Had Jennie not been so ill, nothing would have kept her or Winston from the Paris wedding of Sunny and Gladys on 25 June. At first after the amputation she had a very high temperature but after a few days she made a good recovery, although everyone knew there would be a long convalescence. That week Winston cabled Porch that the operation had been successfully carried out and Jennie was now out of danger. She was even able to have some visitors in her bedroom; propped up on pillows, she chatted brightly, joking that she would just have to put her best foot forward.
‘My Own darling,’ Porch wrote, ‘Winston’s last cable that “Danger was definitely over” was re-assuring – still I am often frantic with apprehension & fear. I have no one in the world but You, that is no one I love, as I love you.’ He told her that he had arranged to pay off her overdue tax bill, so that her income was now free of obligations; he had made the house in West Africa so nice for her and was sad that she might now never see it, but his business was doing amazingly well. ‘I can never tell you too often that I love you & will devote my life to you. Your loving husband M.’7 Jennie received this letter on 28 June and cabled a reply to him at once; she had not felt up to writing before then, and she knew he would be miserable at not hearing from her.
The following morning after breakfast she was sitting up in bed when she suddenly felt a gush of warm liquid on her good leg and told her nurse her hot water bottle had burst. When the bedclothes were pulled back they could both see it was a major haemorrhage: an artery above the amputation site had burst open. Her last words were to the nurse – ‘I am feeling faint’ – then she lapsed into unconsciousness. Winston and Jack were summoned and came fast. Winston lived a few streets away; as usual he had been working in bed and was still wearing his night clothes under his overcoat as he tore through the streets. But Jennie was near to death when he arrived, and she never spoke to her sons again.
Leonie, who was attending her daughter-in-law’s labour, cabled their sister Clara (Clarita) in Sussex telling her to go to Jennie at once as she had been taken suddenly ill. By the time Clara’s train pulled into Victoria Station the newspaper posters were already proclaiming ‘Death of Lady Randolph’. Within minutes of Jennie’s death Leonie’s grandchild was delivered.
Jennie had lived in the very flame of life. For almost fifty years she had known everyone worth knowing in European and probably American society too – some of them intimately – and certainly in British politics. She had virtually pioneered the so-called Dollar Princess marriages to the British aristocracy. Winston’s success had been the high point of her life and had made up for the disaster in his father’s career. The tributes that poured in to comfort the stricken family spoke of her vitality and charm. After her death, when the lines had been smoothed away and the expression had relaxed, her bone structure had all the hallmarks of a Native American inheritance. Many family members remarked on this.
There was a memorial service on 2 July, and the private funeral was held at Bladon church near Blenheim later that same hot, cloudless day. Jennie was buried next to Lord Randolph in the family plot. The family mourners were joined by a few old friends including Jack’s parents-in-law, Lady Sarah Wilson, Jennie’s old love Hugh Warrender and his wife. Lord Howe, husband of one of Lord Randolph’s sisters, attended as a representative of the royal family. They travelled down to Oxford by train with the coffin, bearing Porch’s wreath on top of it, in a separate carriage; it would be another month before he could get home by ship from West Africa. With Sunny away on honeymoon there were no servants on duty; after the funeral, the mourners all walked over to Blenheim for a picnic lunch in the gardens.
It was Jennie’s illness that prevented Winston and Clementine, and Jack and Goonie, from attending either Sunny’s or Consuelo’s wedding, and was one reason why Consuelo was able to marry Jacques Balsan without the press suspecting anything, since her wedding took place only two days after Jennie’s funeral and there were few guests in the circumstances. With the exception of Sunny and Consuelo, they were all on visiting terms by that date. Consuelo had stayed with the Churchills on several occasions; she and Jennie had long ago settled their old argument, and during the war they had worked together fund-raising for hospital projects. Sunny and Winston were once again best friends, barring political disagreements from time to time.
