Despite having to give up flying, Winston had kept himself au fait with developments in the fast-moving world of aviation. By the mid-1920s aircraft were becoming reliable enough to operate short-hop scheduled passenger services, such as London to Paris, for daring travellers. In May 1927 Charles Lindbergh created an international sensation by flying solo across the Atlantic, a supreme test of man and machine. A year later aviation would play an important part in a surprising event touching the wider Churchill family.
Amy Guest had become devoted to air travel during her husband Freddie’s tenure as Secretary of State for Air in the early Twenties. She was fascinated by the success of her compatriot Lindbergh, and although not a pilot, she was destined to play an important role in the history of flight. Immensely rich,* Amy was now a plump matron who thought that rules were for others and who rode rough-shod over other people’s sensibilities (including her husband’s). Although she was always a welcoming and extravagant hostess, useful to Winston in her financial support of aviation, she had totally alienated Clementine with her forthright feminism.
Although never a beauty, Amy had been a dashing young woman and an intrepid rider to hounds, hunting side-saddle and never seen to refuse even the highest fences. She was also an accurate shot, and in later years her fearlessness on safari in East Africa would impress the great white hunter Bror Blixen.17 Amy had always yearned for adventure; as a teenager she wanted to be a nurse in the Spanish–American war of 1898, but had been thwarted by her clever grandfather. ‘Do you really want to help our soldiers?’ he had asked her. ‘Or do you just want to go out there personally? Because if you really want to help the wounded, your mother and I will pay for two trained nurses to work at the army hospital for the duration of the war [instead of you].’18 Several other dreams of adventure had been shattered by her parents and husband.
She was in New York in 1928 when she heard of an attempt to fly the Atlantic by a woman. Immediately she wanted to be the first woman to cross the ocean by air, but when her sons Winston and Ivor threatened to leave Yale University if she attempted such a foolish stunt, she decided instead to sponsor a young woman aviator called Amelia Earhart. Amy then sailed for England, and was in Southampton on 19 June to welcome Amelia and her crew after their successful flight.*
When Amelia’s London hotel was besieged by the press and the curious, Amy invited her to stay at the Guests’ Park Lane town house and, justifiably proud of this intelligent and attractive young countrywoman, she introduced her into Society. Amelia had brought no luggage for weight reasons and was persuaded to discard her riding breeches, shirt and pullover for a silk dress of Amy’s which, commented one reporter, was ‘noticeably large in places’. Amy bought Amelia a suit and took her to Royal Ascot, where the aviator was photographed with Lord Astor, the Prince of Wales and Winston and Clementine Churchill. Amy basked in her role in this great adventure – it was her time in the sun. But Clementine continued to dislike her, and the two families grew further apart.
Randolph’s youthful crush on Diana Mitford was doomed to failure when she married Bryan Guinness, heir of the brewing family, in January 1929. Diana had been stimulated by her visits to Chartwell, though, and the political debate she heard around the dinner table spawned a lifelong interest in politics for which in later life she was to become notorious.
The Churchill children were growing up. Randolph was now eighteen and at Oxford, moving in a racy, port-imbibing set which included John Betjeman and Freddie Smith (son of F.E.). Diana and Sarah were twenty and fifteen – Sarah was still at boarding school and Diana was in Paris staying with a respectable family while she learned French (from where she wrote begging to be allowed to shingle her hair). Jack and Goonie’s son Johnny was twenty, Peregrine was sixteen. Only the two youngest children – Clarissa and Mary, aged nine and seven respectively – remained at home. With or without the often outspoken guests, Chartwell was a lively house at times, more often than not full of children and teenagers because Jack and Goonie’s family were inseparable from Winston and Clementine’s, and Nellie and her two boys Giles and Esmond were also frequent visitors. Talk at the table would get heated on occasion, especially when Randolph was there, arrogantly displaying his knowledge, repeating things he had heard his father say, picking up on a remark of another one of his father’s visitors. Because Winston doted on him and because he was a wonderfully attractive golden youth, he continued to be given more than a fair degree of latitude. He often became so argumentative that his sister Mary recalled ‘Randolph would pick an argument with a chair’.19
At the age of eighteen this trait was still capable of being corrected, for Randolph evidently recognised that he had a problem. He told a contemporary at Oxford (Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford): ‘I have an overwhelming urge to express myself, I am an explosion that leaves the house still standing.’20 It was after one turbulent weekend of debate and argument that Clementine – highly strung, hating noise and discord, and driven to distraction – told a startled Peregrine on the car journey to London: ‘I just can’t stand it any longer.’21 This remark, remembered by Peregrine for fifty years, has been cited in some biographies as evidence of a serious rift between Winston and Clementine, but it is abundantly clear from their letters and from family members’ recollections of the romantic and sentimental love that this couple retained for each other throughout their lives that the incident was nothing more than Clementine needing to let off steam after a difficult few days. Like every couple they had moments of disagreement, and it is true that at one point a few years later a distraught Clementine went to stay with Goonie and spoke of getting a divorce because of the combativeness between Winston and Randolph. Goonie comforted her and Clementine was soon back at home with her Pug.
