The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  From Venice, Winston travelled via Vienna to Malta, where he rendezvoused with his other travelling companions. He had originally organised this trip with his cousin Freddie Guest and his secretary Eddie Marsh. But Freddie’s wife Amy was about to give birth to their first child and refused to be deserted, so Freddie cancelled, offering his car to enable Winston to proceed as planned – he was to send back the car before he joined his ship. In Freddie’s place Winston invited Colonel Gordon Wilson, the husband of his Aunt Sarah. The fourth member of the party was Winston’s manservant, George Scrivings.

  Sailing leisurely via the Red Sea aboard the cruiser Venus, which the Admiralty had placed at Winston’s disposal, the party arrived at Mombasa in November. At Cyprus and Somalia and every other stop on the way, Winston leapt into action, and little escaped his attention. He fired off lengthy memoranda and reports to his department on his findings, causing considerable annoyance (and jealousy, judging from scribbled comments on some of the reports) among senior civil servants confined to their Whitehall desks, and thereby fostering further long-term enmities.

  By one postbag he received welcome news from his brother. ‘I am writing to tell you that a very wonderful thing has happened,’ Jack wrote. It was to say that Goonie and he were in love. In fact he had loved her for a long time, but because he could not afford to marry he had been unable to tell her, and also he did not know how she felt about him. However, six months earlier the two had confessed their love to each other, even though they knew they could not marry, and a week afterwards Goonie had written promising to wait for him. That very day, Jack wrote, he had seen Goonie in London and they had become secretly engaged. One minute he was head over heels and thrilled at having won this wonderful girl as his potential life partner, and the next he was plunged into despair at the difficulties that lay ahead of them. These were chiefly money (he had none), religion (Goonie was Catholic) and her parents, who he felt would be ‘very angry’ when they were told. Unlike Winston, he said, he had no great ambitions; all his dreams were wrapped up in Goonie, so he begged Winston to keep their secret.8

  Jennie was also told and she wrote at once to Winston to say that she had sometimes wondered whether he had designs on Goonie himself – though she thought not serious ones for she knew that Goonie had always cared for Jack. In the same letter she broke the news that she and George had reluctantly decided that they must let Salisbury Hall and take a small flat in London. While her husband believed that her extravagance was to blame for their present financial crisis, Jennie claimed it was George’s disastrous business dealings that had brought them to the edge: ‘I am making the best of it for it preys dreadfully on poor George who is getting quite ill over it all.’9 When George was eventually ordered to St Moritz by his doctor on account of an asthmatic illness, Jennie reported that they simply could not afford for her to accompany him. In reply Winston said he was glad that Jack had ‘not married some beastly woman for money…how happy he must be’.10

  Following two days of lavish official receptions given by the small band of white settlers in Mombasa, Winston and his friends travelled up country to Nairobi on the now fabled Uganda Railway ‘Lunatic Express’. They sat, as all visiting VIPs did, on a bench strapped to the cow-catcher on the front of the locomotive, with an unobstructed view of this Garden of Eden.

  ‘One can see literally every animal in the Zoo,’ Winston wrote to his mother wonderingly. ‘Zebras, lions, rhinoceros, antelopes of every kind, ostriches, giraffes – often five or six different kinds are in sight at the same moment.’ In the ‘White Highlands’ there was unlimited hunting. At one point while stalking a wounded antelope they suddenly came upon a rhino, quietly grazing. ‘I cannot describe to you the impression produced upon my mind by the sight of the grim black silhouette of this mighty beast – a survivor of prehistoric times – roaming in the plains as he & his forerunners had done since the dawn of the world.’ But in this era of the white hunter, despite his awe Winston shot the rhino,* along with another smaller one they found nearby, as well as several lions. Later they rode to Embo, a new cattle station opened only months previously: ‘We rode [twenty-six miles] through all this beautiful country…having nothing but what we stood up in & only a banana inside us…the two white officers there were properly astonished…to see us swoop down upon them with the night. But they gave us a most excellent dinner & we all slept on floors and chairs & blankets utterly but naturally tired. What a difference to the fag of a London day. My health bounds up with every day I spend in the open air…Joyous times.’11

  Even the beauties of Kenya were later eclipsed by his impressions of Uganda. Here Winston met the boy-king, eleven-year-old Daudi Chwa, who, he wrote to Jennie, looked ‘exactly like Consuelo in his expression’. He commented in a short postscript on his youthful stepfather’s financial difficulties: ‘George ought not to gamble.’12

  Consuelo had returned to England for Christmas, which she had arranged to spend with Sunny’s cousin Rose and her husband Matthew Ridley† at their comfortable Elizabethan manor, Blagdon,‡ ten miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne. Jennie, George and Jack had also been invited, but when Jennie heard Consuelo was to be one of the party, she was not particularly enthusiastic.13 She had only seen Consuelo at a distance since her return from the United States, and she was looking remarkably well, Jennie wrote, indeed quite chubby for Consuelo. Where Sunny would spend the holidays, Jennie had no idea. She had heard he was trying to let Blenheim and felt that he might as well try to let a white elephant.14 Then Consuelo announced she would not be able to go to Blagdon if Jennie was also there, and Jennie immediately cancelled, as did Jack.15 ‘It really is too idiotic,’ Jack wrote angrily to Winston. In the event Jennie and Jack joined Sunny, F.E. Smith* and a few other guests hastily gathered together for a quiet Christmas at Blenheim where, ‘looking thin and seedy’, Sunny confided to Jennie that he was terribly lonely.

