1945–65
At any other time Clementine would have relished the palatial appointments of an elegant penthouse in her favorite London hotel. Although maintaining a proud façade, she was in truth despondent at finding herself in the Brook Penthouse at Claridge’s, for all the streams of visitors whisked up in a special lift to see them. Winston simply pointed tearfully to the seventh-floor balcony and declared a dislike of “sleeping near a precipice.”1 But, having been turfed out of Downing Street by an ungrateful electorate, they simply had nowhere else to go.
When Winston had called a general election two weeks after VE Day, Beaverbrook had predicted he would be voted back to power with a hundred-seat majority. Winston had believed him. After all, cheering crowds turned out to line the route wherever he went; another term was surely his due. But Clementine had been more doubtful. Having dutifully dealt with her mailbag during the war and toured the country listening to people’s woes, she had known that there was a yearning among the populace for social reform, and that many saw Labour as the only party to offer credible policies on housing, jobs and social security. Winston, she believed, could no longer rely on his personality, or even his war record. He had to paint a rival vision of a fairer Britain all his own.
Instead, he had opened his campaign with a patently absurd warning that a Labour government would result in a tyranny enforced by a home-grown “Gestapo.” Clementine had begged him to drop the words from his speech, but it was as if, under Beaverbrook’s influence, his reason had once again deserted him. To turn on his wartime coalition colleagues so provocatively, with what the Economist dubbed “pernicious nonsense,” seemed unstatesmanlike. It helped to revive searing memories of the unemployment under the Tory-led governments of the “hungry thirties”; indeed, many still felt cheated by Lloyd George’s promise to build “a country fit for heroes” after the First World War.
Neither had Winston been physically fit for the election. During the campaign, he had finally returned to his constituency (formerly Epping, but now redrawn and renamed Woodford), but as he was touring the streets Clementine had realized he was on the point of collapse and had to rush him into a church to rest. On other occasions she had campaigned successfully without him, addressing six hustings on the eve of polling day alone while he traveled up and down the country. This was not the aloof prewar Clementine with that distinctive glare, but a formidable and skilled politician. Warm and spontaneous, she tried to make amends for Winston’s Gestapo gaffe by insisting that he would introduce “great reforms” and would work “harmoniously” with the other parties. Dressed in a striking flame-red chiffon turban, she beseeched the crowd to reward their wartime hero with “a great solid magnificent vote!”2 But despite garnering cheers aplenty she came away unconvinced they would translate into support for Winston in the ballot box.
Polling day had been set for July 5 but the results were delayed for three weeks to allow for the arrival of postal votes from troops overseas. “I hear the women are for me, but that the men have turned against me,” Winston remarked with surprise during the long wait. Clementine quickly reminded him how bitterly he had once opposed female suffrage. “Quite true,” he conceded.3 After a brief holiday at Hendaye in southwest France, he set off for the final Big Three conference at Potsdam. He had pleaded with Clementine to accompany him to meet Stalin again, as well as the new American president, Harry Truman, but she had refused. She took refuge, implausibly, in the need to report on her Russian trip to the Women’s British Soviet Committee and said she wanted to press on with plans to reopen Chartwell. More likely she wished to conserve her energies for the electoral verdict she now privately dreaded—having seen signs of widespread discontent on her tours of shelters and from her mailbag; Attlee was emerging as a much better campaigner than anyone had expected and she feared that Winston’s cronies were wildly overconfident and that he himself had “lost his touch.” So Mary went in her place. On July 25 father and daughter flew back, midsummit, in time for the result the following day.
By the time Clementine arrived in Woodford to attend the count, on the morning of the twenty-sixth, Winston’s only opponent (a “crack-pot” independent, as Mary dubbed him) had already amassed surprisingly large piles of votes. As news began to come in that Labour was taking Tory seats by the dozen, Clementine deserted her post and fled back to the Annexe to find Winston staring blankly at the wall of the map room, where the results were being posted on a special chart. His seat was safe but every minute brought word of fresh reverses elsewhere—Sandys out, Randolph out, Bracken out.4 At six o’clock that evening he ordered drinks and cigars for the staff and set off to Buckingham Palace to resign. By then Winston knew he had fallen victim to one of the greatest landslides in British electoral history. His belittled deputy, Clement Attlee, had become his prime minister.
After retreating to bed for an afternoon rest, Clementine returned in the evening and was “riding the storm with unflinching demeanour,”5 while others tried and failed to hide their tears. She even suggested that the result might prove a “blessing in disguise,” although Winston clearly did not think so. Mary and Sarah attempted to lift the gloom by donning their smartest evening dresses for a special dinner prepared by a crestfallen Mrs. Landemare. But within hours, wearing a previously unseen look of exhaustion and despair, Clementine was already packing up. “My mother was out of Downing Street quicker than lightning,” recalled Sarah.6 Number 10 and the Annexe had already become “hateful.”7
The result could not have been more painful, but it did not change the respect Clementine felt for Attlee. To her great credit, she now went out of her way to help Violet Attlee move into Downing Street,8 while the Labour leader made sure to return her kindness. He most unusually offered the Churchills a last weekend at Chequers, and later temporarily released Jock Colville from his private office to work at Claridge’s on tying up their affairs. Having spent a weekend with the Attlees by this time, Colville inevitably found himself making comparisons. He judged Clement and Violet to be charming, but their food nowhere near as good and their lifestyle more formal. Mrs. Attlee was welcoming, a onetime beauty, but, Colville sighed, Clementine’s “sometimes caustic comments and unflagging perfectionism were missing.”9 No one could match how she looked and acted the part of First Lady. At a grand dinner three years later, Clementine’s mere presence, even out of power, was considered by Chips Channon so “distinguished” that she made other women present seem “almost naked.”10
The shock at the election result was felt around the world. From Potsdam, the British ambassador to the USSR, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, reported to Clementine that the Russian delegation was left “gibbering and bewildered” at the news. Molotov, whom she had got to know well in Moscow, was “grey in the face and clearly much upset, throwing up his fat hands and asking why? Why?”11 “The leader in the Times today summed it up best when they said ‘Gratitude belongs to history & not to politics,’” Pamela explained to an equally astonished Harriman. She believed Winston was taking the news “wonderfully” but added: “Poor Clemmie I feel very deeply for her.”
She was not the only one to worry about Clementine’s reaction; Field Marshal Montgomery was also concerned and offered to release Mary from her military duties to look after her. Many others, including Clark Kerr, wrote specifically to Clementine to thank her “for being so uniformly kind.” Winston’s chief of staff, Pug Ismay, wrote emotionally to both of them to say how much their “kindness” had meant to him, describing himself as their “devoted servant.” Members of the public sent messages stating how much the “nation” was in her debt, saying that Winston could not have achieved “a quarter” of what he had done without her. Field Marshal Alexander (now supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean) had already written to the board of Clementine’s maternity hospital, Fulmer Chase, to say that it had made a “direct contribution to the winning of the war”12 by significantly raising officer morale.
The president of the Toronto Star newspaper, meanwhile, compared the shock at the election result in Canada and the US to the reaction after Roosevelt’s death. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been relieved to relinquish her position as First Lady after her husband’s death, struggled to imagine the Churchills’ state of mind. She suggested that they were “probably very happy and look[ing] forward to a few years of less strenuous life.” She did concede, though, that “to those who lay down the burdens of great responsibility, there must come for a while a sense of being rudderless.”13
In truth, neither Clementine nor Winston felt there was much to live for anymore—no enemy to overcome, no government to lead, no people to inspire. “It would have been better,” Winston told Moran in all seriousness, “to have been killed in an aeroplane or to have died like Roosevelt.”14
• • •
Believing he lacked the strength to fight on in politics and that his health would soon fail for the last time, Clementine had fervently hoped to persuade Winston to retire in glory but only once the war was won. Earlier in the year she had taken the precaution of some quiet house-hunting and had found a suitable “little” place at 28 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Now that Winston had been forcibly “retired,” she sent in the builders. Unfortunately, the press managed to snatch a glimpse of the beautiful double-aspect drawing room, with its hundreds of leather-bound books and oil paintings of the Duke of Marlborough, and in the now less deferential climate the Churchills came under fire for redecorating to a level unthinkable for “lesser folk” struggling with the legacy of six years of war and shortages of everything from paint to builders.15 The rumpus merely added to their feelings of rejection.
