Usually, by tacit agreement, in such circumstances the Opposition party did not contest a by-election seat. But in the 1908 by-election at Manchester the Tories had nothing to lose and everything to gain by throwing all their resources into the contest to defeat Winston. It was their first opportunity to regain some credibility after the rout of 1906, when seven Tory grandees including their leader, Balfour, had lost their seats. Furthermore, there was entrenched hostility towards Winston on the part of many senior Tories, who still regarded him as a traitor. It was a contest hard-fought on both sides, and against all expectations the Tories won by a majority of 429 votes. The reasons were complex but apparently the nine hundred Catholic voters in Manchester were a significant factor: an imminent but ill-fated Education Bill threatened the closure of Catholic schools (as well as some Church of England ones), and they were persuaded at the last minute not to vote for Churchill.
Winston’s defeat was a triumph for the Conservatives, and they made the most of it. Elated Tory supporters sold ‘Churchill memory cards’ in Manchester. But one staunch Liberal, offered one of these, responded: ‘It’s a little too soon for that, my friend, you have not done with Mr Churchill yet. We have lost him for Manchester, like we lost John Bright before my time, but he will be a great figure in English politics…Manchester will be sorry for what she has done today.’25 Meanwhile, Parliament and the Stock Exchange buzzed with the joke: ‘What is the use of a WC without a seat.’
Winston wrote to Clementine on 27 April that he had been comforted by the knowledge that she had followed his fortunes from afar with sympathy. ‘It was a vy hard contest & but for those sulky Irish Catholics changing sides at the last moment under priestly pressure, the result would have been different. Now I have to begin all over again – probably another long & exhausting election. Is it not provoking!’26 Subsequently he was offered a safe seat at Dundee, where the incumbent had been elevated to the peerage. Safe or not, given the result at Manchester and the interest that fight had aroused in the newspapers, the other parties put up opponents so that it became a four-way fight, and – as Winston forecast – an exhausting business. In his rousing speeches he launched fierce attacks on the Tories: ‘old doddering peers, cute financial magnates, clever wire pullers…all the enemies of progress…weaklings, sleek, smug, comfortable, self-important individuals’. His appearances were attended by thousands of appreciative voters who seemed not to realise that many of the people he spoke of were his own relatives. But they could applaud his intention of ‘unfurling the old flag of civil freedom and social justice under which your fathers conquered, under which you, in your turn, will be unconquerable’. Driven to his best performances by the sting of his recent defeat, he was said by the Manchester Guardian to have evoked with his magnificent oratory the great days of Gladstone. And on 9 May he polled a convincing majority of votes over the Conservative candidate.* Winston was back on track and he could now take his place in the Cabinet.
By now Jack had persuaded his senior stockbroking partner to guarantee him a salary (including bonuses) of £1000 a year, and together with the £400 allowance from his father’s trust he was able to persuade Goonie’s father that they could, with prudent management, live respectably on this. It was agreed that there would be both a civil and a Catholic ceremony. During the early nineteenth century Catholic services alone did not satisfy all the legal requirements, and it was still common practice by Catholics well into the twentieth century either to have a registrar present in church or to hold a civil service as well as a church service, so as to satisfy the civil authorities. The wedding was planned for 7 August. In keeping with their financial status it was not to be a grand affair.
