Late in the evening of Monday, June 5, 1944, Clementine Churchill walked past the Royal Marine guards into the Downing Street Map Room wearing an elegant silk housecoat over her nightdress. Still fully made up, she looked immaculate and, as always, serene. Around her the atmosphere was palpably tense, even frayed. She glanced at the team of grave-faced “plotters” busily tracking troops, trucks and ships on their charts. Then she cast her eyes over the long central table, whose phones never stopped ringing, to the far corner, where, as expected, she spotted her husband, shoulders hunched, face cast in agonized brooding. She went to him as she knew she must, for no one else—no aide, no general, no friend, however loyal—could help him now.
Clementine Churchill was one of a tiny group privy to the months of top secret preparations for the next morning’s monumental endeavor. Fully apprised of the risks involved in what would be the largest seaborne invasion in history, she knew the unthinkable price of failure: millions of people and a vast swath of Europe would remain under Nazi tyranny, their hopes of salvation dashed. She also knew the ghosts that haunted Winston that night, the thousands of men he had sent to their deaths in the Dardanelles campaign of the First World War. She alone had sustained him through that disaster and the horrors of his time serving in the trenches on the Western Front.
Churchill had delayed the D-day operation for as long as he could to ensure the greatest chance of success, but now British, American and Canadian troops would in a few hours attempt to take a heavily fortified coastline defended by men who were widely regarded as the world’s best soldiers. Huge convoys were already moving through the darkness toward their battle stations off the coast of Normandy. Earlier that evening, Winston and Clementine had discussed the prospects of the gambit’s success, at length and alone, over a candlelit dinner. No doubt he had poured out his fears and she had sought, as so many times before, to stiffen his resolve. In the end, the command to proceed had been given.
Looking up now as she approached, Winston turned to his wife and said, “Do you realise that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?”1
• • •
To the outside world Winston Churchill showed neither doubt nor weakness. Since he had declared to the world in June 1940 that Britain would “never surrender,” his was the voice of defiance, strength and valor. Even Stalin, one of his fiercest critics, was to concede that he could think of no other instance in history when the future of the world had so depended on the courage of a single man.2 What enabled this extraordinary figure to stand up to Hitler when others all around him were crumbling? How did he find in himself the strength to command men to go to their certain deaths? How could an ailing heavy drinker and cigar smoker well into his sixties manage to carry such a burden for five long years, cementing an unlikely coalition of allies that not only saved Britain but ultimately defeated the Axis powers?
Churchill’s conviction, his doctor Lord Moran observed while tending him through the war, began “in his own bedroom.” This national savior and global legend was in some ways a man like any other. He was not an emotional island devoid of need, as so many historians have depicted him. His resolve drew on someone else’s. In fact, Winston’s upbringing and temperament made him almost vampiric in his hunger for the love and energy of others. Violet Asquith, who adored him all her life, noted that he was “armed to the teeth for life’s encounter” but “also strangely vulnerable” and in want of “protection.”3
Only one person was able and willing to provide that “protection” whatever the challenge, as she showed on that critical June night in 1944. Yet Clementine’s role as Winston’s wife, closest adviser and greatest influence was overlooked for much of her life, and has been largely forgotten in the decades since.
Neither mousy nor subservient, as many assume her to have been, Clementine Churchill was so much more than an extension of her husband. Like him, she relentlessly privileged the national interest above her health and family; her list of extramarital achievements would put many present-day government ministers, speechwriters, charity chiefs, ambassadors, activists, spin doctors, MPs and hospital managers to shame. Unlike Winston, she was capable of great empathy, and she had a surer grasp of the importance of public image. In her trendsetting sense of style she was a precursor to Jackie Onassis—with her leopard-skin coats and colorful chiffon turbans—and her skills as a hostess played a crucial role in binding America to the cause of supporting Britain. For all this and more, she was honored by three British monarchs, and by the Soviet Union. Just surviving, let alone shaping, what must surely count as one of the twentieth century’s most challenging marriages should surely be a notable triumph in itself.
