The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  When the Paris house was finished they turned their attention to one near the medieval fortified hilltop village of Èze, overlooking St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat to the west of Monaco and close to Alva’s house at Èze-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur. Here the Balsans built Le Seuil, which they furnished in a belle époque style. They panelled some of the rooms to act as a foil for Consuelo’s English furniture brought over from Crowhurst Place, and it was a great pleasure to them both to go hunting for items to furnish this winter home. It stood on a rocky hilltop, with Èze perched on a neighbouring hilltop across a deep ravine. When they bought it there was almost no land around it, but Jacques used his charm and his business acumen and ‘bantered and bartered’ for around fifty small adjoining plots belonging to local people. Consuelo said that only a Frenchman could have achieved it, as the bargaining process took years. Eventually the house was surrounded by beautifully tended terraced gardens. An army of gardeners ensured that drifts of flowers flourished under the olive trees on these terraces all year round.

  Clementine stayed with the Balsans at Le Seuil in March 1925, when Consuelo was nearing fifty. She wrote to Winston, ‘My Darling, I am writing to you in bed in this marvellous scented nest – it is really almost too beautiful & too comfortable. One simply wallows. How I wish you were here with me to wallow, & to paint. Consuelo looks younger and more ethereal every year. Her hair is more silvery but on the other hand her cheeks are pinker and her eyes brighter. Her Jacques surrounds her with petits soins [little attentions]…the garden is a dream – carpets of purple, gold, and cream flowers on the emerald green grass.’4 Churchill, too, was a frequent visitor to Le Seuil over the years, and sometimes painted there. Consuelo and Jacques wanted everybody to share their obvious happiness. ‘One could see at once that it was a loved house,’ said Consuelo’s cousin Gloria Vanderbilt, when she visited.

  When the application for the annulment of Consuelo’s first marriage was heard, Alva – whose abhorrence for Sunny was only equalled by his for her – wrote a letter to the Catholic court of canon law which convened privately at Southwark in July 1926 to test the matter. She confirmed that she had coerced her teenage daughter into a marriage Consuelo had not wanted: ‘I ordered Consuelo to marry the Duke…I considered myself justified in overriding her opposition, which I considered to be merely the whim of a young inexperienced girl,’ she stated.5 Her sister, Jenny Tiffany, recalled Consuelo being told that her mother had suffered a heart attack because of her refusal to marry the Duke, and that she might die if Consuelo continued to be obdurate. Alva’s former secretary, a Miss Harper, verified these statements and confirmed that Consuelo had been in love with someone else at the time. To the court’s inquiry, ‘Do you consider that the constraint was simple persuasion or really coercion?’, Alva’s friend Mrs Lucy Jay affirmed on oath: ‘Not persuasion at all, but absolute coercion.’

  Consuelo appeared in person before the tribunal and offered in evidence a bundle of letters written to her by Winthrop Rutherfurd before her marriage. She had kept and treasured them throughout those unhappy years with Sunny. The Duke testified that Consuelo had arrived late for their marriage ceremony and appeared very upset. He said that about twenty days after the wedding he learned from his wife that she had contracted the marriage only because she had been forced to by her mother: ‘She told me that her mother had insisted upon her marrying me; that her mother was violently opposed to her marriage with [Rutherfurd], and that every sort of constraint, pushed even to physical violence, had been employed to attain her end.’6

  All the witness statements were delivered in strict privacy and the priests hearing the evidence were bound by the threat of excommunication to respect the secrecy of the court. When all the evidence was taken and gathered it was sent to the Rota in Rome, and within a few weeks the first marriage was annulled.