Winston was inconsolable at his mother’s death. It was Jack as executor of Jennie’s estate, with the help of Montague Porch, who did what was necessary – for with all her abilities Jennie was never an administrator, and she died intestate. Although Porch had paid off many of her immediate debts after their marriage, she was still hugely overdrawn to the bank; and indeed, Porch had borrowed to launch his West African project with an overdraft of £4500 guaranteed by Winston. Porch’s business was already in profit, but for the time being his money was tied up in West Africa, and for six months Winston was worried he might have to stump up for a shortfall of £1000 on the fixed-term loan. (This was a significant sum of money – £5000 would buy a small country estate at the time.) Almost all of Jennie’s debts were covered by a spectacular auction sale of her house and contents.8
Porch wanted nothing from Jennie’s estate; eventually he retired from Nigeria and settled in Somerset, where his family were small private bankers. After some years he married again, to an Italian noblewoman, Donna Giulia Patrizi, daughter of the Marchese Patrizi Della Rocca.*
Shortly before Jennie’s accident Winston had found a house that he had fallen in love with. It was called Chartwell Manor, and overlooked the Weald of Kent, near Westerham. Jennie’s illness had put this plan on hold, but now, perhaps as an antidote to his intense grief, he took it up again. Clementine liked ‘the house on the hill’, as she called it, too, but her compulsive worrying about money kicked in and after further inspection she became concerned about the amount of work called for to make it what Winston wanted it to be, as well as about their ability to run it within their income. Unlike Winston, she saw beyond the romantic old house and its superlative location to the problems of damp, dry rot and all the other dilapidations of a property that had lain unoccupied for several years (plus its several acres of wild rhododendrons that would need to be removed). So, writing to him on Diana’s twelfth birthday, 11 July, she gently advised caution. She too longed for a country home, she wrote, somewhere they could have Goonie and Jack and the children to stay (Goonie had given birth eighteen months earlier to her last child, Clarissa), but it should be a place for Winston’s relaxation, not another commitment for her already overworked husband.
The family summer holiday lay ahead, when they could hope to recover from the blows they had suffered that spring. Almost as soon as the children came home, ten-year-old Randolph confided to his sister Diana that one of the junior masters at his school had made him touch him sexually. Randolph later wrote about it in his book Twenty-One Years without embarrassment, stating that he had not felt any distress and only realised that it was wrong when a maid came into the room and blushed scarlet while the master jumped to his feet and behaved oddly. Their nanny overheard the conversation between Randolph and Diana and told Clementine, who went to Winston and told him he must deal with it. Winston, of course, had vivid memories of being physically abused at school. ‘I remember very well,’ Randolph wrote, ‘how my father sent for me one morning when he was still lying in bed and having his breakfast and asked me about the truth of the matter. I told him the truth as I have always done. I don’t think I have ever seen him so angry before or since. He leapt out of bed, ordered his car and drove all across country – the round trip must have been well over two hundred miles.’9 The man concerned was dismissed and Randolph was warned never to allow anyone ever to do this to him again.
At the beginning of August the children went off to the seaside to spend two weeks there with their nanny, following which they were to join their parents in Scotland. On 8 August Clementine set off for the north ahead of Winston in order to stay with friends en route. Her grea
t talent was tennis, and she always enjoyed staying somewhere she could get a good game with challenging players – in this case Eaton Hall near Chester, the large country house of Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, who together with his second wife Violet* was to join the Churchills in Scotland later in the month. It was at Eaton Hall on 14 August, while preparing to leave for Scotland, that Clementine received an urgent cable from Nanny in Broadstairs to advise that Marigold was unwell.
