1916–18
It was a typical Randolph prank. With a faint suggestion of menace, he had dared his younger cousin Johnny to pour the contents of a chamber pot out of a bedroom window. A harmless downpour on the hydrangeas it was not, however. Randolph had omitted to share with Johnny the fact that the target was no less a figure than the new prime minister.
It was the summer of 1917 and Lloyd George was admiring the views over the Surrey hills from the terrace of the Churchills’ new “country basket,” a run-down Tudor manor called Lullenden, near the town of Lingfield. The ever-dapper Welshman appears not to have commented on being drenched in this way, although he can scarcely have failed to notice. Perhaps his pride was at stake. Or perhaps Winston’s was. A regular visitor, Lloyd George must surely have known that Randolph’s cherubic looks belied his character and that he was doubtless to blame. Unrestrained by either his adoring father or his concerned but distant mother—and cared for by untrained local girls when both parents were busy in London during the week—the six-year-old was becoming distinctly unruly.
Randolph took pleasure in terrorizing the other children—his sisters Diana and Sarah, and cousins Johnny and Peregrine. On one occasion he pushed three-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Peregrine inside a model trailer and sent it careering down a steep hill. Fortunately although the trailer, a present from newspaper proprietor Lord Riddell, was smashed to pieces, the pair emerged almost unscathed. Johnny would try to laugh off Randolph’s tyrannical behavior, but eight-year-old Diana found her younger brother difficult to bear. Doll-like in looks and timid in character, she was becoming more and more withdrawn. Her eyes were forever cast downward under astonishingly white eyelashes—her family nickname was the “gold-cream kitten.”
The children had been sent down to Surrey that summer to escape the increasingly ferocious air raids on London; thereafter they had been left largely to their own devices. Winston’s brother, Jack, was away at war; Goonie was socializing in the capital; and Winston and Clementine themselves were preoccupied. Even when the adults came down on weekends, they spent little time with their offspring, sticking to the rambling main house with its seventeenth-century galleried hall while the youngsters camped out in a converted barn, leading, some have suggested, an almost Lord of the Flies existence. Allowed to roam across the farmlands all but unchecked, they drank water from the pond and untreated milk straight from the cows.
It was probably here that Sarah picked up the glandular tuberculosis that would dog her childhood and eventually necessitate, around the age of six, a traumatic operation. Clementine never forgot her daughter panicking as the doctors put the chloroform mask over her face. She managed to fight her way off the operating table and run for it, and her mother could only watch with horror as her little girl was caught and held down with force. Young Sarah was left with a scar on her neck and an equally permanent terror of physical restraint.
The elder children went by pony and trap to the village school at Dormansland. Randolph was taunted about the Dardanelles, but he appears to have shrugged it off; the teasing confirmed that his father was a boss and he exulted in the reflected superiority. At home flustered nursery maids tried a variety of punishments to chasten him—a hard slap seems to have been the favorite. Yet Randolph neither respected nor feared such underlings. He even claimed to be guilty of additional misdemeanors for the satisfaction of proving he could withstand any sanctions they devised. One maid, maddened by his impudence, filled his mouth with mustard. He screamed but swallowed it. So much for Clementine’s delightful Chumbolly, now known by the equally unsuitable nickname of “the Rabbit.” And so much for her bucolic idyll.
• • •
Winston had come back uninjured from the trenches in May 1916, whereupon he immediately set about his rehabilitation as a palatable public figure. It had proven painfully slow. As she had predicted, in returning home on his own rather than by popular demand he had provoked a fresh torrent of abuse in the press. The Daily Mail, invoking the toxic legacy of the Dardanelles, had accused him of being a “megalomaniac politician” who had “sacrificed thousands of lives to no purpose”; in November 1916 the popular weekly journal the World ranked the expedition as “one of the greatest military disasters of all time.”
