Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

  He also found solace with his easel and canvas. Sir John and Hazel Lavery had recently arrived on the Riviera and were also staying at the Eden. Over the next four days he joined them on painting expeditions along the Corniche. Like many of his artist contemporaries, Lavery craved the Mediterranean light. Before the war he had worked in North Africa but now preferred the South of France. Having just been elected to the Royal Academy, he was planning an exhibition later in the year. One of the outstanding works that he produced for it was simply entitled The Bay, Monte Carlo and showed Hazel sitting on a terrace overlooking Cap Ferrat. Churchill painted the identical view, but without Hazel. It was on one of these expeditions that Lavery also painted him standing before his easel on a cliff above the Mediterranean, brush in hand, attempting to reproduce its brilliant light. Entitled The Blue Bay: Mr Churchill on the Riviera, before the year was out it had been reproduced in such American newspapers as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.2

  His passion for painting was now a lively topic of public conversation. Not long after this Riviera sortie, the critic and avant-garde artist Wyndham Lewis offered the typically provocative opinion that it was no use trying to educate the masses but that instead Britain’s political leaders should be educated in art. ‘They tell me,’ he wrote, ‘Mr. Churchill turns out ever so many pictures a week.’ Sadly though, true artists were both rare and frequently judged insane. ‘There was the Mad King of Bavaria. They considered him mad because he liked music,’ he added. ‘If Mr. Churchill liked painting more than he does, he also would be considered mad.’3

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  Mad, Churchill was not. But he was certainly still angry when he returned to London, convinced that in his absence he had been cheated of the chance to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘Winston has come back . . . as cross as a bear with a sore head,’ noted Austen Chamberlain. Lloyd George’s decision continued to rankle throughout the spring. Churchill avoided him at Cabinet or other official meetings, and in his letters no longer addressed him as ‘Dear LlG’ or even ‘My dear David’, but instead deployed the cooler and more formal ‘Dear Prime Minister’. In turn the prime minister confessed that he was sick of Churchill and wouldn’t care if he resigned.4

  *

  Amidst this stormy political weather, Churchill also had to cope with several personal issues. These included sorting out financial details of the Garron Towers inheritance. Although Jack took care of some of them, one in particular required his own intervention. His legacy had included some emeralds and other jewels, but a few items of these had gone missing, been stolen, or sold by the Londonderrys. Whether or not to confront them legally about this caused both him and Clementine some heart-searching. But in the end, after discussing the matter with F. E. he sorted it out amicably with Lord Londonderry for the sake of family harmony.

  All this soon paled into insignificance in the face of a real tragedy. Lieutenant-Commander William (‘Bill’) Ogilvy Hozier was Clementine’s younger and only brother, a retired naval officer who had commanded two destroyers and a cruiser at the Dardanelles. Early in April he flew to Paris and checked into the Hotel Jena. On the morning of Thursday 14 April he paid his bill and sent out a servant to buy the newspaper. When the man returned shortly after 9 a.m. it was to find the door to Hozier’s room locked. Persistent knocking received no answer and it was not until late in the afternoon that the door was finally forced open to reveal the thirty-three-year-old dead in his pyjamas with a bullet wound in his right temple.

  Clementine was devastated by her brother’s suicide and his twin sister Nellie even more so. Although his gambling had long been a worry to the family, he appeared to have no current debts, had paid his bill, and showed no signs of depression. Nor did he leave a note. Clementine and Nellie rushed over to Dieppe to be with their mother, Lady Blanche Ogilvy, who had been living in France for several years, and they decided that Bill should be buried there. As a suicide he could not be interred in consecrated ground. But eventually an English clergyman was found who would take the funeral service. ‘It is cold and snowing,’ Lady Blanche wrote to her son-in-law in a hurriedly scrawled note the night before the burial, expressing her concern about Nellie’s mental state and praising Clementine for her tender support. ‘I would like it said in The Times and other papers,’ she added, ‘that we three were here – dear Winston I am so thankful that Clemmie has such a husband as you are.’ Churchill found time to go by train and ferry over to Dieppe for the funeral, and returned the same night to attend a Conference of Ministers the next day that had been postponed for his benefit.5

