Many of the old Tory grandee houses were now closed to him, but he was welcomed – even lionised – at Liberal functions, and soon afterwards he attended a ball with Jennie at the home of the Marquess and Countess of Crewe, both Liberal supporters. Among the guests that night was a young woman who caught his eye. Her name was Clementine Hozier.
Since Pamela had married two years earlier, Winston had dated a number of women friends from time to time. He even proposed to two of them: first, to the beautiful and talented twenty-two-year-old American actress Ethel Barrymore, a member of the famous acting family. She was on her first visit to London, but it is possible that Winston had already met her in New York. He besieged her with flowers and notes, taking her to dinner each evening at Claridge’s after her shows. In July 1902 he even took her to Blenheim. Did he think, perhaps, that another American woman might emulate his mother? Ethel would go on to have a successful career in movies and is famous for her pithy sayings – among them, ‘To be a success an actress must have the face of Venus, the brain of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno…and the hide of a rhinoceros.’ She told Winston, though, that she felt she would never be able to cope with his world of politics.
The second was Muriel Wilson, heiress to a shipping magnate. She attempted to help Winston overcome the lisp of which he was so self-conscious, making him regularly practise the line: ‘The Spanish ships I cannot see for they are not in sight.’ It has long been assumed that Winston’s interest in Muriel was pecuniary, not least because while touring Europe in Lionel Rothschild’s car, accompanied by Muriel and another girl, he described his relationship with her in a note to Sunny as a banalité. In 1994, however, some letters came to light that he had written to her after he had proposed to her in early 1904 and been rejected, from which it appears that he was rather taken by her. In one he said he had written ‘a long letter three days ago, but decided to burn it’, declining to reveal what he had said in it ‘because you would think me tiresome…Don’t slam the door…I can wait – perhaps I shall improve with waiting. Why shouldn’t you care about me some day? I have great faith in my instinct…Time and circumstance will work for me…I love you because you are good & beautiful.’ He goes on to say that he has not taken her no for a final answer and that the more she opposes him the stronger his feelings will be: ‘I am not going to be thrust back into my grey world of politics without a struggle.’
Later he would write ‘Of course you do not love me a scrap’, yet he believed there must be a key ‘if I could only find it – if you would only let me look for it – which would unlock both our hearts’. He felt ‘mysteriously drawn’ to her, he wrote, yet ‘you dwell apart – as lofty, as shining & alas as cold as a snow-clad peak…I do love to be with you – to watch you, to study you, to come in contact with your nature…I always feel that I am not hateful or ridiculous in your eyes & that no impenetrable veil hangs between us.’ Sixty years later the woman whom Winston would marry wrote to the Wilson family, revealing that Winston had admitted to her that as a young man ‘he was very much in love with [Muriel]’.* At the time, though, Muriel felt his prospects were not good enough and that he had no future.
Later that year he was observed escorting around town nineteen-year-old Helen Botha, daughter of his old enemy, the Boer leader Louis Botha of South Africa. Soon there were widespread rumours of an engagement. The Manchester Guardian offered congratulations, and Muriel Wilson wrote to Winston teasingly, but there was no engagement. Winston was still a free man, all his mental energy given over to politics. And then there was Violet Asquith, who would be a lifelong friend. Winston courted Violet briefly and there were several people who thought they would make a match of it. A friend at that time, Lord Dalmeny (later the 6th Earl of Rosebery), believed that Winston had been devoted to her, and later Winston had confided, ‘I behaved badly to Violet because I was practically engaged to her.’34
Clementine Hozier was different from the other women in his life, but it would be years before she resurfaced to play the greatest role of all.
12
1904–7
My Darling Clementine
Clementine Hozier was the second of the four children of Lady Blanche Hozier (née Ogilvy), who was the daughter of an earl but the possessor of a questionable reputation. Hugely attractive but wayward, Blanche had married in her late twenties. Considered ‘on the shelf’ by then, she had accepted, perhaps with relief, a proposal from a much older, divorced man, Sir Henry Hozier,* who was not of noble stock and therefore believed by Society to be beneath her. The marriage was a disaster that quickly revealed itself when Sir Henry insisted that he wanted no children while Blanche had hoped for a large family. Blanche, or ‘Natty’ as she was known in the family, was subsequently credited with nine lovers. After five years of marriage, in 1883 she gave birth to her first child, Kitty. Two years later Clementine was born, and three years after that came twins, Nellie and Bill. It is doubtful that Sir Henry fathered any of his wife’s children, although he somewhat unwillingly accepted the first two as his own.
