First Lady Page 4
Encouraged by her headmistress Beatrice Harris, whose ethos of feminine independence and suffragist views would be enduring influences on Clementine, she was secretly nursing dreams of academia. University for women was still a comparative novelty, but Miss Harris (who later described her former pupil to Winston as ‘one of the high lights of the school’ and ‘a worthy helpmeet’15) was so confident of Clementine’s chances that she offered to take her in over the holidays to continue her studies. This was going too far for Lady Blanche. She wanted her daughter to be well-educated, but not a blue-stocking spinster. She rejected Miss Harris’s generous offer and set about sabotaging Clementine’s studious ambitions by diverting her into trivial and traditionally feminine pursuits. Undeterred, Clementine crept up to the graveyard on the hill behind the house to study mathematics in secret, her books arranged across the flat tombstones. She was further spurred on in her studies by her great-aunt Maude Stanley, the sister of Lady Blanche’s mother, who also introduced her to the exciting world of politics. A kindly and intellectual spinster in her late sixties, who took a great interest in the welfare of women and the poor, Maude considered Clementine a kindred spirit.
In the tussle over Clementine’s future, however, Lady Blanche held the trump card. To stop this university nonsense once and for all she approached another relative, the wealthy Lady St Helier, an aunt by marriage, and enlisted her help in launching Clementine into the world to which, by birth and upbringing, Lady Blanche deemed that she ‘properly’ belonged. (Her own reputation and financial difficulties meant that she could do little to advance her daughter herself.)
Lady St Helier – popularly known as Lady Santa Claus – loved to help the young. One of her beneficiaries – for whom she had pulled some strings in the British Army – was a certain Winston Churchill, the son of her American friend Lady Randolph (or Jennie). Now here was a poor – and beautiful – female relation also in need of her support. Lady St Helier invited Clementine to stay at her distinguished London mansion at 52 Portland Place, near Regent’s Park, and bought her a gown. She took her to lavish balls and glittering dinners, where, no longer eclipsed by Kitty, Clementine was fêted for her beauty. Sure enough, her head rose from her schoolbooks and was turned. The possibility of her leading an independent life at university and beyond had glimmered briefly but was now snuffed out for ever.
By the time Clementine passed her Higher School Certificate in the summer of 1903, there was no more talk of academia. She left Berkhamsted and Miss Harris behind, albeit with happy and grateful memories. So successful had Lady Blanche been in dispensing with Clementine’s studies, she saw fit to reward her daughter by taking a house with her that winter in Paris, in the rue Oudinot in the 7th arrondissement. She even permitted Clementine to attend a few lectures at the Sorbonne. More to Lady Blanche’s taste, however, was the fashionable Voisin, a smart restaurant near the Palais Royal. Clementine loved the glamour, but worried that such lavish spending was unwise. Lady Blanche explained that it was merely part of a civilised education; and in truth the grammar school pupil was feeling ever more at home in grand society. To this end, in the spring of 1904, she was sent to stay for three months with the von Siemens family, the founders of the German electrical engineering company of the same name, in a beautiful house on the Wannsee, a fashionable suburb of Berlin. Here she perfected her schoolgirl German, learned to ride and absorbed all that upper-class Berlin life could offer her. A certain Continental polish merely inflated her reputation. On her return to London there were plenty of invitations and soon lots of suitors too, with Nellie jokily keeping a ‘file’ of Proposals to Clementine, under Discussed, Answered and Pending.
Chief among the Pending was the eligible Sidney Cornwallis Peel. The younger son of a viscount (and grandson of former Prime Minister Sir Robert), he was constant, fifteen years her senior and rich. He took her to the theatre and sent her white violets every day. Lady St Helier thought her job was done. But Clementine was a romantic, and she knew she was not in love. Despite all the pressure from her relatives to accept his hand, poor Sidney was simply not exciting; his letters veered from pleading to peevish and were generally, as he conceded himself, rather dull. He appears to have sensed that she was underwhelmed, writing in one of the few that have survived: ‘It was stupid of me to allow myself to be goaded into a black rage.’16 She broke off one engagement but was later secretly betrothed to him for a second time.