Winston once claimed that after their wedding they had simply “lived happily ever after.” That is stretching the truth. There was never a break from the “whirl of haste, excitement and perpetual crisis”4 that surrounded them. She could not even talk to him in the bathroom without on occasion finding members of the cabinet in there, half-hidden by the steam. Nor were their exchanges always gentle. They argued frequently, often epically, and it was not for nothing that he sometimes referred to her as “She-whose-commands-must-be-obeyed.”5 An opinionated figure in her own right, she was unafraid to reprimand him for his “odious”6 behavior, or to oppose privately his more noxious political beliefs; gradually she altered his Victorian outlook with what he called her “pinko” ideas and her support for women’s rights. But however furiously they might have disagreed, she loved him and reveled in her union with a man so “exciting” and “famous.” For his part, he simply doted and depended on her.
Throughout the first three decades of their marriage, Winston and Clementine were united by a common project: making him prime minister. When that goal was achieved, their aim changed and became survival itself. In peacetime, despite her misgivings about his refusal to give up politics, they were jointly dedicated to his legacy. Not only did they weather repeated public and personal humiliation together, they overcame the bitterest of personal tragedies and survived the all-but-intolerable strains of being at the center of two world wars. In so doing they forged one of the most important partnerships in history. The question is not just what she did for him, but what could he have done without her?
Even so, this formidable woman has virtually no public presence in popular history. While Churchill is understandably one of the most analyzed figures of all time, the preternaturally private Clementine has remained overlooked and unexplained. She is so elusive that views differ on such basic questions as the color of her eyes (gray, blue or hazel-brown?7) and hair (ash-blond, brown or red?8). Many people think Winston’s wife was the “American one,” when in fact it was his mother, Jennie, who came from the US. Consult certain biographies of Winston Churchill and she features as barely more than a passing acquaintance. The index of Nigel Knight’s Churchill: The Greatest Briton Unmasked, for instance, contains not one single reference to Clementine. Other biographers, such as Richard Hough, author of Winston and Clementine: The Triumph and Tragedies of the Churchills, go so far as to claim that she was a “nuisance” who added to rather than reduced the pressures on her husband.
It is certainly true that Clementine was sometimes rigid and unforgiving, but in these traditionally minded, one-sided accounts Winston’s own testament to what she meant to him has been conveniently underplayed or misconstrued. So have the perspectives of the many generals, politicians, ambassadors, civil servants and assistants who worked closely with them both and became her fervent admirers. Even Lord Beaverbrook, the buccaneering newspaper magnate who was for a long time her most loathed personal enemy, became in the end a devoted fan. It is ironic and telling that many of these incidental observers are far better known than she.
Today we are fascinated by the deeds and dress of our contemporary First Ladies, on both sides of the Atlantic. In a different era Clementine largely, if not wholly, escaped such media scrutiny. She hardly courted the press on her own account—though she was a skillful operator on behalf of her chosen causes. Yet she was more powerful and in some ways more progressive than many of her modern successors. The struggles she endured still resonate—not least her grueling inner turmoil, which Winston found so difficult to understand. It is high time for a fresh appraisal of the woman behind this great but erratic man, one that will allow her contribution to be duly recognized.
The only existing account of Clementine’s life—an admirable book by the Churchills’ daughter Mary Soames—was, although later revised, first published nearly forty years ago. It understandably treats its subject from the family’s viewpoint, with conspicuous gaps in the story. Since then many revealing papers—such as the Pamela Harriman collections at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC—have been released or have come to light for the first time, and several former staff have opened up about their experiences. What fascinates over and over again is the strength of the impression Clementine made on so many people, including allies from Russia, Canada, Australia and America, as well as those who witnessed her in action closer to home. Some contemporaries recorded a “physical shock” on meeting her for the first time. Who would have guessed that she laughed louder than Winston? That she was taller than him and decidedly more athletic? That he cried more than she did and owned more hats? That the camera never quite captured her startling beauty and that she could, like a princess, lift a room merely by entering it? Or that she was not the paradigm of upper-class matronliness but the surprising product of a broken home, a suburban grammar school and a lascivious mother, and that one of her most formative years was spent in and around the fish market at Dieppe?