With Chartwell also being reconfigured, they were left to brood in their suite at Claridge’s. Clementine told Mary, “[T]ime crawls wearily along . . . since your Father was hurled from power.” Even creating a “comfortable & happy” home—her great forte—seemed beyond her: mice and moths had munched through the loose covers and curtains at Chartwell, and without the luxury of her old “diplomatic rations” she could not replace them. Aware that so many were in a far less fortunate position, she felt ashamed—particularly when offers of cottages, curtains and help of all sorts started flooding in from the public. The sudden bump to earth had left her “dropping to pieces.” When she attempted to help the devoted Moppet and her other staff scrub and polish Chartwell, she was sent away: “I am too old & inefficient,” she continued.16 “I blush to think that I who organised the Russian Fund, . . . Fulmer . . . & who complained about the organisation of the YWCA am stumped by my own private life.”
When Japan surrendered on August 14 after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she rushed over to Parliament the next day to watch the House of Lords express its congratulations to the king.17 Alas, she never arrived. She could not push her way through the crowds to the gallery and was left forlorn and disappointed in the lobby outside. “How are the mighty fallen!” noted Chips Channon.18
A few days later she pleaded with Mary to return home from her unit near Hamburg, in Germany, saying, “I am very unhappy & need your help with Papa . . . in our misery we seem, instead of clinging to each other, to be always having scenes.” Clementine blamed herself, telling Mary, “I’m finding life more than I can bear”—in large part because Winston was being “very difficult,” not least over his food. Now restricted to standard rations, he was being served tiny portions of meat and vented his fury at the staff, as well as at Clementine. “I can’t see any future,” she told her terrified daughter. “We are learning how rough & stony the World is.”19
Nor could she face accompanying Winston on what she feared would be an explosively bad-tempered painting holiday in Italy in early September. It was a relief that Sarah agreed to go instead, traveling in the prime ministerial aircraft that Attlee had put at their disposal. From a commandeered marble palace on the shores of Lake Como, where he was royally fussed over, Winston frequently regretted out loud that Clementine had declined to join him. He recognized the blame was mainly his and wanted her to know he was behaving himself. “He says I’m to say—he’s good. He really is!” Sarah reported back, adding that she had been “so distressed” to see her mother “so unhappy and tired” back in London. “Six years is a long time to live at such a high tempo, knowing as fully as you did all the . . . decisions. You are bound to feel a reaction.”20
When Winston returned in early October, Hyde Park Gate was ready. The rearrangement of Chartwell to cut housekeeping costs was nearly finished too. But with the Churchills’ wartime reprieve now over, even Clementine’s economies were not enough to forestall the inevitable financial reckoning and Winston was once again forced to consider selling. It was this prospect that prompted an old friend, Lord Camrose, to marshal other wealthy admirers to buy Chartwell from the Churchills for £50,000 and present it to the National Trust, on condition that Winston and Clementine could go on living there for the rest of their lives. This generosity, and Winston’s lucrative return to writing, meant that for the first time in years the Churchills were to become satisfactorily well-off.
In July 1947 Clementine organized a thank-you lunch for their benefactors (in a characteristic touch, she sent cards entitling their chauffeurs to a free meal at the Wolfe Café in Westerham). Winston celebrated by buying the farms adjoining Chartwell, amounting to some five hundred acres. He was now a country landowner of stature, leader of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, a hugely successful author, and a worldwide war hero and celebrity. His attendance in the House of Commons was only fitful—although he did turn up to make his now-famous intervention condemning the splitting of India and Pakistan into two separate states under the Indian Independence Act of 1947, and rightly predicting appalling sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims. But his devotion to writing The Second World War was considerably more constant, as if he were hell-bent on writing his account of the conflict before anyone else did. In this way, he threw himself into his new life and tried to put the hurt of July 1945 behind him.
From helping to run the war Clementine was reduced once more to running houses. Feeling redundant and ignored, she longed for Winston to retire from politics altogether and for the ceaseless whirl around him to stop. She wanted to share a quieter, calmer life with him. But he pursued his own interests in the same old self-absorbed way, simply expecting her to be on tap whenever he needed her for comfort. Late 1945 was marred by more bitter rows, and she began to doubt whether he had ever valued her at all. It did not help her low spirits that he could be dismissive of her in public. “Please don’t interrupt, Clemmie,” Cecil Beaton heard him growl at a society dinner in December 1945, where Winston was enjoying being the star turn. And yet at the end of the evening she lovingly wrapped him up in coats and scarves before they headed off into the cold night. “I realised to what a degree,” the fascinated Beaton observed, “all in his family circle must pay him due deference.”21
Many marriages, strained by the traumas of war, fell apart around this time. Worried that her parents’ partnership might suffer the same fate, Mary tried to shore her mother up, writing to her that “despite all his difficultness—his overbearing—exhausting temperament—he does love you and needs you so much.” She acknowledged Clementine’s occasional yearning for “the quieter more banal happiness of being married to an ordinary man” rather than the “splendours and miseries of a meteor’s train” and alluded to what she described as the “equality of [their] temperaments,” saying, “You are both ‘noble beasts.’ Your triumph is that you really have been and are—everything to Papa . . . without surrendering your own soul or mind.”22 Clementine had continued to attend her Red Cross and other meetings, but now took doctors’ advice to cancel her forthcoming engagements. She spent time instead replying to the many letters of sympathy she received from friends, former staff and members of the public.
Throughout 1946, Winston was festooned with honors from allies and liberated countries around the world. Early in the year Clementine joined him on a trip to America, where he was showered with honorary degrees and given a civic welcome in New York while he also held talks with President Truman. In March he dominated the news with his thunderous speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, in which he spoke of an ominous “iron curtain” behind which the ancient capitals of Central and Eastern Europe now lay under Soviet servitude. Although only a year, it seemed a long time since Clementine had been so fêted in Soviet Russia; all her hopes of friendliness between Moscow and the West appeared to have been dashed.
Typically, she hovered in the background as Winston lapped up the attention. She was genuinely surprised if anyone noticed her at all. But in June 1946, two months after her sixty-first birthday and in the last round of honors awarded for wartime achievement, Attlee made her a dame for her work on the Aid to Russia Fund and the “many other services which made so marked and brave a contribution.” She was thrilled that he thought she had been “able to help a little”23 (although she would never style herself according to the title she had received). Other awards were to follow. That same month the University of Glasgow granted her an honorary degree for her “womanly grace and . . . wisdom, a power to achieve, a faith to persevere, and a full measure of . . . courage.”24 And, later in the summer, Winston watched her receive a doctorate of civil law at Oxford University for being “the very Soul of Persuasion [and] Guardian Angel of our country’s guardian.”25 It was, however, another two years before she received the recognition that mattered most.
On their fortieth wedding anniversary in September 1948, while they were staying at Cap d’Antibes in the south of France, Winston finally put his thoughts and feelings down in writing. Perhaps only now that others had honored her did he appreciate how vital she had been during the war. Maybe only once he believed his own place in history was assured could he finally take stock of the sacrifices made by those around him. Arguably, he was also realizing that it was thanks to her continued devotion that he was able to carry on in front-line politics in his seventy-fourth year. To Sarah, he proudly remarked, “At her best, no one can beat her.”26 In a note to Clementine pushed under her bedroom door he wrote: “I send this token, but how little can it express my gratitude to you for making my life & any work I have done possible.”27
Feeling appreciated at last, Clementine reverted to her old role of saving Winston from himself. At a dinner in the late 1940s, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed her reaching out to restrain him from drinking too much of the Connaught Hotel’s fine wines.28 On another tour of America in March 1949—where Winston was again celebrated by everyone from the president downward—he decided he was disinclined to bother with a mere university banquet that had been arranged in his honor in Boston. Clementine was quick to tell him to go, sternly saying, “[T]he country has been combed for the finest food and wines, and . . . many of the faculty did not have dinner jackets, or their wives long dresses, and they have bought them specially because you are coming.” Winston did as he was told.29
The war had undoubtedly changed the Churchills’ approach to others as well as to each other. Clementine had taken on some American customs: no longer outraged by the use of first names, she tolerated even “fringe friends” calling her Clemmie. They were both friendlier to their neighbors and staff, and longtime employees such as Grace Hamblin were no longer expected to use the back door. Moppet, Mary’s stalwart nanny, continued to work for the Churchills in other ways after the war (including supervising a flock of chickens that came as a gift) and, even when she retired, continued to be a close companion to the family. With financial worries finally a thing of the past, and plenty of help to run their lives, Clementine became reconciled to living at Chartwell and was ironically more enthusiastic than Winston about improving the grounds.
