Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  During the reconstruction of “Cosy Pig,” as he called it, he leased Hosey Rigg, a nearby house where, he was delighted to learn, Lewis Carroll had written Alice in Wonderland. On weekends he would prowl around his new property, the children tagging along. He wrote his wife: “I am going to amuse them on Saturday and Sunday by making them an aerial house in the lime tree. You may be sure I will take the greatest precautions to guard against their tumbling down.” Sarah would remember the tree house as “a two-storeyed affair; it was a good twenty feet high, and was reached by first shinning up a rope and then climbing on carefully placed struts between the four stems of the elm.” During the Easter holiday of 1924 he and the children began sleeping at the manor in what Mary calls “camping” style. To Clementine, who was laid up, he wrote: “This is the first letter I have ever written from this place, & it is right that it shd be to you. I am in bed in your bedroom (wh I have annexed temporarily) & wh is sparsely but comfortably furnished with the pick of yr two van loads…. You cannot imagine the size of these rooms till you put furniture in them. This bedroom of yours is a magnificent aerial bower. Come as soon as you feel well enough to share it.” The children, he said, had “worked like blacks.” He added a couplet: “Only one thing lack these banks of green—/ The Pussy Cat who is their queen.”167

  Under his supervision—and his straining muscles—the grounds began to take shape. To Cosy Pig’s natural setting he added three hundred asparagus plants, two hundred strawberry runners, and a large consignment of fruit trees: apple, pear, plum, damson, and quince. For Clementine he created a water garden, and, beyond it, a fragrant azalea glade. White foxglove was planted, then blue anchusa. Carp swam in a warm pond. Black swans, a gift from the Australian government, cruised across a large, pleasant lake which a previous owner had created by damming the spring. “Why only one dam?” Winston asked. He wanted a place to swim. Another site was excavated and water diverted into it. Sir Samuel Hoare, in the neighborhood, wrote Beaverbrook: “I had never seen Winston in the role of landed proprietor,” and described him as engaged in “engineering works” which “consist of making a series of ponds in the valley.” He added: “Winston appeared to be a great deal more interested in them than in anything else in the world.” But both lakes, Churchill decided, were too weedy and muddy for swimming, so he decided to abandon one to wildfowl, drain the other, scoop out a third, waterproof its bottom, and build another dike, hiring a crew of workmen and pressing Detective Thompson into service. Thomas Jones arrived and found Churchill “attired in dungarees and high Wellington boots superintending the building of a dam by a dozen navvies. This is the third lake, and the children are wondering what their father will do next year, as there is room for no more lakes.” Writing Clementine on August 19 of his first Chartwell summer, Winston mentioned—fleetingly, almost impatiently—that Conservatives in the Epping constituency, “one of the safest seats in the country,” were actively courting him, and then hurried on to what was, for him, more exciting news: “Work on the dam is progressing…. The water has been rising steadily. We have this evening seven feet. It will be finished by next Tuesday, or eight weeks from its initiation. I am at it all day and every day.” A foot of mud remained in the old lake, and he was clearing it out: “Thompson and I have been wallowing in the most filthy black mud you ever saw, with the vilest odour, getting the beastly stuff to drain away. The moor hens and dab chicks have migrated in a body to the new lake and taken up their quarters in the bushes at the upper end.” Thompson recalls pulling on rubber waders each morning before going out to “the dig” with Winston, shoveling, patching, lining the bottom of the new excavation with bitumen, “thick slimy mud everywhere,” and one occasion of rare mirth when “I dropped a dollop of mud on his pate.”168

