1918–22
Four days later Clementine gave birth to a single red-haired girl, named Marigold but quickly known within the family as Duckadilly. The arrivals of Sarah and Marigold thus respectively marked the beginning and end of the Great War. Randolph’s dominant position as the only son remained unchallenged. Despite the plush surroundings of Tenterden Street, and even without the feared complications of twins, it was a difficult delivery, and mother and baby both suffered.
Marigold was just ten days old when Parliament was dissolved and a new election announced. Fortunately, for once, Clementine was not dragooned into electioneering. She was not really needed; the result was all but a foregone conclusion. Triumphant in war, Lloyd George’s coalition secured a massive victory at the polls. For all his bellicose reputation, Winston actually swam against the tide in speaking out against calls for harsh treatment of Germany, making Clementine very proud of what she considered a true manifestation of his Liberal beliefs. But his stance against “Hang the Kaiser” sentiments and vengeful demands for enormous reparations was hardly designed to please a victorious but war-shattered nation. He won back his seat in Dundee, but the Churchills once again felt the chill of disapproval.
Now in his midforties, Winston was soon busy plotting the next step in his career. He fancied a return to the Admiralty—a backward step but one that would solve the family’s perennial housing problems and, perhaps, help lay to rest the ghost of the Dardanelles. It is safe to presume that Clementine had had more than her fill of the navy, however, and saw the folly in such a move. After a lavish Christmas at Blenheim—their first with Sunny for many years, and one that heralded a rapprochement between the cousins—Winston started work in January 1919 at the War Office. Lloyd George, now mostly away at the peace negotiations in Paris, had made him both secretary of state for war and secretary of state for air. His job ostensibly involved, in the first instance, demobilizing millions of troops and preventing a collapse of morale, even mutiny, during the long wait to go home.
In the meantime, Winston allowed himself to relax and enjoy the splendors of Blenheim at Yuletide. Clementine endured the overwhelmingly Churchillian celebrations for Winston’s sake, but she never enjoyed them as he did. Blenheim still offended her Liberal sensibility. The staff were numerous but invisible, and behind the forbidding splendor there was an overwhelming air of sadness. During another such Christmas a housemaid had gone mad, running through the staterooms screaming. Eventually she was cornered by four burly footmen and that night dispatched to a lunatic asylum. On an even earlier occasion, the butler had drowned himself in an ornamental pond.
Winston was oblivious to Clementine’s discomfort. He was particularly delighted that F. E. Smith was also a guest; his old friend was the ideal sparring partner for the late-night political discussions that Winston so adored. With F.E. and his brother, Jack, Winston could play at soldiering again, just as he had done as a child. He would line up the children in opposing “armies” of French and English soldiers for a series of mock battles in the great hall. The rules were obscure except to Winston and Jack, and no one enjoyed them as passionately as the brothers themselves. Perhaps only Randolph joined them in the rougher elements of the game.
Clementine rather disapproved of such boisterous antics—as well as the louche atmosphere at Blenheim since Sunny’s marriage to Consuelo had collapsed. She was also nervous about the future. Although his new hybrid job came with a handy £5,000 a year (cabinet pay had been restored to its prewar levels), her antennae had already detected discontent about Winston’s bagging of two senior positions. The Daily Mail, that continuous critic, had dubbed the arrangement “grotesque.” It would be better to give up the “Air” and focus on the War Office, she suggested, as such an act would be interpreted as a “sign of real strength . . . After all you want to be a statesman not a juggler.”1 He ignored her advice—on this occasion to his credit. Although he failed to drive it through at the time, Winston rightly saw the sense in establishing a single ministry of defense to encompass all the armed forces and his double appointment was a step toward its creation. Clementine’s unfailing eye for Winston’s own best interests could sometimes blind her to the bigger picture.
As before, his many duties frequently took him away to France and elsewhere, leaving Clementine behind. On one of these trips he bumped into the fiancée of his cousin Reggie Fellowes—the man-eating twenty-nine-year-old divorcée Daisy Decazes de Glücksberg, the beautiful daughter of a duke and heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune. She invited Winston to her room for afternoon tea to meet her “little child”—and in the paternal glow following Marigold’s arrival he agreed. But upon turning up, he discovered the “child” was Daisy, lying naked on a tiger skin spread over a chaise longue. When later relating the incident to Clementine, Winston insisted he had left immediately. She appears to have been surprisingly relaxed about the encounter—perhaps because she believed such lack of subtlety was unlikely to succeed with her husband. In later life she even enjoyed repeating the tale to others.2
She was, however, extremely put out by his frequent absences. Perhaps that was why she “forgot” their eleventh wedding anniversary in September 1919. Given her fastidiousness in other matters, there must be a suspicion that she chose to overlook the day as a protest. It is likely that her conscience was pricked—or her anger abated—by a loving letter from Winston that arrived on her breakfast tray that morning. Its contents made her “very happy.” “I woke up and remembered suddenly the importance of the day,” she wrote to him afterward. “I love to feel that I am a comfort in your rather tumultuous life.” The most revealing passage in her note offers an insight into what it was that kept her in such a challenging marriage: “My Darling, you have been the great event in [my life]. You took me from the straitened little by-path I was treading and took me with you into the life & colour & jostle of the high-way.”3 But in what was also surely another plea for him to invest more in their relationship, now that the war was over, she went on: “How sad it is that Time slips along so fast. Eleven years more & we shall be quite middle-aged.”