  For some years, during the autumn shooting season the Balsans rented Grantully Castle in Perthshire. Clementine was staying with them in September 1926 when she wrote to Winston with startling news:

  Private: Consuelo tells me that her marriage to Sunny has been annulled by the Pope! I was so staggered that I lost the chance of cross-examining her about it…however, after I had recovered from my embarrassment I asked her on what grounds she had suggested to His Holiness that He should operate the miracle – And she replied ‘Coercion, being under age at the time.’ She says Sunny is enchanted as rumour has it that he is to be received into the church of Rome & will then be able to marry Gladys properly – I suppose Jacques’ family suggested it as they are strict Catholics & consider him to be living in sin with Consuelo.7

  Sunny was so delighted to have the marriage annulled that he and Gladys went at once to Rome to be received in private audience by the Pope. Perhaps it was this that alerted the press, or perhaps it was a vicious quarrel that Alva had with a Roman Catholic bishop in New York who decided to put certain information he had gleaned into the public domain so as to get back at Alva. Either way, the annulment was soon headline news in London and New York. It caused a furore. Editors expressed themselves as ‘shocked’, and accusations were made that the protagonists had only been able to obtain such a dispensation because of their rank and fortune. There were suspicions in New York that the annulment had been purchased with a large donation to the Church. Consuelo denied this utterly. A spokesman for the Church, stung, retorted that Church law was for tramps as well as dukes, and took the surprising decision to make the evidence of the tribunal public. Protestant clergymen were up in arms – what right did the Catholic Church have to annul the rites of another Church? In the USA bishops wanted to know what right the Rota in Rome had to dissolve a marriage contracted and legalised twenty-five years earlier in the USA under American law. Indeed, was any marriage now safe? Sunny, who was still living on Vanderbilt money, was invited by several sources to return the ‘Vanderbilt millions’ along with the original marriage licence. Sunny was safe in his Blenheim fastness, but Consuelo’s house in Paris was besieged by reporters for weeks, until the next big news story broke.

  Consuelo and Jacques were duly married in the Catholic Church, and shortly afterwards she was welcomed into the Balsan family; she felt no resentment for the years of exclusion, she said. Sunny converted to Catholicism in a private ceremony at the Archbishop’s home at Westminster, after which his marriage to Gladys was blessed. Goonie acted as one of the witnesses.

  Soon afterwards the Balsans bought the house Consuelo loved best of all her homes: a small moated chateau called Saint Georges-Motel, six miles north of Dreux in the Eure department. Deeply rural even today, surrounded by rich farmland, forests and rivers, it is a fairy-tale place,* and it would become a favourite house for Winston to visit and paint.

  In early 1927 Winston was working on a further volume of The World Crisis. As usual, he wanted to escape the cold winter months by taking a holiday-cum-business trip to the sun. That year he decided on Italy, where Mussolini was holding sway. Winston took his brother Jack and fifteen-year-old Randolph, who was now at Eton (his father had given him the choice of Eton or Harrow). A precocious and entertaining talker, Randolph regularly joined the adults at dinner when he was at home. He absorbed from men such as F.E. Smith and Max Beaverbrook and political leaders like Lloyd George a wealth of information, as well as turns of phrase, which he remembered and used. He was allowed even to correct his elders, which he considered ‘clever’, and to drink wine. His father usually glowed with pride when Randolph held forth – in fact, he would silence the table so as to allow him to have his say, unable to see that his son was developing an unattractive arrogance. Clementine recognised what was happening, but felt it was not her territory. Perhaps she thought, or hoped, that he was simply displaying a youthful bravado and that he would grow out of it, but whenever she told Randolph off for being rude he would go to his father, who always forgave him instantly. Winston was ‘incorrigible’, she said, where Randolph was concerned. So she simply gave up.

  On one occasion at Ch
artwell, as Randolph was returning to Eton his father asked him to take a stroll around the garden. Winston told him wistfully: ‘Do you know dear boy, I think we have had more talk in these summer holidays than I had with my father in all his life.’8 The emotional wounds of those years when Lord Randolph had neglected Winston had gone deep; in fact, he never entirely recovered from the hurt. The strange thing was that although Winston was a fond and caring parent who felt that he was far closer to Randolph than he had been to his own father, he was frequently away from home or too busy to give the boy the time and attention he craved. When he did give Randolph his attention, though, it was undivided. The elder girls fared worse than Randolph who was Winston’s favourite during those years. His son’s showing off had begun, one family member thought, as a way of gaining more of Winston’s attention and admiration.9 By the time he was a teenager he had fallen into believing that he would be the youngest prime minister ever. With his background, ability and credentials, and his family contacts, he thought it should simply be a matter of time. He was never corrected.