  It was all in vain. The bitumen leaked, and the new dam, though built of cement, threatened to slide down the hill. Undaunted, Churchill built a circular pool by the house, fed by the Chart Well, whose waters came purling down through fern-fringed channels and rocks fetched by train from Cumberland. The spring was supplemented by an electric pump, which sent water to and from the ponds “rather like a stage army,” in Sarah’s phrase, or, in Winston’s, “filtered to limpidity.” It was a heated pool, then a novelty; a visiting engineer assured him that the boilers were big enough to heat the Ritz. The uselessness of the dams was frustrating, but erecting them had not been a complete waste; the lakes were comely, and the work, like his landscaping and gardening, had been a diversion from politics. Thompson believes it was good for Churchill “to get close to the ground and the fine smell of it, and to work it and plant it and make it bloom and yield.” After the voters of Westminster had rejected him Winston wrote a friend: “I am content for the first time in my life to look after my own affairs, build my house and cultivate my garden.” Once the mansion was completely finished and the family had spent two strenuous days moving in, he continued to toil outside, devising rookeries, miniature waterfalls in the water garden, elaborate waterworks for the golden carp, and planting bamboo, wisteria, and acers on the banks of the carps’ pool. Then, after putting up a garden wall of Kentish ragstone, he decided to become a bricklayer. Returning from London one evening, he paused in Westerham to visit Quebec House, General James Wolfe’s birthplace. After examining the wall, with its dentils surmounted by a sloping top, he said: “That’s what I want.” Shortly thereafter James Scrymgeour-Wedderburn, an early Chartwell guest, scribbled in his diary: “Winston is building with his own hands a house for his butler, and also a garden wall!”169

  He built much more than that. Altogether he finished two cottages, several walls, and a playhouse for Mary. Scrymgeour-Wedderburn wrote: “He works at bricklaying for hours a day, and lays 90 bricks an hour, which is a very high output.” He himself never claimed more than one a minute, but his craftsmanship was admirable; the sturdy results stand today. He wrote Baldwin: “I have had a delightful month building a cottage and dictating a book: 200 bricks and 2,000 words a day.” Stories about his skill reached James F. Lane, an official of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers. Lane wrote Winston, proposing that he join the union. Winston replied: “Would you mind letting me know whether there is any rule regulating the number of bricks which a man may lay in a day; also, is there any rule that a trade unionist may not work with one who is not a trade unionist; and what are the restrictions on overtime? I may say that I shall be very pleased to join the union if that would not be unwelcome to your members.” As it turned out, he was unwelcome. Lane sent him a union card and a certificate of membership, and addressed him as “Brother Churchill,” but a Manchester local protested that his recruitment invited “public contempt and ridicule.” The executive committee voted that Churchill was ineligible. He kept the certificate, however, and framed it.170

  Like many another country gentleman, admiring his new estate, Winston decided to “live off the land”—to make Cosy Pig pay. The consequences were uniformly disappointing. Poultry, sheep, cattle, and pigs arrived healthy and then languished. He kept hoping for success; in the summer of 1924 he wrote Clementine: “The 9 elder swine are sold for £31. They have eaten less than £1 a week for 18 weeks of life—so there is a profit of £13. Not bad on so small a capital.” But he really knew nothing of livestock, and his wife regarded the creatures with great apprehension. He liked them; he remarked: “The world would be better off if it were inhabited only by animals.” Yet he resisted modern techniques of scientific farming, and was indignant when a prosperous breeder suggested artificial insemination. Churchill growled: “The beasts will not be deprived—not while I’m alive!” The fact is that he couldn’t bear to think of livestock exploited and then slaughtered. To him they were all pets, to be cherished and pampered: the golden orfe, a marmalade cat, Carolina ducks, chickens, sheldrakes, the swans, polo ponies, Canada geese, cygnets, assorted dogs, and bottle-fed lambs. One day Sarah and Mary came to him in tears. Mary’s pug, they cried, was desperately ill. Their father, almost as ups
et as they were, dashed off an incantation to be chanted whenever the dog fell sick:171

  Churchill building a wall at Chartwell, 1928

  Oh, what is the matter with poor puggy-wug?

  Pet him and kiss him and give him a hug.

  Run and fetch him a suitable drug,

  Wrap him up tenderly all in a rug,

  That is the way to cure Puggy-wug.

  Once he had said good morning to it, almost any creature at Chartwell was safe. An exception was a goose; his wife had it cooked for dinner. At the table he picked up the knife, hesitated, and handed it to Clementine. “You carve him, Clemmie,” he said. “He was a friend of mine.” The only animal to fall from grace was a ram named Charmayne. Winston had nursed Charmayne as a lamb, but when it grew up it turned vicious and butted everyone. A veterinarian was summoned. He performed an operation. If anything, the beast grew worse. The children were afraid of it; Clementine begged Winston to get rid of it. He scoffed at the idea. “How ridiculous. You don’t have to be frightened. It is very nice and knows me.” However, one day, to the secret delight of the children, Charmayne got behind Churchill, charged, butted the back of his knees, and knocked him flat. Before the sun set, the ram had vanished. How he had disposed of it he would not say, but Clementine hoped it had been sold, and for a good price; she wanted to see something at Chartwell pay for itself.172