Both Lloyd George and Asquith continued to take great pains to distance themselves from Winston. For well over a year, he had been given neither a government job nor much hope of one, despite growing admiration for his frequent and knowledgeable interventions on the floor of the House of Commons. Coming up to his forty-second birthday, he could only look back at the promise of his youth and wonder where it had all gone wrong. So despairing had he become at his ongoing isolation, at a time when the war was taking yet another turn for the worse, that he wrote to his brother, Jack: “I am learning to hate.” Even Violet had deserted Winston, effectively choosing her father over her onetime hero. His criticism of the Asquith administration’s direction of the war had made him “an enemy of the Government from which he was an exile,” she explained. “My father was the leader of that Government and my loyalty to him must range me in the enemy camp.”1 Here was yet another casualty of Winston’s egotistical insistence that his allies must be fully “on his side” or be considered wholly against him.
Lloyd George had finally maneuvered the flailing Asquith out of power in December 1916, following the disastrous Somme offensive (in which twenty thousand British soldiers had died on the first day alone) and the consequent collapse of Tory support for his coalition government. But even after the fall of his nemesis, Winston remained untouchable. Validating Clementine’s long-nursed suspicions, Lloyd George fought shy of bringing him into the new government in even the most junior role, let alone the War Cabinet. As he had observed, some of his partners in the new coalition disliked Winston more violently than they did the kaiser, and his own desire as the son of a teacher to rise to power easily outweighed any feelings of loyalty.
Winston had found this prolonged exclusion impossible to comprehend. In his view, he had done his penance on the front and knew a great deal about the higher direction of the war, as well as what the men actually fighting it most needed. He also clung to the conceits that he enjoyed a huge following in the country, that his enemies were without reason and that his rightful place was in Downing Street itself. As Violet later put it, while Winston certainly had “vision” he lacked “antennae.”2
Throughout this time only one person had been in a position to disillusion him. Clementine alone could repeatedly tell him why he was deemed untrustworthy and why he had made so many enemies. But while she saw beyond the brusqueness, the scorn for lesser beings, the refusal to listen to rival points of view, others could—or would—not. Genuinely fretting about his despondent state of mind, she had devoted every minute of her time and every drop of energy left over from her canteen work to his welfare. Sometimes, in her devotion to the cause of returning Winston to office, she had gone for weeks without seeing the children. No wonder they were acting up.
Deliverance finally came soon after the publication in March 1917 of the preliminary findings of the Dardanelles Commission—which partly exonerated Winston. Three weeks after the commission’s report appeared, the US entered the war; Lloyd George now badly needed a minister of munitions with energy, efficiency and imagination, capable both of working with the Americans on supplies and, crucially, of avoiding another catastrophic shell scandal now that the conflict was entering a new phase. In July, he decided to hand the appointment to Winston—allowing him, in his own words, to become the “escaped scapegoat.” It was just as Clementine had hoped. She had long surmised that if only the facts about the Dardanelles were made public at the right time, her husband would no longer have to shoulder the entire blame for the tragedy and could work his way back into favor on merit. Even so, she never forgave Lloyd George for taking seven long months after becoming prime minister to give Winston a chance to rehabilitate himself. More than 340,000 British soldiers had been killed in action in the twenty months since Winston had left office, and it seemed as if virtually every family in the country (although not the Churchills) had in the interim been bereaved.
Ensuring adequate supplies of bombs, grenades, ammunition, guns, planes, trucks and ambulances to the military was a more important job than ever now that the Americans were on board. It was a gigantic operation. Winston presided over twelve thousand civil servants in the ministry and two and a half million munitions workers in the factories, some of whom benefited from Clementine’s canteens. The return of a ministerial salary allowed them to move back into Eccleston Square when their tenant, Sir Edward Grey, moved out (although not before destroying the Art Nouveau experiment in Clementine’s bedroom). But, according to custom, the appointment also triggered a by-election in his Dundee constituency. While he ecstatically plunged into his war work, Clementine took over much of the campaigning. The Churchill name inevitably attracted a lot of jeering, but Clementine gamely dealt with the hecklers while lending a compassionate ear to their complaints. In large part thanks to her, Winston was returned with a sizable majority of over five thousand, although the attacks on his name continued.
He remained surprised and hurt by the hostility wherever he encountered it. His aunt Cornelia—one of the more sensible of his relations—counseled him to be cautious: “You are just the man for the job [but] my advice is stick to munitions & don’t try & run the Govt!’3 Yet Winston was perhaps even more restless than when he had been at the Admiralty, and still wrapped up in inflated ideas of his own importance. At a banquet in July 1918 held to welcome the thirty-six-year-old assistant secretary of the US Navy Department, one Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston was so self-absorbed that he virtually ignored the guest of honor. Roosevelt had been a little overawed by the venerable setting of the great hall of Gray’s Inn, and he came away thinking forty-three-year-old Winston was a “stinker.” While Winston could not even remember having met him, Roosevelt was never to forget the slight.