It was known, even within her family, that one of Natty’s most attentive lovers was her brother-in-law ‘Bertie’ Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale,† the husband of her sister Clementine. Jennie Churchill met both Bertie Mitford and Natty when they all hunted in Ireland and she certainly knew of their affair in London, for she wrote about it in her diary and had many cosy chats with Natty.* It was openly believed in their circle that it was Bertie Mitford rather than Sir Henry who was Clementine’s natural father; in fact, Natty confided in a close friend a few weeks before Clementine’s birth that Lord Redesdale was indeed the father of her forthcoming baby. This seemed to be confirmed when the baby was born with the distinctive blue eyes that were characteristic in the Mitfords, and she named the baby Clementine after his wife. However, in his secret diaries Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who had an affair with Natty soon after Clementine’s birth, wrote that Natty had confessed to him that her first two daughters were both fathered by Captain George (‘Bay’) Middleton,† known by his foxhunting contemporaries as ‘the bravest of the brave’ and to history as the dashing escort, and perhaps the lover, of the exquisite but tragic sporting empress, Elizabeth of Austria. Jennie had met all the protagonists while hunting in Ireland.
Whoever her father was,‡ Clementine had grown up in a fractured family. Her parents separated in 1891 when she was five years old, but Sir Henry appeared at the family home from time to time, breathing wrath and vengeful threats of removing the two elder daughters from their mother. Eventually, Natty moved to Dieppe, to evade his threats but also for economic reasons, since Sir Henry regularly defaulted on the allowance he had agreed to pay her. Hardly had Natty and her children settled in their new home than sixteen-year-old Kitty contracted typhoid. Clementine and her young sister Nellie were sent to stay with their grandmother in Scotland and there, a fortnight later, they heard of Kitty’s death. The funeral was held at Batsford in Gloucestershire, the home of Natty’s sister and her husband Bertie.
Kitty and Clementine had been devoted to each other, and were the closest of friends in their unusually peripatetic life. Furthermore, Kitty was a confident and outgoing girl and had been a role model to Clementine. Given that many of the diseases now defeated by antibiotics and modern medical techniques were still prevalent and that childhood mortality was more common than it is now, Victorian and Edwardian families almost expected to lose children to infections, but this did not make Kitty’s death any easier for Clementine to bear.
Natty was broken-hearted at the death of her favourite child and for a while Clementine was left to wander around unchaperoned, during which time she formed an unlikely, and wholly innocent, friendship with the artist Walter Sickert* who was living in Dieppe with his mistress. Sickert used to send Clementine home in an electric brougham.1 When Natty moved her family back to England she devoted all her attention to the twins, Bill and Nellie, who were still small. Clementine, dev
astated by Kitty’s death, felt even more isolated at a time when an adolescent is most in need of a confidante. She developed a very protective relationship towards little Nellie but she was never close to her mother and, unusually for girls of her class, she was now sent to a grammar school (in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire) instead of being educated at home by a governess. This provided her with a wider circle of contemporaries than she had previously known, but she remained shy and reserved, and though she mixed well enough with her schoolfriends she did not forge any lasting friendships.
She grew up deeply troubled by her mother’s chaotic and unconventional, almost bohemian, lifestyle, and disapproved of Natty’s male friends as well as of the drinking and gambling she witnessed. And she developed what would become a lifelong tendency to worry constantly about how the household bills were to be paid. There seems to have been considerable tension between the high-minded, disapproving teenage Clementine and her carefree mother, which made Clementine withdraw into herself even more. When she was eighteen various members of the Ogilvy family were recruited to help ‘bring her out’, and one of these, a rich great-aunt, Lady St Helier, invited her to a ball at her home, Crewe House, in the spring of 1904. It was here that she was introduced to the controversial young MP Winston Churchill.
By his own account, Winston asked his mother to effect an introduction to a particular girl he found stunning, and Jennie went off to make inquiries. When she returned she told him, ‘How very interesting: she is the daughter of a very old friend of mine, Blanche Hozier, whom I haven’t seen for years.’2 The introduction made, Winston was, most unusually, struck dumb. His daughter Mary would later retell his recollection of the event: ‘He stood rooted to the spot staring at her.’ Highly embarrassed, Clementine signalled to a male friend, who came up and asked her to dance. As they moved away, her partner warned her about speaking to ‘that frightful fellow Winston Churchill’.3
It was hardly a propitious meeting, and neither gave too much thought to it at the time. Possibly, Winston noted some time later the announcement of Clementine’s engagement in The Times, followed shortly afterwards with a notice that ‘the marriage will now not take place’. He could not know that she had almost suffered a nervous breakdown over it. She had accepted the proposal of a much older man at a time when she badly wanted to get away from her mother, for whom she had little admiration. But probably when she thought of what marriage involved her innate sensitivity got the better of her.