Marigold was almost three. She had a tendency to colds and sore throats, just as her father had as a child. But the infection that began with a simple cold at Broadstairs rapidly developed into something more serious and the little girl seemed unable to fight it off. Clementine rushed down to the south coast and sent the older children off to Scotland as planned, with her maid. It was evident that Marigold was in distress, and the doctor soon confirmed that the sore throat had turned into septicaemia. It would be another seven years before Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin and at least twenty before antibiotics were available for clinical use. Clementine alerted Winston, who drove from London immediately. Both parents were with their youngest daughter when she died on 23 August 1921. Winston could not speak for grief and according to his secretary, Clementine ‘screamed like an animal undergoing torture’. Stunned, they buried Marigold at Kensal Green cemetery.*
Clementine, always her own fiercest critic, carried the dreadful guilt that she had not been with her child when the infection started, and that had she been there she might have saved her. Winston had still not recovered from burying his mother, barely six weeks earlier, and this latest blow was even more difficult to bear. They travelled to Scotland to join the other three children, and when in September Clementine returned to London with them for the start of term, an abnormally subdued Winston went to visit the Duke of Sutherland before going on to Dundee to give a speech. His stay was hardly restful; the castle was the venue for the usual September fishing and shooting house parties. Among the guests that week were the Prince of Wales, his brother the Duke of Gloucester and the Dudley Wards. Winston found himself unable to join in the many pleasant pastimes that were available for the guests; instead he turned to solitary painting, near a quiet stream, and worked on his speech. He told Clementine she would have found it all too much. ‘It is another splendid day: & I am off to the river to catch pictures – much better fun than salmon,’ he wrote. ‘Many tender thoughts my darling one, of you & yr sweet kittens. Alas I keep on feeling the hurt of the Duckadily – I expect you will all have made a pilgrimage [to the grave] yesterday.’10
Nor was this the last of the bad news. While Winston was in Scotland Sir Ernest Cassel, his mentor and friend since his youth, died suddenly. Clementine was very moved when she wrote to tell Winston: ‘I have been through so much lately that I thought I had little feeling left, but I wept for our dear old friend; he was a feature in our lives and he cared deeply for you…I took the children on Sunday to Marigold’s grave and as we knelt round it…a little white butterfly…fluttered down & settled on the flowers which are now growing on it…the children were very silent all the way home…I wish so much I could be in Dundee to hear you [on] Saturday night. I much want to see you.’11
The postwar years brought changes for many members of the extended Churchill family. Reggie Fellowes, the banker son of Lord Randolph’s sister Rosamund and once suspected by Sunny Marlborough of having an affair with Consuelo, had married Daisy, the French beauty who had attempted to seduce Winston in the Ritz in Paris. As well as being heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune she was a minor novelist and poet, later editor of Harper’s Bazaar and a fashion icon in her own right. She was a major figure in between-the-wars Society and proved a colourful addition to the Churchill family when she married Reggie. She was to become a good friend of Clementine and Winston, and always managed to amuse him.
About this time, the seventeen-year marriage of Winston’s cousin and long-time supporter Freddie Guest was looking precarious. Clementine had come to dislike visiting Freddie and Amy. They lived too extravagantly for her puritanical tastes, and the strong-willed Amy dominated her husband, which Clementine found embarrassing. She also disapproved of Freddie, who was a flirt. Winston, however, sybarite that he was, enjoyed the lavish comforts to be found at Burley-on-the-Hill. He was also fond of Freddie and Amy’s teenage children, Winston, Raymond and Diana.
In the last days of 1921, after Christmas, Winston paid a short visit to Cannes with Lloyd George. The day after he left Sussex Square influenza swept through the house; Clementine, the children and all the servants caught it, and one of the servants died, thus bringing a dismal end to an unhappy year.
Winston was lucky to escape it. At his hotel in Cannes he met Freddie, now Secretary of State for Air, a post he had acquired via Winston’s recommendation. Freddie told him he had fallen in love with the cool, svelte socialite Paula Gellibrand, and was seriously considering, he confided to Winston’s unwilling ears, divorcing the forceful Amy. Paula Gellibrand was an unusual personality, not the sort of woman for whom men usually leave their wives. A top model – she has been described as a Modigliani come to life – she was neither beautiful nor pretty but she was extraordinarily striking, and with her angular figure and features she would frequently be seen in the contemporary images of the photographers Cecil Beaton and Baron de Meyer. At the time she was also being courted by the Cuban-Castilian Marqués de Casa Maury, a Bugatti-driving Grand Prix ace, whom she would later marry.