  Clementine was frequently absent from her husband’s Cosy Pig in those early years. The children always missed her terribly. “DARLING, DARLING Mummy,” Sarah wrote. “Don’t forget to come home sometime. Papa is miserable and frightfully naughty without you!” But she had other obligations. Lady Blanche was dying in Dieppe and needed her daughter by her side. Churchill, ever anxious if Clementine was unhappy, wrote her: “Yr mother is a gt woman: & her life has been a noble life. When I think of all the courage & tenacity & self denial that she showed… I feel what a true mother & grand woman she proved herself, & I am more glad & proud to think her blood flows in the veins of our children. My darling I grieve for you.” Back in London after the funeral, shopping in the Brompton Road, Clementine was hit by a bus, and although she took a taxi home without assistance, her doctor prescribed six weeks of rest in Venice. She wanted Winston to join her, but he declined to leave Kent. “Every day away from Chartwell,” he said, “is a day wasted.” He told her that “every minute of my day here passes delightfully. There are an enormous amount of things I want to do—and there is of course also the expense to consider.” Clementine was well aware of their expenses. It was one of her worries about Chartwell. The payroll alone was staggering: a cook, a farmhand, a groom for the ponies, three gardeners, a nanny, a nursery maid, an “odd-man” (dustbins, boilers, boots), two housemaids, two kitchen maids, two more in the pantry, Clementine’s lady’s maid, who also did the family sewing, and Winston’s two secretaries.173

  Occasionally Churchill himself became alarmed. He sent his wife one long memorandum on economy covering fourteen points. Trips were to be curtailed, their only winter visits to Chartwell would be “picnics with hampers,” all livestock except two polo ponies would be sold, few guests would be invited “other than Jack and Goonie,” and “Item 14,” headed “BILLS,” was a detailed analysis of savings to be made in the consumption of cigars and wines, the number of dress shirts he should wear for dinner each week, and even a reduction in the boot-polish inventory. He also considered renting Chartwell for the following summer for eighty guineas a week, though he wasn’t really serious, and quickly backed off when Clementine took him up on it. She suggested they “establish the children in a comfortable but economical hotel near Dinard, go there ourselves for part of the time & travel about painting for you, sight seeing for me, or we could go to Tours & do the ‘Chateaux’ again—and we could go to Florence & Venice.” Churchill had an alternative. He thought he could put them in the black by “going into milk.” Dismayed, she sent him a seven-page letter pointing out that all his adventures in husbandry had been disastrous: “You will remember that the chickens and chicken houses got full of red mite and vermin; and you will also remember that one sow was covered with lice.”174

  Invariably he became bored with issues of thrift and airily dismissed them. His wife couldn’t. She had to deal with the thickening backlog of unpaid bills and the local tradesmen who called for their money. It was mortifying and, at times, infuriating. Clementine aroused was formidable, and not just within the family. Their guests crossed her at their peril. Afterward Winston, rueful but proud of her, would say, “Clemmie gave poor Smith a most fearful mauling,” or “She dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree!” Yet she was never a match for her own husband. He was too verbal, too skillful in debate, so she usually wrote him, even when they were in the same room. Occasionally, however, she lashed out at him in exasperation; Mary recalls that “on one occasion she became so enraged that she hurled a dish of spinach at Winston’s head. She missed, and the dish hit the wall, leaving a telltale mark.”175 But that was unlike her. She usually pursued her objectives quietly, letting servants go and cutting household costs in ways Winston would not notice until it was too late to undo what she had done. In time she left her own imprint on their country home, if only because she couldn’t afford an interior decorator. Chartwell today reflects her simple, excellent taste: the clean colors—pale cream, pale blue, cerulean blue—bright moire on her four-poster bed, chintzes with bold floral designs, rush carpets, unstained oak chairs and tables, and other graceful furniture, inherited or picked up at auctions.

