1929–39
As the results flowed into 10 Downing Street on the evening of May 30, 1929, Winston was in a terrifying rage. He swore profusely as he sipped his whisky. His head lowered, like a bull’s before a charge, his face flushed to crimson, he felt his chance had come and he had blown it. Once a hope for the future, he was now a disappointment from the past.
This was the so-called flapper election—for the first time, women were allowed to vote on the same basis as men. Clementine, Diana and Randolph had helped Winston to fight and hold his Epping seat—albeit with a severely reduced majority. But his record as chancellor was in no small part to blame for the drubbing being delivered to Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government in the country as a whole. Within days, the Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald would form its second administration. When the Labour cabinet then split in 1931 over its response to the Great Depression, Baldwin would lead the Tories into a national government with the embattled MacDonald. By 1935, he would even be restored to Downing Street as prime minister. But unlike after the Dardanelles disaster, or the loss of his seat in Dundee, any remaining hopes of a way back for Winston gradually faded. He was to be out of office completely, and miserable about it, for a decade—the period frequently referred to as his “wilderness years.” During this lengthy “Siberian exile” he relied on Clementine to comfort him and stand by him no matter what; the effort would test their marriage to the breaking point.
Winston had lost favor with the people as well as with his party. His gold standard decision in 1925 had been blamed for the economic slump of the late 1920s (he himself came to regard it as the greatest mistake of his career) and his confrontational handling of the Great Strike of 1926 had made him look coldhearted and trigger-happy. Ministerial colleagues, tired of his egotistical interference in their own departments, had been only too keen to join the general criticism. Neville Chamberlain protested that working with Winston, “[y]ou never get a moment’s rest!”1 Overall, it was clear that his post at the Exchequer had not played to his strengths and the consequences had reinforced his reputation for poor judgment. The backbiting, meanwhile, did nothing to help reconcile Clementine to his return to the Conservative fold.
The election result also deprived the Churchills of their London home. At a time when others in their circle were settling into opulent middle age, Winston and Clementine were reduced once again to living out of suitcases in short-term lets, staying with friends or stints in hotels. Three years would elapse before their finances were sufficiently robust to allow them to buy another place in the capital. Even then, 11 Morpeth Mansions, occupying the upper two floors of a redbrick mansion block close to Westminster Cathedral, was certainly not the grand London villa they might once have expected. The study and kitchen were tiny, the spiral staircase narrow, and at the time flats were generally seen as rather lower-class. But the views over the Palace of Westminster offered some compensation, and Clementine transformed the place with her usual magic.
Even while at the Treasury, Winston had continued to write books at a prodigious rate to bring in extra money, sometimes churning out two thousand words a day during the parliamentary recess. Now his output increased still further in an attempt to plug the £5,000-a-year hole left by the loss of the chancellor’s salary. His advances and serialization payments, plus the proceeds from the sale of American publishing rights, amounted to a handsome sum, giving him the unusual and welcome feeling of a cushion of wealth—at least until the Wall Street crash in October 1929. Winston was on a three-month American lecture tour at the time and in New York he witnessed a ruined investor throw himself to his death from the fifteenth floor. Without Clementine’s knowledge, Winston had been using his own funds (and borrowing more) to speculate heavily in American stocks and lost £10,000 (over half a million pounds in today’s money). Although he tried to keep the bad news from her as long as he could, when he arrived back at Waterloo station on November 5 he buckled, confessing all before they had even left the platform.
By the end of that year, they were on the edge of bankruptcy. Only Winston’s monumental day-and-night productivity as a writer kept the creditors at bay. With no money to pay for heating or servants, Chartwell had to be mothballed for the winter, while Mary (the only child still living at home as Diana was attending finishing school in Paris before going on to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Sarah was at boarding school and Randolph was studying at Christ Church, Oxford) was moved into a butler’s cottage with Moppet. Even holidays were canceled. When Winston attempted to boost the family coffers with another US speaking tour toward the end of 1931, Clementine made sure to accompany him. The money should have made good his Wall Street losses—£10,000 had been promised for forty bookings—but after delivering just one lecture in New York, he was knocked down late one evening by a taxi on Fifth Avenue and rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital with frightening head, chest and thigh injuries. Clementine was summoned so quickly from her room at the Waldorf Astoria Towers that she forgot to put on her shoes. She stayed at his bedside overnight until he was out of danger, but the tour had to be postponed.
Their parlous financial state allowed little time for convalescence, however. Winston had to write an article about his injuries for the Daily Mail to cover his medical costs, and within a few weeks he had pushed himself back to work to deliver at least some of the lectures. News of their latest misfortune traveled home, and as would happen so often in their lives, wealthy admirers clubbed together to help them. When Winston arrived back at Paddington station in March 1932 (Clementine had traveled on ahead), there was a gleaming new Daimler waiting for him by the platform, a gift from 140 disparate benefactors including Charlie Chaplin, the Prince of Wales and his former arch-critic John Maynard Keynes. It was a magnificent gesture, but not one that would pay the bills.
These years marked the beginning of a long period of brittle health for Clementine. In the immediate aftermath of the 1929 defeat a tonsil infection led to a serious case of blood poisoning and she was sent to Preston Deanery Hall nursing home at Northampton, where a near-starvation “curative” regimen caused her to lose six pounds in five days and drop to 120 pounds. Unsurprisingly she felt “giddy & prickly” and one day, after a visitor left, she panicked, thinking she was about to have a “fainting fit” or even a heart attack. Although she pleaded with Winston to come and “hold her paw,” she conceded he was probably “too busy.” In the absence of her husband, a medicinal brandy would have to suffice.
This illness was followed by bouts of mastoid disease, a potentially fatal infection of the air cells behind the ear. So severe was the pain at one point that her doctors were forced to operate twice in a day. Clementine rose to the challenge and “astonished” them with her courage. The drama drew the best out of Winston as well: he took the trouble to sit by her bedside, patiently reading her psalms. Clementine was so touched that he had spent time alone with her that she actually welcomed her illness, telling him, “[I]t has brought you so close to me . . . you are always deep in my heart and now your tenderness has unlocked it.”2
He was notably less attentive during her increasingly frequent bouts of nonspecific nervous exhaustion. Despite his much-hyped Black Dog, in truth he had no understanding of real depression, whereas at times Clementine’s was acute—a condition someone would later describe as her “high metal fatigue.” Few on the outside would guess but she would spend the rest of her life trying increasingly invasive and unorthodox methods of overcoming it. Even as a child, her niece Clarissa had thought her “neurotic.” “Aunt Clementine was always going to bed instead of coming to lunch,” she recalls. “Obviously living with Winston was quite a business; overall she must have been a tough cookie to take it . . . [But] she was always conscious of her health. It was accepted within the family that she was a hypochondriac and she was definitely hysterical, no question . . . Maybe she felt in some way inadequate, although Winston just doggedly went on when this happened and didn’t pay much attention. True, I never saw her not completely self-controlled. But when people are trying to control themselves all the time in public, they find it too much and need to go to bed.”3 So frequently did Clementine absent herself from her guests that the painter William Nicholson (another Chartwell regular) took to sending her illustrated notes addressed to “Mrs Churchill in bed.” The challenge of being married to Winston did not always command the respect it deserved.