When Freddie imparted his news, Winston – evidently thinking on his feet – did not attempt to sermonise but simply remarked ‘sepulchrally’ that Miss Gellibrand seemed young enough to be Freddie’s daughter, and reminded his cousin that another decade would carry both Freddie and himself towards the age of sixty. In reporting the conversation to Clementine, Winston added that he had told Freddie ‘that he wd lose his office if he lost his Amy. So there’s a problem!’ In a postscript to Clementine he warned: ‘Don’t make chaff about it.’12
Later when he moved along the coast to stay with Adele, Countess of Essex, Winston could see from his window the hotel at Cap-d’Ail where he and Clementine had spent a last happy day picnicking with Jennie in January of the previous year when they were all staying near Nice. ‘What changes in a year!’ he wrote to Clementine. ‘What gaps! What a sense of fleeting shadows! But your sweet love & comradeship is a light that burns the stronger as our brief years pass.’13 He was there to work, and work he did, but he found the time to meet Clementine’s mother Lady Blanche – now living in the South of France thanks to an allowance from Winston – who was an aficionada of the numerous casinos there. Not having Clementine’s fear of gambling, Winston found Blanche amusing. She had won 400 francs one night when he accompanied her; he remarked, ‘I think she enjoyed her evening. She is a dear.’ Consuelo and Jacques Balsan had also made their home there, and as a belated wedding gift Winston gave them one of his paintings of Èze-sur-Mer that they had admired.
When Winston returned home to wintry London in mid-January 1922, he sent Clementine out to the Riviera with her cousin Venetia Montagu. He was too busy to stay there with her – ‘My work will be very important next week – but how barren these things would be…if I had not a real home to come home to and a real sweet to await me there.’ Clementine was pregnant again, and he was concerned about her health after the difficulties of the previous year. He thought the fine weather and a visit to her mother would help in ‘recharging your accumulators’.* While there, Clementine attempted a hand of chemin de fer in a casino and won 15 francs. Playfully she suggested they should bet on whether the new baby’s hair would be rouge or noir. Winston’s aunt, Lady Sarah Wilson, who had been widowed during the war, was also staying there. Sarah appeared at every family occasion and was at the hub of the family’s information exchange as ever: she was tolerated but not much liked.
Meanwhile, Winston dined three nights out of four with a group comprising Stanley Baldwin, F.E. Smith (now Lord
Birkenhead, though always known as ‘F.E.’), the Lord Chancellor and Max Aitken. So in the evenings they could all continue to work on the difficult Irish question over which, in the House, Winston had come up against a firebrand young Tory backbencher, Oswald Mosley. On his free evening Winston dined with Jack and Goonie, who told him that Asquith had accepted Goonie’s invitation to dine the following week, but had imposed the condition that Winston should not be there. ‘I have always been very courteous and considerate to the old man,’ he wrote to Clementine. ‘All the same I cannot forget the way he deserted me over the Dardanelles, calmly leaving me to pay the sole forfeit of the policy which at every angle he had actively approved.’14 Clementine advised him to make the first move towards rapprochement – ‘He has suffered more than we have by the War, by Death,’ she wrote. ‘People will only say “Look how nice Winston is.”’15
During that summer a heavily pregnant Clementine joined Goonie and all the children at a rented seaside house in Devon. The two women were the closest of confidantes and Goonie was a safe ear when the pressures got too much for Clementine at home. With the assistance of a former schoolfriend, Lionel Rothschild, Jack had been made a partner of the leading stockbrokers Vickers Da Costa, and Winston was as busy as usual. Although he was engaged in the negotiations over Ireland, was running a ministry and appeared in the Commons each day, he was also working on the first volume of a book to be called The World Crisis.* As if this were not enough, he went dancing most evenings at summer balls, he reported to Clementine. At one ball, where Edwina Ashley (granddaughter of the late Sir Ernest Cassel) had danced all night ‘in rapture’ with her fiancé Lord Louis Mountbatten, Asquith had put in an appearance in a frail state and had to be helped up the stairs. Winston had danced eight times in a row – ‘good exercise’, he wrote. Perhaps the frenetic activity was a way of dealing with his losses, for he added that, in the midst of it all, ‘I pass through again those sad scenes of last year when we lost our dear Duckadily. Poor lamb – it is a gaping wound, whenever one touches it.’16
The Churchills Page 37