The Churchills’ home in Eccleston Square quickly became an alternative nerve center for the war, with ministers and messengers coming and going and secretaries pounding away on typewriters. Winston delighted in conducting life at breakneck speed, not excluding his frequent journeys between London and their country home. A reckless and impatient driver, known to mount sidewalks in order to bypass traffic, he drove far too fast, sometimes losing control and colliding with other vehicles. On one occasion, his car overturned just outside Dormansland with Clementine at his side—they were fortunate to escape with mere bruises.
These jaunts to Lullenden, although increasingly brief and rare, were a highlight for the children. Clementine could only look on as Winston, happy to be at the center of world events once more, played with the youngsters as if one of them himself. He was glamorous—arriving with guards, secretaries, important guests and a great deal of fanfare. And he was fun—playing “gorilla,” when he would drop out of a tree on unsuspecting children, or “bear,” in which he would chase them through the woods growling gloriously. As soon as he had had his fill, however, he would instantly retreat into an unreachable adult world, leaving the overwrought youngsters for someone else to deal with. Randolph, in particular, could not contain his pride at having such an exalted and exotic creature as his father. In turn, Winston sucked up his son’s adoration and returned it without qualification. The unfortunate consequence was that Randolph felt immune from Clementine’s reproving glances, and from any real sanction.
Now that he was back in the saddle, Winston’s state of mind was positively joyful. But a buoyant Winston was also a selfish and dictatorial one. He expected to live exactly as he pleased. “Churchill on top of the wave,” Beaverbrook later commented, “has in him the stuff of which tyrants are made.”4 Clementine had shared his humiliation, and helped him to absolution, but now her wishes were largely ignored. Once again, particularly after she became pregnant for the fifth time in early 1918, she was distressed by his frequent trips to the front. She thought more of his work could be conducted safely from his desk in Whitehall, and that when he did have to go to France he should cross the channel by sea. Instead, though he knew of her desperate fear of planes, he flew whenever he could, sometimes twice or more a day. A field near the house at Lullenden was specially redesignated a “flying station” so that Winston could land and take off whenever he pleased on the weekend as well. She should not worry, he told her in his egocentric way, as flying gave him a “feeling of tremendous conquest over space” and, he told her, “I know you’d love it yourself.”5
His courting of death in this fashion caused her to writhe in her bed, haunted by nightmares of crashes and flames. She was so consumed by dread and foreboding that she could not stop herself from pouring out her fears in front of her bewildered children. Whenever Winston was in the air, Lullenden was suffused with gloom and tension—and with some justification, for he was involved in a number of potentially fatal accidents. One of his planes caught fire over the channel, another somersaulted after takeoff and yet another crash-landed. These tiny, fragile aircraft were also, as Clementine knew, at the mercy of storms or passing squalls. Winston remained obstinately undaunted. Despite numerous warnings, he refused to give up his reckless habit of boarding planes with a lit cigar.
He was not, however, entirely inconsiderate. Indeed, he fretted as to whether he and Clementine were more or less happy than “the average married couple.” When away in France on their tenth wedding anniversary in September 1918, he wrote to her: “I reproach myself vy much for not having been more to you. But at any rate in these ten years the sun has never yet gone down on our wrath . . . My dearest sweet I hope & pray that future years may bring you serene & smiling days . . . your ever devoted if only partially satisfactory, W.”6
His fine words did not mean he was prepared to change his ways, of course, and he seemed genuinely surprised when she took umbrage. Although normally an exemplary correspondent, on one occasion, after he had been away a whole month, she stopped writing to him completely to demonstrate her distress. He was outraged. “When I reflect on the many and various forms which yr naughtiness takes, I am astonished at its completeness & its versatility. So there!” Winston told her on September 15, 1918, signing himself as her “vilely neglected Pig.”7
He also continued to ignore her fears about money, stubbornly refusing to bow to reality and live within their means. Lullenden, now bought for £4,000 in Clementine’s name with a hefty mortgage, was proving highly costly to run. It satisfied Winston’s craving for a substantial country residence, with seven bedrooms in the main house alone, and the date 1694 carved into the stone fireplace in the hall (although its history was actually even older), but it failed to meet several of Clementine’s romantic dreams. The soil was too poor to establish the rose garden she longed for and there was no money for a tennis court. The house did not even have electricity at first, and remained bitterly cold and damp in winter, while the sixty-seven acres of farmland were hugely expensive to manage, especially with wartime labor shortages.