Clementine devoted her whole life to her husband, yet as her future daughter-in-law, who would later live with them and come to know them both intimately, once calculated, she may have spent up to 80 percent of their marriage without him.4 In part this was because Winston was often away working or pursuing his other interests. But as Pamela Digby Churchill later noted, the Churchills “expect their women to understand them totally. And they don’t spend much time trying to understand their women . . .” Pamela would also observe a lack of “tenderness” on Winston’s part, despite the pet names and their idiosyncratic “wow wow” greeting. “I think in his heart, he adored her, or I assumed it, but I don’t think it ever occurred to him that she might need perhaps a little more.”5
Winston does appear to have sensed that the demands of being married to him were in large part to blame for Clementine’s nervous condition, but as his own doctor noted, he scrupulously avoided “anything depressing”—including visiting hospitals6 or discussing his wife’s seemingly intractable problems. Nor, as Clementine knew all too well, did he enjoy the company of any but the most optimistic people; he tolerated her frequent absences in search of a cure because there was a chance she might return in a better state of mind. There was no question of a change in him, however. Even out of power, Winston continued to thrive on ceaseless rush and bustle; he was miserable without it. His staff could stand the commotion for only so many years (three or four seems to have been the general limit) before they left, completely spent. But the option of resigning for a calmer life was not open to Clementine. Following his ejection from office he continued to take for granted her undivided attention and support, apparently oblivious to the extent of her growing detachment. She took to reciting out loud a couple of lines from a popular elegy reputedly written for an overworked governess:
Here lies a woman who always was tired,
For she lived in a world where too much was required.7
As well as politics, painting and writing, Winston devoted much time during these years to his “cronies.” Clementine disapproved of many of these ever-present hangers-on, whom she likened to “dogs round a lamp-post.”8 Rather than scions of ancient noble families like himself, Winston was drawn to a collection of self-made buccaneers, of whom the most favored by him (and disliked by her) were known as the “Three Bs.” Clementine had long since proved herself a better judge of character than her husband and she waged a constant battle to prevent these adventurers from taking advantage of him—or from excluding her. As her erstwhile rival Violet put it: “His cause was her cause, his enemies were her enemies, though (to her credit) his friends were not invariably her friends.”9
One of the Bs, Brendan Bracken, was an unmarried loner who had cast off his own family back in Ireland. He would let himself into the Churchills’ home and overnight on their sofas without warning, cut articles about Winston out of her scrapbook without permission and once promised to take an excited twelve-year-old Randolph to the zoo and then nonchalantly failed to turn up. She was furious when Bracken had the cheek to call her “Clemmie”10—a privilege she jealously reserved for the very few. She made her feelings clear in withering put-downs or icy stares that prompted another guest to brand her “the coldest woman [she] ever met.”
Most of all Clementine took exception to the rumors that the mysterious Bracken was Winston’s illegitimate son. Bracken fanned the flames by mischievously addressing Winston as “Father,” and Winston in turn enjoyed the resulting sexual frisson otherwise so absent from his life. Her husband’s delight in the ruse—and the fact that even her own children began to believe it—only deepened Clementine’s dislike for Bracken. When she finally confronted her husband to come clean as to whether the red-haired “reprobate” really was his son, he teasingly replied: “I’ve looked the matter up and the dates don’t coincide.”
She was rarely wrong about people and seldom changed her mind, yet with Bracken she did. He was not, as she had feared, another charlatan, using his connection with Winston for his own gain. Beneath his brash exterior he had a warm and generous nature. During Winston’s period as chancellor, Clementine had tried to exclude him from their lives because she thought him bad for Winston’s image, but such was his undying fealty to her husband, and persistence, that by the early 1930s, her anti-Bracken “vendetta” had thawed.11
But she was never to change her view of F. E. Smith, who in 1919 had become Lord Birkenhead. Here was a man for whom excessive alcohol consumption amounted to a virility test and she dreaded the idea of his leading her husband—and later Randolph—astray. Winston, contrary to legend, was not a hard drinker by the standards of his day; in truth, he disliked any loss of control. The Johnnie Walker Red Label whisky placed by his side as soon as breakfast was over was heavily diluted and sipped so slowly it lasted until lunchtime. But as a man unusually prone to tears he relished reports of his drunkenness, which lent him an air of machismo. While Winston was indeed able, as he put it, to take “more out of alcohol” than it took out of him, Clementine was right to fret about the arrogant Birkenhead’s influence over her son. Both Randolph and Birkenhead lacked Winston’s self-restraint and would suffer equally for it. Yet Birkenhead—who spoke of an “intimacy” with Winston that had “a quality” almost “feminine in its caressing charm”12—was perhaps his greatest friend. When he died, from drink, in 1930, Winston broke down and spoke of feeling “so lonely.”13
Clementine disliked Birkenhead but she was horrified most of all by the hold over Winston of the third B, the Canadian Lord Beaverbrook—born William Maxwell Aitken—a rapacious wheeler-dealer of uncertain loyalties and a shady past once described as 25 percent thug, 15 percent crook and the remainder genius and goodness of heart.14 Winston accounted for his fixation with this latter-day Machiavelli by quipping, “Some take drugs, I take Max,” but Clementine was appalled at the newspaper magnate’s manipulative power games, and she almost always (and often correctly) vehemently disagreed with his political advice. She also abhorred his neglectful treatment of his long-suffering wife, Gladys, who died in 1927 aged just thirty-nine, and worried that the presence of his “close friend” Mrs. Norton would corrupt Diana’s and Randolph’s teenage minds. She set out to counter his sway wherever she could, in what became a prolonged contest for Winston’s ear. If her husband was to be dining with Beaverbrook without her, it was not unknown for Clementine to escort Winston to the door pleading with him not to be taken in by that “microbe.”15 For his part, Beaverbrook appears to have regarded her dislike as a challenge, sometimes sending her fruit and flowers when she was ill, but at other times deliberately trying to outsmart her.
• • •
In 1932, Winston took a trip to Bavaria, where he toured the old battlefields trodden by his ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough (about whom he was writing a book). While there he was struck by displays of what he considered to be a distinctly unhealthy militarism. Although widely mocked on his return to Britain, even by his few remaining friends, he sounded warnings about “bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for the Fatherland.”16 From then on “Germany’s card was marked in Churchill’s mind” and he was soon viewed in Berlin as an “enemy of its ‘rightful’ progress as a major power.”17 When Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in January 1933, Winston was swift to denounce both the man and his “pitiless” ill treatment of minorities, who obviously included Jews, decrying the terrible dangers of the führer’s grievances over Germany’s treatment by the Treaty of Versailles. A year later he was predicting in the Commons that air power—which he called a “hellish invention”—would irrevocably alter the course of future wars and that therefore Britain needed to expand the RAF as a matter of the greatest urgency. He also informed the House of Commons of “terrible” news: “Germany is arming—she is rapidly arming—and no one will stop her.”18 His words fell largely on deaf ears. “I was disgusted by the D.M. [Daily Mail]’s boosting of Hitler,”19 Winston wrote to Clementine in dismay in August 1934.
Such was his isolation, indeed, that MPs on both sides of the House would pointedly leave the chamber whenever Winston stood up to speak, considering his stream of warnings about Hitler tedious and absurd. The Times declared that his alarmist prophecies made even “Jeremiah appear an optimist.” Supported by five MPs at most, he was lampooned by cartoonists, shouted down by students, and looked ill and beaten. Although determined to “bugger on regardless,” he felt battered by the abuse from the evangelical voices of appeasement and found public appearances an ordeal. As part of the wall of mockery, there were even sniggering doubts about his virility, not helped by admissions such as: “The reason I can write so much is that I don’t waste my essence in bed.” Now coming up to sixty, he clearly appreciated the young, pretty secretaries who worked devotedly for him late into the night, but there was never a whisper of anything untoward. Certainly the once green-eyed Clementine no longer appeared perturbed by potential rivals; on one occasion, she invited his old love the actress Ethel Barrymore down to Chartwell to cheer him up.