Feeling equally secure in her marriage, she even encouraged Winston to flirt with old flames such as Violet Asquith or Pamela Lytton—as well as with new admirers, including the beautiful Odette Pol-Roger, the grande dame of his favorite champagne house. Tactfully she would leave him alone with such women for dinner, taking the chance to go to the theater with an assistant. “During the course of the evening,” recalled one secretary, Heather White-Smith (then Wood), “she would whisper with a twinkle ‘I wonder what is going on?’”30 The once-jealous Clementine recognized that such harmless old-age dalliances stopped Winston from getting bored and made him more pliable. They also provided her with welcome free time.
• • •
The war had left Clementine with a taste for public duty but in want of a role. She could be forgiven for being envious of Eleanor Roosevelt, who, at the age of sixty-one, had only just begun her substantive career. Far from sinking into gloomy obscurity following her husband’s death, Eleanor relished her independence, refusing to be seen merely as Franklin’s widow. In December 1945, President Truman had approached her about becoming a delegate to the United Nations, an organization she viewed as her husband’s greatest legacy. During her stint at the UN, Eleanor would chair the commission charged with drawing up an international bill of rights and in 1952 she was even touted as a possible Democratic candidate for the presidency. “Her real life’s work began after FDR’s death,” confirms her grandson David Roosevelt. “The Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] was her crowning achievement.”31
This success did not greatly endear her to Winston. He constantly dodged her requests for meetings or to appear with her on television in America. Clementine was more forthcoming, especially following Eleanor’s trip to London in 1948 for the unveiling of a statue of her husband outside the American embassy. “Your visit has given me joy as it has to so many,” she cabled afterward, signing off with “Love.”32 Mostly it was Eleanor who kept the relationship alive, however. She was assiduous in sending the Churchills her good wishes at Christmas and agreed to appear as Sarah’s first guest on the younger Churchill’s American television chat show in 1951, providing her with a gratifying scoop.33
Eleanor’s globe-trotting was a far cry from her counterpart’s largely domestic existence. Clementine was therefore pleased in 1949 to be invited to chair the YWCA’s National Hostels Committee. It was hardly the UN but it gave her the chance to exercise her talent for organization, and she soon became an effective scourge of hard mattresses and inadequate bathrooms. Nearly a decade later she would involve herself in an appeal for World Refugee Year, and another for the building of New Hall, Cambridge, the university’s third college for women. Never forgetting how her old headmistress Miss Harris had wanted her to go on to university, she maintained a keen interest in women’s education even though none of her own daughters had taken degrees. She argued strongly that the new Cambridge college founded in Winston’s honor in 1960 should be coeducational. Contrary to some reports she initially lost that battle, but Churchill College was one of the first all-male colleges to vote to admit women a few years later.
While she lacked a prominent public role of her own, she at least found a new and perhaps unexpected purpose in her grandchildren. In February 1947, Mary married Christopher Soames, an ebullient young diplomat. Although Clementine was initially untrusting of this new arrival (and perhaps a little jealous), over time she grew to like and rely on him. Fearful of losing Mary as a companion, she suggested the young couple move into the house at Chartwell Farm, which Winston had just bought. Until it was ready, they could stay at the big house. The couple’s noisy lovemaking34 was soon to be heard by everyone, amusing Clementine but driving to distraction the noise-averse Winston—who marched down from his study to order the embarrassed couple to keep quiet. Although never a diaper-changer, Clementine doted on the grandchildren who soon followed, enjoying nursery teas in a way unthinkable with her own brood. Mary recalled how at one family picnic her mother remarked, “You have so much fun with your children that I now realise how I missed out.”35
Making up for lost time, she enjoyed taking her eventual tally of ten grandchildren to Christmas pantomimes in London. And when Edwina Sandys, her eldest granddaughter, made her society debut in 1957, Clementine arranged a dance for her at Claridge’s. (She and Winston even tapped their feet in time to Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” when it was younger sister Celia’s turn a few years later.) But even the diplomatic Mary admitted that she had learned from Clementine’s mistakes. “I made a conscious decision to put my children first because I did feel something had been . . . yes, missing at home.”36
Diana and her husband, Duncan Sandys, with their three children, were also frequent visitors to Chartwell and both got on well with Winston. Clementine disliked Duncan, however, and there remained “an atmosphere of watchfulness”37 whenever she spent time with Diana. Nor had relations with Randolph improved. He continued to upset Winston with his drunken scenes. Clementine found the arguments impossible to bear and would either erupt angrily or withdraw into a chilly silence. Underlying the tension was Randolph’s bitterness at his parents’ collusion in Pamela’s infidelity. Clementine nevertheless insisted on continuing to see her former daughter-in-law. She felt that Pamela had suffered unfairly since the war, in part as a result of outsiders’ jealousy. There were those who accused her of having lived “high on the hog,” and from certain quarters came ridiculous suggestions that she had in some way collaborated with the enemy. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Clementine sympathized when Pamela was abandoned by Ed Murrow—who decided he could not bear to leave Janet (who had long since known about the affair) after she became pregnant with his child during a holiday reconciliation back in the US. Later Clementine was uneasy when Pamela took up with the Italian Gianni Agnelli, heir to the car manufacturer Fiat, and was even more perturbed when Agnelli—followed by a series of other wealthy lovers—showered Pamela with gemstones and couture but also omitted to marry her. “One has to remember that Clementine was very Scottish,” said a younger member of the family. “I remember going with Pamela to lunch with Clementine, and going up in the lift she took off all her jewellery and put it in her handbag. She didn’t want Clementine to see what she had as she thought it would upset her.”38
Only in his rare reflective moments did Randolph concede that his mother had gone out of her way to help him. As chairwoman of a trust Winston had set up at the end of the war to look after his children and grandchildren, she quietly bailed out his extravagances. Randolph married again in November 1948, and Clementine bought the newlyweds a house. A year later his new wife, June Osborne, gave birth to a daughter, Arabella. But by then June was also already finding her husband’s bullying, drinking and temper unbearable.
Sarah returned to acting after the war, and in the autumn of 1946 signed up with an Italian film company in Rome. Still hell-bent on stardom, she excitedly sent a synopsis of her latest movie to all her family but “the only person who really took trouble to read it was [her] father.”39 Gil Winant, who had been “let go” by the less appreciative Truman administration, was still devotedly in love and planning to divorce his wife to be with her. She knew him to be a good man but recoiled from the idea of entering into wedlock again so soon. “It seems that I must always hurt the person who loves me,” she wrote in despair to her father.40 On November 3, 1947, a distraught Winant took a pistol out of his dressing-gown pocket at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, and shot himself. Clementine sent four dozen yellow roses to his funeral and made Winston accompany her to Winant’s London memorial service at St. Paul’s. She was consumed by grief at the loss of her friend; Sarah was riven with guilt.
Sarah returned to America to work in theater and television and later hitched up with the handsome British photographer Antony Beauchamp. Winston took an instant dislike to Beauchamp when they met in Monte Carlo in January 1949. Clementine also had her doubts after hearing him shout at Sarah in her hotel room and gently tried to persuade her daughter against committing herself. But in October Sarah and Beauchamp took a holiday together in Sea Island, Georgia, and they decided to marry there and then. Sarah cabled her parents but by the time her message arrived they had already read about it in the newspapers.
Despairing at her daughter’s stubborn folly over another ill-advised marriage, Clementine ignored Sarah’s pleading letters or replied with brief, businesslike telegrams. Eventually, Beauchamp wrote angrily to Clementine that her disapproval was making Sarah ill. Urgently apologizing, Clementine begged Sarah, “[F]orgive me and believe in my love . . . for you.”41 Mother and daughter were joyfully reunited in England in May 1950 and the following year she bought a London “nest” for the couple in Pimlico. Sarah understood that Clementine was trying to “crush” her doubts about Beauchamp and doing “everything she could to make [them] happy.”42 Clementine could not, however, conceal her fears about the union, or about Sarah’s increasing dependence on alcohol to get her through.