Once Winston was back at work, the management of Lullenden fell to Clementine. Now that she saw it at close quarters she was horrified at what she considered the brutality of farming. She disliked the life of constant pregnancy and milking that the cows had to endure, and the slaughter they faced when no longer productive. Meanwhile, in a desperate bid to cut costs she brought in three German prisoners of war to work the fields. Their presence alarmed the neighbors, and with good reason: one even attempted to poison the water supply. She had to send them away, and so the hay crop rotted on the ground, the brambles and thornbushes rioted and the ditches became clogged with undergrowth and dank water.
Just caring for the house and gardens cost £450 a year. The farm, which Winston had foreseen as a generator of income, was actually costing even more. Yet he was still swept up by a romantic vision of playing the country gentleman—even if he was never around to see it through. He spent an enormous £1,000 on expanding the vegetable garden, improving the cowshed and pigsty and increasing their livestock. He even bought a horse and cart for local trips and to pick up coal from Lingfield station.
One day, when Clementine was five months’ pregnant and alone at the reins, the horse bolted at the sight of a steamroller. The cart overturned, throwing her out and shaking her badly. Thoughts of her miscarriage never far from her mind, she was terrified that she would go into premature labor, but happily it was only her knee and the cart itself that were damaged. The incident did nothing to endear the country to her, though. She felt ever more a townie.
Her cousin Madeline Whyte rented a cottage nearby for a month to help out, but Clementine—whatever her public demeanor—was in reality succumbing to anxiety and exhaustion. With Winston away so often, she became even more agitated when he neglected to write, failing to disguise her true feelings with vague attempts at humor. “I would have enjoyed a letter from you these last days, but I am not fretting or pining for you, but just think you are a little pig. ‘What can you expect from a pig but a grunt?’ . . . But I haven’t even had a grunt from mine.”8 Feeling abandoned, she decided to make contact with an old school friend from Berkhamsted, only to make the haunting discovery that she had just died giving birth to twins.
Clementine had been frightened to be with child again in the spring of 1918. As her daughter Mary noted, it was hardly “her moment of choice.”9 Pregnancy exhausted her, made her feel neurotic and threatened to strand her in the country because she had no fixed abode in London. It also prevented her from participating (albeit in a supporting role) in Winston’s high-powered and enthralling world. One of a growing number of young women who wanted to take control of their bodies so that they might be able to do more in life than simply produce babies, she urged Winston to read a controversial new booklet entitled Married Love, lent to her by the sympathetic Goonie. Written by the pioneering birth-control campaigner Marie Stopes, and dedicated specifically to husbands, it aimed to ensure that men took their fair share of responsibility for contraception by spelling out the practicalities and benefits. It was a message that Clementine was keen for Winston to take on board. “I can’t think why this pamphlet was not written years ago,”10 she told him emphatically. It appears Winston was sufficiently taken with the notion that he discussed it at a dinner of the Other Club, a male-only political talking shop.
Contraception at the time was still surprisingly primitive, almost taboo. The main options were withdrawal, the hugely expensive and little-known Dutch cap, or abstinence; none was exactly satisfactory and only one was reliable. It seems, however, that Clementine’s efforts with Winston may have paid off. This was to be her last pregnancy until a point in her life when she was actually ready for another child.