Just how much Clementine shared Winston’s concern about the Nazi peril in those early days is not clear. She made sure to keep abreast of the news, and cut out articles on events in Germany for Winston that she thought might be of use. When she was away, he wrote to her frequently about his concerns, and detailed new evidence in support of his case, but in the early thirties she rarely addressed the subject directly in her replies. In fact, in 1931 she suggested it would be folly ever to engage the Germans in war again, as the last time they had not really been defeated but merely “stifled by numbers.”
Whatever her private thoughts on the German issue, in most other areas their marriage was turbulent. They were profoundly at odds over how to deal with what was now widely viewed as Randolph’s “pathological” self-importance. Even Winston had finally recognized that his indulgence was spoiling his son, writing to him in 1929: “You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence.” Calling Randolph insolent and self-indulgent, he continued: “I have tried—perhaps prematurely—to add to our natural ties those of companionship & comradeship. But you . . . give nothing in return for the many privileges & favours you have hitherto received. I must therefore adopt a different attitude towards you for yr own good.”20
Unfortunately, Winston’s tougher “attitude” was short-lived and Randolph quickly reverted to his old sense of freewheeling entitlement. This became further inflated when, in June 1932, Winston threw a roast-duck-and-champagne twenty-first-birthday party for him at Claridge’s. More than sixty titled and powerful men and their sons sat down to a dinner at which Lord Rothermere hailed Randolph as “Britain’s Young Man of Destiny” and Winston spoke of handing on the “sacred lamp” of power. Randolph repaid his father’s devotion by bedding other men’s wives, appearing in the newspapers in drunken brawls and on one occasion throwing the half-blind Bracken’s glasses into the sea out of jealousy.
Clementine rarely put pen to paper regarding her son at this time, but Mary recalled bitter rows and recriminations between her parents on the subject and a distinct chilliness in their relations. For the first time there were hints that their ever more regular separations might become permanent. Indeed, Pamela believed that the only subject that ever really came between Clementine and Winston was Randolph.
Nevertheless, the boy continued to worship his father. If Papa failed to indulge him quite as before, it was his distant mother he blamed. Randolph became notoriously misogynist, most pointedly in his attitude to women in politics. On one trip with Winston to the US, a female reporter from the Toronto Star quoted him as saying that he thought women “simply did not fit in” with British political life and that their presence caused a lamentable “lack of dignity.”21 No doubt Clementine felt even greater dismay when Winston began to seek Randolph’s advice on his speeches—he was thrilled with his son’s suggestion that he should be more “garrulous.”22
Although Winston would now rebuke Randolph when he was rude to his mother, and send him from the room when he refused to apologize, his inclination was still to relent. He clung to the idea that he could salvage the relationship, whereas Clementine felt she had no option but to break any remnants of a bond between mother and son. “He was so badly behaved—Randolph would get possessed by the devil in drink—that Clemmie couldn’t handle it anymore,” recalls John Julius Norwich, a Churchill family friend. He believes to this day that she really did “hate” her son, and that he in turn held her in equally low regard. “I remember [Randolph’s] passionate admiration for his father . . . He never mentioned his mother at all.”23
The tragedy was that on the odd occasion they did spend time together away from Winston and Chartwell, Clementine and Randolph enjoyed each other’s company. In October 1930, when he was just nineteen, Randolph dropped his studies at Oxford—against her advice—to take up an exciting invitation to give a lecture tour in the US. Word soon came back that he had met a young woman named Kay Halle, from Cleveland, Ohio, and was planning to marry her. Clementine hurriedly set out for New York in February 1931 to try to persuade him that he was too young to settle down. Given their history of antagonism, it was a risky strategy. She was to travel solo by luxury liner—which she exploited to the full by ordering manicures, pedicures, massages and dinner in bed. “Papa is amused & rather outraged at the idea of me going to America without him,” she wrote to Randolph. “But I think I should prefer to go alone & not as the appendage of a distinguished man!”24
Upon reaching her son, Clementine was surprised by his warm reception. They sat talking long into the night. “His joy at seeing me was really sweet & I felt much moved,” she said. Away from the pressures of being Winston Churchill’s heir, she saw her son in a new light: “[Randolph] is a darling. He has quite captivated me . . . & he seems to enjoy my company . . . It is quite like a honeymoon.”25 Not only did she successfully scotch his wedding plans, but she also spent six enthralling weeks with him touring the country. Randolph escorted his mother through the louche delights of Prohibition-era speakeasies as well as to the more formal charms of lunches with senators, ambassadors and members of the great political dynasties. They also swam in warm waters, played golf and took a look at the White House, if only from the outside. The US fashion for heavy makeup and obsession with face and figure was her sole disappointment: American women were in her view “clothes pegs & painted masks” who were lovely to look at but “inane & dull.”26
Clementine and Winston had been known to be “hostile” to America as a result of President Coolidge’s crushing announcement in 1928—when Winston had been in charge of the national purse strings as chancellor—that he would not forgive Britain’s crippling debts from the Great War. Clementine had been hawkish, too, in her attitude to American ambitions to supplant Britain as a world power, advising Winston that it was “no use grovelling or even being civil” to the US.27 She had railed about Coolidge’s “coldness, smugness, self-sufficiency, boastfulness, Pharisaicalness & cant” and had even described Americans as “Swine”28 who intended to “do [them] in.” (It was a common belief among upper-class Britons of the time that Americans were somehow less civilized and less educated than themselves.) Now that Clementine had mingled so enjoyably in American society, her whole conception of the Land of the Free was dramatically altered. She found she loved the sights of Washington and the shopping in New York, and realized that many Americans were “extremely nice!”29 She particularly relished attending a “wonderful club for women” called the American Women’s Association, which introduced her to the novel concepts of networking and female leadership.
Sadly, when she and Randolph returned to life in England after this harmonious interlude, their relationship plummeted to new depths of distrust. Randolph successfully took up journalism, but his earnings failed to sustain his wanton lifestyle. He swanned around in a chauffeur-driven Bentley, lived in the best suite in the May Fair Hotel, acted obnoxiously in nightclubs and when he could not pay his bills ran back to his parents for money. To Clementine’s horror, in 1934 Winston was, on one occasion alone, obliged to settle pressing gambling debts of £1,500, wiping out a tenth of his entire earnings for the year. He later confessed to feeling “overwhelmed with work”30 trying to pay for it all, once drawing himself as a pig loaded down by a ten-ton weight.
Randolph’s visits, usually marked by a request for yet another sizable check, would inevitably herald horrific rows. His cousin Peregrine Churchill recounted how family dinners at the time were not for the fainthearted: “All those overpowering egos!”31 Sometimes Winston refused to see Randolph; more than once Clementine banned him from the house completely. Relations deteriorated to the point where Clementine began to fear her son. After a time, she instructed her staff never to leave her alone with him.