Needing to escape the troubles of family life and restore their strength, in the years immediately after the war Winston and Clementine resumed their enthusiastic holiday-making. As so often before, many of their trips were taken separately, and frequently Winston would be hard at work on the six volumes of the highly successful (and lucrative) The Second World War while he was away. In August 1949, Winston went to stay at Beaverbrook’s cliff-top villa, La Capponcina, near Monte Carlo. While playing cards late one night with friends he suffered a stroke. When informed, Clementine chose to stay at home, in the apparent belief that the media storm her sudden appearance would provoke might be worse than her absence. Fortunately, the stroke was mild and Winston flew home a week later. Even so, it was a sign of things to come.
• • •
The next general election, in February 1950, saw Labour returned to power by the narrowest of margins. Voters had grown tired of living in a gray world of housing shortages and continued rationing while defeated countries seemed to be recovering from the war more swiftly. Despite his stroke, growing deafness and a hernia operation, Winston’s health appeared surprisingly robust and his attacks on Labour’s record were beginning to be heard. Clementine too was feeling better about life, until May 1951, when she endured the first of a series of invasive operations after being admitted to the hospital for a major gynecological “repair.” This time she could afford not to stint on her convalescence and spent weeks resting at Chartwell before embarking on extensive holidays in southwest France, Paris, the Alps and Venice. A snap election was called on her return in early October and now the Tories, after waging an upbeat campaign, came home with a majority of seventeen seats. Just short of his seventy-seventh birthday, Winston was once again prime minister.
Of course there was satisfaction that he had been restored to power after the ignominy of 1945, but she thought him too old and his health too compromised for high office, and she could muster little enthusiasm for an all-Conservative administration—even if it avoided rolling back many of the Attlee reforms. Being in the thick of things again no doubt offered some compensation, though. Winston consulted her, as usual, on appointments—including his plan to offer the prestigious role of war secretary to Duncan Sandys. She quickly warned that he would be exposing himself to allegations of nepotism and Sandys was duly downgraded to the more junior post of minister of supply. This intervention aside, Clementine struggled to summon her old enthusiasm for government. The mold she had broken in 1940, becoming Britain’s first active First Lady, contracted back into a more conventional (and perhaps constitutionally correct) shape during Winston’s second term. She involved herself more with hospitality and ceremony than with helping to run the country. Her hands-on tours in February 1953 of the East Anglian coast—where floods had killed hundreds and made thousands more homeless—were a rare public reminder of her wartime role.
Clementine rented out Hyde Park Gate to the Cuban ambassador so that she could move back into a Downing Street that had also physically changed since her previous residency. The staterooms on the first floor—largely abandoned by the Attlees and used only for the occasional large official function—were now looking drab. The imitation silk curtains installed by the dreaded Ministry of Works had shrunk five inches from the floor and the sofas had been reupholstered in unflattering greens and browns. Clementine knew better than to spend public money on a lavish redecoration, but she somehow worked wonders on the fine Georgian rooms. The Bristol glass chandeliers were scrubbed to sparkling perfection and the addition of simple bunches of flowers, family photographs and William Nicholson paintings in muted colors, displayed in beveled frames, banished the austerity-era dreariness.43 She planned to live in the modest self-contained flat in the attics that the Attlees had created for their own use, but it was not an arrangement that commended itself to Winston, and despite her initial objections about convenience and staffing, she eventually gave way. Citing the need to entertain foreign dignitaries before, during and after the coronation of the new queen (George VI died on February 6, 1952), the Churchills soon moved back downstairs into their customary grandeur, with Clementine compensating as far as possible for what the aesthete Cecil Beaton described as the “puky” new color scheme.
A couple of weeks after the king passed away, Winston suffered from a spasm of the cerebral arteries that caused temporary confusion in his speech. The condition was kept secret outside a small inner circle but it raised questions as to how long he could carry on. Clementine was also weakening. Suffering from an overwhelming sensation of fatigue, she canceled her public engagements that summer and resorted to her old pattern of taking “cures.” This escape from the grind of tending to Winston perked her up—as did another holiday afterward with Sarah and Antony on the island of Capri. When her niece Clarissa announced she was to marry Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, she immediately offered to return from Italy to host the wedding at Downing Street only a week later.
Large-scale entertaining became the dominant chore of Clementine’s second term at Number 10, particularly in the lead-up to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth on June 2, 1953. There was a succession of state visits, a Commonwealth conference, a banquet for the heads of state and government attending the coronation, and a whirl of other lunches, dinners and receptions. On the great day itself Clementine draped herself in the satin robe of the Order of the British Empire and borrowed a tiara from a friend. Riding beside Winston in a coach during the procession she looked radiant, but the strain of the preparations had taken its toll. Though barely noticeable, her arm was encased in a sling because of neuritis, a painful inflammation of the nerves that would in time drive her once again to near collapse.
Three weeks later Clementine hosted a dinner for thirty-eight at Downing Street in honor of the Italian prime minister, Alcide De Gasperi. She presided over the event with her usual élan. As the guests were leaving the first-floor Pillared Room, however, she glanced back only to see Winston struggling to rise from his chair. Christopher Soames quickly informed De Gasperi that the prime minister was overtired, and others present apparently attributed the slur in his speech to the wine. Winston seemed to improve a little once he was helped to bed, but it was confirmed in the morning that he had suffered another stroke. Incredibly, he still held a cabinet meeting, at which his colleagues noticed little untoward, and it took all Clementine’s strength to persuade him not to take questions in Parliament that afternoon. Some excuse would have to be found, as his illness was to be kept utterly secret; Winston wanted nothing to get in the way of an impending conference in Bermuda with US president Eisenhower (he still believed in a very personal style of diplomacy with American presidents as the surest way of influencing them, in this case over the issue of the “Western alliance” approach to Russia at a pivotal point in the Cold War following the death of Stalin earlier in the year). But the next day he was much worse and had to be bundled out of town to the seclusion of Chartwell, and the conference, which had already been announced and attracted worldwide interest, would have to be canceled. Now the queen and the cabinet were informed of the true nature of his illness, but Lords Beaverbrook, Bracken and Camrose took it upon themselves to gag the press about its being a stroke.
In reality, Churchill was losing the use of his left leg and arm and needed constant nursing. Moran feared he would not last the weekend and the family, including a subdued Randolph, swiftly gathered around him. For once Randolph marveled at his mother’s capacity to deal with a crisis, not least because she had herself had a fall and had broken several ribs. “I thought you were magnificent on Saturday & doing everything possible to maintain Papa’s morale,” he wrote to her soon afterward. “So long as that persists no miracle is impossible.”44 Winston did start to improve, albeit slowly, but he was still far from capable of running the country, let alone traveling to Bermuda. Unavoidable decisions were being made by Colville and Soames on the basis of what they thought he would have done, and it is more than probable—for she was in constant attendance—that they did so after occasional consultation with Clementine. The blanket of secrecy about his condition was so carefully maintained by the small, makeshift (and certainly undemocratic) band running the country that only carefully selected visitors, such as Violet (Asquith) Bonham Carter, were permitted. These the ever-alert Clementine waylaid beforehand, making them promise not to offer him unrealistic hopes of staying at Number 10.
“Clemmie said that she felt sure he ought to retire in the autumn & begged me not to urge him to stay on,” Violet noted in her diary.45 She also observed how difficult Winston was to handle, having become prone to sudden and unreasonable rages “like a violent child.” Later Violet wrote to her old rival, with what sounds like genuine praise: “I must tell you darling, what intense admiration I felt for your courage, wisdom & dispassionate judgment.”46 She was right: Clementine was taking an unsentimental view—understanding more clearly than others that her ailing husband could no longer command the same authority, either at home or abroad. The problem was that everyone else was either too scared or did not appreciate the need to suggest to him directly that he should step down, and Clementine was reluctant to make herself a lone voice on this most sensitive of subjects. The unresolved question of his future was to overshadow their lives for the next two years.
As Winston gradually recuperated, so did his impatience rapidly increase. Clementine thought him rashly intent on projecting himself as indestructible. They argued bitterly over whether he should accept an invitation from the queen to attend a horse race in September and then stay with her at Balmoral. True to form, Winston quickly apologized for losing his temper, although he also got his way. He and Clementine duly joined the royals at the St. Leger Stakes at Doncaster, where their forty-fifth wedding anniversary was celebrated joyfully, and then took the train up to Scotland. Perhaps Clementine had been unreasonably pessimistic; after the strain of the past couple of months, Balmoral proved to be an uplifting break.