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  Two weeks later he received another hurriedly scrawled note, this time from his mother. Enclosed was a long letter from his wayward cousin. The letter he had sent to Clare in January had never reached her and she was keen to mend fences and bring him up to date with what she had been doing in New York, as well as her future plans. Bernard Baruch had found her difficult to handle. ‘She ran around New York like a fire engine out of control,’ he said years later, ‘. . . sometimes I had to wonder if Winston was deliberately playing a joke when he gave me this exotic creature to “look after”. She was impossible.’

  Fire engine or not, Clare had met with some of her Jerome cousins and family, and dined with Winston’s old friend Maxine Elliot, the American-born star of stage and film. She gave talks about Bolshevism, saw a great deal of the painter Ambrose McEvoy who was also visiting the city, made several sculptures, and was now contemplating a visit to Mexico City to sculpt a bust of the revolutionary General, and now President, Álvaro Obregón. If she did, she would make a detour to California to see Charlie Chaplin to whom she had a letter of introduction. ‘Bless you Winston dear,’ she concluded. ‘I hope your feeling about me is what mine is about you – always devoted, Clare.’ Then she added a PS: ‘Don’t you think you might send me to Moscow as British representative or Ambassador? . . . My tact, diplomacy & pacifist character should fit me for the job . . . In these days when women do things it ought to be appropriate.’ After all, she reminded him, he had said more than once that he would vote for her if she stood for Parliament.6

  It is hard to imagine that she considered this extraordinary suggestion anything other than an ironic joke. But with Clare it was hard to be certain; she was just as capable of being naively sincere. Certainly, society gossip about her exploits in Moscow had not ceased with her departure to New York, as Lady Jean Hamilton discovered during a stay at Taplow Court on the River Thames in Buckinghamshire, the home of Ethel (‘Ettie’) and William (‘Willie’) Grenfell, Lord and Lady Desborough. With its spreading cedars, walled fruit garden, and 200 acres of land, the house was a favourite weekend gathering point for members of London society including politicians, writers, and poets. Churchill had been a steady Taplow habitué since returning from the Boer War, and at a couple of high-spirited parties had been flung into the Thames where he coolly continued to swim in his top hat and spats. Taplow was always a hub of society gossip. This time it was his cousin who provided its principal fodder. ‘Everyone,’ noted Jean Hamilton, was discussing Clare. How could she, they protested, live in looted houses and ride in motorcars belonging to her class so brutally murdered by her new hosts? It was all so ‘unspeakably dreadful and cheap’. Especially so when she occupied the Tsar’s box at the opera dressed all in red but without, the gossips noted, the courage to wear her white gloves!7

  Clare still featured in the British newspapers as well. Reviews of her sculpted heads of the Communist leadership appeared, as did advertisements for her new book. In any case, Churchill left little doubt as to how he felt. ‘It is rather pathetic how she hankers after your goodwill,’ the forgiving Jennie told him, ‘[but] don’t be hard on her.’ He wasn’t. But his dictated, typewritten reply was brief and cool in tone, wishing her well in America and promising to welcome her back as a friend provided that she was not still associated with ‘these Bolshevik butchers’. He simply ignored her suggestion about going to Moscow as an ambassador. If it
was serious, it was fatuous. If it was a joke, it wasn’t funny.

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  In Churchill’s dealings with Clare his mother was always a significant presence. This was equally true for other aspects of his social life, and it was rare for much time to pass when they did not meet for lunch or dinner; scarcely had he returned to London than she invited him and his brother over for dinner with John and Hazel Lavery. Jennie was now a white-haired sixty-seven-year-old, and enjoying her third marriage. Montagu Porch, a former officer in the Colonial Service and three years younger than Winston, was visiting Nigeria. Like her elder son, Lady Randolph had always relied heavily on credit to sustain her lifestyle. Unusually, however, she had recently received an infusion of cash after selling her Mayfair house at a healthy profit and moved into a new home in Bayswater, close to Winston and Clementine.