The early 1930s also highlighted the Churchills’ parental shortcomings in preparing their elder daughters for adulthood. Diana had made her society debut in 1927, during the same season as her second cousin Diana Mitford. It was, of course, the latter who had taken London by storm and been pursued by dozens of bewitched young men. Both Diana Churchill and her parents had found the contrast with her namesake humiliating. It did not help that the Mitford girl hero-worshipped Clementine, whom she later confessed to having tried to emulate: “When people say Clementine was so cold, well, she was extremely kind to us as children and, to me particularly, wonderful.”32 Still worse was that even Randolph adored Diana Mitford; according to another cousin, Anita Leslie, her resemblance to his mother only added to his yearning. “She had the same beautiful features, and huge blue eyes that looked as if they had been carved out of sapphires.”33
Perhaps Clementine had forgotten her own pain at being eclipsed by her vivacious sister Kitty, for she took little care to hide her disappointment from her daughter. Sarah recalled a painful visit to the dressmaker with her “beautiful and elegant” mother, during which Clementine had delivered “a near mortal blow” to the slightly plump Diana by remarking that Sarah was “so easy to dress.”34 The unspoken comparison was clear. On another occasion, Anita found Diana in tears, crying, “Mummy is horrid to me and I haven’t been a success. I have sandy-coloured eyelashes.”35 Nor did her dreams of a career on the stage come to fruition. She found she had little real talent, and as there was already an actress called Diana Churchill she could not even trade on her name. By the time Sarah, with her ivory skin, green eyes and auburn tresses, was preparing for her society debut, Diana was neither working nor married; such a failure in an elder sister was considered “a terrible tragedy.”36
Salvation appeared to arrive in the autumn of 1932, in the form of a proposal from handsome John Bailey, the thirty-two-year-old son of a South African mine owner. Winston ensured that the wedding, held on December 12 at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, was suitably grand—so as to demonstrate that although he himself was down, the Churchill dynasty was by no means out. The king sent a blue enamel dressing-table set; Sunny, the Duke of Marlborough, lent the ballroom at his house in Carlton Terrace for the reception; the wedding night was spent at the Ritz. The trouble was that Bailey was in love with the romantic novelist and society beauty Barbara Cartland, but on discovering his “impossible” drinking, she had sensibly run a mile. At twenty-three, Diana had been in such a desperate rush to “escape” from home that she discovered her mistake much too late. The marriage broke down after just a year, another embarrassing failure. Diana’s poor choice hardly helped to raise her in her mother’s esteem.
Sarah’s future was also uncertain. Upon coming out in 1933, she found the round of society balls excruciating—often escaping into the ladies’ to play cards with her cousin Unity Mitford. Clementine disliked staying out late and comparing notes with gaggles of super-competitive mothers, but she thought it necessary. Sarah wanted to follow her sister Diana into acting. She was considered more suited to the craft but neither Clementine nor Winston was any happier at the thought. Despite her own thwarted ambition to go to university, Clementine could summon no empathy for either daughter’s theatrical dreams, dismissing both girls as without “talent or even aptitude.”37 Yet Sarah had the inner steel Diana lacked. Her doggedness had long since earned her the family nickname of “Mule” and her hopes would not be so easily crushed.
In truth, having received so little parenting themselves, Clementine and Winston were struggling to find their way. Only Mary, still safely ensconced in the country in the capable care of Moppet, seemed to be growing up largely trouble free. Moppet sent her upstairs to do her homework every evening like clockwork and consequently Mary did better than expected at school. The very success of this arrangement, however, would itself become a source of anxiety for Clementine.
• • •
In December 1934, the wealthy Guinness heir Lord Moyne, one of Winston’s former junior ministers at the Treasury, invited the Churchills on a four-month cruise to the East Indies. The aim was to try to capture a specimen of the giant lizard known as the Komodo dragon for the London Zoo. Too busy with politics and book writing, Winston decided not to take up the offer, but Clementine was determined to go. Her various “cures” had provided only temporary relief from the physical and emotional strains of her life, so an invitation to the palm-fringed southern oceans was opportune.
It was while sailing across these glittering seas on board Moyne’s sumptuous motor yacht, Rosaura, that Clementine was thrown into the company of Terence Philip. He was tall, rich, suave, an authority on art and unburdened by driving ambition—unlike Winston, in fact, in almost every respect. He was also an entertaining gossip, seven years her junior, and he complimented her lavishly on her beauty and brains while seeking little in return. Clementine met him as she approached her fiftieth birthday and, excited by the attentions of such a man, fell in love.
Apart from the crew, for the first three weeks there was only one other couple aboard—Moyne’s agreeable cousin Lee Guinness and his wife, Posy. Clementine and Philip were then alone for a few days before Moyne himself, an amusing bon viveur, and his married long-term mistress Vera Broughton, joined them in Singapore. Clementine was known to frown on adulterers and even to refuse to socialize with unmarried couples at all. On board the Rosaura, however, romance, sunshine and champagne soon swept her up onto a thrilling high, which made her forget such straitlaced strictures. The ever-growing gloom of European politics, Winston’s obsession with his faltering career, and her children’s troubles all rapidly retreated over the horizon. Her letters home became shorter and less frequent—hurried notes with only the odd tinge of regret. After years of isolation and anxiety, she had at last found companionship and a release from tension.
Two days after Christmas 1934 the family had waved her off from Victoria station. On her way by train to Messina, where she was to join the Rosaura, she had written to say how much she loved her “sweet and darling Winston,” telling him not to be vexed with his vagabond Kat. “She has gone off to the jungle with her tail in the air, but she will return presently to her basket and curl down comfortably.” Sunbathing on the scrubbed wooden decks of the Rosaura as it headed south in the early days of 1935, she was able to take stock of her life. After little more than a week, she wrote a letter that suggests she was now in pursuit of rather more than a Komodo dragon. “Oh my Darling, I’m thinking of you & how you have enriched my life,” she began, before continuing in the past tense with “I have loved you very much but I wish I had been a more amusing wife to you.”38 She concluded wistfully, “[H]ow nice it would be if we were both young again.” Winston replied that he would “always feel so overwhelmingly in [her] debt,” before plucking her heartstrings with: “I hope & pray I shall be able to make you happy & secure during my remaining years . . . & leave you in comfort when my race is run.”39
On a stopover in Madras in January Clementine was photographed dressed in a diaphanous white dress. She appears lean, glowing, relaxed and perhaps at her most beautiful, and stands almost touching Philip’s side despite the expanse of deck all around her. They look for all the world like two young lovers. She had already described to Winston, in rather breathless tones, her enjoyment at frolicking with this other man in the swimming pool that Moyne had had rigged up on deck. “We hang onto the sides & get beaten about by the waves,” she had written, “& when there is a respite we turn the hose on to our faces & tummies.”40
Later, away from the other passengers, she went deep-sea fishing with Philip in the turquoise waters of the subtropical Bay of Islands off New Zealand. On board she noticed that the captain of their launch had only one leg. “‘Bitten off by a shark?’ I asked Terence in a frightened whisper. ‘Perhaps only the war’ he whispered back—‘Can I ask him?’ ‘No, certainly not yet!’” When relating how they landed a “lovely blue tunny” that slithered out of their hands, her tone became yet more familiar: “[W]e nearly fell over the edge with it. I nearly cried and [the captain] clearly thought we were the most awful muffs. I said I felt faint & wanted food. So we left the fishing grounds for an hour & got into a little bay & had luncheon—But I felt so sick I could only drink claret & suck some very strong peppermints.”41
On other solo jaunts they boated up a river in Sumatra and motored to a deserted coral island for a picnic. “When we got back I discovered that I had lost an ear-ring . . . I am lost without a fat pearl in each ear & they are my only pair,” she recounted. “So we went back & Terence found it.”42 She fell under the spell of Philip’s admiration over these blissful weeks, conceding, years later, even to her own family, “[H]e made me like him.”
