Clementine never slept a night at Chartwell again. Within weeks of Winston’s death she had sold both London properties and let go many of the staff. It was as if she needed to shed these symbols (and expenses) of her marriage before she could begin the final chapter of her life alone. Not that her devotion to Winston diminished; henceforth, her work was to guard his reputation and legacy. To that end she immediately handed Chartwell over to the National Trust and asked for it to be returned to the appearance and layout of its 1930s heyday. With the public soon to be permitted to troop around the house, all traces of Winston’s struggles and indignities as an old man were to be expunged. He was to be remembered as a great statesman and warrior rather than a frail human being, and so his bedroom had to be specifically shut off from view. Clementine would remain until her death intimately involved in decisions about how to present Chartwell to best effect, without having to shoulder the ultimate responsibility. Mary believed that as a consequence her mother derived more genuine satisfaction from the house in the last twelve years of her life than in the forty she had lived there with Winston.
Home was now an elegant five-bedroom flat at 7 Prince’s Gate, a stone’s throw from Hyde Park. Diana’s daughter Celia Sandys visited often and remembered that her grandmother continued to live in considerable style, with a cook, two maids, a secretary and “a driver and car purring at the door.”1 Inflation and nursing costs eventually began to stretch her finances, though, and toward the end of her life she began to fret about money again. In February 1977 it was announced that she had chosen to sell some of her paintings, and the following month an auction of five works fetched £86,300. The sale prompted an outcry—LADY CHURCHILL OBLIGED TO SELL HEIRLOOMS was how the Times reported the story on its front page. Thousands of people sent her donations from their savings, which her secretary dutifully returned. Others began a campaign to persuade the government to grant her an allowance. In the end, she had to put out a statement: “I greatly deplore any idea that either special legislation or an appeal should be initiated.” “It was completely ridiculous, she lived very comfortably,” recalls Celia. “But there was a panic that she was going to run out of money. Maybe she didn’t have a lot in the bank but it was embarrassing that pensioners were sending her teabags.”
Clementine had drawn Celia closer to her since Diana’s suicide in 1963. After Winston’s death she also softened her attitude to Randolph, and mother and son at last found some enjoyment in each other. She went to stay with him on several occasions at his house at East Bergholt in Suffolk, and he would go to noticeable lengths to make her visits “enchanting,” picking vast bunches of scented flowers from the garden, and on one occasion placing a copy of Francis Bacon’s Essays by her bed. He was still prone to drunken rages—one year she bought a cheap new dinner service from the Reject Shop for his birthday to replace the finer ones that had been smashed2—but she had been touched by his tenderness following Winston’s death, when he had told her, “I know what a terrible time you have had in the last ten or fifteen years . . . When you have had a good holiday and rest you must try to create a new life for yourself.”3
The Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, seems to have reached a similar conclusion. Four months after Winston’s funeral he made her a life peer as Baroness Spencer-Churchill of Chartwell. Wilson’s thinking was said to be that it would please the people to know that Clementine had been persuaded to rejoin public life. For her part, she was thrilled at entering Parliament on her own account and derived great pleasure from taking her seat in the House of Lords on the crossbenches, independent of any particular party. She intended to become very active and in July 1965, no doubt remembering Winston’s agonies over the death penalty during his time as home secretary, voted in favor of the bill proposing that capital punishment be abolished. That first year she made thirteen appearances, but in 1966 she attended just seven times and did not vote or make a speech. In the past she had shown time and again a flair for politics, as well as a capacity to shine on big occasions, but at the age of eighty, with her hearing and sight fading, her body if not her mind was no longer up to the task. The tragedy is that it was all twenty years too late. If Winston, like Roosevelt, had died in 1945, as she had feared at the time, she might have secured her own great political reputation. Yet this was not to be, as she had dared to imagine all those years ago, her “reincarnation” into politics in her own right.