  After leaving them at Cap d’Ail she had travelled to stay with an old friend in Florence and Rome, where as usual she indulged in expensive shopping expeditions and returned to London with a new pair of high-heeled evening slippers made by Rome’s finest shoemaker. Resuming her normal hectic social round, she found time to look in on a private view of Lavery’s Riviera paintings at his home accompanied by her smoke-grey chow dog before heading off to the country to stay with Sir John and Lady Horner, whose daughter Katharine was a lifelong friend of Clementine’s and whose home at Mells Manor in Somerset had frequently provided a welcome rural retreat for the Churchills; Katharine’s husband Raymond Asquith, son of Herbert Asquith, had been killed on the Western Front. One evening, hastening downstairs, Jennie slipped in her new shoes, took a heavy fall, and broke her left leg just above the ankle. The bones were set and two days later she was taken by ambulance back to her London home to recuperate. All seemed well.

  But ten days later gangrene set in. Soon she developed a high fever. An anxious Churchill promptly phoned a surgeon and within hours her leg was amputated above the knee. Family members hastened to her side. If ever it was clear that Churchill belonged to a tightly knit family, this was the proof. His aunts Leonie and Clara – Clare’s mother – were beside themselves with anxiety. Churchill’s brother was distraught. ‘I knew there was death in the house,’ he told Oswald, Clare’s brother, as they walked back to Jack’s house one night. ‘I had a presentiment of it. I only did not know who it would be.’

  Yet Jennie quickly recovered and was soon joking cheerfully about her missing leg with her sisters and friends. Churchill was vastly relieved, and when Sir Ian and Lady Hamilton came for lunch he was able to assure them that she was out of danger – a message he repeated in a telegram he sent to Montagu Porch the following day. But on the morning of Wednesday 29 June, after eating a hearty breakfast, his mother suddenly suffered a massive haemorrhage of the main artery in her thigh and fell unconscious. Urgently summoned by phone, Churchill rushed over from home still dressed in his pyjamas but could do nothing to help. Jack had been nursing her diligently night and day for the previous five weeks and had just started again to sleep at his own house after the doctor declared that the danger was past. He, too, now rushed to the scene. Quite by chance Bourke Cochran and his wife were in London and they also turned up, bringing Leonie with them.

  Before noon, Churchill’s mother was dead, having never recovered consciousness. Hurriedly, he scrawled a note to Bernard Baruch, who was also in town, cancelling a lunch they had planned that day at Sussex Square. ‘I deeply grieve to tell you that my mother died this morning,’ he wrote, adding that he still remained anxious to talk with him as soon as he could.8 At three o’clock that afternoon Lady Randolph was laid in her coffin. Churchill and his brother, cousins and aunts went to pay their last respects. ‘I wish you could have seen her as she lay at rest – after all the sunshine and storm of life was over,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Very beautiful & splendid she looked. Since the morning with its pangs, thirty years have fallen from her brow. She recalled to me the countenance I had admired as a child when she was in her heyday and the old brilliant world of the eighties and nineties seemed to come back . . .’9 Her death was a stark reminder that the days of his youth were now over. It was a major emotional loss. ‘She shone for me like the Evening Star,’ he was to write of her in My Early Life. ‘I loved her dearly – but at a distance.’ But this oft-quoted avowal refers to his childhood days and reflects the detached irony of his memoir. Mapping out his ambitions in his youth, he had depended heavily on her strong emotional and practical support, and after marrying Clementine he had sometimes turned to his mother at moments of stress, as he had done when overwhelmed by the crowded domestic scene during the war.

