By this time Clementine was only two months from giving birth and had had to stop her canteen work (for which she would later be decorated). Knowing from Winston that the end of the struggle now lay within sight, she pleaded with him to return from France as soon as he could, wisely looking ahead: ‘My Darling do come home and look after what is to be done with the Munitions Workers when fighting really does stop. Even if the fighting is not over yet, your share of it must be, & I would like you to be praised as a reconstructive genius as well as for a Mustard Gas Fiend, a Tank juggernaut and a flying Terror. Besides the credits for these Bogey parts will be given to subordinates and not to my Tamworth.’9
On 15 November, four days after the end of the war, Clementine had her fourth baby, a girl with her father’s red-gold hair. They called her Marigold. The relief brought by the end of the war combined with the safe delivery of the new baby made this a specially joyous time. And with the end of the war came the dissolution of the coalition government and another general election. But there was no clear winner, and the coalition government was returned to power under Lloyd George.
On 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Winston was at Versailles for the signing of the treaty that formally ended the war between Germany and the Allied Powers. While he was there he had a droll experience. He was staying at the Ritz in Paris when he was introduced to the twenty-nine-year-old divorcee Daisy Decazes de Glücksbierg,* the fiancée of his cousin Reggie Fellowes (Daisy and Reggie would marry later that year). Daisy invited Winston to come to her room to see her little child. It was perhaps because of the arrival of baby Marigold that he went along as she requested, only to find that the ‘child’ was Daisy, stark naked and lying on a tiger skin on the chaise-longue.10 He left at once but he must have told Clementine about it, for years later she told a friend that she had quite forgiven Daisy because the seduction attempt was unsuccessful.11
Gladys Deacon had spent most of the war years in London – it had not been an especially hard time for her. She had not joined other women of her class in voluntary war work, although at the outbreak of war in Italy she spent a few months driving an ambulance. In 1915 she had become a naturalised British subject and from then on her life revolved around Sunny – she visited him frequently at Blenheim and he stayed with her in London. He was still as besotted as in the early days of their relationship. Sunny had the guardianship of his two boys until September 1915, after which they went to Consuelo, but he was able to visit them at Eton whenever he wished. Gladys went to Paris in spring 1916 to see her mother. During those war years it had not been the old Paris, but it had not been under siege either; many officers’ wives, including Clementine while Winston was in the trenches, visited to meet a loved one on leave.
While Gladys was in Paris Sunny commissioned her portrait by Boldini, but a family friend who had not seen her for years was appalled to see the deterioration in her once perfect beauty. ‘Her face has grown very full and heavy-jawed, and all her colours jar – hair too yellow, lips too red, eyes too blue. She looked deplorable…not a lady.’12 She was still an attractive woman, but this was the first intimation of the awful damage that would eventually result from the facial surgery Gladys had undergone thirteen years earlier. The wax injected into the bridge of her nose had become unstable, and had begun to run down her face and neck causing blotches, and to settle around her jaw, making it lumpy. She attempted to disguise the disfigurement with ‘clouds of tulle’ around her neck, and she evidently discussed it with her mother, for the latter recommended facial massage to disperse the wax.
She continued to mix in the intellectual, artistic and high-bohemian circles in which she had always moved, and one friend she met in a café recorded an image of her sitting opposite him, elbows on the table, head resting on her hands, avidly absorbing the writer’s admiration as he observed: ‘I am being listened to by the most beautiful grown-up child in the world.’13 In an era when many women dressed in drab colours to show they were patriotic and serious, Gladys favoured bright colours, feathers, large beads and veils and always made an impact in any company. When she returned to London and told Sunny that she was thinking of returning to France later that year, he became anxious that she might move back permanently. For him the days spent with Gladys were the only highlights in a life he regarded as full of care.