There was, however, release. An almost ethereal calm seems to have descended on Clementine during her nearly thirteen years as a widow. All those nervous complaints largely disappeared, even if the harsh challenges of her life did not. The sudden if not entirely unexpected death of Randolph from a heart attack at the age of fifty-seven in June 1968 hit her cruelly, of course, but there was no emotional collapse as of old, merely a controlled silence. She had now outlived three of her five offspring, and Sarah was still drinking herself to her grave by slow stages. Only on days when she knew her mother was coming to take her out to lunch would she try particularly hard to stay sober; she was to survive Clementine by just five years. By contrast Mary was always the perfect daughter, living a rich and full life until 2014.
Contemporaries “took a very dim view of the Churchill children,” David Montgomery, son of the field marshal, recalls. “Apart from Mary they were seen as disastrous.”4 Now established as the great matriarch of the Churchill clan, Clementine responded by seeking to protect the family’s good name wherever she could. She took a stern line with Randolph’s daughter, Arabella, in the 1970s over the “unfortunate” publicity when the girl joined a group of people occupying empty buildings. Even Winston’s greatness was dealt the occasional punch by newly published diaries or revisionist histories, though such “gusts of controversy” usually blew themselves out. His towering reputation across the globe was secure, and if her light was fading, so be it. At least she was still remembered among the Churchills’ surviving wartime allies. The only letter she received on the first anniversary of Winston’s death was a warm, handwritten expression of solidarity from Charles de Gaulle.5
She enjoyed the winter of her life as she had always hoped: living in London and visiting theaters and galleries. Her new secretary, Nonie Chapman, proved to be a faithful companion, while other former members of staff, such as Doreen Pugh and Heather Wood, would sometimes stop by for lunch in her beautiful dining room. “I always came from one to two thirty exactly as she got tired,” remembered Pugh. “She liked these one-to-ones.” Violet was a regular caller, until her death in 1969, and Pamela remained loyal too, sending Clementine presents and visiting from time to time—as in 1971, when she finally got engaged to her wartime lover Averell Harriman. “My dear,” Clementine said, smiling knowingly, “it’s an old flame rekindled!”6 As Winston’s former secretary Jane Portal, who also stayed in touch, put it: “Perhaps at the end she was, while treasuring her memories, able finally to be herself.” On good days she was still capable of tilting her head back to emit a youthful laugh. She was also at last able to cultivate her own friendships, old (such as Field Marshal Montgomery) and new, developing a great affection for Lady Gladys d’Erlanger, whom she called by her nickname “Smut,” the mother of young Winston’s wife, Minnie.
In Winston’s final years life had clung to him, not he to life, and Clementine could surely be forgiven for feeling a sense of relief immediately after his death; no doubt her existence without him was more restful. But as she grew older his absence pained her more and more. “What I miss most about Winston is his company, his affectionate nature, his wit and his longing to kindle passions. His imagination was boundless,” she told the Times on her birthday in 1974.
Immaculately dressed as always, Clementine was lunching at home on December 12, 1977, when Nonie noticed a sudden change in her breathing. She died a few minutes later from a heart attack, aged ninety-two, proud and unbowed until the end. Her funeral, attended only by family and close friends, was held a few days afterward at Holy Trinity Brompton, the fashionable Anglican church in South Kensington where she had worshiped in her latter years. She was buried quietly with Winston at Bladon, as she had always planned. On January 24, 1978, thirteen years to the day since his death, a memorial service was held for her at Westminster Abbey. The Labour prime minister James Callaghan attended, as did the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal parties, Margaret Thatcher and David Steel. Her grandson Winston read an extract from the sermon spoken at her wedding, including these prescient lines: “There must be in the statesman’s life many times when he depends upon the love, the insight, the penetrating sympathy and devotion of his wife.”
• • •
Clementine was not cut out from birth for the part history handed her. Adversity, combined with sheer willpower, burnished a timorous, self-doubting bundle of nerves and emotion into a wartime consort of unparalleled composure, wisdom and courage. The flames of many hardships in early life forged the inner core of steel she needed for her biggest test of all. By the Second World War the young child terrified of her father, as she then believed him to be, had transmogrified into a woman cowed by no one.