  Meanwhile, from East Africa Winston’s party travelled by train and steamer to Khartoum, which he had last seen when he participated in the cavalry charge at Omdurman. The four men arrived in high spirits on 23 December, but within hours Winston’s manservant George Scrivings became seriously ill and had to be rushed to hospital. He sank rapidly and died the following day of choleric dysentery, which devastated Winston, who wrote to Jack that it had ‘cast a gloom over all the memories of this…wonderful journey…We passed a miserable day, and I had him buried in the evening with full military honours as he had been a Yeoman. The Dublin Fusiliers sent their band and a company of men and we all walked in procession to the cemetery as mourners, while the sun sank over the desert, and the band played that beautiful funeral march.’16 To Jennie, who had been notified immediately by cable of the unexpected death, fell the unenviable task of breaking the tragic news to Mrs Scrivings.

  Jennie was working on a new literary project at this time: her memoirs, entitled Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill, which skate so lightly over her life as to be virtually useless to modern researchers. ‘Cleverly but cautiously written,’ George Cornwallis-West recalled; ‘there was not a line in it to which any of her many friends could take exception.’17 She sent chapters to Winston to vet from time to time, but he was a brutal editor for a first-time author. About the chapter on George Goschen (‘the forgotten man’ in the matter of Lord Randolph’s resignation) he advised frankly that he did not think it could be published in the manner his mother had written it without giving offence: ‘It would cause a great deal of offence, not only to the Goschens but to Jews generally.’ On another occasion he simply scribbled a bald ‘No’ alongside a paragraph of political reminiscences. Jennie bristled – the book was still ‘in the rough’, she said, and would never have been sent to the publishers in the form in which he saw it. But Jennie’s life had been gossiped about for so long that as soon as it was published it became a bestseller, and it brought in some much needed income at a difficult time, for George had recently been swindled out of a large sum of money by a croo
ked stockbroker.

  Winston and Sunny met in Paris on the homeward leg of his East African tour in mid-January 1908. Scrivings’s death had made Winston very depressed. His manservant had not eaten anything that the others had not also eaten, and although it could have happened to any of them Winston felt miserably responsible. ‘I cannot bear to think of his wife & children looking forward to his return,’ he wrote to Jennie. ‘Letters [arriving from him] by every post and then this horrible news…I must from ever-straitening resources make some provision for her future.’18

  As usual Winston relied on his pen to bolster his ever-straitening resources. From his notes of the trip he produced articles totalling thirty-five thousand words for the Strand magazine, which more than covered his expenses; and within months he published a book containing sixty photos called My African Journey, which has seldom been out of print since its first publication. But the benefit was not merely personal – Winston returned bursting with ideas and plans to help the countries he had visited, including an extension of the rail link into the African interior.

  He had purchased his first house at 12 Bolton Street in 1905, and as an economy he had let it for six months while he was away. It was not yet available, and the Ridleys (perhaps to make up for the Christmas clash of Consuelo and Jennie) loaned him their London flat in Carlton House Terrace for a few months so that his work could resume as soon as he arrived back in London. He attended the House of Commons almost every day, ran the Colonial Office, wrote numerous personal letters, lunched and dined regularly with friends and political contacts, wrote his articles and worked on his book. His output was prodigious; his name was never out of the newspapers. Although he had his critics, he was not generally unpopular. He was never at rest on account of his conviction that he would not live to an old age but was meant to make a mark on history, so he regarded time as his enemy. He told more than one person, ‘We Churchills die young, and I want to put something more on the slate.’19 To his family, though, he had truly picked up his father’s baton, and all believed it was merely a matter of time before he was given a Cabinet post. To Jennie, who adored powerful men, the son who had been largely ignored as a child had now become her raison d’être.

  Some weeks after Winston’s return to England, Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman* was forced to retire after a heart attack. He was succeeded by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, H.H. Asquith, who recognised that Winston’s ability and energy could not be overlooked. Asquith offered him a choice: the Admiralty without a Cabinet seat, or the Local Government Board which carried a Cabinet post. Winston replied that while he wished more than anything to have a Cabinet post he would prefer to stay in the Colonial Office working under Elgin than move to the LGB:

  There is no place in the Government more laborious, more anxious, more thankless, more choked with petty & even squalid detail, more full of hopeless and insoluble difficulties…I would rather continue to serve under Lord Elgin at the Colonial Office without a seat in the Cabinet than go there…Five or six first-class questions await immediate attention – Housing, Unemployment, Rating Reform, Electoral Reform, Old Age pensions administration…On all of these I [should] be confronted by hundreds of earnest men who have thought of nothing else all their lives, who know these subjects – as I know military & Colonial things – from experience learned in hard schools, or else men who have served for many years on local bodies.20

  He went on to outline the sort of reforms he would want to make concerning the exploitation in the workplace – and even in the Army – of teenage boys, and concerning maximum standard working hours for unskilled labour, matters upon which he felt strongly. But he insisted: ‘I am sure you will find people much better qualified than I for service in this arena. No condition personal to myself shall prevent me serving you where you wish.’21 The Admiralty, Winston wrote longingly, was the most glittering prize, and he yearned for it, but he felt he could not accept it because the post was presently held by his uncle, Lord Tweedmouth.

