First Lady Read online

  First Lady

  For Jon, Laurie and Joe

  With all my love

  ‘I send this token, but how little can it express my gratitude to you for making my life & any work I have done possible, and for giving me so much happiness in a world of accident & storm.’

  Winston to Clementine, on their fortieth wedding anniversary, 12 September 1948, Cap d’Antibes

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1

  The Level of Events

  2

  More Than Meets the Eye

  3

  The Pain and the Pride

  4

  I Believe in Your Star

  5

  Married Love

  6

  Loss Unimaginable

  7

  A Chandelier’s Life and Sparkle

  8

  Temptation and Redemption

  9

  World of Accident and Storm

  10

  Operation Seduction USA

  11

  From FDR to Stalin

  12

  A Private Line

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  The young, timorous Clementine had few friends and was devoted to her dog, Carlo. She never got over his death under the wheels of a train. © National Trust

  Before her marriage, Clementine was often seen in the tie and shirt collar combination favoured by suffragists. Once she married Winston she spent many years trying to recruit him to the cause, with varying levels of success. © From the Collection of Lord Stanley of Alderley

  Clementine arriving at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster for the ‘Wedding of the year’ on 12 September 1908. © Mary Evans Picture Library

  Clementine was considered to have the profile of a queen. She was hotly pursued by eligible young (and older) men, and broke off at least two engagements. © Mary Evans Picture Library

  Winston and Clementine emerge from the church to huge crowds. Her dress was hailed as elegant and beautiful; his attire was deemed to lend him the air of a ‘glorified coachman’. © Mary Evans Picture Library

  Nellie and Blanche Hozier wave the newlyweds off on their honeymoon. © Mary Evans Picture Library

  Clementine and Winston endured cheers and jeers together. He was widely admired as First Lord of the Admirality at the beginning of the First World War, but such popularity was not to last. © Mary Evans Picture Library

  Clementine broke the mould for political wives by accompanying Winston to all-male rituals including watching Army manoeuvres, such as here at Aldershot in 1910. Her sense of style was noteworthy, and she would become widely admired for her dress-sense. © Press Association Images

  Clementine was more athletic than her husband and an impressive tennis player. Here she is playing in Surbiton in May 1920. © Press Association Images

  At the height of the Dardanelles debacle in 1915, Clementine was welcomed back to her old school by her headmistress Beatrice Harris, who had imbued her with ideas of female independence. Clementine never forgot her encouragement and example. © Berkhamsted School

  Sir John Lavery painted this portrait of Clementine and her daughter Sarah in the spring of 1916, when Winston was away in the trenches. Many believe it captures her profound sadness at the time. © National Portrait Gallery, London

  Clementine with Marigold, her third daughter, who died in tragic circumstances in 1921 when only two years old. © Mary Evans Picture Library

  Winston, Clementine and Sarah watching the troops of the Brigade of Guards, 22 January 1919. Winston, although often an absent father, was natually warm and spontaneous with his children when they were young. © Press Association Images

  Clementine was fearless on horseback. Here she is with Winston and Randolph in 1933 wild boar hunting as guests of the Duke of Westminster in France. © Mary Evans Picture Library

  Clementine (far left in white) visited the Pyramids on camel-back in 1921 with a party that included Winston (on her left), Gertrude Bell (third from left) and T. E. Lawrence (fourth from left). © Churchill family

  Clementine with the suave art dealer Terence Philip on board the Rosaura in 1935. She was thrown into his company on her cruise to the South Seas with dramatic results. © Churchill Archives Centre

  ‘Fast’ but not ‘wild’, Pamela Digby (third from left) married Randolph (centre) in October 1939. The ill-fated marriage launched her career as ‘the twentieth century’s most influential courtesan’. © Central Press/Getty Images

  Clementine was very proud of her ‘soldiering’ daughter Mary, who became her most trusted confidante. Here she was visiting a gun site with Mary and Winston on 30 June 1944. © Press Association Images

  Clementine’s Aid to Russia Fund was perhaps her greatest work apart from Winston, of course. It set a new bar for charity fundraising, raising astonishing sums of money from a cash-strapped nation. © British Red Cross Museum and Archive