Perhaps Moyne thought nothing of it. Philip, the London director of Knoedler, the New York art dealers, had a reputation for passing flirtations and was in any case thought not to be that interested in women sexually. Or maybe their host merely enjoyed seeing Clementine so happy. There is no proof that anything physical took place between them during the cruise, but there was certainly no lack of opportunity, and Moyne had set a decadent tone by bringing along his mistress rather than his wife. Whether her relationship with Philip was adulterous or not, it seems that he was almost certainly not in love with her. Nevertheless, his open and ardent admiration shook Clementine to her core.
At first, seemingly oblivious to the threat, Winston churned out lengthy typed bulletins about events at Chartwell or Randolph’s latest antics. He confessed to feeling “unprotected” without his Kat and wrote that he had been “sometimes a little depressed about politics” and that he would have liked to have been “comforted” by her. But then she began to mention “Mr Philip”—soon he was just “Terence”—rather too often and too enthusiastically. She also wrote more explicitly than before. Early on in the cruise, she had railed against the “indecency” of a Jean Harlow film, but within weeks she was enthusing about the Balinese dedication to sex. Perhaps goaded by her account of their trip to the desert island, Winston sent to her next port of call, Batavia, the capital of Java, an expensive pair of new earrings for her birthday, some “really lovely ‘twinklers’” she had long coveted. Gratifyingly, the gift elicited the response: “wow—I love it.” The earring retrieved by Philip had been a cheap fake.
The children began to wonder about the drift in their mother’s affections. Back in January Sarah had written: “DARLING DARLING Mummy. I imagine you . . . gaily chasing after butterflies and dragons with Mr Terence Phillips [sic].”43 A month later she pleaded: “Don’t forget to come home some time. Papa is miserable and frightfully naughty without you! Your children however are model in every way.”44 Finally Winston wrote that although he had not grudged her this “long excursion,” as he called it, before declaring: “Now I do want you back.” He was not displaying jealousy as such—he never did—but he was becoming a little impatient.
When she finally returned to him—and real life—on April 30, 1935, Clementine was a revitalized woman with a model’s physique that she showed off at George V’s Silver Jubilee celebrations a few days later. Of course she soon came crashing back down to earth. She discovered that Randolph, Mary and Sarah had all been ill; that Randolph’s antics had become so acutely embarrassing they had elicited the sympathy of the prime minister (Baldwin had remarked to Winston on how “one’s children are like a lot of live bombs. One never knows when they will go off, or in what direction”); and that Winston had spent more money on Chartwell, redecorating the drawing room, returfing the orchard and installing new bookshelves.
In short, nothing had changed—certainly not Winston nor his obsession with the Nazis. Hitler had recently announced that his air force was already as strong as Britain’s—completely contradicting Baldwin’s previous assertions to the contrary. Yet this vindication of Winston’s position had done little to shake the general atmosphere of apathy and denial that clouded British foreign policy. In truth, the Luftwaffe was actually superior in strength and still rapidly growing. “How discreditable for the Government . . . to have misled Parliament upon a matter involving the safety of the country,” Winston informed Clementine bitterly.45
Little wonder she was reluctant to let go of her life on the Rosaura altogether. Over the next two years Philip came to Chartwell to visit Clementine a number of times, and they may well have met elsewhere. But in the late thirties he seems abruptly to have moved away to work at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York, where he would die a few years later. Whatever the nature of their relationship, like many another sunlit holiday fling, it fizzled out under the gray skies of England. A coral-pink dove that she had brought back from Bali in a wicker cage also survived only a couple of years. She had it buried under the sundial in the kitchen garden at Chartwell with lines around the base from a poem by W. P. Ker:
It does not do to wander
Too far from sober men,
But there’s an island yonder,
I think of it again.
• • •
It was “very nice” to be back, Clementine wrote to her former secretary Miss Street in August 1935, but she added, “Oh Dear I want to start out again very badly! Mr Pug is very sweet but now he says ‘NO.’”46 Her only real option was to throw herself back into family life. Tortured by what she saw as her failures with her elder offspring, she resolved to do better with her youngest child. Until her adolescence, Mary was much closer to Moppet—or Nana as she called her—than to Clementine and quite open about it. If Clementine suggested doing something, Mary’s instinct was to consult beloved Nana first. Mama was beautiful and clever—but she was, in Mary’s own words, more of a “deity” than a parent. In Clementine’s absence, Moppet had performed the maternal role brilliantly, creating a stable home for Mary in which she had thrived. Now that Mary was fast growing up, time was running out for Clementine, and with painful regret, she knew it.
In 1935 Winston spent Christmas away from his family, on a luxurious stint in Morocco with Lord Rothermere and Lloyd George. Clementine seized the opportunity to spend more time alone with her youngest. Their skiing trip to Zürs, in Austria, which Mary remembered as a “great thrill,” was their first proper holiday together. Indeed, it was the first occasion Mary, now thirteen, had spent “any period of time” with her mother without Nana.47 Clementine’s decision to take up skiing for the first time at the age of fifty was her way of reaching out to her daughter—and perhaps also a device to separate the girl from Moppet. “Clementine was jealous of Moppet,” recalls her niece Clarissa, “because of her good relationship with Mary. But that was Clementine’s fault. She wasn’t much of a mother as you can imagine.” There are reports of painful rows between the two women, with Clarissa confirming that Clementine’s jealousy “made it an awful job for Moppet.”48
She became a stylish if not especially speedy skier, but at least she now shared a hobby with Mary, and she made plenty of time for them to chat and read together in the evening. Only now did Mary come to know and understand her hitherto distant mother as a “person.” The experiment was such a success that it was repeated the following winter, and the next. (Winston, disliking both snow and exercise, never joined them.) The more intimate relationship was not without its stresses, though. “I dreaded her displeasure, and the emotional, electric storms that could brew,” wrote Mary later.
But the trips established a companionship between them that never really faltered. Thus Clementine’s belated efforts with her last child were amply repaid—further highlighting her disappointments and differences with Diana, Randolph and Sarah. “She didn’t mean to neglect the others—they were beautifully provided for,” Mary once claimed, insisting their mother was not a bad parent. “But she didn’t give to the others as she gave to me.”49
While Clementine was away with Mary, Sarah informed her father that she was in love with an older Austrian-born comedian by the name of Vic Oliver. The pair had met in October 1935, when they had both been appearing in impresario C. B. Cochran’s theatrical revue Follow the Sun. Before leaving for Zürs, Clementine had gone up to Manchester to see Sarah’s first night and she was impressed by her twenty-year-old daughter’s dancing, even if it was performed scantily clothed and was not exactly “respectable.” Oliver was the show’s principal star, although at the time he made little impression on Clementine. Despite the fact that he was eighteen years older, divorced and with a devoted mistress in New York, Sarah had set her heart on becoming his wife.
