanaticism.’²¹ Why, she wondered, could he not admire her sense of adventure that matched his own in younger days, venturing off to distant and exotic places to bring back news, and even risk his life?

Once on board the Aquitania and bound for New York, she took pen and paper to write him a bitter and emotional letter about her feelings of betrayal and disappointment. Whereas she had always told people that he had heart and was loveable, she could say that no longer, she lamented. ‘You never waited to hear what I thought,’ she raged. ‘You did not want to know what I had seen. What I could tell no-one else, but would have told you, did not interest you . . . you just turned your back on me.’ She would never forget his unkindness, she continued, and he should know that if she now had Bolshevik tendencies these were the result of her treatment in England, not in Moscow. ‘I will only think of you as in the past,’ she concluded, ‘with affection, Your Cousin Clare.’22

But to Churchill family was important, and even though Clare had maddened and embarrassed him he had an essentially forgiving nature. Despite her angry outburst, he sent her a gracious reply explaining that having nothing to say to her that was pleasant on her return from Moscow, he had thought it better simply to remain silent until a better time arrived. But he still regarded her with affection, admired her gifts, would always do his best to help her, wished her well in America, and hoped she would come back ‘with a healthy gap between you and an episode which may have faded and to which we need neither of us ever refer’. Privately, he also felt deeply protective towards his younger wayward cousin. Without telling her, he found her a guardian angel in New York in the form of Bernard Baruch, who had been his opposite number in the United States dealing with munitions production. The American had made his fortune before the age of thirty on Wall Street, chaired the United States’ War Industries Board, and served as a staff member to Woodrow Wilson during the Paris peace talks. He and Churchill had first met at the Hotel Majestic when their talk quickly turned to the atmosphere of revenge clouding the negotiations. ‘I remember how he turned from the mirror, before which he was adjusting a black satin tie,’ recalled Baruch, ‘and said to me earnestly: “I was all for war when it was on. Now it is over, and I am all for peace.” ’ Now, writing to his wartime friend, Churchill asked him to keep an eye on ‘this wild cousin of mine – she’s brave,’ he added, ‘but has no judgement and might get into trouble.’²³