Shortly afterward Winston flew to the south of France for another holiday at Beaverbrook’s villa. Clementine took the opportunity to spend a few quiet days with Nellie at the theater in Stratford. Rather than begrudging her this brief respite, he acknowledged he was more dependent on her than ever. In private he begged: “Please continue to love me or I shall be very unhappy.”
When Winston resumed his full duties as prime minister in October 1953, a disapproving Clementine fled from him yet again. Although he was stronger—and rescheduled the Bermuda conference with Eisenhower for December—he found her absence troubling. During a short flit to Paris, he wrote to her about his loneliness three times: “One night I had dinner in bed as I did not want anyone but you for company,” he pined.47
Even news that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Second World War, the many other books written over his lifetime and, of course, his famous wartime speeches, failed to lift his mood. In any case, he was prevented from receiving the award in person, as the ceremony in December clashed with the rearranged conference. So Clementine flew to Stockholm in his place, staying with the king and queen of Sweden at the royal palace. She was welcomed not as a mere substitute for her husband but as an honored guest in her own right—Queen Louise described her presence as nothing short of “queenly.”48 The Swedish press followed her closely, writing enthusiastically about everything she wore, said and did. At a banquet for nine hundred people, she was “quite overcome”49 when the band suddenly struck up “Oh My Darling, Clementine.”
Winston’s other great honor that year came when Queen Elizabeth made him a Knight of the Garter, the highest order of chivalry, which is restricted to just twenty-four living recipients at any one time. Some, such as his private secretary Anthony Montague Browne, thought he should have declined the title, going down in history as “the Great Commoner” like Pitt the Elder (at least until he unexpectedly accepted an earldom). Clementine, though now styling herself Lady Churchill, was widely thought to share this view.
• • •
Clementine still loved attending big occasions; it was organizing them that she found so draining. She’d had her fill of playing hostess during the war. But she continued to drive herself and those around her extremely hard; adamant that every event should be flawless, she exploded at staff for the most trifling lapses in standards. Sometimes before yet another Downing Street dinner she would work herself up into a state of near hysteria, only to reappear shortly afterward, immaculate in jewels and finery and smiling gracefully at the guests as if she had not a worry in the world.
Winston remained difficult, of course, and could be brusque and petulant with his entourage. But his sense of fun and loyalty on other occasions made him easier to forgive. When he went to greet the queen on board the royal yacht Britannia upon her return from Australia in 1954, one of his servants was “overcome by the splendor” of the celebrations and became “incapacitated.” Although cross at this indiscretion, Winston worried that if Clementine found out she would insist on instantly sacking the poor man. The evening ended with the prime minister “surreptitiously undressing the servant . . . and . . . tucking him up with many admonitory remarks. Nothing was heard of the incident . . . again.”50
It was not only the staff of whom Clementine could be intolerant. She was becoming increasingly “aggressive” with Winston. Mary thought he indulged her outbursts only because he realized he had imposed another term of office on her against her wishes. Clementine would sometimes fret afterward that she had been unkind or too touchy. Usually, though, it was Winston who would be first to sue for peace, asking for absolution for imagined slights or, as Clementine put it, sweeping her “into the waste paper basket.”51 There is a sense that during his second stint as prime minister Winston took ever greater pains to placate Clementine. As he weakened, she became more dictatorial. During dinner at Chartwell one evening in July 1953, not long after his stroke, he leaned toward her with: “You will not be angry with me, dear, but you ought not to say ‘very delicious.’ ‘Delicious’ alone expresses everything you wish to say.” Eyes blazing, she rounded on him “with a discourse on manners in which,” Moran observed, “Clemmie did all the talking and Winston took in every word.”52
She refused to accept his failing health as an excuse for rudeness. When on one occasion he slumped in a chair, yawned widely and made no effort to talk to a visiting relative, Clementine rebuked him by administering a sharp tap on the knuckles with a fork.53 Her mood was not eased by her neuritis. By the spring of 1954 she was wearing a surgical collar (she hated being seen in it). The treatment favored by her doctors—and by Clementine herself—seems as before to have been to escape from Downing Street, and so in May she packed her bags for a three-week “cure” at Aix-les-Bains. Her health improved—as it invariably did once away from Winston and the family—but the condition would not subside entirely for the rest of her husband’s time in office.
Even without the neuritis she would have had reason to seek solace. Sadness tinged virtually every aspect of Clementine’s life in the 1950s. Devastated by her husband’s flamboyant womanizing, Diana had suffered a nervous breakdown around the same time as Winston’s stroke. Clementine was dismayed to see her daughter in such agony, but their relationship had never been strong and at this point it appears to have collapsed altogether. There were several harrowing scenes when wounding accusations were made on both sides. Randolph later recounted that he had once found Diana armed with a carving knife threatening to kill her mother.54 Clementine’s secretary Chips Gemmell remembers Diana coming to visit when she was “off her head.” “It was terrifying,” she says. “I was asked to make sure she got into a taxi safely afterwards.”55 Diana, by Sarah’s account, nursed a sense of being “greatly wronged” (although by no one specifically) and complained of a “lack of recognition.”56 She found some comfort in her father, who talked to her about Black Dog, but such was Winston’s own health, and the demands on him as prime minister, that this was as much as he could offer.
Sarah tried to help, but her own marriage was in trouble, as Antony had taken to bedding a series of actresses. From 1955 they lived apart and by August 1957 she was on the brink of filing for divorce when Clementine phoned her with tragic news: Antony had taken his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. Yet again a man Sarah had loved had committed suicide—and all the self-recrimination that had attended Winant’s death came flooding back. In January 1958 she was in the US working on a television program and renting what she described as a “rickety cabin” in Malibu. It was outside her home one evening that she was arrested and charged with drunkenness. Humiliating pictures of her were splashed across the newspapers, followed by accounts that she had behaved so violently in her police cell that it had been necessary to restrain her with a straitjacket.
Clementine quickly arranged for Sarah to fly to the south of France, away from the press pack. She joined her for a few days, and during her long, nonjudgmental talks with her daughter the two women drew much closer. Sarah then went on to a Swiss clinic, of which her only memory was being probed about whether her drinking was linked to her loving her father more than her mother. Upon her return to Britain there were more tussles with the police and court appearances for her public drunkenness (Clementine once questioned Sarah’s wisdom in wearing a leopard-skin coat in the dock and remonstrated on another occasion against the police’s forcibly carrying her daughter into the proceedings). There was even a ten-day spell in Holloway Prison. Clementine largely bore the burden of instructing solicitors, dealing with the newspapers and trying to persuade Sarah to undergo more treatment. Inevitably, Sarah’s beloved career suffered. Clementine was relieved when she found her daughter sober enough to be “pleasant,” but there was now a persistent fear that Sarah would succumb to a breakdown, or even kill herself with booze.
Clementine had few confidantes to turn to. She had lost her sole surviving sibling to cancer in February 1955. Nellie was sixty-six when she died, little more than six months after her diagnosis. Clementine’s staff at that time remember her nursing her sister in her final days and being utterly bereft at her death. “There was an even greater loneliness about her now,” recalled her assistant of the time, Heather White-Smith. One of Nellie’s last outings had been to Winston’s eightieth birthday party in November 1954, which was not the joyful occasion Clementine had hoped. Parliament had decided to mark the occasion by presenting him with a portrait by the fashionable artist Graham Sutherland. Clementine took immediately to the debonair and charming painter, describing him as a “wow” (the highest Churchill accolade) even though she thought many of his modernist paintings “savage” and “cruel.” Winston agreed to several sittings, and a fortnight before the big day he was shown the final work. Clementine was initially intrigued by the untraditional treatment, but Winston’s reaction was instant loathing—and she too came to resent how it presented an ancient, grumpy figure in depressing grays and browns, colors he detested. “She thought it made him hideous,” Grace Hamblin recalled.
This was not the heroic legacy either had envisioned, but Clementine spent the next two weeks reminding him that the hated gift had been born out of the affection and respect of his colleagues. The twenty-three thousand birthday telegrams and cards that poured in from around the world helped to lift both their spirits so that by November 30 itself, they were able to receive the painting in good grace. As Parliament welcomed them in Westminster Hall with a deafening ovation, Clementine glowed.