Clementine was a highly sensitive woman, not really equipped emotionally or physically to deal with the hurly-burly of energy and noise that Winston seemed to create effortlessly around him. She coped, and she dealt with it, because she loved him. She provided him with a superbly run home filled with flowers and comfort, beautiful food efficiently served on time by well trained staff. Everything revolved around Winston’s need to work, write, paint and occasionally to relax. But it took a great toll on her, and it became essential that several times a year she got away from Winston and the children so as to rest quietly and rebuild her reserves. Theirs was not a conventional union – how could it be? But Winston understood and was generally sensitive to her needs. There would be many holidays apart as the years went by, but these breaks were always punctuated by fond letters between them, Winston usually inquiring solicitously about her well-being. There can be no doubt where Clementine’s love and sense of duty lay. As noted earlier, her children never came first, and she was content to consign them to a series of governesses and tutors. She once told her daughter Mary that it had taken all her strength and time just to keep up with Winston, explaining without apology that as far as her children were concerned, ‘I never had anything left over.’22
The year 1929 saw the publication of another volume of Winston’s history of the 1914–18 war, The World Crisis, which had occupied a good deal of his spare time for a decade. Not all of his spare time, however, because in those years he had also produced a large portfolio of oil paintings and several other books. But 1929 was most noteworthy for this political family for the fact that on 30 May the Conservatives were defeated in the general election. Winston had presented his fifth budget in April and had felt confident that it would be well received by the electorate. But as so often happens after a long period under the same administration, the electorate was in the mood for change. The election went well for Winston personally, with his attractive wife and appealingly wholesome family – Randolph a very promising eighteen-year-old and three pretty daughters (the youngest, Mary, a bright seven-year-old) – all campaigning alongside him and wearing their blue ribbons. But there was no convincing majority, and Baldwin resigned because he had no wish to head a minority administration
and refused to head a coalition.
Instead Ramsay MacDonald formed the second Labour government with the support of the Liberals, and Winston was out of office from June, although he retained his parliamentary seat. He wondered at first if this signalled the end of his career, for he was now in his mid-fifties and in all likelihood it would be at least four years before the Tories could expect to form another government. There was no guarantee that an incoming prime minister would then be looking for ministers of sixty.
He was disappointed at the defeat of his party but not unduly upset, for unlike his enforced resignation after the Dardanelles this setback was not a personal defeat, merely the ebbing of a political tide. He decided to capitalise on having more time available by making a three-month tour of the USA and Canada, leaving in early August, to be funded by fees earned for speeches, articles and various book deals. Clementine was to have joined him, but as the departure date drew near she was still convalescing from a mastoid operation and was advised not to travel. He asked Jack to take Clementine’s place, and then the two boys, Randolph and Peregrine, begged to join their fathers. Winston decided that it would be a wonderful experience for them, so it was an all-male Churchill party that toured the North American continent in a private railway carriage supplied by Canadian Pacific.