Winston was in France in March 1919 when their latest nanny, a young Scottish girl by the name of Isabelle, was struck by the influenza epidemic that killed 150,000 people in England alone over the course of the devastating winter of 1918–19. Delirious with fever, Isabelle grabbed Marigold, wanting to take her with her to bed, and Clementine struggled to retrieve her child from the dying girl’s arms. No doctor would come, as all were too busy with other cases. Sick with the flu herself, Clementine tried to nurse Isabelle through the night, but in the small hours the poor girl succumbed. Clementine was terrified that the tiny Marigold might have caught the disease too, and spent several anxious days watching to see whether the telltale symptoms would emerge. Happily, none did, but even during the height of the crisis, with her husband’s interests always to the fore, Clementine had instructed Winston not to return home until she and the entire household were free of infection.
Winston was in any case immersed in his work and needed little persuasion to avoid family dramas. He had been appointed war secretary after the great conflict had ended, of course, and some of his critics suspected he was spoiling to prove himself elsewhere. Looking east Winston had been deeply troubled by the 1917 Russian Revolution and was implacably opposed to the Communist Bolsheviks. His romantic attachment to kings led him to view Czar Nicholas II, who had been executed by the Bolsheviks, as a tragic hero, and the revolutionaries’ leader, Vladimir Lenin, as a barbarian.
The rest of Europe, sick of bloodshed and devastated by war, lacked both the will and the resources to intervene and simply hoped the Russians might settle their differences themselves. But now that the Germans were defeated, the Bolsheviks’ proclamation of worldwide revolution aroused Winston’s natural aggression. “Kiss the Hun and Kill the Bolshie”—avoid excessive punishment of Germany but use force against the Russian Reds—was how he described his viewpoint to Violet. It was not a sentiment shared by the majority of his compatriots, who, after such a long war of attrition, were repelled by the idea of more slaughter and wanted the “Hun” to be taught a sharp lesson. At the Paris peace conference, Lloyd George signed up to punitive measures against Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, including the imposition of massive reparations and the surrender of a tenth of the country’s prewar territory and all its overseas possessions.
With the prime minister preoccupied elsewhere, Winston was given a largely free hand at home. He set about launching a dogged campaign in Parliament, the cabinet and the press in favor of intervention on behalf of the White Russians, who were fighting the Communist revolutionaries. He was convinced the British public would support him as soon as they were made aware of the “foul baboonery” of Bolshevik atrocities. As one historian has noted, this was just one of many subjects on which Winston sounded “like a stuck record, more likely to turn listeners off than on.”4 He began providing the White Russian General Denikin with “surplus” British war matériel and repeatedly lobbied Lloyd George and the Americans to support large-scale military support for the antirevolutionaries. Incredibly, by mid-1919 Britain was on the brink of another war.
Tensions continued to mount over the next few months, but chaos among the White Russians and fading support for Winston at home prevented a full escalation of hostilities. Indeed, while newspapers were decrying MR. CHURCHILL’S PRIVATE WAR, some on the left were calling for him to be tried for treason for intervening against the Reds without public support or political approval. Clementine soon found herself facing the sound of angry mobs chanting, “Arrest Churchill!”
To avoid any further military imbroglios, in 1921 Winston was extracted from the War Office (although not before he had been embarrassed by the discovery that his beautiful cousin, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, had been conducting an affair in Moscow with another Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky). An exasperated Lloyd George moved him to the Colonial Office, a reverse step back to the department that he had dominated at the beginning of his ministerial career. Winston, who had hoped to become chancellor of the Exchequer, was bitterly disappointed by this turn of events, and by Lloyd George’s decision to entrust the Treasury instead to the less glamorous Sir Robert Horne (yet more evidence, in Clementine’s eyes, of the prime minister’s untrustworthiness). For all of his wife’s efforts to persuade Winston to recast himself as an advocate for peace, he had willfully chosen a course that had led him to be painted as a warmonger. It was a perception that would prove almost impossible to change and was, for a long time, disastrous.
• • •
In early 1919 the Churchills were still without a permanent London home or the means to procure one. House prices had soared since the war, and unlike the Admiralty, neither the War Office nor Winston’s later appointment as colonial secretary brought with it an official residence. With a newborn baby and three other small children, Clementine endured a merry-go-round of temporary and often unsuitable abodes mostly rented from friends or extended family for just two or three months at a time. In desperation, she even offered her impoverished younger sister four guineas a week to move out of her redbrick house at 15 Pimlico Road, although Nellie seems to have rejected the idea. Clementine soon realized that the only way to restore the family finances was to let go of Lullenden, now little used anyway, particularly in winter.