Afterward the portrait was hidden away in the basement at Chartwell, until one day Clementine asked Grace for her help. “Lady Churchill was very much exercised. [She asked,] ‘So now, what do you suggest?’” Grace offered to destroy it, and with the help of her brother sneaked it out of Chartwell “in the dead of night” and took it by van to his home several miles away, where they lit a bonfire in the back garden out of the sight of passersby. “It was a huge thing so I couldn’t lift it alone,”57 Grace revealed in an extract of a taped interview closed to the public for twenty years. She threw the painting on the fire and watched it burn, telling Clementine the next morning what she had done.
For years, rumors circulated about the portrait’s fate, and various theories were expounded as to the circumstances of its disappearance. “I destroyed it,” Grace confessed on the secret tape before her death, “but Lady C and I decided we would not tell anyone. She was thinking of me.”
The birthday applause had been genuine, but so were the growing concerns about Winston’s “twilight” powers. While he chose to remain in office Clementine never hinted beyond their inner circle at her own feelings and treated sniping in the press with contempt; she had no desire to “hound” him into resigning and was implacably opposed to others’ forcing him out, which she feared would literally kill him. But there were signs of brewing unrest in the cabinet that could be ignored no longer, and given her unique influence over the prime minister, it was inevitable she would be somehow drawn in. One morning in July 1954, Harold Macmillan, then minister of housing, visited her alone in Downing Street. He told her Winston no longer commanded the support of all his cabinet colleagues and would have to step down. She listened and agreed to convey his arguments to her husband.58 But then, most unusually, her courage failed her. Clearly shaken, she sent for Colville as soon as Macmillan had left the room and arranged for him to join her and Winston at lunch.
Clementine was still agitated when the three met shortly afterward in the white-paneled dining room; however, she finally summoned up the resolve to relate the morning’s events. Winston reacted surprisingly well, merely summoning Macmillan that afternoon to inform him that he intended to “soldier on.” Clementine never forgave the man she now considered the leader of an anti-Winston cabal. Still, it was now clear that politically the prime minister was living on borrowed time. In the New Year, after four years of Tory government, thoughts inevitably turned to the next general election and he at last conceded that he could no longer postpone setting a date for his departure. Early April was chosen but Clementine’s relief was tempered by fears for his morale. Her neuritis returned with a “vengeance”59 and in March she spent two weeks at Chequers. Winston joined her on weekends but during the week he was alone, with only dark thoughts for company. This time his majestic career at the top table of politics was really at an end. “It’s the first death—& for him, a death in life,”60 Clementine told Mary.
Before stepping down, however, they were to hold one of their famously good parties. The first day of April had been dominated by gossip about Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two Foreign Office officials who had disappeared four years previously and were now suspected of having passed secrets to the Russians. The mood quickly lifted as guests climbed the Downing Street stairs for after-dinner drinks—or rather the forty-six magnums of Pol Roger champagne ordered by Grace. The invitation cards stated merely that Sir Winston was “At Home” to celebrate Lady Churchill’s seventieth birthday, yet there were distinct undertones that the event marked the end of an era. Clementine’s Labour friends were present among the convivial crowd, and she made a point of greeting Mrs. Attlee with a kiss. Winston’s old loves Violet Bonham Carter and Pamela Lytton were also in attendance, mixing with Sylvia Henley and the surviving Romillys and Mitfords. Clementine’s secretary Heather Wood and the other staff mingled amiably, wearing specially bought evening dresses. (Anthony and Clarissa Eden were absent, however, and his subsequent distancing of himself from the Churchills hurt both deeply.)
In the throng, Cecil Beaton noticed that for once all eyes were on Clementine rather than Winston. For most people her face was almost as familiar as his—“her Grecian profile, the deep-set pale-blue eyes . . . These two faces [had] together travelled through many epochs in [the British people’s] personal history. Tonight was a private goodbye.” She was dressed in black lace with embroidered orchids at the waist; “her eyes were focused to other distances.” Beaton heard that she was in agony (as she confessed to Violet, she was “doped” up to ensure she was “gay as a lark”) but he also noted that there was still “fire and dash in the consort of the old warrior.”61
With the newspapers on strike, the reaction was surprisingly muted when Winston resigned a few days later on the afternoon of April 5. The following day the Churchills hosted a good-bye tea party for the Downing Street staff and Winston departed for Chartwell, cheers ringing in his ears as he walked the long corridor from the Cabinet Room to the front door for the last time. Clementine stayed in London to orchestrate the move, joining him a few days later for Easter but spending most of the time in bed. Shortly afterward, they set off with Colville and the Prof for a holiday in Sicily. Sadly they decided to come back early—the weather was cold and gray and Clementine was in constant pain.
• • •
So began the Churchills’ final stretch outside the magic circle of power—for the first time without hope of rejoining it. Winston descended into a “state of apathy and indifference.”62 Only when a furor over the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, and her hopes of marrying the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend threatened to spark another royal constitutional crisis in the autumn of 1955 was a flicker of interest sparked. Initially, Winston thought the princess should be allowed to have her way, and may have intended to make his position clear. But, recalling how he had so nearly torpedoed his career by supporting Edward VIII’s plans to marry Wallis Simpson, Clementine responded bluntly: “If you are going to begin the abdication all over again, I’m going to leave [you].”63
Clementine’s daughters agreed that the adjustment to civilian life was worse for her than for their father. He was still showered with admiring attention, and he had his cronies, his painting and writing, and, above all, Chartwell. By contrast, she had hoped to enjoy their liberation from high office by socializing in London and going to the theater, but decades of devotion had left her with few friends, and Nellie’s death had robbed her of one of her few remaining sources of female companionship. Sometimes she became so desperate to talk that she unburdened herself to less-than-discreet or -loyal acquaintances. On more than one occasion she had long heart-to-hearts at crowded parties with the notorious gossip Noël Coward—once she was “extremely trenchant” about Randolph, for instance, and on another occasion she poured out her feelings about Diana’s illness.64 In 1958 she tried to contact some old Berkhamsted school friends,65 and often she immersed herself in the light escapism of a Barbara Cartland novel. But mostly, in her loneliness, she turned to the young women she employed as secretaries. She took them to the royal box at Wimbledon, to the theater, cinema and art galleries, and invited them for lunch, drinks or even just to watch television.
One of these women was Shelagh Montague Browne (Anthony’s second wife), who before she married lived in the flat above the Churchills’ Hyde Park Gate offices. She remembered how Clementine would “ring up and say ‘I see you’re in, dear, would you like to come and watch Emergency Ward Ten with me?’” Clementine would then encourage her to stay for supper, although Montague Browne sometimes tried to plead a prior engagement. On other occasions, when Clementine spotted friends arriving at her flat, she would telephone to say, “They look interesting.” “So I would invite her over for a drink and she would arrive in an instant. I thought how vulnerable she was and how she needed girlfriends.”66 Chips Gemmell remembers one poignant lunch with Clementine, saying, “I saw her hand coming towards me very slowly so I took it. I think it was a sweet gesture.”67 In August 1955, she invited one of her favorites, eighteen-year-old Heather Wood, to accompany her to St. Moritz for a month. Heather found herself listening to Mrs. Winston Churchill’s “most intimate” secrets68 and, for a time at least, became almost a surrogate daughter. Early one morning, there was a gentle knock on Heather’s hotel room door, and Clementine was standing outside “like a small, shy girl.” “I do hope you are not being worn out dear by this tiresome old woman,” she said.69
Winston worried about her deeply but was either too miserable himself or too immersed in his own pursuits—he was still writing and painting into the early 1960s—to help her. Although he was lonely and increasingly relied on his private secretary Montague Browne for companionship he rarely accompanied his wife on her chosen jaunts. It was another man, a friendly American widower called Lewis Einstein, who provided her with male company in St. Moritz—as well as a large chauffeured car to take her on scenic drives through the mountains.