A few months earlier Jennie had written to Winston about Jack, saying now that her younger son had ‘gone off’ she supposed that he, Winston, would soon get married, as that was often what happened in families. Sure enough, Winston already had the matter very much in mind. Clementine’s cool English beauty, her presence, simplicity and intelligence entranced him. It seemed to him that it would be appropriate to propose to her at Blenheim, which he regarded as his ancestral home. On the day of Jack’s wedding he wrote to her:
This is only to be a line to tell you how much I am looking forward to seeing you on Monday. But I have a change of plan to propose wh. I hope you will like. Let us all go to Blenheim for Monday and Tuesday & then go on, on Wednesday to Salisbury Hall. Sunny wants us all to come & my mother will look after you – & so will I…
Jack has been married today – civilly. The [church] service is tomorrow at Oxford: but we all swooped down in motor cars upon the little town of Abingdon and did the deed before the Registrar – for all the world as if it were an elopement – with [Goonie’s] irate parents panting on the path…Afterwards…back go bride and bridegroom to their respective homes until tomorrow. Both were ‘entirely composed’ & the business was despatched with a celerity & ease that was almost appalling.27
In this letter he also reported that the previous night, while staying at Freddie and Amy Guest’s house, Burley-on-the-Hill near Oakham in Leicestershire, a fire had broken out. Much damage was done to the seventeenth-century mansion and the occupants were lucky to escape with their lives. Dressed in his pyjamas and overcoat and a fireman’s helmet, Winston had directed operations standing on the tiny (and inadequate) fire engine that had rushed from Oakham: ‘My eyes smart still & writing is tiring,’ he wrote. Most pictures and valuable items of furniture perished but Winston had lost nothing, having instructed his servant to throw everything out of the window as soon as he was roused; but Eddie Marsh lost all his papers, his entire wardrobe – even his watch, a family heir-loom – ‘through not packing up when I told him…It was vy lucky that the fire was discovered before we had all gone to sleep – or more life might have been lost than one canary bird.’28
Clementine had seen in the papers that the house had burned down: ‘My heart stood still with horror,’ she wrote. She was in Cowes for the Regatta – just as Jennie and Lord Randolph had been thirty-five years earlier – when she received the cable from Sunny inviting her to Blenheim. Clementine was at first reluctant to go directly from Cowes to Blenheim since she did not have an appropriate wardrobe with her (she would later recall that she was down to her last cotton frock) and she had no maid. Winston’s plans looked as though they might be scuppered, but he replied to her cable with another: ‘I do hope your reluctance is only due to not quite understanding the change [of plan] and fancying there was to be a great function or to very naturally requiring some more formal invitation, & not to any dislike of Sunny…perhaps on imperfect information…He is my greatest friend, & it would grieve me very much if that were so…. You know the answer I want to this. Always yours, W.’29
Clementine admitted that her reluctance was born only of shyness, and duly arrived at Blenheim on Monday 10 August. Winston was waiting for her at the railway station at Oxford, and at Blenheim Jennie acted as chaperone and provided a maid. Perhaps Jennie recalled her own awe when she first arrived at the great house, and her pretence at sophistication in the face of the cool reception she had received from Randolph’s mother and sisters. Anyway, she was kind and motherly to Clementine.
Winston had made such a point, the day before, of asking Clementine to walk with him the following morning after breakfast that it was apparent to her that a proposal was on the cards. She must have lain awake that night working out what her reply would be. She had come down to breakfast expecting him to be waiting, but he was noticeable by his absence. Winston was never an early riser, but Clementine could be excused for having expected him, on that day at least, to make a special effort. She herself was always punctual. When breakfast was over and he had still not put in an appearance, she started to look annoyed and hint at returning to Cowes. Sunny, more attuned to feminine sensibilities than his cousin, immediately sent a servant to rouse Winston and tell him to come down at once before Clementine decided to leave. Then he suggested that she com
e for a short drive with him, to give Winston time to dress.
Eventually, the couple set off for their walk. When it began to rain they rushed to take shelter in an ornamental Greek temple a few hundred yards west of the palace. There, Winston proposed to Clementine and she accepted.
With characteristic enthusiasm, he swept her along; they must get married at once – no need for a long engagement. He agreed, however, that they should keep the matter secret until Clementine’s mother had been informed, and that Clementine would return to London the following day by train to tell her. Plans made, they left the little temple, and as they walked across the lawn they saw F.E. Smith coming from the house. Besides Jack and Sunny, he was probably Winston’s best friend. Winston rushed up to him, threw his arms around him and, well within earshot of servants, announced his engagement. That was the end of the secret. It was hardly to be expected that he could have kept his feelings in check and not tell the other members of the Blenheim family. His letters to friends, telling them his news, so radiate with joy that there can be no doubting that this was a man in love and thrilled that his love was returned.