From the slopes, Clementine professed “horror” at the news, but she decided to leave the matter to Winston and even to extend her skiing trip for a couple of months after Mary returned home for school. In her absence, Winston ignored her appeals to him not to be “severe.” All guns blazing, in February he summoned Oliver and Sarah to Morpeth Mansions, deliberately omitting to shake hands with a man he dismissed as “common as dirt,” with a “horrible mouth and foul Austro-Yankee drawl.” Winston told the comedian that, should he dare to persist with the engagement, he would issue “an immediate public statement” that would be “painful to them both.”50
Oliver gave way, agreeing to Winston’s terms of a year’s separation before marrying. But her father’s aggression—including addressing her “like a public meeting”—made the Mule all the more determined. “I think I have put her off,” Winston claimed triumphantly to Diana. “On the contrary,” replied the more perceptive Diana. “I think you have chased her away.”
Sensing imminent disaster, Clementine finally returned from her holiday and tried a less confrontational, woman-to-woman approach. Over breakfast at Chartwell, at a time when she knew Winston would not be around, she promised Sarah her own flat in London to use with “total freedom,” on the condition that she should give up Oliver. It was an offer that would have been unthinkable just a few months earlier and showed how Clementine’s attitudes had relaxed since her adventures aboard the Rosaura. It also revealed how desperate she was not to lose her daughter. “Sarah was the closest to Mummy,” Mary believed. “She understood her . . . there was a chemistry.”51
The Churchills were not a family among whom sex had previously been discussed, so Sarah was shocked at what she saw as her mother’s “immoral” suggestion—and at the way Clementine now speculated as to whether a man was “executive” (her new term for “good in bed”).52 Sarah was not in any case tempted by the parade of eligible young bachelors her mother hastily invited to Chartwell, executive or not. She was starstruck and was all the while secretly in constant contact with Oliver, even though he had left for the US. She appreciated her mother’s conciliatory efforts, but her mind was made up.
In September 1936, with Winston safely out of the country in the south of France, Sarah bolted. Oliver had finally succumbed to her pleas for a lifeline by sending her a ticket to New York on the German liner SS Bremen. After withdrawing her savings, amounting to just £4, Sarah told the unsuspecting Clementine that she was going up to Morpeth Mansions for the night to visit her hairdresser. And she did go to the flat. But from there she took a cab to the boat train at Waterloo. Guilty at betraying her mother’s trust, she handed a friend a letter to pass to Clementine in person after her departure. Alas, the so-called friend merely posted it and rushed to tip off the Daily Express. By the time Sarah reached the port in Southampton a newspaper photographer was waiting for her. The first Clementine knew of her daughter’s whereabouts was when she saw the next morning’s headline: MISS SARAH CHURCHILL ELOPES TO NEW YORK.
Sarah’s letter, when it arrived, implored Clementine to “please make Papa understand” and asked her not to worry. Clementine was distraught and also certain that Winston would not be mollified. His efforts to stop the marriage reached new heights of paternal belligerence. Randolph was dispatched on the next steamer across the Atlantic, lawyers were instructed to erect legal barriers and private detectives were hired to dig up dirt on Oliver. An increasingly panicked Sarah phoned Clementine to appeal for her help, but Winston was unstoppable. In the melee, Oliver appeared ever more a refuge from the intensity of Churchill life. “I had needed to get away from my happy home for it wasn’t a question of having one strong parent but,” Sarah later recalled, “two great and strong parents.”53 She quickly and quietly married Oliver on Christmas Eve 1936 with only a lawyer and a cleaning lady as witnesses. Winston had waged an unsuccessful war against his daughter and the whole world had watched him fail.
It was far from the only humiliation of the mid-1930s. Take India and his opposition to the most gradual moves toward self-government. Since the late twenties Winston had devoted energy—and much of his remaining political capital—to an imperial position that even his natural sympathizers recognized was futile, and that served to exclude him from the MacDonald-Baldwin national government of 1931. Curiously, Clementine’s instincts for Winston’s best political interests failed her on this issue, as she appears largely to have agreed with him that it was essential to retain the British Raj, and even made one of her now-all-too-rare public speeches in support. The Churchills’ stance cut them off not only from the Conservative front bench, but also from natural anti-appeasement allies such as the rising MPs Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Alfred Duff Cooper. Duff Cooper later wrote that Winston’s attempted blocking of dominion status for India was “the most unfortunate event that occurred between the two wars.”54 Certainly it was a position that would cost him dearly. For all his efforts, the Government of India Act, which introduced limited self-rule, passed into law in August 1935.
Clementine’s judgment during the abdication crisis of 1936 put her back on the side of history. She and Winston fought like Kat and Pug over whether the new king, Edward VIII (George V having died in January), should be forced to renounce the throne if he were to marry his twice-divorced American mistress Wallis Simpson. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had bluntly informed the king that Mrs. Simpson would be unacceptable as queen, and that he would have to choose between her and his crown. Winston, though, displayed unwavering loyalty to Edward, who had personally turned to him for support. He rose to speak in the king’s defense in a debate in the House of Commons in December 1936, begging the government not to take an “irrevocable step.” Before he could utter more than a few words, however, he was “howled down” in shame.
It was—as Clementine had warned him—a near-career-ending misjudgment of the mood of the House of Commons. The normally supportive MP Robert Boothby compared it to a dog being sick on the carpet, and many thought Winston’s die-hard championing of an unpopular monarch—even if rooted in the romantic ideals of the divine right of kings and the supremacy of love—had undermined his credibility forever. He had woefully misread the majority view (at least among the political classes) that the king should put duty first. Worse, just when there were signs that others were beginning to heed his warnings about the rise of Germany and the need to rearm, he had laid himself open to the damaging charge that he had exploited the whole saga to undermine Baldwin. Only after the constitutional crisis was resolved by the king’s abdication a few days later did he finally see the error of his ways. At the coronation of King George VI in May of the following year, Winston turned to Clementine with tears in his eyes and said, “You were right: I now see the other one wouldn’t have done.”55
The saga had shaken even Clementine’s faith that Winston would one day reach Number 10. Some thought his reason so flawed that there were once again suggestions that he might be suffering from a form of insanity—or late-stage syphilis, like his father. Clementine had endured so much, but this series of humiliations took her close to the breaking point. Exhausted, depressed, without hope for the future, she started planning her way out. She went to see her sister-in-law Goonie at her house in Regent’s Park to say that she wanted a divorce from Winston.56 “There might have been many times, I’m sure,” recounted Pamela, “in the twenties and thirties when she could have left him and nobody would have blamed her.” Goonie, however, wisely advised her to go abroad to reflect before she finally made up her mind.
It was only when Clementine left for Austria that Winston appears to have realized that he was in danger of losing his wife as well as his daughter. When Sarah returned to Britain, he invited her to a reconciliation lunch at Chartwell. “I suppose we must call him Vic,” he wrote to Clementine, who had decided to stay away. Now civil but still unconvinced, Winston pronounced: “She has done what she liked, and now has to like what she has done.” Few were surprised when the relationship with the unreliable Oliver quickly began to unravel. Its demise left Sarah deeply unhappy, though, and by the end of the decade she, Randolph and Diana (who had embarked on another unsatisfactory marriage in 1935) were all drinking heavily. But at least Winston’s efforts to broker a peace with his daughter won him favor with his wife; she returned from Austria some time afterward a little pacified.