In the early days of the war Sunny had served as a lieutenant colonel on the General Staff. He was later appointed joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Agriculture. But even with the insider privileges that accrued through these positions, like all great landowners he was now battling against financial difficulties because of new government taxation strategies. He also incurred losses through some bad investments recommended by George Cornwallis-West, as well as having to deal with the ongoing demands from the many family dependants who were beneficiaries under numerous complicated trusts, and from charities to which he was committed. His land agent had resigned to go to war and Sunny had been unable to fill the post because all suitable candidates were involved in the war effort. This was to have an inevitable adverse effect on returns from the land. All of these matters, added to the massive costs of running the estate, forced Sunny to consider the ultimate option of closing Blenheim. However, when one of Winston’s friends, the brilliant Canadian Max Aitken, suggested he present Blenheim to the nation he was furious. And to his anxieties about Blenheim was now added the unbearable thought that he might lose Gladys.
Boldini and other arty friends were pressing Gladys to return permanently to Paris, but she did not want to lose Sunny either, despite the fact that her long relationship with him had brought with it a certain curtailment of her activities during her best years. To please him, instead of returning to Paris immediately she had spent the summer of 1916 in Brighton so that Sunny could visit her, then went to Paris in the autumn. Matters were not helped when he broke his foot, falling from his horse, and feared he might be left with a permanent limp. He knew that Gladys had a hatred of physical disability, and when he told her about his injury he suggested fearfully that this was her opportunity to end their relationship if she wanted to. She did not accept this escape route, apparently, and the couple spent some time together in Paris while he consulted specialists. They were in the same position as everyone else: it was difficult to see forward while the war was still going on.
Throughout 1917 Sunny hoped for the long-awaited change in the divorce laws that would enable him to divorce Consuelo on grounds of desertion after three years. This much discussed clause had been deferred because of the war, and many unhappy people longed for it to come on to the statute book. And there was a further irritation for Sunny – he quarrelled with Winston when the minimum wage was increased by 12.5 per cent. As an employer, this affected him so adversely that he vowed never to visit Winston and Clementine again. ‘That 121/2% I can never forgive,’ he wrote to Gladys. ‘It means another 150 millions a year more in wages. I wonder what the French would have done to their Minister of Munitions.’14
In the spring of 1918 he worried for the safety of his heir, Lord Blandford, serving in France as a second lieutenant in the Guards, but he worried even more when Blandford fell in love with a beautiful musical comedy actress while home on leave, and said he wanted to marry her. Sunny chose to attribute this ‘looseness’ in his son to the ‘common blood’ of his American mother, but the crisis was resolved when Blandford had to return to France and the relationship ended quite naturally. Soon after his return to his unit in the remote village of Jeancourt, the young officer was startled to receive an unexpected – ‘avuncular’, he described it – visit from Winston, who afterwards reported to Sunny that his son was well and happy. ‘I thought you would like to know exactly how I found him,’ he wrote. ‘He lives in a weather-proof tin hut on the side of a hill, before which runs a road, deep in white mud and just below is the pan of the valley and the lines of the horse and the tents of the men…Blandford is in c
harge of about 80 Household Cavalrymen who live at this point and go up each night to dig trenches in or just behind the front line. In the event of an attack they would hold the village…just above them.’ Blandford was one of only two officers on the site, Winston wrote, and he thought he might find it rather lonely. ‘He doesn’t like whiskey and he hasn’t been able to get any port, so for the time being he is teetotal.’15
Gladys spent the winter of 1918–19 in France. Instead of returning to London after the Armistice as Sunny had hoped, she travelled down to the French Riviera and rented a house between Beaulieu and Nice, close to that of the now widowed Duke of Connaught, Leonie Leslie’s long-time lover and the last surviving son of Queen Victoria. It was almost inevitable that the old man, who was something of a roué, would become obsessed with this attractive and intelligent young woman, and he did. Gladys enjoyed the innocent relationship, but eventually the two quarrelled irrevocably over a trifle. Gladys did not keep such relationships secret from Sunny.