This is not a history of the war, or a study of Winston Churchill from an alternative vantage point, although oft-neglected aspects of his character do come to the fore. It is, instead, a portrait of a shy girl from a racy background who was related to Britain’s most glamorous aristocratic family (in more ways than one) but was looked down upon by her own mother and disdained by the dominant political dynasty of her day. It is the story of someone who feared casinos and bailiffs, and struggled to bond with her children. It is an attempt to recover the memory of a woman who married a man variously described as “the largest human being of our times” and “the stuff of which tyrants are made.” (That he never became one is in no small part thanks to her.) Even before 1940 Clementine’s life was packed with drama, heartache and endurance. But, colorful and troubled as her life had been thus far, all of that was merely a lengthy and exhaustive apprenticeship for her critical role as First Lady during her country’s “death fight” for survival.
Before Clementine Britain had known merely the “politician’s wife”: opinionated, perhaps, but rarely directly involved in government business. And today we have much the same: women glossed up for the cameras on set-piece occasions, thin, smiling and silent. Her immediate successors—Violet Attlee in 1945 and Clarissa Eden in 1955—were of markedly lesser ambition and failed to pick up her baton. Clarissa, Anthony Eden’s wife, was glamorous, younger, more intellectual and arguably more modern than Clementine (her aunt by marriage), but she lacked a populist touch and admits she was never even briefed on government business, and lacked “the gumption to ask.” She said: “I can’t believe how passive and hopeless I was.”9 Clementine’s postwar successor, Violet Attlee, was “jealous” of the time taken up by her husband’s job10 and Harold Wilson’s wife, Mary, was at first so overawed at being the prime minister’s spouse that she would be physically sick every morning.11 Cherie Blair, probably the prime ministerial consort most involved in her husband’s role since Clementine, explained the universal predicament thus: “There is no job description for the Prime Minister’s spouse because there is no job. But there is a unique position that provides for each holder an opportunity and a challenge.”12 How interesting that a woman born into the Victorian age, who never went to university, had five children and could not vote until her thirties, should have grasped that opportunity and challenge with greater ambition and success than any of those who have come since.
The case can be made that no other president or prime minister’s wife has played such a pivotal role in her husband’s government. It was arguably greater than that of even the greatest of American First Ladies, Clementine’s direct contemporary Eleanor Roosevelt. This appears all the more remarkable in light of how poorly defined and resourced the position at 10 Downing Street is in comparison with that of American First Ladies. From the very earliest days of the Union the wife of the US president has enjoyed a status that, albeit not enshrined in the Constitution itself, provides an official platform for public work and influence, backed by the heavily staffed Office of the First Lady. Clementine had no official staff, role model or guidebook. She in effect invented her wartime role from scratch, and eventually persuaded an initially reluctant government to help her.
She never sought glory for her achievements and rarely received it. She was in fact genuinely astonished when noticed at all. Curiously, it was often visiting Americans who were most observant of the scale of her contribution during the war. The US ambassador Gil Winant was intensely moved when he accompanied her on a tour of bombed-out streets during the Blitz. As she talked to people left with little more than piles of rubble, he noticed the “great appreciation” she stirred in middle-aged women, who seemed inspired and uplifted by her presence. Marveling at the “deep” and “significant” looks of empathy that “flashed between her and these mothers of England,” he was puzzled as to why the newspapers and indeed the British government made so little of what she did.13 Clementine’s huge mailbag at the time was full of letters from people who were grateful for her help, people who viewed her as their champion. But while others, such as the queen, have been loudly and widely hailed for their war work, her part in the story seems to have been lost.
“If the future breeds historians of understanding,” Winant wrote shortly after the return of peace, Clementine’s “service to Great Britain” will finally be “given the full measure [it] deserves.” This book attempts to do just that.