Clementine returned to Chartwell from St. Moritz in September 1955 in good spirits, only for her neuritis to flare up again within a couple of months. Regular self-administered injections of pethidine, a highly addictive opiate, brought only partial relief and added insomnia to her troubles. Her evident anguish was starting to frighten those close to her, prompting a Roman Catholic friend to give her a rosary. Worried that her mother was becoming desperate, Sarah wrote: “I wish all was better for you—When you hold your rosary at night—do not wish for sad things . . . pray we can all yet be happy—I am powerless & incapable in front of your despair—but I thank you for sharing it with me—it makes me feel closer to you.”70
A Chartwell family Christmas saw a brief improvement in her condition, but in January 1956 Clementine was admitted to the hospital for three weeks. Winston had already returned to the south of France to stay at La Pausa, a luxurious stone villa built in 1927 by Coco Chanel and now owned by his literary agent, Emery Reves. He wrote to her every couple of days and at one point planned to return. Clementine preferred him to stay put and, upon finally being discharged, ignored his entreaties to convalesce with him at La Pausa and set off instead on an eight-week cruise to Ceylon. In need of undemanding company, she had planned to take the sweet-natured Heather Wood, but Wood had decided to leave to create a life of her own. (Winston tried personally to persuade her to stay, to no avail, although she felt the “parting” from her “second mother” “very deeply”; Clementine gave her a gift of a V for Victory lapel brooch in rubies, diamonds and sapphires.) Since Heather would not come to Ceylon she took Sylvia Henley. The two cousins enjoyed themselves but Winston became irritated when Clementine failed to write for long periods. Every time he tried to persuade her to stop at La Pausa on her way home she countered with an unconvincing excuse, such as not having the right clothes. Montague Browne interpreted Clementine’s avoidance of her husband as her way of enduring a life lived “on the brink of a nervous breakdown.” Yes, she “shied away” from the enormous “stress of [Winston’s] gradual but perceptible physical and mental decline . . . It was never neglect; it was exhaustion.”71
She returned to Britain in better spirits on April 12 but departed after only a month to stay with Lewis Einstein in Paris. In August she again hooked up with her attentive “crony”—as her family began to refer to him—back in St. Moritz. If Winston felt any jealousy toward this innocent liaison there is no evidence of it in his letters or behavior. In fact, the Churchills had reestablished a mutually viable pattern: short periods together in London or Chartwell, between often lengthy trips apart.
For his part, Winston was now back in France with Reves and his Texan girlfriend, the former model Wendy Russell. Clementine’s dislike of Reves and Russell was clear, and was another reason she dodged La Pausa. She suspected them of parading Winston as a trophy and disapproved of how they indulged him. On returning home after one of his trips there, he made the mistake of ordering sauce with his fish. Clementine flared up immediately. “This is not the South of France!” she declared pointedly. “We are not vulgar, rich people!”72
Reves and Russell would invite selected guests for Winston’s entertainment. One such was Noël Coward, who visited La Pausa for lunch in June 1956. Coward certainly amused Winston but he also observed that the former war leader was “absolutely obsessed with a senile passion for Wendy Russell. He followed her about the room with his brimming eyes and wobbled after her across the terrace.”73 There are indications that Clementine herself suspected Winston had a crush on Russell (although she feared for his dignity rather than for his fidelity). In any case she finally persuaded Winston to spend some time away from Reves, in the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, by promising to visit if he did. But it was not until he took up with the Greek ship owner Aristotle Onassis that Clementine extended her stays. Onassis was a charismatic charmer and his wife, Tina, was kind and engaging; here was a couple that appealed to them both.
The Onassis yacht, the Christina, was itself a wonder and at the end of September 1958 Winston and Clementine were invited to join a Mediterranean cruise. They boarded on a high, having just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary together at Beaverbrook’s Riviera villa, La Capponcina. In one of his rare flashes of generosity, Randolph had arranged for an avenue of golden roses to be planted in the walled garden at Chartwell to commemorate the occasion, and engaged a number of well-known artist friends, including Augustus John and Cecil Beaton, to paint pictures of the flowers for a leather-bound album to be presented to his parents on the day. For once Clementine was simultaneously astonished and delighted by her son.
Reves and Russell were now out of the picture and peeved. Clementine had vetoed them from the Christina guest list, declaring she would bail out if they came on board. Onassis indulged her and subsequently invited the Churchills on four more cruises. He proved himself a perfect host, gathering agreeable guests and choosing routes around the Greek islands and the West Indies that he knew would appeal to them. Clementine had adored sea journeys ever since her cruises on the Rosaura in the 1930s, and life aboard the Christina brought out the best in her; now it was Clementine, rather than Winston, who held court over dinner.
The happy setup changed, however, when Onassis began an affair with the opera singer Maria Callas. Celia Sandys joined her grandparents on the Christina in July 1959 when Callas was also there and remembers, “[W]e watched events unfolding, and met each evening in my grandmother’s cabin to gossip.”74 Onassis and Tina separated soon afterward and divorced in 1962. Winston traveled with Onassis on three more occasions, but Clementine, out of loyalty to Tina, never did so again.
Winston’s final cruise with Onassis, in 1963, took him to the Adriatic. By his side were his faithful secretary Anthony Montague Browne; young Winston, now a twenty-two-year-old journalist; and Jock Colville and his wife. Against his better judgment, he had also been persuaded to include his son. Over dinner one evening Randolph attacked his father verbally in front of other guests, making “violent reproaches” about how Winston and Clementine had encouraged Pamela to seduce Americans during the war. “What he said was unseemly in any circumstances,” Montague Browne related, “but in front of comparative strangers it was ghastly.”75 Twenty years on, Randolph still could not forgive or forget.
Back home the ever-fragile Diana was in torment. Three years earlier her twenty-five-year marriage to Duncan Sandys had ended in divorce, breaking her heart. In early 1963 he brought her fresh pain and humiliation when he became embroiled in a notorious sex scandal. During the Duchess of Argyll’s divorce case, photographs were released in which the duchess was shown wearing nothing but pearls while fellating someone whose face is out of view; it was widely speculated that Sandys was the “headless man” in question. While Clementine never became close to Diana, she was sympathetic about this latest ordeal and mother and daughter now at least spent more time together.
A bright spot in the gloom was offered by Sarah, who had managed finally to put unhappiness behind her when she married again in April 1962. Even Clementine took to Baron (Henry) Audley, a sensitive and engaging fifty-year-old man of weak health. Now in her late forties, Sarah could barely believe her luck. They settled happily in Spain, until fifteen months later, in July 1963, Henry suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. The bishop of Gibraltar conducted the funeral at the British naval cemetery in Málaga, but beforehand he visited her privately to seek reassurances about her behavior and sobriety during the ceremony: “You won’t let me down will you?” he asked. Two days later she returned to England for a time and went to Chartwell for lunch, where her father met her at the door. “We stared silently at each other; then he took my hand and said simply, ‘We must close ranks and march on.’”76
• • •
Not even the most luxurious existence could protect the Churchills from the depredations of old age. Since mid-1958 Winston had employed a male nurse, Roy Howells, and as he entered his late eighties he suffered further bouts of pneumonia. Especially troubling was his descent into deafness. Clementine badgered him to wear a hearing aid, but he resisted what he felt to be a fiddly imposition; he talked less and less, leaving her to fill the lulls in conversation. So far as she was able, she tried to keep his chin up, but Clementine was now carrying the burden of a husband who quite openly wanted to die.
Nor was she in fine fettle herself. After at last conquering her neuritis in the summer of 1958 she had developed shingles, which left her with a drooping eyelid and in need of yet more surgery. Recurrent flu dogged her winters, and she continued to suffer from periodic lows. In 1961, with Winston due to embark on a cruise with Onassis, she agreed to be admitted to the hospital for a complete rest and checkup. There was no obvious physical cause of her severe fatigue but she was formally diagnosed with depression.
After Winston’s resignation as prime minister, he rarely spoke in the Commons and even less in his constituency. And yet his responsibilities as a member of Parliament continued. Once again, Clementine was obliged to act as his proxy. Her diligence minimized the mutterings among younger party members, but she herself remonstrated with her husband for relying on her too often to stand in for him. He hated constituency glad-handing and did nothing to hide it, so she strove to keep him out of trouble by making “every visit . . . seem a great pleasure.”77 She was anxious lest the voters guess (correctly) that his excuses were mere covers for a lack of interest.
Nevertheless, in the election year of 1959 he returned to Woodford to make it clear he would be standing again. That October, at the age of seventy-four, Clementine joined Winston on the trail to fight their fifteenth election together. Weary as she was, she understood that this was the sole remnant of a once magnificent public life. That did not stop her from thinking it was high time he gave up, and when Winston won back his seat with a reduced majority, it was apparent that others thought so too.
