A week later, Randolph was on leave in London and found himself without a partner for dinner. He asked a married friend, Mary Dunne,* but she was already engaged that evening and suggested he invite a friend newly arrived from the country who was staying in a flat that Mary was renting to her. Pamela Digby was the nineteen-year-old, red-haired, blue-eyed daughter of Lord and Lady Digby of Minterne in Dorset; later, she would remember the conversation when she answered the telephone:
‘This is Randolph Churchill.’
‘Do you want to speak to Mary?’
‘No – I want to speak to you.’
‘But you don’t know me.’
Down the phone Randolph explained that anyway he wanted her to come out to dinner, and at the same time Mary Dunne, who had just arrived, was nodding at her vigorously and encouraging Pamela to accept the invitation. So she did, telling Randolph to collect her at seven o’clock.
‘What do you look like?’ Randolph asked, before he ended the short conversation.
‘Red-headed and rather fat, but Mummy says that puppy fat disappears.’5
At the age of twenty-eight Randolph had moved on from being attracted only to women who resembled his mother, such as Diana and Clementine Mitford. His women friends – and there were a good number attracted to this eligible and well placed bachelor, despite his explosive temperament – tended to be sophisticated types and were quite often married; Mary Dunne was one of them. Another was his present mistress, Clare Luce, a vivacious vaudeville star who visited Randolph at his regimental camp most weekends. Young debutantes (Pamela had made her debut at the age of eighteen in 1938 without ‘taking’) generally bored him. Yet it was from this pool that he would have to fish for a wife, and Randolph’s various biographers agree that when war was declared he made up his mind that, as he was Winston’s only son and stood a reasonable chance of being killed, he should marry and father a son as soon as possible so that ‘the line’ was continued.
This seems to be at least a partial explanation for the fact that, although he claimed to be deeply in love with Laura Charteris,* whom he had met in early 1939, within three days after that first dinner at ‘Quags’, as Quaglino’s restaurant was known, Randolph Churchill and Pamela Digby announced their engagement. But Pamela’s potent charm and sexual magnetism should not be underrated, even though at the time it was still a raw talent that was yet to be honed.
Pam was then girlishly pretty, with the captivating smile that is as characteristic a feature of the Digby family as the blue eyes are of the Mitfords. Her debutante portrait on the cover of Tatler 6 shows her unsmiling and thoughtful, however. ‘Darling Daddie,’ she wrote, ‘I can’t get over that picture in the Tatler. Do I really look as frightful as that? It’s terrible!’7 The mother of a fellow debutante wrote to Lady Digby: ‘I really wanted to tell you how absolutely overcome I was by the beauty of your elder daughter. I’ve never seen anything so heavenly as that wonderful hair and looks, and apart from her beauty, such a perfectly charming expression. What a lovely creature she is. I felt I must write to you.’8
However, Pam was not considered one of the outstanding girls of her coming-out year: 1938 was ‘a vintage year for beautiful girls’, one 1938 debutante recalled, reeling off a list of names who had looks worthy of a Hollywood career and which included Clarissa Churchill.9 Pam may not have been on this list of beauties but she managed what most of them had not – namely, a proposal of marriage from one of the most eligible men of that year, the dashing and handsome twenty-year-old Hugh Fraser,* younger son of Lord Lovat. For a few days the young couple discussed the matter: would their parents allow them to wed? They concluded they would almost certainly not, because of their ages and the fact that they would have very little money to live on. So they hatched a plan to elope, and it was Pam who was most grown-up about it, calling it off after a week or so. Fraser was very hurt, and it was nearly fifty years before he felt able to talk about the matter to Clarissa Churchill.10
Even at eighteen, Pam was an interesting conversationalist. Her smile lit up a room and she possessed a bubbly, friendly personality that was immensely attractive. She had travelled to Australia and Canada as a child, and spent time in Paris and Munich in 1937 living in with approved families while taking languages classes at finishing schools attended by fellow debutantes. There is a rumour that Unity Mitford introduced her to Hitler, but there is no evidence of this meeting and it seems unlikely. Those who peopled her letters home to her parents while she was in Munich were mainly the same former boarding-school girl friends and Old Etonians with whom she would mix in London at coming-out parties and at country-house weekends. While in Munich she sometimes encountered Germans at parties; but, she told her mother, ‘Between you and me and the gatepost I hated the Germans…they were very boring, I thought. I spent most of my time wondering when I would be able to get home.’11 She was strictly guarded by her tutors (or so she reported to her parents) and claimed several longed-for invitations had to be declined because a chaperone could not be found. She wrote that she attended the opera and heard the Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli sing in Das Rheingold and Siegfried, and listened to a piano recital of pieces from The Flying Dutchman. She took history of art lessons at the Pinakothek at her own request. Lady Ravensdale (daughter of Lord Curzon and sister-in-law of Oswald Mosley) introduced her to Pauline (‘Popsie’) Winn, Edwina Drummond and Sarah Norton, and these three girls were to become Pam’s best friends. Making such useful contacts and acquiring some international polish was what the exercise was all about.