In March, the Churchills invited Sir Ian and Lady Jean Hamilton to the country for Sunday lunch, having already hinted to them that they were thinking of selling. Perhaps they were lucky with the weather—Lullenden was rather seductive in the spring sunshine—or maybe Winston and Clementine were simply at their most beguiling as hosts. In any event, the Hamiltons decided to rent the house, even though Winston quoted an outrageous £500 a year, and were subsequently induced to buy it. Falling victim once again to a certain sharp persuasiveness, they handed over £9,800 for the property and a small number of wildly overpriced livestock. (Sir Ian himself later admitted that its actual worth was closer to £3,000.)5
The Hamiltons’ largesse, or perhaps gullibility, was the Churchills’ gain. With a great deal of luck, they would emerge from the Lullenden experiment having more or less broken even. But it had brought home to Clementine the folly of trying to live like a country squire without the matching income. By contrast, Winston seems not to have given their narrow escape from ruin much thought. Meanwhile, the sale, due to complete on September 30, 1919, would leave them without a roof over their heads. The search for a home in London appropriately grand for Winston and affordable for Clementine became ever more frantic.
Finally, in July they found a huge early Victorian property at 2 Hyde Park Street. It offered a respectable address and wonderful views across the park at an astonishingly low price that included a useful mews house at the back. The Churchills made an offer of £2,300 for the lease and were so delighted with what seemed to be a bargain that they did not at first bother with a structural survey. Only in August, when the building’s state of health was thoroughly inspected, did the truth emerge. The whole building needed a huge amount of expensive and time-consuming work, well beyond what they could ever afford. In its current state, it was simply uninhabitable.
They tried hastily to backtrack but, alas, too late. The vendor, Lord Wellesley, the future seventh Duke of Wellington, threatened to sue if they did not proceed with the deal. Thanks to a mixture of naïveté and Winston’s distaste for anything less than the best, the couple and their four children were now facing both homelessness and financial ruin. They could not afford to make the house safe, nor could they pull out. Clementine’s natural hopes of finding somewhere secure to raise her family seemed to have been permanently dashed and all the insecurities of her childhood revisited her. Knowing that the family was now perilously close to having nowhere to go, she tried desperately to delay the sale of Lullenden, while writing begging letters to London friends such as Sir Ernest Cassel, asking to be put up in the capital for a few days at a time.
The Churchills’ lawyers were meanwhile still battling with Lord Wellesley over the frighteningly high cost of the repairs.6 It only exacerbated their parlous financial position when, at the end of the year, they agreed to buy another smaller home (now demolished) at 2 Sussex Square for around £7,000. As if oblivious to Clementine’s mounting distress, incredibly Winston was also instructing agents (fortunately without success) to find him yet another “country basket” in his favored county of Kent. The crisis highlighted the difference between them: Clementine struggled to see a way out; Winston simply assumed there would be one. At the eleventh hour, in January 1920, salvation duly arrived, in the form of their faithful benefactor Sir Ernest Cassel (who appears to have acted out of little more than generosity of spirit, loneliness and a certain political sympathy). He agreed to buy the Hyde Park Street lease from them for the original asking price while he looked for a long-term buyer. For the first time—but by no means the last—the Churchills had been bailed out in the nick of time by a generous friend.7
• • •
In the spring of 1920, Winston took off with a group of other men for the south of France—the first in a pattern of separate vacations that would persist for the rest of their marriage. No expense was spared; as one historian put it, Winston liked to “travel in comfort and arrive in luxury.”8 He left Clementine behind to supervise the children’s school holidays and prepare Randolph for Sandroyd, a preparatory boarding school near Cobham in Surrey. Remembering how much she had enjoyed her own schooldays at Berkhamsted, she took the relatively unusual step for her class at the time of enrolling her elder daughters, Diana and Sarah, at Notting Hill High.
Not until January 1921—shortly after Clementine’s grandmother Lady Airlie died at ninety—would she and Winston finally take their first holiday together since before the outbreak of the war. Clementine had never really loved her stern grandmother, and the old countess’s death revived painful memories of her youth. Her escape with Winston a few days later to a hotel in Nice therefore came as a welcome tonic. By this point, although only thirty-six, she was neither physically nor emotionally robust and she increasingly questioned whether she had enough energy or strength to sustain her highly stressful lifestyle.
Yet even this was not to be an intimate break alone. They were joining Cassel and his granddaughter Edwina, the future Lady Mountbatten, and had barely unpacked their suitcases before Winston was called back to London. Perhaps these separations helped to keep their relationship fresh; Clementine certainly tried to adopt a philosophical approach when they occurred. But they sometimes left her feeling isolated, even abandoned, and there are hints that she began to harbor doubts about the viability of her marriage at this point. Winston was so often engrossed in his work, and without a war there no longer seemed a need for her to help him. This was not what she had had in mind for their life together in peacetime.