Then, in April 1906, she found her nerve again – at her cousin Sylvia Stanley’s wedding. Sylvia was in pain from a broken arm, but insisted that the ceremony go ahead. Her passionate determination to marry the man she loved highlighted Clementine’s own tepid feelings and she parted from Sidney for the last time.
Afterwards she seems to have panicked; after all, she needed to escape from her mercurial mother and what she would later confess to have been a ‘very difficult childhood’.17 Within weeks she was engaged again, this time to Lionel Earle, a wealthy civil servant with intellectual tastes. He was twice her age, and she had known him for barely a month. When he joined her for a fortnight’s holiday in the Netherlands, she saw him for the pompous bore he really was. Distraught, she broke off yet another engagement and had to return early wedding presents. The resulting emotional stress led to two months in bed.
Now that Nellie had also finished school, Lady Blanche gave up the lease on the house in Berkhamsted and moved to London to take a firmer hand with her daughters’ social careers. It is not clear how she financed the rent, but Lady Blanche first opted for 20 Upper Phillimore Place, Kensington, where Clementine had no choice but to earn her keep, supplementing her small allowance by giving French lessons at a half-crown an hour. A year later Lady Blanche moved again, this time more permanently, to a cream-painted stucco house nearby at 51 Abingdon Villas (not then a modish address). Here Clementine also began working for her cousin Lena Whyte’s dressmaking business. Needlework bored her, but she learned to make clothes and even hats – for herself as well as for clients. Later she compared these years to the struggles of Scarlett O’Hara, the heroine of Gone with the Wind, who keeps up appearances by making her gowns from old curtains.18
It was a very different existence to the idle luxury in grand houses enjoyed by her Stanley cousins Sylvia and Venetia, or the aristocratic circles in which her mother wanted her to move. Her clothes, for all Lady St Helier’s generosity and her own needle and thread, made her feel like an outsider. So too did her inability to return hospitality. She was all too aware of the sniggers about her lack of fortune, the least charitable finding snobbish glee in calling her ‘the Hozier’. She was also considered cold; but while certainly reserved she was trying to protect herself in a world that was both cliquey and savage. ‘Nobody knew who I was so I felt terribly out of place,’ she recalled to one of her assistants later in life. ‘I hated it.’19
Dressing in this era of upper-class Edwardian leisure was time-consuming and expensive, a process that involved high-maintenance coiffures, hats and numerous outfits. Just one ‘Saturday to Monday’ country house weekend required several large trunks of different clothes as outfits were changed four times a day. For her peers, there were servants who washed, starched, ironed, stitched, fetched, and brushed and pinned up hair, whereas Clementine would perform most of these chores herself. It is little surprise that as soon as she could afford one in later life she insisted on hiring a lady’s maid, and kept one long after the role had largely gone out of fashion.
Lack of an adequate wardrobe meant that some invitations had to be refused, but Clementine had inherited her mother’s genius for making the simplest outfits elegant so she was usually able to hold her own for an evening at least. There are several contemporary accounts that pour praise on her beauty. The diarist Lady Cynthia Asquith wrote that she should have been a queen, describing her as ‘classical, statuesque, yet full of animation . . . her superbly sculpted features would have looked so splendid on a coin’.20 The society magazine, the Bystander, descr
ibed Clementine in a 1908 issue as having ‘most delicately aquiline features, fine grey eyes, and a delightful poise of the head’ with ‘the grace and distinction and soft strength of early Grecian art: she is divinely tall’. Sir Alan Lascelles, the future royal secretary and most pernickety of aesthetes, told Clementine’s daughter Mary that he would never forget his first glimpse of her mother in the Christmas holidays of 1903, when he was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy and she just two years older. Upon her announcement by the butler, the doors were thrown open to a large gathering, and in walked ‘a vision so radiant that even now, after sixty-one years, my always moving, always fastidious, eye has never seen another vision to beat it’.