• • •
In October 1935 Mussolini had launched a brutal invasion of Abyssinia, but in Britain the Conservatives under Baldwin’s leadership had won the following month’s election on the pledge that there would be “no great armaments.” It was thus unsurprising—to everyone but Winston—that as the most “belligerent” exponent of rapid rearmament he had again been excluded from the new government. Clementine now saw that his exile might prove propitious. It would, she argued, leave him untainted by the government’s continuing blunders. “I really would not like you to serve under Baldwin,” she told him from Zürs in January 1936, “unless he really gave you a great deal of power and you were able to inspire and vivify the Government.”57
From this point on, Winston changed his tactics, seeking to broaden his appeal and win support from a wider spectrum of public opinion (and indeed his own wife). Instead of directing his fire at Labour and the Liberals and the die-hard appeasers in the Tory party, he sought to woo his onetime opponents, together with progressive Conservatives, by integrating their beloved League of Nations and its doctrine of “collective security” into his call for rearmament. This attempt to build an anti-Nazi coalition led Clementine to take a closer interest in Winston’s campaign, so that from early 1936 onward whenever she went away for one of her cures she would make sure to have copies of Hansard (the official report of the proceedings of both houses of Parliament) sent out to her so she could keep close track of his speeches.
Events in Europe were in any case gathering pace. In March 1936, while Clementine was still in Zürs, Hitler again flagrantly defied the Treaty of Versailles by reoccupying the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. Then, in July, nationalist elements of the Spanish army revolted against the left-wing Republican government and a bloody civil war broke out. Despite the fig-leaf policy of nonintervention championed by the British and French, the Soviets moved to prop up the republic while Hitler and Mussolini began supplying military aid to General Franco’s rebels—a contravention that if anything Winston actually supported, as, in 1936 at least, he believed that it would be “better for the safety of all if the Communists” were “crushed.”58 By 1938, however, as the civil war dragged on, Winston radically changed his mind. He began to fear that a nationalist victory in Madrid would result in Spain’s falling under the influence of Nazi Germany and that therefore Franco’s fascists represented a real and growing threat to Britain. He even argued it was in the national interest to seek a once unthinkable alliance with Moscow (a stance that did much to raise his standing with Labour MPs).
By the late 1930s the Spanish war was to prove a turning point more widely for public opinion in Britain. For many it demonstrated that bloodshed was almost certainly the only way to halt the spread of fascism beyond the German Reich, Italy and now the Iberian Peninsula. Groups of unlikely allies increasingly haunted by the idea that Britain could eventually suffer the same fate began converging on Chartwell, rallying to the only man seen as capable of stopping the madness of appeasement.
One of Winston’s recruits—the defiantly odd Professor Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell)—started to provide much-needed scientific data for his speeches. Soon this professor of physics at Oxford University became one of the Churchills’ most frequent visitors. Unlike that of the Three Bs his presence was welcomed by Clementine and she willingly accommodated his many idiosyncrasies—including a dietary regimen that consisted almost entirely of egg whites. In a house where she was so often ignored, he took the trouble to converse with her as well as her husband, despite his hostile attitude to most other women (including his own sister, with whom he was not on speaking terms). He also played tennis with Clementine—albeit insisting on wearing long shirtsleeves, even in hot weather, apparently with the aim of discouraging women from regarding him as a “sex object.”
The “Prof” was just one member of what from the mid-1930s was fast becoming an alternative intelligence network devoted to gathering information on Hitler’s plans. The emerging nerve center for British and European opposition to Nazism, Chartwell provided the venue for covert meetings between military officers, civil servants, journalists and industrialists, as well as refugee Germans and later Czechs and Austrians. Over time Clementine’s “country basket” took on the bustle and tempo of a government department, as messengers arrived at all hours and the telephones continually rang. Once again, Winston had become a magnet for powerful and influential visitors and Clementine found herself welcoming and hosting them all—often in great secrecy. Gradually drawn into the frantic activity, she was universally trusted for her tact and discretion, although some of those who put themselves in danger to pass on information were concerned that Winston’s volubility would lead him unwittingly to betray them. Part of her role was to ensure he remain appropriately discreet.
She also helped develop a network of informants on Germany’s massive rearmament—recruiting a cousin, Shiela Grant Duff, a journalist who fed vital details back from Prague. It was serendipitous that another mole, Desmond Morton—head of the government’s Industrial Intelligence Centre and reputedly the model for James Bond’s “M”—lived just across the fields and could come and go easily without detection. Others—such as Ralph Wigram, who risked his Foreign Office career and even his liberty by passing secret files to Winston that revealed the shortfalls in Britain’s defenses—were unable to take the strain of deception. After telling his wife in December 1936 that he felt a “failure” for not being able to goad the government into action, he mysteriously died at the age of forty-six, some believe by his own hand. Winston’s reaction was that the unduly “sensitive” Wigram had taken his government’s ineptitude “too much to heart.”59 It fell to Clementine to insist he pause a moment to comfort a brave man’s grieving widow.
In May 1937, Baldwin retired as prime minister and was replaced by Neville Chamberlain, who quickly dashed Winston’s hopes of office once again. Under Chamberlain’s leadership, the division between supporters of appeasement, such as himself, and critics, such as Winston, became if anything even more personal and bitter. Most of the leading figures on either side had known each other for years and some were related. Many had attended the same schools (over a third of Tory MPs had been to Eton or Harrow) and universities. The rebels were socially shunned and scorned, and branded traitors to their government, class, party and even country. Wigram was not the only one to suffer; others also broke down under the strain of finding a room go silent every time they walked in.
Winston’s pressing sense of mission turned many of his remaining followers and staff into devoted accomplices, their working hours often stretching to two or three in the morning. So unceasing were his demands that in the summer of 1936 his long-standing secretary Violet Pearman suffered a stroke brought on by overwork. Every moment of the day, including mealtimes, was now feverishly devoted to proving to a disbelieving nation the horrifying scale of the Nazi threat. Talk of fighter planes, bombers, troop movements, tank production, weapons development and the full-scale ruthlessness of the Third Reich dominated almost every waking minute. (The little time left over was spent churning out books and articles to pay the bills.) His endless gloomy prophecies of global cataclysm drove some of the less politically inclined guests to distraction. The painter William Nicholson, for instance, complained that it made him feel “quite sick.” Clementine too sometimes felt overwhelmed, once exclaiming to her nephew Johnny in the car on her way up to London, “I can’t stand it any longer.”60
Other upper-class British families were still happily sending their daughters to Berlin to be “finished” in what they considered a more polished and disciplined culture than that of Paris. Society ladies even wore bracelets with swastika charms in tribute to the führer. Many admired how Hitler was putting a muscular pride back into a defeated country, creating a power that, in acting as a bulwark against the Communist hordes to the east, deserved to be hailed as Europe’s savior. The stories of atrocities emerging from this civilized nation of art and music lovers were scarcely to be believed. Nancy Astor hosted frightfully smart pro-appeasement gatherings at her mansion, Cliveden, overlooking the Thames, and members of Clementine’s own family—including her beloved niece Diana Mitford—were ardent admirers of the Nazis. Diana’s marriage in October 1936 to her second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, took place in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room in Berlin, with Hitler as guest of honor. Although Winston remained obstinately outspoken, as the decade wore on and life in Britain remained much the same, most people were, as the British historian Geoffrey Best has put it, “keener on hearing what Hitler said about peace than what Churchill said about war.”61 Part of the problem was the messenger himself: Winston had been wrong about so much else.