Time, as she had written to him, was slipping by so fast; she was still struggling to reconcile herself to the fact that she was now approaching middle age. When Winston went back to London, Clementine stayed on to visit Lady Essex at St. Jean Cap Ferrat. Freed of domestic or maternal duties—even of advising Winston—she played a great deal of tennis, having over the years become a notable amateur player. Winston became worried that her innate competitiveness would lead her to play too much and reverse any improvements in her health. He was particularly concerned, he admitted candidly, because he wanted her to help in the forthcoming election. “You will want to be fit for the political fights that are drawing near,” he informed her.9 And in a later letter: “Do stay until you are really re-equipped to fight. I shall need you very much . . . you can render me enormous help.”10 She was so enjoying herself, however, that she ignored his pleas to take it easy and entered several prestigious amateur tournaments. It was exhilarating to feel free and young again, and she extended her stay still further. She even, uncharacteristically, unwound enough to allow herself a little flutter at the casinos, which were still illegal back in Britain.
Meanwhile, Winston was left in charge of the children. He visited Randolph a couple of times at Sandroyd (where the headmaster described the boy as “combative”) and sent Diana and Sarah to the seaside at Broadstairs with a maid to recover from a series of coughs and colds. Marigold, now nearly two and a half, was at home with Winston in London as he liked to have at least one “kitten” in residence to brighten up the house. A merry little heartbreaker, she loved to run around the dining room, her face bright with laughter. Marigold’s other party trick was to sing the popular song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” She had a “sweet, true little voice,” as a member of the family described it, but was unusually prone to sore throats, which in the days before antibiotics were taken far more seriously. Infections were difficult to treat once they had taken hold. On at least one occasion during Clementine’s absence, Winston was sufficiently worried to call in the doctor.11
Winston also had news of another sort for his absent wife. At the end of January, a distant cousin was killed in a railway accident and as he was childless his Irish estate, known as Garron Tower, and a large pile of cash were passed on to Winston. This unexpected windfall had the potential to net him some £4,000 a year, almost as much as the salary he received as a minister. Winston had been a part-time journalist since the army days of his youth and following his marriage he had, when possible, been supplementing the family budget with prolific newspaper and magazine articles—part of every holiday would be devoted to writing thousands of words in the face of impending deadlines. Now, however, he could afford to be more choosy, turning down what Clementine considered to be unsuitably “trivial” or “pot-boiler” commissions that she feared might undermine his public standing, and his chances of high office. Even she, constitutionally insecure about their finances, now looked forward to a “carefree” future. While Winston promptly celebrated by rushing out to buy a Rolls-Royce cabriolet, Clementine exulted in the security of knowing that bills could be paid, a delicious feeling she compared to “floating in a bath of cream.”
Characteristically, the Churchills shared their good fortune with the impoverished Nellie. She had married the handsome Bertram Romilly, who had been badly injured during the war, and now found herself running a household and raising two small children on a modest disability pension. They lent her £500 to open a hat shop, while also giving sixty-eight-year-old Lady Blanche, a distant grandmother who had escaped social disdain after the war by returning to her previous bohemian lifestyle in Dieppe, an additional income of £100 a year.
Winston’s appointment as colonial secretary on February 13, 1921, brought the prospect of much exciting travel. One of the first trips was to Cairo for a conference on Middle Eastern affairs the following month and (perhaps aware of his wife’s restlessness) he suggested to Clementine that she join him on board ship straight from her extended holiday in the south of France. She was thrilled at her first chance to accompany Winston on official business abroad and was “living in blissful contemplation,” she wrote, of their “smooth and care-free future.”12 Before departing on their adventure, Winston summoned Diana and Sarah back from the seaside to say good-bye and visited Randolph again at school. He disliked leaving them all for long stretches, but Clementine seemed undeterred by the fact that she had now not seen her children for going on two months. At least Jennie was on hand to keep an eye on them (and the latest inexperienced young girl hired to oversee them), reporting back that they were all “great darlings.”
At Winston’s side, and unburdened by domestic responsibilities or financial worries, Clementine glowed with a fresh vitality. The glamorous T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—joined them and became a close friend. She played lots of tennis and met politicians, ambassadors and leading archaeologists, and they both lived and traveled in great luxury. There was even time for magical visits on camelback to the Pyramids of Giza with Lawrence. In such exalted company Clementine established herself as something of a cool customer. While others sweated and swooned in the heat, she remained unflustered, apparently unaffected.