  A week later, however, on 10 April, he accepted the post of President of the Board of Trade. Asquith advised that he could not offer an increased salary for the time being, at which Winston prudently renounced any increase at all – a gesture eagerly accepted by Asquith and later ruefully regretted by Winston. Asquith’s wife Margot wrote remarkably frankly to the thirty-three-year-old Winston:

  There are a few moments in life when unwilling decisions seem forced on one. I know them well, they make one feel sick & rebellious but I’ve had luck with mine. I knocked a great love out of my life to make room for a great character & do you suppose we ever regretted it – never. I was very touched by yr loyalty & sweetness when you said you wd give of yr best – I know you will, and believe it will be through you if we win in 2 or 3 years the Gen. Election. It’s being in the Cabinet that matters. H. and the others need you badly…Power first & after that you can do what you like. To be loved & backed by the British people added to what you are already, very well known all over the world, and much loved personally by the Cabinet. Let us say for short the P. Minister wd be my ambition.22

  Such a letter from a source so close to the Prime Minister must have been a heady fillip – even for Winston, whose firm conviction it was that he had been saved from death in South and East Africa because it was his fate to ‘do something in the world’. His appointment to a Cabinet post meant he would immediately have to seek re-election by his constituents in Manchester in a by-election.* But now he had other matters to attend to, and accordingly spent the coming Sunday at Salisbury Hall with his mother.

  Winston had met Clementine Hozier again a month earlier, in March 1908, when he attended a dinner party given by Lady St Helier,† her great-aunt. It was the first time he had seen Clementine in four years and it was a meeting that almost never happened. She had been out all afternoon giving French lessons at half a crown an hour, so when her aunt sent a message round to 51 Abingdon Villas, off Kensington High Street, asking her to make up numbers at dinner because otherwise she would have thirteen at table, Clementine wanted to refuse, saying she had no clean white gloves (then obligatory) and she was too tired. Her mother remonstrated, reminding her how kind her great-aunt had been, bringing her out into Society at her own expense. Meanwhile, at 12 Bolton Street Winston was soaking in his bath, having decided that dinner at Lady St Helier’s would be a bore and he had better things to do with his evening. When Eddie Marsh found him there, he reminded him how helpful Lady St Helier had been to him over Omdurman and how ungenerous it would be now to let her down at the last minute. Winston reluctantly got dressed, and presented himself an hour late at Lady St Helier’s door, full of apologies.

  Although everyone had reached a main course by then, his place at the table had been left empty, between the guest of honour Lady Lugard (wife of Sir Frederick Lugard, a noted African explorer) and Clementine Hozier. As soon as he saw her, Winston determined not to appear an idiot to this woman, whose beauty had struck him dumb at their first meeting. To Clementine’s embarrassment, after Winston was seated he spent the entire time talking to her, ignoring Lady Lugard, who had been invited especially for Winston’s benefit. But Clementine succumbed totally to his brilliant conversation. He set out to charm her, and she was charmed. He made one mistake – he promised to send her a copy of his biography of his father, and evidently forgot. She thought badly of him for this, not realising that one of the most exciting periods in his life was unfolding.

  If the book slipped his mind in this drama-packed week, his dinner partner had not, and a few days later Winston asked his mother to invite Clementine to Salisbury Hall. The date arranged was that pivotal weekend in April when he was appointed to head the Board of Trade. And it was the only date available for Clementine and her mother; they were leaving on the Monday for a six-week trip to the Continent. Lady St Helier warned Natty Hozier she was ‘mad’ to let her daughter go away when Winston was so obviously showing an interest in her, but the trip was not merely a hol
iday. They were to collect Clementine’s younger sister Nellie, who had been receiving treatment for tuberculosis in a German clinic. During their brief time together that Sunday at Salisbury Hall the couple hit it off, and although Winston was already involved in the by-election and in taking over his new department, he made time to write a long letter to her on Thursday 16 April from 12 Bolton Street:

  I am back here for a night and a day in order to ‘kiss hands’ on appointment, & I seize this fleeting hour of leisure to write & tell you how much I liked our long talk on Sunday, and what a comfort & pleasure it was to me to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality & such strong reserves of noble sentiment. I hope we shall meet again and come to know each other better and like each other more: and I see no reason why this should not be so. Time passes quickly and the six weeks you are to be abroad will soon be over…Meanwhile I will let you know from time to time how I am getting on here in the storm.23

  He invited her to write to him, and she did, ten days later: ‘If it were not for the excitement of reading about Manchester every day in the belated newspapers I should feel as if I were living in another world than the delightful one we inhabited together for a day at Salisbury Hall.’24