That night, Clementine sent Winston the first of a lifetime’s love letters. It was a note containing the drawing of a heart with the word ‘Winston’ written in it. It was enough to make him rise early the next morning in order to write a fond response to her and pick a bunch of dew-drenched roses for her to take back to London. And after breakfast he wrote a letter for her to take to Lady Blanche Hozier:
Clementine will be my ambassador today. I have asked her to marry me & we both ask you to give your consent and your blessing. You have known my family so many years that there is no need to say much in this letter. I am not rich nor powerfully established, but your daughter loves me…I think I can make her happy and give her a station & career worthy of her beauty and her virtues. Marlborough is very much in hopes that you will be able to come down here today & he is telegraphing to you this morning. That would indeed be very charming & I am sure Clementine will persuade you.
In the event this letter, the first of many he scribbled that morning, was not needed. When the engaged couple reached the station Winston could not bear to be parted from Clementine, so at the last minute as the train moved off he leapt aboard and accompanied her to London; then, task accomplished, he returned triumphantly to Blenheim that evening accompanied by his fiancée and her mother.
‘Yesterday,’ Lady Blanche wrote to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt from Blenheim, ‘he came to London to ask my consent, and we all three came on here. Winston and I spoke of you and of your great friendship with his father. He is so like Lord Randolph, he has some of his faults, and all his qualities. He is gentle and tender, and affectionate to those he loves, much hated by those who have not come under his personal charm.’30 Blunt noted in his diary: ‘It is a good marriage for both of them.’ To mark their engagement Clementine gave Winston a small gold heart with a ruby in the centre, to hang from his watch chain.
When Winston said they should not wait, he meant just that. It was important to have the wedding and honeymoon within the summer parliamentary recess, so he at once appointed his best man, his friend Linky Cecil (who proposed himself for the office), and the date of the wedding was fixed for 12 September, barely a month away. The two mothers, Blanche and Jennie, now had to organise a Society wedding – ‘the wedding of the season’ it would be called – in a very short time. The church they had in mind was found to be already booked, but a couple being married earlier that day obligingly moved their time forward at Winston’s request, to allow the Churchill–Hozier marriage to be performed that afternoon.
One of the first letters Winston had written on the day after his engagement was to his first love: ‘Pamela, I am going to marry Clementine & I say to you as you said to me when you married Victor – you must always be our best friend.’ There is no record of Pamela’s response – she was travelling in Norway, but her husband sent a cable: ‘A thousand congratulations…I can wish you nothing better than to find in marriage all the happiness which it has brought to me.’31 The signs were all good: ‘Je t’aime passionément,’ Clementine wrote to her fiancé, adding that she felt less shy expressing herself in French.
Among the hundreds of congratulatory letters – from everyone in Society, it seems, from the King and Queen down – was one from Muriel Wilson, who had once turned him down because she thought he had no future. She wrote: ‘[Clementine] is so extraordinarily beautiful I did not think you could help falling in love with her…I only hope she realises how lucky she is…Bless you dear Winston.’32
Winston evidently tried to persuade Sunny to attend the wedding with Consuelo, but Sunny made it clear there was no chance of that. Although the news had given him great pleasure, he said, he felt he could not – in his own sad circumstances – stand the pain of witnessing his cousin’s happiness at the ceremony and so: ‘Alas, I shall be unable to be present at your wedding…I hope you will allow me to spare myself the mingled pleasure and pain of such a ceremony…I have made arrangements that [Blenheim] be at your disposal from the date of your wedding until you wish to journey elsewhere.’
