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  The only major previous account of Clementine’s life – an admirable book by the Churchills’ daughter Mary Soames – was, although later revised, first published nearly forty years ago. In any case, it understandably treats its subject almost exclusively 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 third parties, 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 her 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 an upper-class matron but the surprising product of a broken home, a suburban grammar school, a lascivious mother and a formative year spent in and around the fish market at Dieppe?

  This is not a history of either world war, nor another study of Winston Churchill from an alternative vantage point, though 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 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 the 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 down to her.) Even before 1940 Clementine’s life was packed with drama, heartache and endurance. But, colourful and troubled as it was, this was merely a lengthy and exhaustive apprenticeship for her critical role as First Lady during her country’s ‘death fight’ for survival.

  Prior to Clementine Britain had known merely the ‘politician’s wife’, opinionated perhaps, but rarely directly involved in government business. 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, lacking ‘the gumption to ask . . . I can’t believe how passive and hopeless I was.’9 Clementine’s post-war successor Mrs Attlee was ‘jealous’ of the time taken up by her husband’s job,10 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, explains the universal predicament: ‘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 in her thirties, should have grasped that opportunity and that challenge with greater ambition and success than those who have come since.

  The case can be made that no other premier’s wife, in a democratic country at least, has played such a pivotal role in her husband’s government – arguably greater during the Second World War than 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 is at 10 Downing Street in comparison with the White House. 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 machine to help her.

  Yet she never sought glory for her achievements, and rarely received it. She was 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 of their lives than piles of rubble, he noticed the particularly ‘great appreciation’ she stirred in middle-aged women, who seemed inspired and uplifted by her presence. Marvelling 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 or 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 grateful for her help; people who viewed her as their champion. But while others, such as the then 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.

  Chapter One

  The Level of Events

  1885–1908

  Fear defined Clementine Hozier’s earliest memory. After being deposited by her nurse at the foot of her parents’ bed, she saw her ‘lovely and gay’ mother, Lady Blanche, stretching out her arms towards her. Clementine yearned for the embrace yet was frozen to the spot by the sight of her father slumbering at her mother’s side. ‘I was frightened of him,’ she finally explained much later.1 But by then the damage was past repair. That moment of spurned maternal love prompted long-lasting feelings of rejection within Lady Blanche, such that Clementine was never to gain a secure place in her mother’s affections. Nor would she conquer her trepidation of the forbidding Colonel Henry Hozier, who, she came to believe, was not actually her father anyway. For all the fortitude Clementine would show in adulthood, the instinctive insecurity that endured from her infancy never left her.

  The Hoziers were then living in Grosvenor Street, central London, a far cry from the romantically haunted Cortachy Castle in the Scottish Highlands where Lady Blanche had grown up. Clementine’s mother was the eldest daughter of the tenth Earl of Airlie, whose ancient Scots lineage was enlivened by castle burnings and Jacobite uprisings. Her seraphic face belied her own rebellious spirit and her parents, their family fortunes much reduced by the Earl’s gambling losses, had been keen to marry her off. They were thus relieved when in 1878, at the age of twenty-five, she became engaged to Hozier, even though he was fourteen years her senior and only of come-lately gentry with limited means.

  Lady Blanche’s mother, also called Blanche, was a Stanley of Alderley, a tribe of assertive and erudite English matriarchs who combined radical Liberal views with upper-class condescension. They thought too much food, new clothes, fires in the bedroom and – above all – jam, the epitome of excessive indulgence. Champions of female education, the Stanley women had co-founded Girton College in Cambridge in 1869. No less formidably clever than these eminent forebears, Blanche senior had later mixed with the likes of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, the Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, his bitter Liberal rival William Gladstone, and John Ruskin, the art critic, designer and social thinker. She had also made her ineffectual husband switch the family political allegiance from Conservative
to Liberal and was equally forceful with her tearful granddaughter Clementine, who was not one of her favourites; it was evidently unfitting for a girl of Stanley blood to show her emotions.

  Hozier’s family had made their money in brewing, gaining entrance to society through the profits of industry rather than the privilege of birth. Although his elder brother became the first Lord Newlands, a now extinct title, and Henry himself received a knighthood in 1903 for his innovative work at the insurance market Lloyd’s of London, the Hoziers remained essentially nouveau: middle-class stock who earned their own living.