  Hospitality was a constant source of joy to Churchill. He loved to show Chartwell off. Cyril Connolly wrote: “A man with a will to power can have no friends.” Winston was an exception. No man yearned for dominion more than Cosy Pig’s owner, and few have had more friends. They came to Kent in a constant stream: Lloyd George, Bernard Baruch, the Birkenheads, the Duff Coopers, Eddie Marsh, Bob Boothby, the Archie Sinclairs, Brendan Bracken, the Bonham Carters, cabinet members, publishers, writers—men and women who often shared but one trait: they were gifted, and therefore worthy foils for their host. Brendan Bracken, with his quaint spectacles and carrot-red hair flaming in a tousled mop, was particularly striking. Churchill had been amused when he heard that Bracken was rumored to be his illegitimate son; even more amused when he learned that Bracken wouldn’t deny it; and delighted when Bracken took to addressing him as “Father.” At Chartwell, Margot Asquith wrote, “every ploy became ‘a matter of pith and moment.’ ” Lord Rawlinson would come to discuss hunting and painting. Beaverbrook arrived with an enormous gift for Churchill’s fifty-first birthday, a refrigerator, so Winston could drink champagne without ice. T. E. Lawrence descended the stairs to dinner wearing—to the enchantment of the children—the robes of a prince of Arabia. Professor F. A. Lindemann, “the Prof,” looked dull in his bowler hat, but in his way he was more wonderful than Lawrence. In 1916 RAF pilots were dying daily in nose dives. At the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, Lindemann had worked out, with mathematical precision, a maneuver which, he said, would bring any aircraft out of a tailspin. The pilots said it wouldn’t work. The Prof taught himself to fly, took off without a parachute, deliberately sent the aircraft down in a spin, and brought it out so successfully that mastering his solution became required of every beginning flier. One evening at Chartwell, Winston said: “Prof, tell us in words of one syllable, and in no longer than five minutes, what is the Quantum Theory.” He produced his gold watch. Lindemann did it—and at the end the entire family burst into applause. But the children’s greatest thrill was provided by Charlie Chaplin. On first meeting Chaplin, Winston had written Clementine: “You cd not help liking him…. He is a marvellous comedian—bolshy in politics & delightful in conversation.” His evening at Chartwell began badly. He wanted to discuss the gold standard. Churchill lapsed into a moody silence. Suddenly his guest snatched up two rolls of bread, thrust two forks in them, and did the famous dance from his 1925 film The Gold Rush. “Immediately the atmosphe
re relaxed,” recalls Boothby, who was there, “and thereafter we spent a happy evening, with both Churchill and Chaplin at the top of their form.”176

  Churchill building a snowman

  Of these years Churchill would later write: “I never had a dull or idle moment from morning till midnight.” Even today one senses the Churchillian presence at Chartwell, in the vast study, by the dining room’s round table, in the solid brick walls, the seat by the fishpond where he liked to meditate, and the studio in which his stunning paintings stand row on row, awaiting eventual public display. Perhaps, as Mary says, his painting, writing, and manual labor “were sovereign antidotes to the depressive element in his nature.” If so, never was depression so thoroughly routed by activity and wit. One can almost hear the merry rumble of his voice when, introduced to a young man on the eve of his twenty-fifth birthday, Winston said: “Napoleon took Toulon before his twenty-fifth birthday,” and, whipping out the gold watch, cried: “Quick, quick! You have just time to take Toulon before you are twenty-five—go and take Toulon!”177

  In fantasy one envisages long-ago summer afternoons here, with young voices calling scores from the tennis court, the middle-aged basking by the pool, and couples discussing imperial issues over tea and strawberries in the loggia. But if those who knew the Churchills could choose one moment of the year to relive, it would be Christmas. For them, in a nostalgic chamber of the mind, it will always be that magical eve when the entire family has gathered here, including Jack and Goonie and their young, with Randolph home from Eton, the girls rehearsing an amateur theatrical, Clementine helping the servants build a snowman, and Churchill upstairs writing one of his extraordinary love letters to her. (“The most precious thing in my life is yr love for me. I reproach myself for many shortcomings. You are a rock & I depend on you & rest on you.”) Presents, hidden all week in an out-of-bounds closet, the “Genii’s cupboard,” are about to appear. Fires crackle; the house is hung with holly, ivy, laurel, and yew; the Christ child gazes down lovingly from a large Della Robbia plaque. Now the double doors between the library and the drawing room are flung open and the Christmas tree is revealed in all its splendor, a hundred white wax candles gleaming, the scent of pine and wax like a breath of rapture, and Churchill, the benign sovereign in this absolutely English castle, leads the way across the threshold toward his annual festival of joy “with my happy family around me,” as he would later write, “at peace within my habitation.”178