Halfway through the frantic preparations, despite writing frequently of how passionately she loved Winston, Clementine considered calling the whole thing off. Her brother Bill stepped in to remind her firmly that she had already broken off one engagement and that as head of the family (he was twenty, and a naval officer) he could not allow her to embarrass such an important public figure as Winston. This steadied her, and the plans went ahead – Winston may not even have heard of it until long after the marriage. But Clementine was not alone in suffering from nerves. Jennie apparently took it upon herself to prepare her son because he was anxious about the sexual aspect of marriage. Winston was a romantic, never a womaniser. This was not an era when promiscuity among unmarried people flourished anyway, and although he may not have been a virgin on his marriage (few men returned in that state after service in India), he could not have been described as experienced. It seems he asked Jennie’s advice on the subject, probably because he was concerned about Clementine. Or maybe Jennie raised it, worried that the highly strung Clementine might need special consideration on her wedding night.
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, one-time lover of the bride’s mother, described the wedding day in his diary: ‘It was quite a popular demonstration. [With] Lord Hugh Cecil Winston’s best man, and the great crowd of relations, not only the Church [St Margaret’s, Westminster*] was full, but all Victoria Street…I arrived late when all the seats were taken, but Blanche Hozier found me one in the family pew…the bride was pale, as was the bridegroom. He has gained in appearance since I saw him last, and has a powerful if ugly face. Winston’s responses were clearly made in a pleasant voice, Clementine’s inaudible.’33 The bride wore a high-waisted ivory satin gown, and among her five bridesmaids were her sister Nellie, her cousin Venetia Stanley and Winston’s cousin Clara Frewen. Seated among the eight hundred guests, family, friends and political colleagues, was Clementine’s uncle (and perhaps her natural father), Bertie Mitford. And as a very special wedding gift to Winston, Sunny and Consuelo Marlborough attended, sitting together with their elder son between them. Among the wedding gifts the couple found twenty-two silver inkstands.
They left by train for Blenheim in a private compartment, and as the train slowly pulled out of the station Winston took his bride in his arms. When they next looked up it was to find that their train had halted and another was slowly passing alongside, from which a stream of fascinated passengers were gazing at them.
From Blenheim next morning Winston sent his mother a note: ‘Everything is vy comfortable and satisfactory in every way…& Clemmie [is] vy happy and beautiful…there was no need for any anxiety. She tells me she is writing you a letter. Best of love my dearest Mama. You were a great comfort & support to me at a critical period…we have never been so near together so often in a short time. God Bless you! What a relief to have got that
ceremony over! & so happily.’ He opened the letter to add a generous postscript: ‘George said he could wish me no better wife, or happier days, than he had found in you.’34
A week later he wrote to say they had done little at Blenheim except to loiter and love there – ‘a serious occupation,’ he added.35
14
1908–14
The Next Generation
Churchill once wrote: ‘I married and lived happily ever afterwards.’1 From the start his marriage was a success, and the romantic in Winston was boyishly thrilled with his beautiful bride whom he habitually called Kitten, Cat or Kat, while she called him her Pug or Pig, and they would continue to do so throughout their long lives. And it was a marriage of opposites, for Clementine was reserved and austere, while Winston was outgoing, bombastic and self-confident. Perhaps one reason for the success was that Clementine accepted that Winston’s main life was away from home and that her role was to provide a restful and secure environment for him when he returned. They always had separate bedrooms, and often sent each other loving notes before rising. When they were apart they wrote to each other, and these notes and letters record the bond between them.
Neither had ever come first with anyone before they married, and they blossomed emotionally with each other. Like all couples they would encounter difficulties from time to time, but it is clear that, like Winston’s famous ancestors John and Sarah Churchill, these two people remained in love for the rest of their lives. A friend wrote after their deaths, ‘No woman would have found it easy to be married to Winston…despite his devotion and his affectionate nature…she was…sufficiently self-assured to be able to cope with his demands and his idiosyncrasies.’2 Clementine adored Winston above anyone else on earth. She furnished their various homes with exquisite taste, made them comfortable and efficient as well as beautiful. But life with Clementine was not always easy, Jock Colville said: ‘Her standards were consistently high and her husband, her children, her friends and her domestic staff often fell short of them. She could then display an acidity of tongue before which the tallest trees would bend, and she would occasionally give vent to uncontrollable temper. The storms were terrifying in their violence, but the more usual calms were beautiful and serene.’3
The Churchills Page 28