The conference delivered many of Winston’s aims to bolster British interests in the region, helping to bring about postwar political settlements in Transjordan and Iraq and a pledge to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine under a British mandate. But he had arrived to a wave of hostility and several credible death threats. Even from the safety of the armored car provided to transport them around, the sight of angry crowds of Egyptian nationalists pelting stones at them was no doubt unnerving. Perhaps her experience in Ireland in 1912 had inured Clementine to the threat of mob violence; certainly Winston’s bodyguard Walter Thompson was astonished by her courage, noting that “nothing seemed ever to disturb or to dishearten her.”13 When their train was stoned and the first windows smashed, Clementine put down the book she had been reading but, according to Thompson, “seemed more annoyed than interested.”14 She tolerated the constant intrusion of bodyguards without complaint, but she was no pushover. She had “an icy way she could look at a man when things went to the snapping point of endurance,” he recorded.15 It was not just her composure that was remarkable. Clementine’s slender, neat and elegant appearance (in contrast to poor Winston, whose pale skin would turn an ever deeper pink in the heat) was also widely noticed. Thompson was not alone in hailing her around this time as “the best-dressed woman of her day.”
Clementine did not hurry home at the end of the conference—she spent two leisurely weeks wandering back via Alexandria, Sicily and Naples. By the time she finally returned on April 10 she had been away for a good three months. Rested, fulfilled and happy, she was pleased to be reunited with the children. Randolph, now nearly ten, was grumpy and demanding, and Marigold was suffering from yet another cold, but Clementine was hugely moved that they had all made a “Welcome Home” banner, which they hoisted as she drew up in the Rolls-Royce outside their home in Sussex Square. At such moments, her reserve melted away and she joyfully scooped them up in her arms. If only she could always be so spontaneous. But perhaps this was a new beginning: Winston’s career was back on track, she was by his side, and she had at last a secure home. There was even money in the bank.
Her contentment was not to last. Four days later her brother, Bill Hozier, was found shot dead in a Paris hotel room. Just thirty-three, he was handsome and charming and had gone into business after retiring from the navy at the end of the war. But like his mother and his twin sister Nellie, he had a weakness for gambling. Winston, who had once or twice helped him to cover his losses, had recently made him promise to stop betting on cards. When he died, he had not long ago deposited ten thousand francs into a bank account. Even so, it was soon confirmed that he had killed himself.
Life for little brother Bill had never run smoothly. As a child he had been uprooted from his upmarket prep school Summer Fields after barely a term without ever being properly registered, because Lady Blanche could not pay the fees. Although the grandson of an earl, instead of following his peers to board at one of the great public schools, as Eton, Harrow and Rugby are known in Britain (because they were once theoretically open to any member of the public irrespective of occupation or religion), he was sent to the grammar school at Berkhamsted. It was a relegation (in his eyes) that he bitterly resented for the rest of his life. Unlike Clementine and Nellie, who had adapted so well to school life in Berkhamsted, Bill could not—or would not—relate to the local boys. The effect on both his studies and his morale was recorded in school reports as “disastrous.”
In search of his rightful place, Bill had left school early and in 1903 joined the navy. Here too he failed to shine. Indeed, Lieutenant William Ogilvy Hozier’s naval career might have been destroyed at the tender age of twenty-two if Winston had not used the power and influence of his office as home secretary to rescue him. His commanding officer, Captain Ryan, had excoriated Bill in a report on August 8, 1910, as “inexperienced and highly inefficient.” Instead of rising to the challenge, Bill convinced himself that he had been harshly treated and sought a transfer to another ship. Knowing that Clementine was fond of her brother, Winston had repeatedly intervened on the young officer’s behalf by trying to discredit Captain Ryan with the then–first lord of the Admiralty Reginald McKenna. It was an extraordinary episode, even in an era when it was not uncommon for cabinet ministers to ask one another for favors for their families,16 and though well intentioned, it gave Bill the unfortunate impression that any complaints he might have would command Churchillian endorsement.
At the news of his death Clementine rushed over to her distraught mother in Dieppe and took charge. Suicide was not a crime in France at the time, but it was a sin in Catholic doctrine, and at first it seemed that the family might not be allowed to bury Bill in consecrated ground. Winston pulled strings for his brother-in-law one last time, however, and the British vice consul was dispatched to put pressure on the local clergyman to accommodate Lady Blanche’s desperate wish for a “decent” funeral. Yet nothing would quite expunge the terrible feeling of shame, or the abiding grief. Clementine was frantic to avoid any impression that her only brother was “a mere scapegrace disowned by his family.” She was also aware of muttering—even among certain Churchills—about “bad blood.” So, in order to lend the occasion an appropriate grandeur, she delayed the time of the service until late in the afternoon to make it easier for her husband to attend. “Oh Winston my Dear do come tomorrow,” she pleaded, “& dignify by your presence Bill’s poor Suicide Funeral.”
Winston did not fail his wife or her family. He dropped everything and dashed across the channel, arriving just in time for the service. In his will, Bill left him his elegant gold-topped malacca cane; Winston would use it for the rest of his life.