In April 1904, when she was in Paris to consult doctors about her loss of hearing, Consuelo refused to return to Blenheim at Sunny’s request to act as hostess at a weekend party for some important guests. Sunny was reduced to apologising for her absence through Winston, who announced that ‘the special treatment’ she was receiving from her consultant in France could not be interrupted – ‘She particularly desired the party to go on.’4 That summer the Marlboroughs were together in Paris for some weeks, joined there by Gladys Deacon. Both were delighted to see her, though having recently lost her much loved sister from a heart condition, Gladys was upset and appeared on edge the entire time. If her behaviour was slightly erratic, her recent loss seemed an adequate explanation. When Gladys returned to her mother in Italy, the Marlboroughs each wrote to her affectionately. Sunny, clearly still love-stricken, was worried about her health and longed to see her again. He spent an entire day at Blenheim reading through all her letters to him, but her latest caused him great pain, for she had insisted that their relationship must be henceforth platonic (which appears to confirm that it had not always been so). She had been right to be so frank with him, he wrote, and he was glad in a way that she had been, because he had been living in a fool’s paradise. Yet the pain and anxiety of their long separation was too much to bear, and he almost wished they had never met. Later that year when he visited Italy he kept his word not to attempt to see her, though he could not resist calling on her mother to inquire about Gladys’s health. Meanwhile, the terrible spectre of divorce faced Sunny and Consuelo, but both were reluctant to embark upon such a course because of the inevitable social ramifications.
Once again Winston spent most of the parliamentary recess in September 1904 at Blenheim, working on his biography of his father. He had made himself a portable office and archive in a series of three-foot-square tin boxes, each divided into compartments. At least one of these boxes accompanied him on every journey so that even on the train or when spending a weekend with friends he could continue his work. Invariably he would ask his hostess to provide him with a large table, where he would set out his sheaves of papers, lists, notes and letters in order to utilise every spare moment to advantage. ‘I have moved a greater part of my tin boxes here and am now settled down in the Arcade Rooms which are most comfortable,’ he wrote to Jennie. ‘Consuelo is quite alone here…I have been working most assiduously at my book and the great thing to avoid is unnecessary movement…I may as well remain here where I can ride each morning.’5
When Sunny returned to Blenheim Consuelo took herself off to her father in Paris, where she found a welcome normality in a house alive with the laughter of a happy family and a couple at peace with each other. ‘I rejoiced in the happiness he had found in his second marriage,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘My stepmother had a gay and gentle nature. Entirely engrossed in her husband and the four children her two previous marriages had given her she lived the life that suited my father…my father had his racing stable and a small house at Poissy, a short drive from Paris. We sometimes spent the night there and in the early morning went out to his private track to see the horses gallop.’ Seeing her father so content, and recalling the ghastliness of his divorce from her mother, it is no surprise that Consuelo wondered whether she might find a similar contentment away from Sunny. The major drawback was that the law as it stood required a husband to prove unfaithfulness in his wife – which would, of course, bring such disgrace on the woman that her social life would be utterly destroyed. In those days even an innocent party, along with all the members of their family, would also be tainted by the stigma of divorce.
Once having crossed the floor, Winston began to feel that Oldham was no longer the right constituency for him, and having done his research he had concluded that Manchester, the home of the free-trade doctrine, would suit him better. His son would note many years later: ‘It is not without significance that many of his leading supporters in Manchester were Jews. The names of Nathan Laski, Chaim Weizmann, Israel Zangwill, Joseph Dulberg and Barrow Belisha stand out among his early adherents and supporters. No wonder that he so early was indoctrinated in the cause of Zion.’6 Winston threw himself in on the side of ‘the simple immigrant, the political refugee, the helpless and the poor’, and he opposed the Aliens Bill of 1904 on the grounds that ‘it will commend itself to those who like patriotism at other people’s expense. It is expected to appeal to insular prejudice against foreigners, to racial prejudice against Jews, and to labour prejudice against competition.’7 On this platform he made his first speech from the Opposition bench and established his reputation as a champion of minority groups, or what he called ‘the left out millions’. He was also active concerning a new Army bill and a licensing bill, and on one occasion caused uproar in the Chamber by accusing the Prime Minister of orchestrating an attempt by the Conservatives to howl him down when he was attacking the government.
The Chamber was never dull when Winston was on his feet. His thinking was original, his grasp of politics – whether one agreed with him or not – all-encompassing. His speeches, carefully prepared and delivered to devastating effect, often against Joseph Chamberlain who was vehemently opposed to free trade, were also aimed at showcasing himself. He was going to succeed spectacularly, on the fast track, or die in the attempt; everyone in the House knew it, and en route Winston made lots of enemies because of his blatant opportunism and shameless ambition. He was even blackballed by the Hurlingham polo club. Nevertheless, this would have been less of a blow to him than having to
formally resign from the Carlton Club, which he did on 14 April 1905. He was still playing polo, his favourite recreation, whenever he could spare the time: ‘I am going to spend the Sunday with Ivor [Guest] at Ashby [Ashby St Ledgers, Northamptonshire],’ he wrote to Jennie on 6 April, ‘with polo on Sat[urday] and Monday. I have begun electric treatment to tighten my dislocated shoulder.* It is rather pleasant. We shall be together either at Blenheim or Salisbury Hall the whole of the Easter holiday.’8
The Churchills Page 24