Just as Winston forever sought to impress his late father and redeem his failings, so was she fired by her need to prove her critics wrong—and herself worthy of her brilliant and volatile husband. This private struggle to fashion a public persona of such determination and elegance cost Clementine her health and her happiness. In her search for perfection it was she, rather than Winston as has long been supposed, who succumbed to full-blown depression and the miseries of its treatment. But it should never be forgotten how she overcame prejudice, even ridicule, to do much that a woman had never done before. Although she had no political status of her own, Winston’s unfailing trust in and dependence on her meant that she was able to command civil servants, dress down generals, chivy cabinet ministers and face up to presidents on his behalf. Her power and influence—and the results she achieved—would be unthinkable for a prime ministerial spouse today. Britain does not have an official role for the consort of her premier. Even so, whoever occupies that uncertain position is subject to the unforgiving eye of the modern media—a trial that Clementine was mostly spared thanks to the greater deference of her time. It is no accident that her most significant contribution came at a moment of extraordinary crisis, when normal constitutional conventions were bent out of shape by the desperation of the hour. The fact is that she saw what had to be done to help her country survive—and did it.
She had her faults, not least her shortcomings as a mother and perhaps a dash of hypochondria. But she was the lodestar for one of the greatest men of the twentieth century and he loved her without question for nearly sixty years. He claimed marrying her had been his most brilliant achievement: “For what,” he asked, “can be more glorious than to be united with a being incapable of an ignoble thought?” As she inspired and sustained Winston, so did she help lead her country through its darkest hour, yet neither has served her memory well. She has been largely forgotten in the annals of history. Winston, whose tome The Second World War has influenced many scholars’ subsequent understanding of that conflict, must shoulder some of the blame. He refers to her in volume 2 just once, and we find her in the index only as “Churchill, Mrs.” Of all the influences in his life she was the most woefully unappreciated—but in truth she was the strongest.
The Great Man view of history—subscribed to by Winston himself, unsurprisingly—has always tended to ignore or devalue the significance of marriage. Winston Churchill could be reckless, blindly loyal, self-absorbed, oversentimental, prejudiced, devoid of empathy and vainglorious. He wanted absolute devotion from the people closest to him and would sometimes reject out of pique those who refused to give it. These flaws were inextricably bound up with his sense of destiny and his own all-consuming commitment to the British Empire. Without them he could not have been the supreme statesman he became, but they were also sometimes his undoing, and without a countervailing force in his life, one prepared to stand up to him when necessary, he would probably have been wrecked by them.
Clementine was certainly more to him than that. Winston’s chief of staff General “Pug” Ismay, who observed both Churchills at the closest of quarters, saw how her continuing confidence in Winston throughout their lives was his “mainstay.” He firmly believed that without her the “history of Winston Churchill and of the world would have been a very different story.” Winston Churchill, the embodiment of British courage and resolve, receptacle of the nation’s fire and brimstone, took his strength, Ismay witnessed, “from Clemmie.”7
Ultimately he did recognize that his greatest achievements would have eluded him but for his wife’s unflinching belief and guidance. She boosted and never betrayed him; she counseled but also challenged; she chided as well as consoled. She shored up his inadequacies, moderated his extremes and stopped him from making countless mistakes. She was in a way his ultimate authority, his conscience and the nearest he had to a direct line to the people. Without her by his side sharing the burden, it is difficult if not impossible to imagine his becoming the single-minded giant who led Britain, against almost impossible odds, to victory over tyranny. The way she managed a character described by Attlee as “fifty per cent genius, fifty per cent bloody fool”8 was itself a type of genius.
Clementine could not have invested more in a partnership that was almost certainly the most important of its time. Theirs was the ultimate coalition. Nothing has been seen like it to this day. As Sarah was wont to say, she was born of not one but two great, strong people, who were inextricably tied to each other to the enduring benefit of us all. When in 1940 he became prime minister of a country fighting alone for its survival, Churchill declared he had nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. In truth, he should have added to this now legendary list.
Last, but not least, he had Clemmie.