Two months after Bill’s suicide, death visited the Churchills again, when Jennie died, equally unexpectedly. She was sixty-seven, vibrant, still sexy and particularly proud of her shapely ankles. For years after her second marriage had collapsed she had been mostly lonely and alone, resorting to taking her maid with her on trips to the theater. She still had admirers, but she had been forced to reconcile herself to no longer being the most beautiful woman in the room.
In truth, she had long been a little jealous of the much-fêted Clementine and Goonie for displacing her as the centerpiece in the lives of her sons. Jennie’s feelings were particularly apparent when, on her shopping trips to Paris, she would buy expensive designer hats from Worth for herself and bring back cheap little things from Le Bon Marché for her daughters-in-law. Clementine could not help noticing the potential heartache inherent in relying on one’s adult children for company. To her great annoyance, Jennie would command Winston to visit her frequently and to help with her interminable financial crises. Grandchildren were similarly summoned at whim.17
In June 1918, Jennie’s life had changed when she entered her third marriage, to the kind and debonair Montagu Porch. Another youngster—twenty years her junior—he was genuinely devoted to her. Although she continued to style herself as Lady Randolph rather than Mrs. Monty Porch, she had never known such happiness. Her spirits revived, she reveled in dressing up (she had in recent times been spending a staggering £5,000 a year on clothes) and socializing with a zest not seen since her prime. It was in May 1921, during a convivial stay with her friends the Horners at their country house at Mells, that—while descending the stairs in a pair of vertiginous heels—she tripped and fell. The local doctor diagnosed a broken ankle and Jennie returned home to her London house at 8 Westbourne Street, Bayswater, to recover. All seemed well. But then gangrene set in and the foot had to be amputated.
Jennie bore her misfortune and pain with extraordinary fortitude and humor. Clementine, whose Sussex Square house was only minutes away, could not fail to be impressed by her mother-in-law’s courage. The two women, who had never been close, finally became more intimate. Clementine found herself less judgmental of Jennie’s extravagances and, as she grew older, more understanding of her libido. They had more in common than either had originally thought. If, after the death of Lord Randolph, Winston had become Jennie’s lifework, there was now a clear understanding between them that he had in recent years become Clementine’s alone.
Secure in her own place, Clementine realized that Jennie’s example had taught her much in terms of resilience and resourcefulness. It is likely that Clementine’s war work, arranging medical supplies for the Dardanelles expedition or canteens for the munitions factories, was at least in part inspired by the hospital ship Jennie had chartered during the Boer War. Jennie was also brave in isolation—Monty was away in Africa when she was injured and had stayed on after receiving assurances from Winston that she was out of danger.
Then, early on the morning of June 29, 1921, Jennie suffered a sudden and violent hemorrhage. Winston ran crying through the streets in his dressing gown when he heard the news to be with her, but by the time he reached her bedside it was too late. “I do not feel a sense of tragedy,” he wrote to Jennie’s friend Lord Curzon the same day, “but only of loss.” He was later to tell Clementine that losing his mother had been like an “amputation” and had made his life “seem lonely & its duration fleeting.”18 He kept a bronze cast of Jennie’s hand near his desk for the rest of his life.
• • •
It had been such a grisly spring. Clementine was determined to enjoy her summer. At the beginning of August all four children were packed off to seaside lodgings in Broadstairs under the care of yet another new nanny, a young French nursery governess called Mademoiselle Rose. The plan was that after a couple of weeks Diana, Randolph and Sarah would leave Marigold behind with Mademoiselle Rose and join their parents for a holiday with the Duke and Duchess of Westminster on their estate in Sutherland, a beautiful bolt-hole in the Scottish Highlands. In the meantime, Clementine visited the Westminsters alone at their Cheshire stately home, Eaton Hall, an enormous high-Victorian palace (since demolished). Without Winston—who was working—or the children, she would be blissfully free to relax, socialize and take part in one of her beloved tennis tournaments without distraction.
The children dutifully wrote to their mother about shrimp fishing, rowing boats and sunburn. But from the beginning both Randolph and Sarah also alluded to Marigold—or Baba as the other children sometimes called her—being unwell. She seemed to be rallying, however, and in any case she had coughs and sore throats so often no one suspected anything unusual. Then, with terrifying speed, the infection began to spread around her body, her temperature soared uncontrollably and she started finding it difficult to breathe. Eventually a local doctor was called but his remedies were limited. Even now the inexperienced and probably overstretched Mademoiselle Rose hesitated for two more days before taking further action. Only when the terrified landlady of the lodgings absolutely insisted did she finally call Clementine with the dreaded news that Marigold had developed septicemia, a severe form of blood poisoning that can lead to organ failure. The little girl had by now been ill for a fortnight.
Clementine left Eaton Hall at once and dashed down to Broadstairs as quickly as she could, while the three elder children were sent up to Scotland as originally planned with a maid. By the time she arrived, Marigold was in a critical condition. Winston shot down from London soon afterward and a specialist doctor was summoned. It was too late. On the evening of August 22, a few days after Clementine’s arrival, Marigold said to her mother, “[S]ing me Bubbles.” Summoning every ounce of control, Clementine began the song that Marigold loved so much:
I’m forever blowing bubbles
Pretty bubbles in the air
They fly so high, nearly reach the sky
Then like my dreams they fade and die.