At this point his mood turned fatalistic. In February 1937 he told Clementine that money was so short that “no good offer” for Chartwell “should be refused” as, he pointed out, “our children are almost all flown, and my life is probably in its closing decade.”62 No such offer was forthcoming and their finances continued to worsen over the months that followed. When Clementine returned from another excursion to Zürs in the spring of 1938, she discovered that her sworn enemy Lord Beaverbrook had brought them still closer to the edge of financial ruin. In late March, the pro-appeasement press baron had canceled Winston’s lucrative fortnightly column in the London Evening Standard (worth some £100,000 in today’s money) when he called for Britain to rise “in its ancient vigour” against Germany’s annexation of Austria, known as the Anschluss. Winston thus lost a crucial platform to warn his fellow countrymen about the Nazis (although he was soon taken on on similar terms by the Daily Telegraph). This blow may have been only temporary but it was compounded by news that another £12,000 had been wiped off the value of his US investments. He had no choice but to put Chartwell formally on the market. Still worse, its value had sunk to £20,000 in the 1938 recession, down from £30,000 the previous year, but even at this low price there were no takers.
In his frustration Winston was genuinely considering giving up on politics to dedicate himself to books and other moneymaking ventures. Then, at the eleventh hour, the Churchills—and Winston’s political career—were saved by the striking generosity of an outsider. Sir Henry Strakosch, who had been briefed on the crisis by Brendan Bracken, stepped in to cover Winston’s losses in the American markets. Strakosch, a committed anti-Nazi who was born in Austria and had become a naturalized Briton, had been providing Winston with detailed and authoritative information on German rearmament. Now he saved the Churchills’ all-important base at Chartwell, which was withdrawn from the market, and made it possible for Winston to continue his vital work. (On his death in 1943, Strakosch left them a further £20,000.)
After the Anschluss, with the once-mighty Austria now part of the greater German Reich, Winston warned that Czechoslovakia would be next. And this time he was proved right: Hitler did not take long to demand control over those parts of the country with large German populations, stoking fears that war was now inevitable. The British fleet was mobilized and air-raid trenches were dug in London’s parks. But on September 29, 1938, Neville Chamberlain packed his beloved umbrella and went to meet Hitler and Mussolini in Munich, in search of peace. He was comprehensively duped, effectively sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s demands in a naïve belief that by doing so he could avert war. When Chamberlain returned to Britain claiming that he had secured “peace with honor,” public opinion was radically divided. The Munichois—as they became known—hailed him as a world hero, while the Churchills and their growing band of supporters saw his capitulation as a final act of foolish betrayal.
People the Churchills had entertained in their home now cut them in the street. Some say their isolation at this point was more personally challenging than when Britain was fighting alone in 1940; it was social suicide to be seen with a man widely branded a warmonger and party traitor. “The gloom after Munich was absolutely terrific,” recalled Winston’s nephew Johnny Churchill. “At Chartwell there were occasions just alone with him when the despondency was overwhelming.”63 Older and wearier than she had been when she faced the opprobrium heaped upon him during and after the Great War, Clementine felt the slights more deeply now. But since Munich she was becoming even more vehement than Winston in her views, haranguing even the mildest Chamberlain supporters for what she called “pussy foot” or pacifist views. She once rounded on the redoubtable Eva, the wife of Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, for expressing pro-government views over lunch at Chartwell, reducing her to tears.
In early October Winston rose to his feet in the Commons and delivered a spectacular denunciation of Chamberlain’s efforts to maintain a “friendship” with Hitler despite all his “pitiless brutality.” The speech nearly cost him his seat. Elements of his local party, with thoughts of a more malleable MP, began to plot against him. Some within the constituency—and many outside it—branded him unstable, or worse, an “agitator” who deserved to be shot or hanged. As Winston paced back and forth late into the night at Chartwell, desperately writing any number of articles and books to pay the bills, he watched helplessly as his country staggered blindly toward apocalypse while the Men of Munich went on ignoring or distorting the facts in the vain hope that Hitler could be placated with smiling inaction.
Exhausted by all this tension and emotion, Clementine, now fifty-three, was also nursing a painful broken toe. An invitation from Lord Moyne to cruise to the Caribbean, leaving England on November 25, seemed too good to refuse—even without Terence Philip, and despite the mounting international crisis. It might strike us as incredible, or even reckless, that she left at this point, but she was evidently deeply distracted—to the point that she forgot Winston’s birthday, blaming the “lonely vast Atlantic” for causing her to lose track of the date.
Her state of mind clearly troubled him, and a couple of weeks later he wrote, “I send you telegrams frequently, but in yr answers you do not tell me what I want to know—How are you? . . . Have the rest & repose given you the means of recharging your batteries?” His letter is that of a man who has lost so much but hopes he can reel his one remaining treasure back to him. “Do you love me? I feel so interwoven with you that I follow your movement in my mind at every hour & in all circumstances . . . Darling do always cable every two or three days. Otherwise I get depressed—& anxious about you & yr health.”64
The Rosaura was the same beautiful boat, but little else resembled Clementine’s previous voyage. Lord Moyne was chairing a royal commission into social conditions prevailing in the West Indies and the purpose of the trip was investigation, not adventure or relaxation. As a result, Clementine witnessed the terrible deprivation of the British Empire’s Caribbean holdings. Not only did it horrify her, it provoked her to give vent to her anger at what she saw as Tory complacency, and she admitted finding much in common with the Labour members of the royal commission who traveled with her. (The resulting report was so critical that Chamberlain deemed it impossible to publish.)
It was thus her sense of injustice rather than her longing for romance that was reawakened on this trip. But when she learned of the premature death of her hapless old fiancé Sidney Peel, she nevertheless found herself, to her own surprise, sobbing uncontrollably. She remembered his having “made [her] difficult arid life interesting”65 but she also knew that a privileged existence of comparative indolence with him never would have been enough. Peel’s death perversely brought home what life with Winston had given her.
In Jamaica, she told Winston that she was “thrilled” when raucously cheered as the “wife of the future prime minister of England.”66 The crowd hailed Winston as an antifascist scourge and even a savior. Such an unexpectedly enthusiastic reception after years of ridicule and scorn emboldened her. She repeatedly cast her thoughts back home to the dangers that lay ahead, asking Winston at one point whether war was really inevitable. Now she was the one pleading for him to write more often with all the news.
He missed her profoundly, writing at the time to his friend Lord Craigavon about “this time of trouble and misunderstanding in which [he felt] much alone.”67 He sent her detailed typed political bulletins marked “secret” on the growing fears for France and the Chamberlain government’s woeful unpreparedness for war. She, in turn, became increasingly uneasy about just how isolated Winston must have been feeling in her absence. Even on board the Rosaura there were those who opposed his views and still clung to appeasement. When, after listening to a radio broadcast from England on January 24, 1939, Moyne’s mistress Vera Broughton led attacks on Churchill for endangering Chamberlain’s so-called peace, a revivified Clementine flounced out majestically, booking her passage on the first steamer home the very next day.
Just six weeks later, on March 15, Hitler’s troops invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia, followed soon after on Good Friday by Mussolini’s annexation of Albania. Now, at last, much of the press—even his old enemies at the Daily Mail—began to row in behind Winston, boisterously calling for him to be brought into the government. Around the same time he started to suspect that the Germans were genuinely out to assassinate him, so once again his security had to be stepped up and he reemployed his former bodyguard Walter Thompson. Her doubts and anxieties put to one side, however, Clementine was soon giving rousing speeches in his constituency—denouncing Hitler, calling for national unity and fearlessly blaming Chamberlain’s government for the crisis engulfing Europe because of its failure to act in time. “At any rate,” she informed a sizable crowd in Chigwell in July, “we have made up our minds to do our duty, whatever may befall!”68