In the meantime, she despaired at the thought of another baby when she already found her existing children so challenging—Randolph in particular. Since her early excitement at having produced a son, her feelings toward him had cooled, making her doubt her abilities as a mother. Although the children all had loving nicknames, this concealed the fact that she found it difficult to bond with any of them. Margot Asquith liked to observe that she had “little or no maternal feeling.” Now she feared that she might (like her dead friend) be carrying twins—with all the expense and worry that would entail. She also knew that after ten years, Winston’s father had tired of his mother, Jennie, and divorce had been under serious discussion. It lingered in the back of her mind that, a decade on from their wedding, she also would be found wanting; she knew too well how often men exploited their wives’ pregnancies as “excuses” for conducting affairs. Perhaps worst of all was the idea that Winston’s political resurgence and the restrictions imposed by her condition might make her redundant as his counselor in chief.
It is a little surprising that she did not abandon her canteen work at this stage. She continued to drive herself extremely hard. One society hostess was amazed that, although obviously worn out, she insisted on leaving a dinner party at eleven p.m. to make her night visits to the factories. But then the canteens were the only part of Clementine’s life that was her own. She knew she was good at her job and thrilled in the praise she received. At the end of 1918, in recognition of her efforts, she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). It was a great honor and gave notice to all those doubters and critics that, given the chance, she could be much more than a powerful man’s ornament.
While laborious and challenging, the work was of course unpaid, and so it did nothing to solve the Churchills’ growing financial crisis. Around the time she found out she was pregnant, they had been forced to relet Eccleston Square—to the Labour Party—as they needed the income to meet the bills for Lullenden and Winston’s way of life. Winston was back in the cabinet but he was not earning as much as before. They could not afford to buy another London home and Cromwell Road was no longer available as it too was let out. Winston sometimes spent the night at the Munitions Ministry in the old Metropole Hotel just off Trafalgar Square (now the luxury Corinthia Hotel) but mostly he stayed with friends. For a while, when both were in town the Churchills were reduced to camping out in friends’ spare rooms. The choice was limited—the Dardanelles had seen to that.
The Hamiltons were one of the few couples to offer them a roof, at 1 Hyde Park Gardens. The two couples had shared the experience of daily abuse over the Dardanelles, but their relationship was hardly warm. Clementine had of course not rated Hamilton as a commander of the operation and held him partly to blame for the disaster. In return Lady Jean Hamilton was among those who found Clementine rather aloof. She did, however, feel some feminine sympathy for her, as she considered Winston to be an “awful, utterly unthinkable” husband.11
Clementine normally avoided casual female intimacy, and particularly those maternal exchanges on baby recipes and sleeping patterns—and especially husbands—that some other women find supportive. But when the Churchills came to stay in June 1918, it was quickly clear to Jean Hamilton that Clementine, then four months’ pregnant, was on the verge of breaking down and in desperate need of sisterly support. Perhaps Lady Jean’s kindness—and her own anguish—persuaded Clementine to open up. In any case, she waited until the two women were alone one evening after dinner before seizing her chance. Knowing that Lady Jean had long tried for children without success (and was on the verge of adopting), she begged her hostess for help. Greatly distressed, she explained how she had neither the money to pay her medical bills nor anywhere safe to give birth (considering Lullenden, which still had no piped water, too rustic and remote). “She asked if I’d like to have her baby,” an astonished Lady Jean recorded in her diary. “I said I would.” Lady Jean even offered to let her give birth at her house, and in return Clementine “said if she had twins [Lady Jean] would have one.”12
It was an extraordinary idea and one that begs many questions: Even with the expenses of Lullenden, could they really not afford the £25-a-week fee for a nursing home? Was Clementine’s pessimism getting the better of her or was she simply being realistic about their finances? Was it the prospect of twins that she found so overwhelming?
Whatever Clementine’s motives, the incident appears to have finally prompted Winston to take action to help his wife. Soon afterward his aunt Cornelia agreed to lend her house, 3 Tenterden Street, just off Hanover Square, for Clementine’s confinement. The immediate crisis passed and Lady Jean went ahead with her original adoption as planned. Aunt Cornelia’s generosity gave Clementine some peace of mind as well as a comfortable home. Moreover, she was able to stay in London and follow the progress of the war, thus making herself useful. Her astute comments on strategy and the need not “to waste [their] men” as the war finally drew to a close undoubtedly impressed Winston. He was full of details of weaponry and destruction and felt, now that the Americans had entered the war, that victory was in sight, but it was she who had the foresight to look to the future and the need for him to reinvent himself as a man of peace, as well as of war.