  Tablecloth embroidered with names including the Duke of Gloucester, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, the Princess Royal and Clementine Churchill. The tablecloth was embroidered from signatures obtained at the ‘Bring and Buy’ shop at Streatham Hill Congregational Church. © British Red Cross Museum and Archive

  Dressed in her Red Cross uniform, Clementine became a huge success on her 1945 tour of Russia. Stalin was said to resent the popular appeal of Churchill’s wife. © British Red Cross Museum and Archive

  Winston buying a flag for Clementine’s Aid to Russia Fund. Such pictures were sometimes released to disguise the fact that he was actually on a secret mission overseas. © IWM

  Winston described Clementine and her Aid to Russia Fund as the one bright spot in Anglo-Russian relations during the war. © British Red Cross Museum and Archive

  Clementine in 1943. She thought dressing up and a touch of glamour especially important in wartime and rarely failed to deliver. © William Hustler and Georgina Hustler/National Portrait Gallery, London

  Clementine understood that entertainment and a ‘lack of class feeling’ was essential to raise morale during both world wars. Here she takes to the floor with a worker at an arms factory in the North of England in January 1942. © Press Association Images

  Clementine was known for her full-throated laugh, which was more raucous than Winston’s quiet chuckle. Many thought her ‘cackle’ rather contagious. Here she is laughing heartily on a visit to Chigwell, in Essex, during the election campaign shortly after VE Day. © Press Association Images

  Two First Ladies of war: Eleanor Roosevelt was keen to drag Clementine into the limelight with her and here they are broadcasting together in Quebec in September 1944. Clementine admired Eleanor’s easy, chatty style and public works but Winston was not such a fan. © Press Association Images

  Animals of all sorts played a major part in Churchill family life – not always to Clementine’s liking. Here, however, she cuddles the first of two successive poodles named Rufus while taking an elegant afternoon tea with Winston at Chartwell. In an unusually intimate picture taken after he was ejected as Prime Minister in 1945 – and before he returned to office in 1951 – Winston looks rather cross and it seems Clementine was, as she often did at his low points, trying to cheer him up. © William Sumits/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

  Clementine received the insignia of the Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire from the King at Buckingham Palace in July 1946. She is flanked by her daughters Mary on the left and Sarah on the right. © Press Association Images

  Relaxing in Hendaye, France, 1945 shortly after VE Day. Holidays together were rare – they disagreed profo
undly on companions and destination. On the left Clementine reads the papers with Mary. © Mary Evans Picture Library

  Clementine addresses the audience after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature on behalf of her husband in December 1953. She learned to handle big events with aplomb. © S&G Barratts/EMPICS Archive

  Clementine attends the premiere in Leicester Square, London, of Sarah’s 1951 film Wedding Bells. Mary looks the picture of health on the right, but Diana’s struggles are clearly taking their toll. © AP/Press Association Images

  Clementine was a devoted if not exactly cosy grandmother. Here she is in November 1954 at the christening of Charlotte Clementine Soames, her grand-daugher. Also pictured are Mary and Christopher Soames with their children, Nicholas, Emma and Jeremy as well as Diana (second from left) – as godmother – and her husband Duncan Sandys. © S&G Barratts/EMPICS Archive

  Eleanor was assiduous in maintaining her friendship with Clementine after the war. Here they chat during a reception in London in April 1959 to mark the publication of Eleanor’s autobiography. © Press Association Images

  Introduction

  Late on the evening of Monday 5 June 1944, Clementine Churchill walked past the Royal Marine guards into the Downing Street Map Room. Wearing an elegant silken housecoat that covered her nightdress, her beautiful face still fully made up, she looked immaculate and, as always, serene. Around her, though, the atmosphere in the heart of British military command 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, from which the phones never stopped ringing, to the far corner where, as she expected, she spotted Winston, shoulders hunched, jowly face cast in agonised 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 was one of a tiny group privy to the months and years of top-secret preparations for the next morning’s monumental endeavour. Fully apprised of the risks of what would be the largest seaborne invasion in history, she knew too the unthinkable price of failure: millions of people and a vast swathe of Europe would remain under Nazi tyranny, their hopes of salvation dashed. Uniquely, however, she also understood the ghosts that haunted Winston that night, thinking as he was of the thousands of men he had sent to their deaths in the Dardanelles campaign of the First World War. She alone had sustained him both through that disaster and the horrors of his time serving in the trenches on the Western Front. Now, tens of thousands more were to risk their lives in northern France. Huge convoys were already moving through the darkness towards their battle stations off the coast of Normandy. He 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 what were regarded as the world’s best soldiers.