  On the trip to Italy together, Winston and Randolph were received by the Pope, and Winston had two meetings with the Fascist leader Mussolini. Clementine had stayed at home with Nellie and her two clever but unruly little boys, Giles and Esmond, and kept Winston updated with family news. In an attempt to make some money Nellie had written a novel called Misdeal, which was unashamedly a roman-à-clef of her own life. Clementine described it as ‘hair-raising’, and persuaded Nellie at least to use a pseudonym.* As soon as the Romillys left and her own girls returned to school, Clementine set off for Lou Seuil to visit Consuelo.

  Although Winston still visited Sunny at Blenheim from time to time, he did not like Gladys and she did not like him. He was also made uneasy by the emotional tension between the two, so his visits tailed off – to his regret, for he treasured his link with the great house, always inextricably connected in his mind with his heritage and his deep love of England. But during Gladys’s time the family Christmas parties at Blenheim, which had been such a feature of life for all the Churchills, were no more, so that it was Chartwell that became the family gathering place for the holidays in the late Twenties. ‘Always a glorious feast,’ his daughter Mary recalled.

  Jack and Goonie and their three children Johnny, Peregrine and Clarissa were always there, as well as Nellie, her husband Bertram Romilly and their two sons (inexplicably known as ‘the lambs’). Sometimes close friends such as Winston’s secretary Eddie Marsh would join them, but it was essentially a warm family occasion that all the children remembered. Johnny recalled that Uncle Winston adored children and that, unlike the other grown-ups, he seemed to enjoy playing with them. ‘Charades, with their secrecy, dressing up and acting, particularly appealed to him. He was a generous uncle, and we in return always gave him the best presents we could afford…Some…such as a pair of braces or a toothbrush, struck me as dull, but…my uncle…always loved receiving presents. No matter how small and humble the gift he accepted it with surprise and pleasure…he would take the parcel into a quiet corner, open it carefully and examine the contents with the greatest possible interest.’10 He would help visiting children to construct huge structures with Meccano in the dining room, irrespective of the fact that guests and staff had to duck under and around them to get to the table. Anything less like his own austere childhood would be difficult to envisage; but the one thing Uncle Winston was a stickler for, was table manners. Everyone at table was expected to contribute to good conversation. Once, after a dinner at which his nephew Johnny had been placed next to a very shy woman and had eventually given up trying to make conversation with her, Winston took him aside angrily. ‘How dare you make no attempt to talk to your neighbour!’ he fumed. ‘Don’t you know it is manners to make some kind of effort?’11

  One memory of Johnny’s visits to Chartwell paints a small and unusual picture of Churchill domesticity: ‘It is a family idiosyncrasy to greet one another with the noises made by pets,’ he wrote.12 Winston and Clementine often meowed, wowed and woofed to each other, and the children also each had an animal sound. ‘I think it all began with my uncle trying to talk to his swans, answering their greeting when he arrived to feed them.’ But it is equally likely to have begun much earlier, when Winston and Clementine were first married and were always ‘Pug’ and ‘Cat’ to each other.

  When it snowed, as it often did in the winters during those years, there was tobogganing down the many slopes at Chartwell, snowmen and igloos to build, and ice-skating on the lake. The snowfall was so heavy in 1927 that a tunnel had to be dug from the main road outside the estate to allow access. ‘When we were all assembled on Christmas Eve’, Mary recalled,

  the double doors between the drawing room and the library were flung open to reveal the Christmas tree, glowing with light, and radiating warmth, and a piny, waxy smell from a hundred real white wax candles. Electric lights can never distil for me the magic cast by the glimmering, sputtering beauty of the Christmas trees of my childhood days. Not surprisingly, one year the tree caught fire, and only Randolph’s presence of mind, and speed in fetching an extinguisher, saved us from catastrophe.13

  Winston had to work hard as Chancellor in those difficult post-war years. He was efficient, but he did not shine in the role, and Chartwell was his escape from the pressures of Westminster. There he worked on his estate, bricklaying and improving the gardens, painting and writing. Invariably, interesting people were to be found at his dinner table. Regular visitors included Professor Frederick A. Lindemann, always called ‘the Prof’,* one of the most brilliant scientific brains of his generation.