The ‘beautiful Miss Hozier’ was gratifyingly admired but Lady Blanche remained Clementine’s harshest critic. For all her own wanton pleasure-seeking, she insisted her daughter return from balls by the impossibly early hour of midnight. When Clementine inevitably arrived home late her mother would reprimand her in full view on her doorstep. On one occasion, Lady Blanche even boxed her ears, an assault so traumatic that Clementine ran without hat or coat the three miles to Mary Paget’s house in Harley Street. The sympathetic Mrs Paget went to reason with Lady Blanche before Clementine would agree to return home.
A year after finishing school, during the summer season of 1904, Clementine attended a ball given by Lord and Lady Crewe at their home in Curzon Street. Among the guests in this Liberal household was Winston Churchill, now a rising young politician. Already a controversial figure, he was barred from most Conservative homes because earlier in the year he had defected from the party to join the Liberals over his opposition to Tariff Reform. (Winston was committed to the principle of free trade on the basis that it would keep food prices low, while the Conservative government was seeking to protect British industry with import duties.) Considered a renegade and class traitor by the Tories, he was viewed as pushy and puffed up, even by admirers. His notorious adventures during the Second Boer War (the conflict doughtily defended by Clementine against her French classmates in Dieppe) and the insalubrious way in which his famous father Lord Randolph had died (reputedly from syphilis), lent him an air of raffish danger. A prolific author as well as a soldier and MP, he was already a celebrity.
Upon arriving at the ball, accompanied by his American mother, the voluptuous Jennie, Winston was arrested by the sight of a fawn-like girl alone in a doorway. He stood motionless, staring at her. When he asked who she was, it transpired there were many connections between them: Jennie’s brother-in-law Sir Jack Leslie was the girl’s godfather, and some years before Jennie herself had been a great friend of her mother. So Lady Randolph – whose supposed collection of two hundred lovers over her lifetime outnumbered even Lady Blanche’s amorous adventures – introduced Winston to Clementine. The great wordsmith was struck dumb, not even managing the customary invitation to dance. Clementine assumed she had been introduced out of pity, and in any case did not care for what she had heard about this notorious publicity-seeker. He was, to boot, shorter than her, and with his pale round face was rarely considered handsome. Clementine signalled to a male friend, Charles Hoare, for rescue. He swept her away onto the dance floor, where he asked what she had been doing talking to ‘that frightful fellow Churchill’.
It was an encounter that left no lasting impression on either of them. Winston had a habit of clamming up when first meeting beautiful women, as he had no capacity for small talk. He was also chauvinistically judgmental: he and his private secretary Eddie Marsh would habitually rank a woman on whether her face could launch ‘a thousand ships’, merely two hundred, or perhaps just ‘a covered sampan, or small gunboat at most’.21 Of course only an armada would do for him, so he had spent years chasing the ‘thousand ships’ Pamela Plowden, daughter of the Resident of Hyderabad, Sir Trevor Chichele-Plowden. ‘Marry me,’ he had once declared, ‘and I will conquer the world and lay it at your feet.’22 At other times, though, he was capable of ‘forgetting’ to see or even write to her for months on end, and she detected something tellingly unphysical in his manner. In any case, his future was uncertain and his finances even more so, and Pamela Plowden was not a woman to gamble with her own comfort. Nor could she remain constant; after rejecting Winston’s proposal in 1900 she married the less demanding Earl of Lytton and proceeded to take numerous lovers.
Winston, unlike so many other powerful men then or since, was not tremendously fired up by sex. For him, like the hero in his semi-autobiographical novel Savrola, ‘Ambition was the motive force and he was powerless to resist it.’23 Pamela rightly understood that any wife would always take second place to his career and that, although treating their beauty with semi-religious fervour, he could be brusquely dismissive of women’s conversation. His belittling of Lucile, the heroine in his novel, with the line ‘Woman-like she asked three questions at once’24 is indicative of his general attitude.
Winston felt he ought to have a wife, however. In the running in 1906 was shipping heiress Muriel Wilson, another willowy beauty with expensive tastes. Once again the sexual spark was missing, and in any case she found politics boring and could not envisage sacrificing her life of pampered luxury to the inconveniences of public duty. Her firm rejection was humiliating.