  On Saturday 2 July the family travelled by train to Oxford in a reserved coach, the blinds half down. A car drove them the last eight miles to Bladon and the small and peaceful church nestled close to Blenheim Palace. Here Jennie’s body was already laid out amidst a wealth of flowers framed by two altar lights that had burned all night, a scene captured by Lavery in a painting. ‘Jack and Winston were like widowers,’ Shane Leslie wrote to Clare in New York. ‘Her sons and sisters were affected almost beyond the grief that is claimed by ties of flesh and blood . . . Winston was bowed under the greatest grief of his life.’ After the service, when her coffin was finally lowered into the freshly dug grave next to his father, a tearful Churchill threw in a spray of crimson roses. At the same hour, in St Margaret’s Church in Westminster, a memorial service took place attended by dozens of Jennie’s friends, relatives, and members of London society including the American ambassador, Sir Ernest Cassel, the Curzons, and the Wimbornes. The Churchills’ two daughters Diana and Sarah were also present. Freddie Guest, Archie Sinclair, and Eddie Marsh served as ushers. The King and Queen sent official representatives, and Sir William Sutherland represented Lloyd George. At Bladon, the lesson was read by the sub-dean of the Chapels Royal.

  Lady Randolph’s death received headline coverage across the Atlantic as well as in the British press. After all, as the Boston Evening Globe put it, she was not only Lord Randolph’s widow and the mother of Winston Spencer Churchill, but ‘Miss Jennie Jerome of New York’. Her conquest of British society was a common theme of American obituaries, and the Boston Post described her as the United States’ ‘Best Ambassador’ in Britain. Inevitably, her death also focused eyes on her son Winston, whose name by now was familiar to many Americans. ‘She died,’ noted the Post, ‘before she realized the ambition of her life – to see her son Winston Churchill as Prime Minister.’ Back in New York, Bernard Baruch, who was still grieving his own father’s recent death, picked up the same theme. ‘I am watching with intense interest your broadening career.’10

  More letters of sympathy poured in. Many recalled the glory days of his mother’s prime – and of theirs – but some gave voice to more reflective thoughts. ‘Life’s work will soon absorb you again, as indeed it is right it should,’ wrote his ever loyal aunt Cornelia. ‘But don’t lose sight of that rift in the heavens which reminds us of the life beyond and which can only inspire you to right thinking and doing.’ Other close friends chimed in. Only the weekend before, Winston and Clementine had spent another of their regular stays at Taplow. ‘Your spirit is brave & will stand fast,’ wrote ‘Ettie’ Desborough, ‘but I cannot bear to think of you in the dark country of grief.’ But it was his cousin Ivor Guest, Freddie’s brother, who undoubtedly captured its true significance for Churchill himself. ‘For her doubtless it was a release from crippled age,’ he wrote, ‘but to lose one’s mother is to be severed from one’s own youth, and begets a new sense of isolation in confronting destiny henceforth.’

  That Churchill had to accept that the final curtain had fallen on a major scene in his life he made clear to Millicent (‘Millie’), the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland, a near contemporary who had directed field hospitals in France during the war. ‘I find it difficult writing this afternoon that she is gone,’ he penned from the Colonial Office as the finality of his mother’s death began to sink in, ‘that there is no chance of Eddi
e opening my office door to say she has come to see me – as she often did – that I shall never have one of our jolly talks again.’ And to Lord Curzon, one of his mother’s oldest friends, he made it clear that he saw her death as a major milestone in his life. ‘I am deeply touched by the kindness of all you write,’ he told the Foreign Secretary. ‘You have ever been a true friend. We all keep moving along the road.’11

  His mother’s death also completed the transformation of his finances, as he now received his half share of both his parents’ trusts. This was complicated, as it involved extracting money due from his Jerome grandfather’s settlement in New York, but eventually it produced another tranche of income. Three days after Jennie’s funeral, he met with Sir Reginald Cox, the senior partner at his personal bankers, to discuss his future financial arrangements. By the end of 1921 his family’s entire net worth stood at £100,000, or £4,500,000 in today’s values – a level it would not reach again until close to the end of the Second World War. All too predictably, however, his annual spending continued to outrun his income. This gave him even more incentive to get on with writing The World Crisis, as well as producing articles for newspapers and magazines that would pay him well.