  In the eyes of many in the City, Henry was a ‘gay, flamboyant’ personality, but the Lloyd’s archives suggest a darker nature. He was a ‘born autocrat’ with an ‘excessive love of power’ and an absence of humour, one report states. He also suffered from an equally ‘excessive’ fondness for spending the Corporation’s money. An internal investigation in 1902 revealed that his business methods, while apparently productive, were of ‘doubtful ethics’. Some of his soi-disant successes were, in truth, exaggerated or unfounded and, after he challenged one persistent critic to a duel in 1906, his reputation inside the upper echelons of Lloyd’s never quite recovered.2 Clementine was probably unaware of these stains on his character, admitting in a booklet she wrote for her own children, entitled My Early Life, that she knew very little about the Hoziers.

  The Earl, too, considered his son-in-law a ‘bounder’, and Lady Blanche discovered to her horror that Hozier’s previous career giving orders in the Army had led him to expect the same unquestioning obedience at home. Far from liberating her from parental control, marriage to the splenetic and vengeful Henry proved even more restrictive. Before her wedding, Lady Blanche had assumed that she would become a notable political hostess in her own right. True, Hozier briefly dabbled in public life – standing unsuccessfully in 1885 as the Liberal Unionist candidate for Woolwich, and also helping to pioneer the idea of an Intelligence Service – but he had not the remotest interest in hosting his wife’s freewheeling aristo friends. Nor did he want children, whereas Lady Blanche decided not only that she did, but that she would take the matter into her own hands if he refused to oblige her. It was not unhelpful that Hozier was frequently away on business and unfaithful himself. Sexy, bored and lonely, Lady Blanche saw no reason not to shop around for a worthy mate of her own.

  Five years after her wedding day, on 15 April 1883, she gave birth to her first child Kitty. Two years later, on April Fools’ Day, Clementine (rhyming with mean not mine) was born in haste on the drawing-room floor. The twins – Nellie and William (Bill) – arrived after another three years. Of the four children, it is now thought likely that none was Hozier’s and that there was probably more than one biological father. Although it was not unusual for upper-class couples in the late nineteenth century to take lovers, the custom was to wait at least until an heir had been born before playing the field. Discretion was also demanded. Lady Blanche, though, ignored all the rules and there were rumours of altercations between rivals. Indeed, the blonde, blue-eyed Lady Blanche is reputed to have juggled up to ten lovers at once – a feat of athletic organisation she was pleased to advertise quite widely.

  Clementine had no knowledge of all this as a child and the family has only in recent years publicly acknowledged the question marks over her paternity. The doubts were, however, well aired by others during her lifetime. Her mother’s own, albeit inconsistent, confessions to friends suggest Clementine was in fact a Mitford. Lady Blanche’s handsome and generous brother-in-law, the first Baron Redesdale, Bertie Mitford, was certainly a favoured amour. Photographs of Clementine and Bertie – particularly in profile – suggest remarkable similarities, not least their fine aquiline noses. Perhaps it was in tribute to her sister’s forbearance in sharing her husband in this way that Lady Blanche named her second daughter after her. Bertie’s legitimate son David went on to father the six renowned Mitford sisters, most famous among them the novelist Nancy, the Nazi supporters Unity and Diana (whose fascist sympathies were shared by their brother Tom), the Communist Decca, and Debo, later Duchess of Devonshire.

  Besides Mitford, the other prime paternal candidate is Bay Middleton, an avid theatregoer of great charm but private melancholy. He later broke his neck steeple-chasing but was a frequent visitor to Lady Blanche during the years when she conceived her eldest two daughters. She dropped hints to notable gossips about his involvement, although some have since suggested that this was a fig-leaf for her sister’s sake. Such was the complexity of Lady Blanche’s sex life we shall probably never know the truth. Even Clementine’s daughter Mary Soames said she found it ‘difficult to take a dogmatic view . . . Je n’y ai pas tenue la chandelle’ (colloquially translated: ‘I wasn’t playing gooseberry’).3