Fearing that Gladys would get tired of waiting for him, Sunny sought new legal advice about divorcing Consuelo. By coincidence, Consuelo was staying in France not too far from Beaulieu at the time, and Gladys heard that she intended to build a house there; Consuelo was merely staying with her mother at Èze-sur-Mer to recover her strength after an attack of flu.* Given their earlier relationship, it is a surprise to read Consuelo’s account of those weeks with Alva: ‘We grew very close during those last years of her life, sharing each other’s interests.’ But by 1919 a new happiness had entered Consuelo’s life. Not only had both her boys come safely through the war, but she had met the love of her life. He was Jacques Balsan.
Following her affair with Charles Castlereagh which had so damaged her reputation, Consuelo had been very discreet, although it is likely she had at least one serious affair (with Lord Curzon) and possibly another before the outbreak of war, with Harry Cust† (one of Jennie’s former inamoratos). Marlborough was convinced Consuelo had also been the lover of his cousin Reggie Fellowes, though he could find no evidence. She had gradually built up a circle of other London friends, apart from the aristocrats whose lifestyle she shared at her regular Friday evening dinner parties and at country-house visits. After returning to England in August 1918 she involved herself in fund-raising for the Medical School for Women at the Royal Free Hospital, the only one in England at that time to allow women to practise medicine, and she helped to establish a delivery ward staffed entirely by women.
Consuelo had also worked with Jennie raising money for the two American-funded hospitals for officers in England, and she was the first woman to give one of the prestigious annual Priestley lectures: her topic was infant mortality.16 When she mentioned that venereal disease was a major cause of death in infants, several well dressed matrons got up and left the hall. Consuelo was mortified, but she carried on and her speech was otherwise well received – by the newspapers too. Towards the end of the war she had bought a small country house in Surrey. Crowhurst Place was an exquisite fifteenth-century moated manor house and there Consuelo found a peace and happiness she had never known, disturbed only by her concern for her sons Blandford and Ivor who were still serving in France at that time. By then she had been persuaded to become a London county councillor as a ‘progressive’, known for tackling women’s and children’s issues in the poorest slum areas of the city.
She had first met Jacques Balsan in 1894 at her debut in Paris at the age of seventeen. He claimed he told his mother that night that he had met the girl he would like to marry, but he thought Mrs Vanderbilt would never allow it as he had been told Consuelo was earmarked for a German prince. The wealthy Balsan family were textile industrialists with factories in Châteauroux. In the nineteenth century they had made the cloth used exclusively for French Army uniforms called ‘blue horizon’ and had provided millions of uniforms since the time of Napoleon. Jacques’s younger brother, the socialite playboy, polo player and racehorse breeder Étienne Balsan, was responsible for launching the career of Coco Chanel. He saw this young girl from a poor family working in a tailor’s shop in Moulins, a small town about 180 miles south of Paris. After becoming her lover he introduced her to Parisian society, lavished clothes and jewels on her and provided her with a flat at an exclusive address, 160 Boulevard Malesherbes. There she began designing hats and, with Étienne’s help, opened her first shop.
Moving in the same international circles, Jacques Balsan had seen Consuelo on a number of occasions in the intervening years. He had even been a house guest at Blenheim on several occasions when Consuelo was there. During the war he had sent her several postcards, in one of which he wrote that he did not believe he would return from one particularly dangerous mission and wanted to say goodbye to her. Jacques was rich and he played hard, but he was not merely a playboy; he had represented his family business on several successful international missions during his twenties. At an early age he had become fascinated by flying, and before the advent of powered flight it had been balloons that interested him. He held a balloon pilot’s certificate (no. 90), and was soon setting height, distance and endurance records in his own balloon, the St Louis. In 1900 he was awarded the Exposition Universelle ribbon for high altitude. However, after the Wright brothers stunned the world with the first powered flight in December 1903 in North Carolina, he transferred his interest to aeroplanes. Although the Wrights were the first to succeed, there were other aviation pioneers in France at the time such as Voisin, Blériot and Farman, who had reached virtually the same stage of aeroplane development. In 1909, after Blériot flew the Channel, Jacques Balsan judged that planes were now beyond the experimental stage and were capable of sustained powered flight. So he purchased a Blériot and became the eighteenth man to hold a pilot’s licence in France (Blériot himself held licence no. 1).