Before that he had flirted with the American actress Ethel Barrymore, who had caused a sensation in London when, in 1902, she arrived in a low-cut bodice pinned with flowers. Winston took her to the Churchills’ family seat, Blenheim Palace, and upon her return to America he bombarded her with political news from Britain. He proposed to her two years later but sadly, her lack of interest became all too clear when she inadvertently praised one of his greatest parliamentary foes.
Earlier still he had visited the West End music halls, once launching a rousing tribute to the dancers at the Empire Promenade, who were then under attack from anti-vice campaigners. ‘In these somewhat unvirginal surroundings,’ he recalled later, ‘I made my maiden speech.’ Once again, the nature of his interest in the dancers is debatable. On one occasion he went home with a Gaiety girl, who when asked the next morning how it had gone, replied that Winston had done nothing but talk into the small hours ‘on the subject of himself’.25 So, as he approached his mid-thirties, he was still to marry or, as the newspapers liked to point out, grow a moustache or hairs on his chest. The press began to label him with that undesirable tag, ‘confirmed bachelor’.26
One evening in March 1908, Clementine returned home tired after a day of teaching French to find a message from Lady St Helier asking her to make up the numbers at a dinner the same evening. Clementine was reluctant: she had no suitable gown and was out of the requisite clean white gloves. But, under pressure from Lady Blanche, she eventually picked out a simple white satin princess dress and did her duty for her benefactress.
At 12 Bruton Street, Mayfair, Winston’s faithful private secretary Eddie Marsh found him lingering in his bath. He was grumpy about the prospect of a dinner party that he fully expected to be a ‘bore’. Marsh tactfully reminded him of Lady St Helier’s many kindnesses, and after more fuss eventually his boss rose from the bathwater to dress.
Clementine was already starting on the chicken course with the other guests around Lady St Helier’s dining table by the time Winston arrived. Ruth Lee, the wealthy American who, with her British husband Arthur, later donated their country house Chequers to the nation, wrote in her diary that Winston had taken the ‘vacant place on his hostess’s left. He paid no attention to her, however, as he became suddenly and entirely absorbed in Miss Clementine Hozier, who sat on his other side, and paid her such marked and exclusive attention the whole evening that everyone was talking about it.’27
Winston’s fascination was piqued by one of the very necessities that, in Clementine’s eyes, made her an outsider: never before had he met a fashionable young woman at a society dinner who earned her own living. Not only was this in itself worthy of respect but she was also ethereally lovely – another admirer had compared her to a �
��sweet almond-eyed gazelle’. At twenty-two, she already knew far more about life than the ladies of cosseting privilege he normally met, and she was well educated, sharing his love of France and its culture.
Through the influence of her aunts and her schooling, here also was a woman who was interested in politics, if still unversed in its cut and thrust. She was receptive to new ideas, especially, it seemed, from him. For her, his gauche behaviour at the ball four years previously now seemed to have given way to a maturity and eagerness to please. She found his idealism and brilliance liberating.
After the ladies had left the table, Winston seemed exceptionally keen to finish his cigar and join them. He strode straight over to Clementine and monopolised her so obviously for the rest of the evening that the other women teased her when she finally left to fetch her coat. Years later, when asked whether she had found Winston handsome at that first meeting, she replied tactfully: ‘I thought he was very interesting.’28 His one false move was an unfulfilled promise to send her a copy of his biography of his father Lord Randolph Churchill. The omission ‘made a bad impression on me’, noted Clementine later.
Thereafter he wasted little time. Within a couple of weeks he had invited Clementine and Lady Blanche to his mother’s house, Salisbury Hall, near St Albans, Hertfordshire. There, Clementine had an early taste of political life when his promotion to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade (at the precocious age of thirty-three) was announced during her stay. No doubt the excitement of being at the centre of national events lingered in her thoughts as she embarked soon after on a long-standing trip to pick up Nellie from a tuberculosis clinic in the Black Forest and visit her grandmother in Florence.