The little girl put out her hand and whispered: “Not tonight . . . finish it tomorrow.” Both parents were with her when Marigold died the next day, three months short of her third birthday. Winston shed many a tear and was unable to speak. Clementine, according to Winston’s secretary, “screamed like an animal undergoing torture.”
They buried Marigold in Kensal Green Cemetery on August 26 and erected a simple, unassuming headstone engraved with the words Here lies Marigold, dear child of Winston and Clementine Churchill. After they had dismissed Mademoiselle Rose, it was as if a book had been slammed shut. Clementine and Winston boarded a night train for Scotland to rejoin the other children, but to the end of her life, Clementine would barely speak of Marigold again. Mary, born after her sister’s death, grew up puzzled by the identity of the little girl whose framed picture stood on her mother’s dressing table.
Religious in her youth, it is possible that Clementine now turned to her faith to carry her through. The Churchill household was far from pious—Winston had once told his mother: “I do not accept the Christian or any other form of religious belief”19—but now she took to slipping off to church alone.
For nearly two weeks, they all stayed at Lochmore, a rambling fifteen-bedroom Victorian pile owned by Bendor and Violet Westminster, with views over the water to mountains beyond. It was a rare occasion when all the family was on holiday together. The weather was kind, and the Westminsters organized picnics in the hills, riding and boating. There was comfort in each other’s company. Alas, it came to an end all too quickly when Winston left to join the Duke and Duchess of Sunderland’s house party at their Dunrobin estate, where the guest of honor was the Prince of Wales. Clementine wearily made her way back south to London without him to prepare the children for the new school term. Somehow she kept going with all the rituals and errands of her life, her daughter Mary later writing that she did not “indulge her grief” but “battened it down.”
That Winston should part from his family at this point in favor of the social anesthetic of a large crowd might be regarded either as heartless, the behavior of a man afraid of contemplating his loss, or both. His letters to Clementine during this time are surprisingly distant, writing of his “many tender thoughts” of “[her] sweet kittens” as if they were not also his. He even seemed surprised that he could not shed his grief in quick order. Little more than a fortnight after Marigold’s death, he wrote about tennis, painting, politics and grouse shooting, adding only toward the end of the letter: “Alas I keep on feeling the hurt of the Duckadilly.” Obviously, removing himself from his family had not had the desired palliative effect. Meanwhile, on September 18, Clementine had taken Diana, Randolph and Sarah to the grave, where they had watched a white butterfly settle on the flowers. “The children were very silent all the way home,” she told him.
Inside, she would never get over her grief, or quite dispel a gnawing sense of guilt. Outwardly, however, she gathered her strength, snapped herself out of her misery and a few days later decided to jolly the children up by hiring a smart car and setting off on a splendid picnic. Not long after, as if fate could be any more spiteful, Ernest Cassel died suddenly from a heart attack at his London home. Clementine could not believe she had any feeling left, but she may have wept more tears at the loss of one of their only true and loyal friends than for her daughter. For Cassel she could allow herself to cry whereas for Marigold her sorrow felt limitless and frightening.
• • •
By the end of 1921, Clementine was an emotional and physical wreck. Her deep depression—marked by severe listlessness alternating with near-hysterical outbursts—appears to have been far more serious than Winston’s brooding periods of Black Dog. The doctors were flummoxed as to what to do and merely prescribed another vacation. Only the thought of a break on the French Riviera after Christmas kept her going through December.
On Boxing Day, Winston chose to go on ahead to Cannes without her in the company of Prime Minister Lloyd George, and happily indulged himself in his normal round of politics, painting, writing and hunting. Clementine was to join them as soon as the school term started. Once again, luck turned cruelly against her. Within hours of Winston’s departure, Diana, Randolph and several servants were one by one struck by another outbreak of a deadly strain of influenza. By the evening of what Clementine came to call “Black Monday,” Sussex Square resembled a hospital ward with two nurses tending five ailing patients (a cousin, Maryott Whyte, who had come to help, had also contracted pneumonia). A few days later, Clementine herself collapsed from nervous exhaustion and the doctor ordered her to bed for a week. Too tired to read let alone receive visitors, there was nothing to stop her reliving Marigold’s death a hundred times.