Balsan flew the first aircraft to be used in a military context (a single-engine Blériot) on a reconnaissance of guerrilla lines in Morocco in 1913. It was a dangerous mission, for early engines were unreliable: had he crashed and been captured by the Moors he would inevitably have been put to death. For this act of bravery he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. When war was declared he volunteered immediately, was made a captain in the French Air Force and reconnoitred the Battle of the Marne from the air. In 1915, sponsored by Consuelo’s father and two other Americans who deprecated American neutrality (they undertook to pay the fare of any American who wished to fight in the French Air Force), Jacques was involved in forming the Escadrille Lafayette, an elite squadron of volunteer airmen. By 1918 he was a lieutenant colonel, the equivalent of a wing commander, in charge of scout-plane squadrons.
Jacques had loved Consuelo from afar for years, without ever making his feelings known to her. But in 1917, when he was sent to London on a special mission, he began courting her. At the time Blandford was in love with his actress and attending her performances every night. One evening he found his disapproving mother sitting in the neighbouring box watching him, while ‘being courted by Balsan’. It was not long before Consuelo realised that she loved Jacques. He had to return to his duties in France, but immediately the war ended she was to be seen in Paris on his arm at Armistice parties. Of course, she was not free to marry him. Furthermore, he was a Catholic and his family would never recognise a divorce, even if Consuelo could arrange one. Consuelo was then forty-one and Jacques forty-nine. He had been very briefly married, in a civil ceremony only, in 1903. This had ended in divorce in 1906, which his family apparently accepted; Consuelo’s biographer suggests that this was probably a marriage of convenience to legitimise a child (who subsequently died).17 Nevertheless, Consuelo decided that it was time to divorce Sunny, if he would agree. She knew that he longed to marry Gladys, and this gave her hope.
Although Sunny had been vicious in his condemnation of Consuelo since their separation, when her lawyers approached his with a formal request that they divorce he did not hesitate. It was now possible for a woman to divorce a man by providing
evidence of unfaithfulness, which usually took the form of the husband spending a night in a hotel room with a professional co-respondent. No intercourse took place; the important pieces of evidence were the hotel bill and the fact that the two people were seen in the same bedroom together the following morning by a maid who was prepared to testify. Next, the husband had to leave the wronged wife, who then had to apply for restitution of conjugal rights; when the husband refused, a divorce was granted. In Sunny and Consuelo’s case, in order to take advantage of this charade they needed to be seen living together for some weeks before the episode in the hotel. Appalling as this prospect was to both parties, each had their own agenda and so were willing to comply. Sunny spent some time in December 1919 at Crowhurst with Consuelo, with his sister Lilian* in attendance to leaven the inevitable awkwardness and provide a witness statement.
On 17 February 1920 they were both present at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, for the marriage of their elder son Lord Blandford to the Honourable Alexandra Mary Cadogan, daughter of Viscount Chelsea. They both approved of Mary, and were equally relieved that the relationship with the actress had ended quite naturally. With Blandford’s wedding accomplished, the Marlboroughs’ divorce proceedings went ahead. While waiting for the date of the hearing to be set, Consuelo received the news that her father had died in Washington on 22 July. She crossed the Atlantic and attended the private family funeral in the New York house where she had grown up, then accompanied the coffin to Staten Island, where he was interred in the family vault. New York papers had already got wind of the impending divorce and ran articles claiming that when she was free Consuelo intended to make her home in the USA. She stayed with her mother on Long Island, where Alva ‘had built herself a medieval castle which dominated the Sound’.18 Consuelo told her mother of her decision to live in France. Blandford was happily married; Ivor had returned to Oxford to complete his interrupted education, and showed no signs of marrying. If she waited until he did so, Consuelo thought Jacques might not wait for her.
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