Winston loved America and the confidence of the people. And he was popular there, which felt good after the political defeat in England. Randolph, too, fell under the spell of the New World, and when on one occasion they were subjected at dinner to a boring speech by a local cleric, Randolph rose to his feet to deliver an unscheduled five-minute reply that had his audience agog with admiration. He knew exactly how far to go and how to win the sympathy of his audience, Winston told Clementine proudly, and he believed he could not have done it better himself.23 Randolph kept a diary of the tour, and published part of it in his memoir Twenty-One Years.24
When the Churchill party reached California they stayed at San Simeon, the ranch of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Even the extravagant hospitality the party had received throughout their tour failed to prepare them for the luxury of San Simeon and they were happy to wallow. It was there that Randolph lost his virginity, to Tilly Losch, the exquisite Hungarian dancer and actress.
Before leaving England Winston had taken advice from an expert and trusted financier about investing in Wall Street, which had been booming for over a year. Because he was going to be travelling and not always contactable, he had made arrangements for the broker to invest on his behalf without asking permission for each deal. He told the man blithely: ‘I can usually lay my hands on two or three thousand pounds.’ By September, when Winston examined his portfolio, he realised that the broker had invested about ten times more than he normally placed in the markets. But his concern was quickly dispelled when he saw that the new shares had already netted him a profit of £2000. Together with a large publisher’s advance for his proposed biography of his ancestor the 1st Duke of Marlborough, royalties on his other books, some commissioned articles and lecture fees, he was feeling very confident financially. (This was despite the loss both of his ministerial salary and of the use of the Chancellor’s official residence at 11 Downing Street.) Reckoning he had over £21,000 at that point (today, almost £700,000), he wrote to instruct Clementine to lease Venetia Stanley’s house, as she wished to do anyway, and to hire enough servants for luncheon parties of ‘8–10 often, and dinner of the same size about twice a week. You should have a staff equal to this.’25
The first Wall Street crash began on 24 October 1929 when over twelve million shares were traded in one day, and over the next four trading days panic selling eventually caused the market to collapse. It was said that anyone who purchased stocks in 1929 and held on to them would pass most of their adult life before they reached parity. In one week alone some $30 billion was wiped off stock prices, resulting in the mass unemployment that was the other aspect of the Great Depression. On the day Winston and Jack Churchill reached New York to embark on their Atlantic crossing, the headlines announced the death of a ruined man who had leapt from the top of a skyscraper.
Winston lost over £10,000 (almost £300,000 sterling today) – half his wealth, hard-earned and carefully garnered. He was not wiped out, but it was a tremendous blow to him. He had two immediate concerns: first, that he would be able to hang on to, and still be able to live at, his beloved Chartwell. Second, how would he break the news to Clementine who, he knew only too well, had a horror of debt? She had spent the summer months with Nellie and the girls at Dieppe, then had gone to Italy in October. So she was rested and happy, still feeling the effects of the sunshine as she looked forward to Winston’s return after their long separation. He intended to break the bad news gently.
On 5 November Clementine was at Waterloo Station to meet Winston off the Southampton boat-train (the boys had returned to England earlier, as they were due back at university). He kissed her but then, unable to bear pretending until a better time arrived that all was well, he blurted out the bad news there and then on the station platform. Clementine would never have made her reaction known in such a public place, but it is not difficult to imagine what a shock this would have been to her. For most of her life she worried about money, even in relatively good times – the legacy of her constant anxiety when young about her mother’s fecklessness.
As they entered the Thirties – always recalled by Churchill as his ‘wilderness years’, for as well as his financial worries he was without office – they were living far more carefully. He worked hard at his writing and always earned enough to keep their finances ticking over, just. Often only a royalty cheque or an advance enabled him to clear his debts; but as noted earlier, although he was willing to economise to a certain degree, like Sunny, Winston was unable to lower his standards. The children were told to turn off lights and to keep telephone calls short but did not later recall real shortages. The couple entertained less often, reduced the number of servants, closed off all but a few rooms at Chartwell in which Winston could work on his money-earning books: four volumes of Marlborough: His Life and Times and My Early Life, as well as essays and lectures. And while in London they took furnished houses on short-term rentals, or stayed in a hotel. Clementine knew a thing or two about budgeting, and it was she who made sure that they survived the financial crisis. For several years, instead of living in the big house the family used a staff cottage in the grounds of Chartwell which Mary recalls as delightfully ‘cosy’. It was only many years later, ‘when I read my mother’s letters and papers that I really began to understand: then I realised how fragile was the raft which supported that seemingly so solid way of life’. She was still in the care of a nanny, but her brother and sisters had begun to grow away from the family.