Three years later, in the summer of 1962, Winston broke his hip at the Hôtel de Paris in a fall. He needed two operations and a lengthy period of recuperation. Clementine rarely felt able to leave his side as he was an obstreperous patient and a danger to himself when left unattended. He refused to stop smoking cigars in bed and appeared oblivious when on one occasion he set fire to a napkin, valance and carpet. Even his professional nurse, Howells, found him exhausting. “He drained the people around him of every last drop of energy,” he recalled. “Apart from the physical strain, the mental wear and tear was tremendous.”78 After one especially unproductive visit to her onetime idol, Violet finally conceded she would never have done as Winston’s wife. “It is as though you alone could reach him with comfort & amusement,” she wrote to Clementine. “Your ‘private line’ with him has remained intact . . . You have had so many years of . . . anxiety & strain with never a let-up—& now W needs you & claims more from you than ever before.”79
Virtually unable to walk, he wanted merely to sit silently gazing into the fire or, when at Chartwell, at the view. He got muddled when playing cards, he rarely picked up his paintbrushes and, partly as a result of his deafness, he would descend into long periods of complete silence. Even mealtimes passed with barely a flicker of the old Winston. Clementine now had to shout to make herself heard. Sometimes he lay in bed all day doing nothing. He told Diana, “My life is over, but not yet ended.”80 A troupe of nurses tended him around the clock and the expense of it all frightened Clementine. To save money she started taking buses instead of the car, until Winston found out and made her promise to stop.
They began to feel as if they were practically the only survivors from a former age. Roosevelt and Stalin (although both younger) were long since dead and Clementine was troubled to hear, in October 1962, that Eleanor Roosevelt had fallen ill with a virulent strain of tuberculosis. She cabled the former First Lady with best wishes from them both and Eleanor wrote back, with a visibly shaky signature, to thank Clementine for her kindness. “The bug is still with me but I hope to win the battle shortly. With warm good wishes to both of you and hoping that you are both enjoying good health.”81 She died just three weeks later.
Finally, in May 1963, Winston accepted the realities of his own position. With great sadness he announced he would not be standing again as an MP and the Commons prepared to pay him a special tribute. But when Clementine received a copy of the proposed wording the following year, she reacted with cold fury, denouncing it as “mangy.”82 It was duly rewritten to her liking to include a reference to the “unbounded admiration and gratitude” of the House of Commons for Winston’s services to the nation and the world, and above all his “inspiration of the British people when they stood alone.” Clementine was at Winston’s side when the reworded resolution, printed on vellum, was delivered by a delegation led by the prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. After a brief private ceremony in the downstairs dining room at Hyde Park Gate, the politicians hurried back to the Commons and the present day.
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Winston’s health appeared to rally over the summer, but by the autumn of 1963 it was clear that Clementine’s was deteriorating. David Montgomery, the field marshal’s son, remembers even his notoriously unemotional father remarking that “he was worried about the toll the strain . . . was taking from her.” “She struggled to be jolly . . . and to keep her equilibrium,” recalls her assistant Shelagh Montague Browne. “She was very courageous.” Sadly she became so overwrought that in early October she had to be sedated and admitted to Westminster Hospital, where her now severe depression was treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Montague Browne remembers being told that the shock treatment was for “a chemical imbalance in her brain.”83
Clementine was still in the hospital when, during the night of October 19–20, Diana, who had also been receiving ECT,84 took a huge overdose of sleeping pills and was found dead on the bedroom floor of her Belgravia flat by her housekeeper. She had recently been a great help and support to both her parents as well as Sarah in her grief over Henry’s death. She had also found fulfillment in her work helping many others through the Samaritans, a fast-growing charity set up ten years previously by a London vicar to help the desperate and the suicidal. She had lunched with her daughter Edwina that very day in seemingly good spirits and had also made plans to visit her mother in the hospital and to dine with her father the following evening. Her death was therefore both “unexpected” and “inexplicable.” Mary had to rush to the hospital, while still reeling from the shock, to break the news to her mother before she heard it on the radio. One small mercy was that Clementine was already heavily sedated, cushioning the blow. As both Sarah and Randolph were abroad, Mary had similarly to inform Winston. “He sat the whole day without speaking or moving, in tears,” recalls his former secretary Jane Portal. “I think he felt—I don’t know about Clementine, but I’m sure any parent would—what had he done to make this happen?” Mary then had to phone the newly widowed Sarah at her home in Spain. Clementine was released from the hospital only the day before Diana’s funeral and neither she nor Winston was well enough to attend—although they were both present at the memorial service the following week, which was held at St. Stephen Walbrook, the City of London church where the Samaritans had been founded. An air of immeasurable sadness now hung over the Churchill family.
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In November 1964 Winston turned ninety. Clementine took great care over his birthday celebrations, beginning by singing him “Happy Birthday” in his bedroom in the morning. “That was lovely,” he said, smiling.85 Later she gave him a small gold heart for his watch chain, engraved with “90,” and gathered the clan for a candlelit feast of all his favorite dishes. He beamed at everyone but was obviously frail and somehow detached.
In the new year, on January 12, he suffered another stroke, and over the following days slid into a coma. Clementine brought in a priest to pray at his bedside, but mostly she just sat serenely, holding his right hand, his beloved marmalade cat asleep at his feet. He was deeply unconscious but clasped her fingers so tightly the nurses were convinced he was aware of her presence. It was as if he simply could not let her go. Slipping quietly into his softly lit bedroom, the family came to see these two great figures together for one last time. As Winston took his final breaths the cold winter morning of January 24, they instinctively sank to their knees.
Later Clementine invited Violet—the woman who had loved but lost him—to say her good-byes. She went into his room to spend ten minutes with him alone. Two days afterward, Winston’s body was taken to Westminster Hall to lie in state until the burial on January 30. Every day, often after dark, Clementine slipped in through a side door to watch the mournful but dignified queues of people coming to pay their last respects.
Churchill had long ago declared that he wanted to be buried like a soldier and would not make do with what he scornfully dubbed the 1945 “farm-cart funeral” of Lloyd George. Clementine was consulted on numerous aspects of the occasion to ensure that his wishes were carried out (he wanted military bands, for instance, of which he was given nine), but in any case the queen had previously made it clear that he would be granted the honor of a full state funeral. Thus, with imperial ceremony, his coffin was drawn slowly through London’s streets from Westminster to St. Paul’s Cathedral by one hundred and four ratings and officers of the Royal Navy. Hundreds of thousands lined the route on that bitterly cold day, while men and women from wartime resistance movements in France, Denmark and Norway raised a hundred flags in salute.
Clementine followed in silence with Sarah and Mary in the queen’s horse-drawn town coach, equipped with lap rugs and hot-water bottles against the penetrating chill. Sarah, although drunk at the time, remembered the creaking of the carriage, the sounds of the horses’ hooves, the distant ninety-gun salute and the drums “beating out the relentless precision of the slow march.”86 When they arrived at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Her Majesty was already in her pew—an exceptional suspension of protocol on the part of the monarch—and the Churchills were told there was no need to curtsy. A gallant Randolph lent his arm to his mother and escorted her inside, where fifteen past and present heads of state including Presidents de Gaulle and Eisenhower were among the thousands waiting.
Another mourner, Cecil Beaton, thought age and grief made Clementine look more beautiful than ever. He found himself unutterably moved by “the face of Lady Churchill asking for instructions as to procedure, with small jerky little steps, yet marvellously dignified, a face in a crowd, another sample of selflessness and pure feeling.”87 Yet she still frowned upon “crying on parade” and remained dry-eyed all through the day.
After the service Churchill’s coffin was loaded onto a motor launch and borne down the Thames to a special train waiting at Waterloo station. The booms of the dockside cranes were lowered as he passed and fighter jets dipped their wings as they roared overhead. Yet more silent crowds lined the tracks as the train made its way to Oxfordshire. Clarissa Eden told Beaton that the “family all felt touched” by the groups of people gathered at “country stations and footballers standing to attention” as “Churchills galore” raced by in their carriages “all eating, and drinking Medoc.”88 She described turning to look at her aunt and feeling “deeply touched by Clemmie who looked frightened, muttering ‘How kind you all are. Where do you want me to go next?’”
At the brief private burial at Bladon, the Blenheim parish church, Clementine’s greatest wish was that the press should stay away. So, with just the family and a few close friends around her, she laid a wreath of roses, tulips and carnations, and bade her private farewell with the words: “I will soon be with you again.”89