  During the 1914–18 war Lindemann had worked at Farnborough, then in its infancy as an experimental aviation unit. In those days the biggest threat to airmen was not the enemy but an involuntary spin at low levels. No one had been able to work out how to recover from a spin, although a young pilot who survived one suggested that pushing the stick forward had appeared to make a difference. This seemed to defy all logic, so Lindemann set to work to prove mathematically that pushing the stick forward was indeed the correct procedure. No pilot could be found, however, who was willing to put this unlikely theory into practice, so Lindemann learned to fly and tested it himself at great personal risk. As a result of his heroic act numerous lives were saved. Furthermore, he had the gift of being able to reduce complicated scientific matters to simple terminology so that laymen were able to understand, which was a huge asset to Winston. Sometimes to amuse other diners the Prof would work out on his table napkin the answers to riddles such as how many bottles of champagne would fit into a railway carriage or how many bottles of champagne Churchill would consume in his lifetime. Clementine liked the Prof and Eddie Marsh, and they were regarded as almost family.

  Other regular guests included Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken* (Clementine was wary of both for many years – eventually she accepted them, but she never entirely trusted Beaverbrook’s motives), Sir Philip Sassoon, T.E. Lawrence, the artist Walter Sickert and his wife, and F.E. Smith, who was Winston’s closest friend for many years. Family members who were regularly to be found at Chartwell included Clementine’s cousin and close friend Venetia Stanley, and Tom and Diana Mitford, the children of her cousin David, Lord Redesdale. Tom, a brilliant pianist, was at Eton with Randolph and was regarded as having a calming influence on him. Diana was out-of-the-ordinary beautiful (Winston called her ‘Dinamite’), and Randolph was enamoured of her from the age of twelve when he and his sisters had spent summer holidays at the Redesdales’ Cotswold manor house. But the young were only invited as guests in their own right after they had passed the age of fifteen and were able to contribute to the conversation because – apart from Christmas, when Winston was happy to give unlimited time to children – he refused, he said, to have the house ‘bunged up with brats’.14

  Tom Mitford, brother of the Mitford sisters, recorded a Chartwell lunch that T.E. Lawrence attended in the guise of his alter ego, T.
E. Shaw.† Dressed in the standard bulky unflattering uniform of an RAF aircraftsman, the formerly svelte-looking officer appeared – as the diarist Harold Nicolson noticed at about the same time – squarer and stockier; ‘a bull terrier in place of a saluki’.15 Churchill and Clementine liked Lawrence and he had an open invitation to visit, but Tom Mitford was still at an age where appearance is all:

  I am a little disappointed with Shaw. He looks just like any other private in the Air Force, is very short and he’s in his five years of service become quite hardened. He isn’t a bit like the Sargent portrait of him in his book. Last night I sat next to him at dinner and he had Winston on the other side. Winston admires him enormously. He said at one moment, ‘If the people make me Prime Minister I will make you Viceroy of India.’ Lawrence politely refused and said he was quite happy in the Air Force. When asked what he would do when, in five years’ time he has to leave, he said simply, ‘Join the dole I suppose.’ It is curious that he should enjoy such a life with no responsibility after being almost King in Arabia. Some say it is inverted vanity; he’d have accepted a Kingship, but as he didn’t get it he preferred to bury himself and hide away…This morning we flew over to see Colonel Gunnes at Olympia, about 80 miles away. We had a 7 man unit and flew in perfect formation over Brighton and the other resorts – very low to frighten the crowd. Lawrence was thrilled at flying: he said the Ministry had stopped him flying a year ago.* Winston drove his machine a little way. I hadn’t realised he had done a lot of piloting before the war. We flew in arrow head formation…and landed in a field…it took about an hour getting there and ¾ hour back, as we didn’t return in formation.16