  The excitable younger Mitfords relished their great-aunt’s racy reputation, unlike the rest of Lady Blanche’s family who thought her ‘mad’. London’s more respectable drawing rooms were similarly scandalised by the public uncertainty over the bloodline of the Hozier enfants, with the result that Lady Blanche was regularly snubbed. Meanwhile, her children were cared for by a succession of grumpy maids and governesses who vented their frustration by swishing their wards’ bare legs with a cane. The one kindly soul in those early years was sixteen-year-old Mlle Elise Aeschimann, a Swiss governess who arrived when Clementine was three. She thought the infant girl starved of attention and took to carrying her around everywhere, despite Lady Blanche’s admonitions against spoiling her. Mlle Aeschimann started Clementine and Kitty on their lessons, especially French, and though she stayed only two years her warm-heartedness made a lasting impression. Clementine later went to visit her in Switzerland and even helped her financially when in old age she fell on hard times.

  Clementine remained an anxious child, however, and was tormented by a perfectionist streak. According to her daughter Mary she had a ‘most sensitive conscience, and suffered untold miseries if the immaculate white of her lace-edged pinafore was marred by spot or stain’.4 She also took endless pains over forming the neatest handwriting, a trait that led the adult Clementine to describe her younger self as a ‘detestable little prig’.5 Her principal emotional crutch was a large, black pet poodle, which devotedly listened to her troubles, until it died under the wheels of a train in an accident. Clementine had been ordered to leave the dog behind at the family’s new home, a country house outside Alyth in Scotland, but it had pursued her to the station and tried to jump on board. ‘I do not remember getting over this,’ she told her own children many years later.6 Such emotional neediness – and a continuing fear of adults – earned her much maternal scorn. Her elder sister Kitty, by contrast, was puckish, pretty, shared her mother’s extrovert flamboyance and won Lady Blanche’s effusive love. Unsurprisingly, Kitty became accustomed to getting her own way – even once threatening to burn down the house to stop a governess from reporting her latest misdeed. Devoted to her always, Lady Blanche’s preference for her firstborn was brazen and consistent.

  In autumn 1891, Hozier sued for divorce and the two elder girls became ‘helpless hostages’ in a bitter battle over custody and financial support. Clementine was just six when she and Kitty were wrested from their mother to live with Henry and his sister, the spinster Aunt Mary, who believed children benefited greatly from being whipped. Hozier found the girls an inconvenience, though, so parcelled them out to a governess in the Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted. Rosa Stevenson advanced her charges little academically but both girls observed her fastidious housekeeping, including two hours every day polishing the oil lamps: ‘They burnt as bright and clear as stars,’ Clementine remembered fondly.7 She also recalled the delicious sausages, ‘although the slices were too thin and too few’.

  Sadly, Aunt Mary considered Mrs Stevenson too soft, and uprooted the girls again by dispatching them to a ‘horrible, severe’8 boarding school in Edinburgh. The odour of yesterday’s haddock and the crumbs on the floor offended Clementine’s precociously high st
andards, and like her sister she felt desperately homesick.

  Finally admitting defeat, Hozier allowed Lady Blanche to extract her unhappy daughters and whisk them back to her rented house in Bayswater (a district then known among the smart set as the west London ‘wildlands’). Waiting for them there were the young twins Bill and Nellie, who, after a year apart from their elder siblings, no longer recognised them. Hozier came for tea on a couple of occasions but his awkward visits were not a success and soon stopped altogether; once the divorce was finalised, so too did almost all of his financial support. Lady Blanche may have had her children back together, but she was now dependent on her own cash-strapped family for handouts.

  Over the following eight years, Lady Blanche and her brood led a peripatetic existence, moving to one set of furnished lodgings after another. In part this was out of financial necessity as her creditors caught up with her, but the constant roaming also suited her capricious nature. Even so, she ensured every new home was elegant and fresh, with snowy white dimity furniture covers (always two sets so they could be kept spotlessly clean) and fine muslin curtains at the windows. Clementine was enraptured by her mother’s ability to spin comfort out of the least promising circumstances, writing in My Early Life: ‘She had very simple but distinguished taste and you could never mistake a house or room in which she had lived for anyone else’s in the world.’ Lady Blanche’s exalted standards even inspired a new verb: to ‘hozier’ became synonymous among her daughters’ friends with ‘to tidy away’. Unfortunately the cost of such stylish home-making pushed the family ever further into debt.