There was another blow for Winston to weather in September 1930, when his old friend Lord Birkenhead (F.E. Smith) died suddenly at the age of fifty-eight. The two men had been the closest friends for almost a quarter of a century, when they had entered Parliament in the same intake. A brilliant and charismatic man, F.E. enjoyed the same lifestyle as Winston, the same expensive drinks, food and cigars. Together they had founded the exclusive dining club known as ‘the Other Club’, and it was believed to be his excesses, especially drinking, that killed him before his time. When he received the news Winston wept openly, and Clementine remembered him saying repeatedly, ‘I feel so lonely.’
He was still low because of this bereavement when Randolph, now nineteen and in his last year at Oxford, received – on the back of his visit with his father the previous year – an invitation to deliver a series of lectures in the USA. A lecture firm offered him the huge sum of $12,000 to make the tour. Against all parental, avuncular and tutorial advice, Randolph accepted the offer, leaving off his studies in October 1930. He justified his decision by saying he would return to Oxford (but he never did). Unlike his father, who had been so coldly treated as a schoolboy when he underperformed, Randolph had received only a
ffection and understanding in the same circumstances. At Eton when he wrote to apologise to his father for ‘having done so badly and [having] disappointed you so much’, Winston – perhaps recalling how it felt to be lectured by a stern father – allowed him to drop Greek.26 Randolph’s will was done in this as in so many issues, and Clementine felt ever more uneasy about the latitude allowed to him, but without ever doing anything about it. She loved Randolph, but she did not share Winston’s blind devotion for their son. In December, using some money Winston had given her to buy a small car, Clementine sailed to New York in order to visit Randolph, to whom she wrote, ‘Papa is amused and rather outraged at the idea of me going to America without him!’27
He welcomed her warmly but she quickly discovered that, as she suspected, he had not been concentrating wholly on the lecture tour and that her instincts to check on him had not been at fault. He was spending money rapidly, and had fallen in love. He told Clementine that he intended to marry Kay Halle, an Irish-American girl from Cleveland, Ohio. Indeed, he had proposed to her several times but the personable Miss Halle had refused him. This news had just hit the headlines, and on her first morning in New York Clementine was surprised to read that she had travelled to America to put a stop to the wedding.
She attended one of Randolph’s lectures and told Winston, ‘Frankly, it was not at all good.’ She felt Randolph could be brilliant if he would only give his full attention to his talks. But when she attempted to tell him this he had responded that it would go down well with most of his audience. ‘So he won’t take pains,’ she wrote, ‘& this is a great pity. He delivers the same lecture everywhere, so he really ought to have got it good by now.’ However, she had to admit that ‘he has a most fascinating manner & delivery & the audience seemed spellbound – but I think it was his looks & his colossal cheek, chiefly!’ On the subject of Miss Halle, Clementine wrote that she had met her and liked her, though she had pointed out to Randolph the dangers of marrying a woman eight years older than himself, and asked how he intended to support a wife. He was not interested in women of his own age, Randolph had replied, and he was confident his father would continue his allowance of £400 a year. Clementine pointed out that in three months he had already spent over £1000, or the equivalent of over £4000 a year. Nevertheless, she trod a diplomatic path because ‘it would be madness to go against the idea, as I think he might try & rush into it. Much may happen…& Miss Halle may not come up to scratch. She is, I think, very fond of Randolph but rather flustered & worried.’28 These matters aside, she wrote that Randolph was a sweet and charming companion and that she was enjoying her holiday so much that she said she almost felt she was on a sort of honeymoon. Perhaps she was not unduly worried about the Kay Halle question because she noted that Randolph flirted shamelessly with other women he met while he escorted his mother around Washington and other cities.
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