She often worried that his actions and publicly expressed views gave an impression that he was a lesser man than he really was. So she urged him to spend more time in Britain. “Darling do come home and look after what is to be done with the Munition Workers when the fighting really does stop . . . I should like you to be praised as a reconstructive genius as well as a Mustard Gas Fiend, a Tank Juggernaut & a flying Terror.” She advised him to redeploy the workers into pulling down slums “in places like Bethnal Green, Newcastle, Glasgow [and] Leeds” and replacing them with “lovely garden cities.”13 She was particularly keen to make sure that the women who had contributed so much toward the war effort would not now be abandoned but perhaps trained to make the furniture for these dwellings. With his public image at the forefront of her mind as ever, she perceived the need for Winston to rebrand himself a social reformer and thus further diminish the stain of the Dardanelles.
Winston was also looking forward. Certainly, he had been struck by the role played by women during the war, recognizing that it had changed Clementine and would likewise transform other women’s lives. “I think you will find real scope in the new world opening out to women, & find interests wh will enrich yr life,”14 he wrote to her in September 1918. He was prepared to go only so far on female emancipation, however. There were certain male fortresses that should not be breached. In 1919, when Nancy Astor became the first woman to sit as an MP, she was ignored by men she had known for years, including Winston.15 When she asked him why he had been so rude, he retorted: “Because I find a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom, when I had nothing with which to defend myself, not even a sponge.”
The world outside, though, had changed forever. Women had called off their suffrage protests during the war, depriving many former opponents of their chief objection to the female vote. True, many who had taken on tough, demanding and relatively well-paid jobs were to lose them when the troops returned from the front. But total war had brought about a social revolution. British society was never to be quite so unequal again and women, including Clementine, were no longer seen as hysterical weaklings. They led more of their lives outside the home than ever before; they were more visible and more demanding of respect.
Earlier in the war, the speaker of the House of Commons, James William Lowther, had chaired a conference on electoral reform that had recommended limited women’s suffrage. The result, in early 1918, was the Representation of the People Act, which granted the vote to property-owning women over thirty such as Clementine. Like Winston, the majority of MPs—385 to 55—supported the legislation as recognition of women’s contribution to the war effort.
This limited measure was not, however, the sole area of female advance. Women’s fashion was also becoming more liberating. The elaborate corseted outfits of the Edwardian era—perfected by the likes of Jennie—were out. Bras were becoming commonplace, and easier, looser and often cheaper and more practical outfits could be worn on top of them. A certain androgyny was in vogue, and Clementine’s slender, athletic figure and taste for the unadorned was right on trend.
• • •
By the autumn of 1918, when Clementine was enduring the final months of her pregnancy, it was clear that victory was in sight. Under the “Hundred Days Offensive” the Allies were gradually pushing the Germans out of France and retaking parts of Belgium. With the rapidly improving military news, Clementine began to think more of family and future and there are hints of her urging Winston himself to plan for a happier, more peaceful life.
War had dominated the Churchills’ lives for more than four years. It had tested their marriage and their sanity. It had made them social and political pariahs. And it had driven them to virtual bankruptcy. But by its end Winston had proven himself a resourceful, innovative and driven minister, and had won the respect of many of his critics, not least by his courage in volunteering to fight on the front. His reputation had undergone a remarkable recovery and his life and career were once again full of promise. Clementine had also done much to prove her worth. Even though the birth of their fourth child was just days away, she wanted badly to be with him when the glorious moment of the Armistice finally came. So, minutes before eleven o’clock on Monday, November 11, she ran excitedly into his office off Trafalgar Square.
Outside there was a strange but expectant silence. Then, just as they heard the strokes of Big Ben, they saw through the windows a solitary office girl come down into the street. Soon there were hundreds pouring out of doors or leaning out of windows, cheering and waving. Within minutes the roads were full of smiling faces. Elated by the scene, Winston ordered a car, and as he and Clementine climbed inside they were surrounded by well-wishers, some standing on the running boards as the vehicle inched its way through the crowd.
Slowly the car crept along Whitehall to Downing Street, where they intended to offer their congratulations to Lloyd George. It had been so long since Winston and Clementine had been cheered rather than booed—now at last they were experiencing together the joy of being hailed as heroes.