She sent Winston a note of such anger and distress about his silent absence that she later panicked and sent a telegram asking him to destroy it unopened. She followed this up with another long letter explaining her “deep misery & depression,” and how she wished that she were “basking” with him in the Riviera sun. She had endured, she said, “one of the most dreary & haunted weeks” of her life.20
Winston’s response was not wholly sympathetic. “My darling, I cd not bear not opening yr letter . . . I am so sorry you had such a churlish message.” He had, he explained, sent her a lengthy handwritten letter, but it had been delayed in the post. It did not contain an offer to return to be at her side, however, but yet more bad news. “I must confess to you that I have lost some money here, though nothing like as much as last year. It excites me so much to play—foolish moth.”21
By the time Clementine was finally free from sickroom duties and fit to travel, Winston had returned to London. She soon replaced him in Cannes and it was now that Clementine’s suspicions were confirmed: she was pregnant again. Seeking consolation following the loss of Marigold, it seems she had decided to try for another child. But she did not let her condition stop her from pushing herself hard on the tennis court. She even won the mixed doubles handicap in the Cannes lawn tennis tournament. She returned to London in the spring revivified, but her extended holiday had done nothing to strengthen her maternal ties with her children, or to remedy their problems. Randolph was becoming increasingly obstreperous, Diana nervy and insecure, and Sarah still suffered from glandular tuberculosis.
Nor had Winston’s work at the Colonial Office been free of trouble. The devolution of powers to an Irish assembly had for decades been arguably the British government’s most pressing colonial issue. A home rule bill had finally been passed by Parliament in 1914 but had never come into force due to the war. In response, radical Irish republicans had formed a volunteer paramilitary force and staged the failed Easter Uprising in 1916. The fiercely nationalist political party Sinn Fein had gone on to win a majority of the Irish seats in the 1918 general election; within a matter of weeks they had proclaimed an Irish republic and a bloody war of independence ensued.
The savage treatment of the nationalists by British forces—most notably the hated Black and Tans—had done nothing to quell the sporadic violence in Ireland, a problem in which Clementine took a great interest. The solution was by no means simple—the massive support for Sinn Fein in the south was balanced by that for the Unionists in the north. Nevertheless, Clementine felt sympathy for the nationalists since they had helped the Churchills escape loyalist mobs during their trip to Belfast in 1912. She consequently pleaded with Winston to ensure “some sort of justice” in Ireland and to draw back from “iron-fisted” or “Hunnish” treatment of the Irish rebels, urging him to recognize that in their place he would not be cowed by harsh or vindictive British retaliation. It appears that her pleas for moderation may well have softened his approach and perhaps even altered events. Winston duly invited Michael Collins, a key Sinn Fein negotiator, to his home in Sussex Square and devoted much of the second half of 1921 to Irish affairs. The resultant truce was followed by a treaty that, approved by the Dáil (the lower house of the Irish parliament) in January 1922, would eventually lead to independence for southern Ireland.
Yet this forward step did not halt the Irish Republican Army’s murder spree. When Sir Henry Wilson, MP, security adviser to the Northern Ireland government, was assassinated on his front doorstep in London in June 1922, a hit list was found of other targets. Winston’s name led it. He was instantly assigned a security detail. When Randolph and Diana returned from roller-skating in Holland Park shortly afterward they found the house surrounded by police, with several more conducting a thorough search inside. Winston announced he would sleep in the attic and erected a metal shield in front of the door. He stayed there until dawn clutching a revolver and slept there every night for months, while the heavily pregnant Clementine remained as usual in her bed without protection of any sort.
• • •
In mid-August 1922, Winston decamped to the Duke of Westminster’s chateau near Biarritz. So it was that Clementine found herself without her husband for most of the last weeks of her final pregnancy. For all his sentimentality about the “kittens,” Winston was not one to endure the waiting and hard slog of labor and birth.
Clementine sought respite at Frinton-on-Sea on the Essex coast. This small town, with a grassy seafront and firm golden sand, had become fashionable with Londoners and was one of her favorite destinations for a bucket-and-spade holiday with the children. She chose to rent a large modern house called Maryland for the considerable sum of forty-five guineas a week (some £2,300 or $3,500 today). It was near a smart tennis club, and although her condition stopped her from playing, she entered Randolph and Diana to represent her. Alas, they had not inherited their mother’s application or talent and they won the booby prize and came in last. Ignoring their growing hatred of the sport, Clementine insisted they continue to play regularly. Giving up was not an option. There were to be no excuses, no complaints, just the determination to carry on with life—however challenging it became.
“I’m getting very stationary & crawl even to the beach with difficulty. I long for it to be over,” she told Winston that summer. “It has seemed a very long nine months.” Exactly a year had passed since Marigold had started to fade, and Clementine wrote to Winston to remind him of the anniversary of her death. He replied: “I think a gt deal of the coming kitten & about you my sweet pet. I feel it will enrich yr life and brighten our home to have the nursery started again. I pray God to watch over us all.”22 Only a few days later he wrote again to reassure Clementine that “yes,” he had been thinking of the loss of Marigold, but that most of all he had been thinking of her.
In September Winston and Clementine were reunited in London for the birth. Duckadilly could never be replaced, let alone forgotten, but the new baby, “Mary the mouse,” would help Clementine to ease the pain. She arrived safely early on the morning of September 15, to much celebration. Winston took advantage of the occasion. It was the one and only time in their marriage that he would betray her trust.