  Earlier that evening Winston and Clementine had discussed the prospects of the gambit’s success again, at length and alone over a candle-lit dinner. No doubt he had poured out his fears and she had sought, as so many times before, to stiffen his resolve. Yet it could be put off no longer; the command to proceed had been given.

  Raising his face as she approached, Winston turned to his wife and asked, rhetorically: ‘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 had become the voice of defiance, strength and valour. Even Stalin, one of Winston’s 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 But 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 carry such a burden for five long years while cementing an unlikely coalition of allies that not only saved Britain but ultimately defeated the Axis?

  Winston’s conviction, his doctor Lord Moran observed while tending him through the war, began ‘in his own bedroom’. This national saviour and global legend was in some ways a man like any other; he was not an emotional island devoid of the need for personal sustenance, 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 was so much more than a mere extension of her husband’s career and ego. Like him, she relentlessly privileged the national interest above her own health, safety and family; her list of extra-marital achievements would put many present-day government ministers, speechwriters, charity chiefs, ambassadors, activists, spin doctors, MPs and hospital managers to shame. Unlike Winston, though, she was capable of great empathy, and had a surer grasp of the importance of public image. In her trend-setting sense of style she was a precursor to Jackie Onassis – being known particularly for her leopard-skin coats and colourful chiffon turbans – and as a hostess she was renowned across the globe for her elegant hospitality; her skills at the diplomatic dinner table won the admiration of Charles de Gaulle, and played a crucial role in binding America to Britain’s cause. For all this and more, she was honoured by three British monarchs, and also by the Soviet Union. But just surviving, let alone shaping, what must surely count as one of the twentieth century’s most challenging marriages would have been a notable triumph in itself.

  Winston once claimed that after their wedding they had simply ‘lived happily ever after’. That is stretching the truth – never was there a break from the ‘whirl of haste, excitement and perpetual crisis’4 that surrounded them. She could not even go to talk to him in the bathroom without on occasion finding members of the Cabinet in there too, half-hidden by the steam. Nor were their exchanges always gentle. They rowed 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’ behaviour,6 or to oppose privately his more noxious political beliefs; gradually she altered his Victorian outlook with what he called her ‘pinko’ ideas, and even her support for women’s rights. But however furiously they might disagree, she loved him for his undoubted compassion, and revelled 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 day arrived their aim changed, becoming survival itself. And in peacetime, whatever 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 centre of two world wars. In so doing they forged one of the most important partnerships in history. The question is not simply what did she do for him, but also what could he have done without her?

  Even so, this formidable woman has virtually no public presence in popular history. While he is understandably one of the most analysed figures of all time, the preter
naturally private Clementine has remained overlooked and unexplained. She is so elusive that there are differing views on such basic questions as the colour of her eyes (grey, blue or hazel-brown?7) and hair (ash-blonde, brown or red?8). Many people think Winston’s wife was the ‘American one’, when in fact it was his mother Jennie who hailed from the US. Consult certain biographies of her husband and Clementine features as barely more than a passing acquaintance. The index of Nigel Knight’s Churchill: The Greatest Briton Unmasked, for instance, contains not a single reference to her. Others, such as Richard Hough, author of Winston & Clementine: The Triumph & 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 and his life’s work has been conveniently underplayed or misconstrued. So have the perspectives of the many generals, politicians, civil servants and diplomats 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 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 and hardly courted the press on her own account – even though she was a skilful operator on behalf of her chosen causes. Yet she was more powerful and in some ways more progressive than most if not all of her modern successors. Moreover, many of the struggles she endured still resonate – not least the gruelling inner turmoil Winston found it so difficult to understand, or help her with. It is high time for a fresh appraisal of the woman behind his greatness, one that may allow her contribution to be duly recognised.