A noted rider in both the hunting field and the show ring,* Pam was as gregarious as Randolph, and she had a self-confidence and flirtatiousness that almost matched his own. Furthermore, she had been educated, as most young English girls of her class and time were, to at least pretend to regard men as slightly superior beings. Men were invariably attracted, and when she returned to England she was a popular guest at weekend parties at Popsie’s home, Leeds Castle,† and at various Astor houses (Sarah Norton would marry an Astor). But Pam was well brought up, and she was then conventional enough, for a while anyway, to remain a virgin despite numerous temptations. Her biggest problem at that time was her £200 annual allowance, which had to cover all her expenses including clothes. She abhorred debt, and would never contemplate exceeding her annual budget, but she often felt self-conscious beside her much richer friends who could spend £400 on a single cocktail dress by Molyneux or Hartnell. Sometimes she bought material and made herself a skirt or a blouse, and all her expenses were diligently listed in her accounts which she submitted to her parents, with explanations: ‘a green evening dress…terribly jeune fille-ish, high at the back with a slightly cowled neck and a tiny sleeve, but the best part is its sash…I got the model because it fitted me and was much cheaper [only] £8.8s.’ There was also a navy blue crêpe de Chine dress ‘that will go with anything and is dark enough to wear next winter’.12
Far from longing to get away from her home and her parents, as two of Pam’s biographers have claimed, her surviving letters from the period provide solid evidence that she adored her parents and her childhood life at Minterne: ‘I can’t get over the thought of being at Minterne again – it is simply marvellous’, ‘…longing to see you again, it is so near now, only ten days. I do love you so’, ‘Tell Daddie I shall die if he doesn’t come and see me soon.’ This is not to say that Pam didn’t do what most of her contemporaries did, those small rebellious acts such as sneaking out through the French windows at a ball while the chaperones sat together drinking tea in the hall; then slip away to a nightclub, have a few forbidden drinks, and get back in again before the ball ended without being missed. At weekend parties she was a flirt, but she made no meaningful relationships with young men other than Hugh Fraser. At that time no man quite measured up to her father.
In September 1939 when she met Randolph, Pam was feeling very grown up, having just taken delivery of a Jaguar car. This was a nineteenth-birthday present from her paren
ts, who were pleased with the way she had lived within her allowance. Having tasted life in London, she decided she did not want to spend the whole of the war at Minterne. Her father had been appointed an honorary guard to the King and her mother served as Commander of the Dorset branch of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). Sheila, her next sister, joined the Army, but that didn’t interest Pam either. Instead, she found herself a war job with the Foreign Office through the introduction of a friend. She would be a French translator at a salary of £6 (£172 today) a week, out of which she had to pay £210s (£71.80p today) rent on her flat. With the allowance from her parents and given that men were expected to pay for dinners and dances in those days, Pam thought she could manage quite well.
Lord and Lady Digby, who never knew of the secret engagement to Hugh Fraser, were less than enchanted at the news of the sudden engagement to Randolph, for despite his illustrious connections he had the sort of reputation – brawling, womanising, gambling – with which no one would wish their teenage daughter associated. Lady Digby (‘Pansy’) had never been entirely happy with Pam’s frequent visits to Leeds Castle, either. There her much-loved daughter inevitably mixed with a set considered by Pansy to be ‘very fast’ indeed, she and Lord Digby came to believe that it was these early visits to Leeds Castle that set the tone of their daughter’s future life.13 Her brother Eddie, the present Lord Digby, was still at Eton at the time and recalls that Pansy simply had to rely on Pam’s common sense and the good example of her own happy country home life. Pam was encouraged to bring these friends to Minterne, where Eddie was regularly star-struck by the girls: ‘I fell in love constantly,’ he admitted.14
Pam’s father was a locally popular country squire. She wrote frequently to him when she was abroad during her ‘finishing’ process, sometimes about her visits to art galleries, the opera and concerts but more usually about hunting: ‘I am enjoying myself…[but] I wish I was home now, and then I could have lots of hunts on Red Rogue.’ It was not usual for children and parents of their class to have very close relationships, but her father was Pam’s hero, and was almost certainly the reason she always felt so confident in her relationships with older men.
At the time Randolph proposed to Pam it was rumoured in their set that he was so desperate to marry and father a child before he was posted abroad that he had proposed to eight women in the past few weeks. Pam recalled that, at first, ‘I was getting so terribly upset by seeing all my friends going off, as they dramatically thought, to be killed, and I thought how marvellous it was to be going out with somebody about whom I didn’t give a damn.’15 Her friends were almost unanimously opposed to the engagement, and warned her off Randolph to the extent that she began to waver. This was enough to send Randolph’s courtship technique into overdrive, and Pam was flattered and excited by this powerful, mature man who for several days deluged her with phone calls begging her to marry him, and at once. She was also intrigued by his absolute certainty in himself; he believed the country was in for a long fight, and that therefore in the meantime they should enjoy every moment to the full.
But perhaps the deciding factor for Pam was meeting Randolph’s father. Randolph took her to Chartwell, where a delighted Winston welcomed her warmly with an old-fashioned courtesy that touched her. It was a mutual, innocent attraction and in one sense at least she was probably more in love with Winston than with Randolph. Anyway, the entire proposition became more attractive with Winston, the father figure, as part of it. Winston and Clementine were down at Chartwell to close up the big house for the duration (though in fact it was used in the early part of the war to house evacuees), and Cousin Moppet who had brought Mary up was now installed in the former chauffeur’s cottage with the two small Sandys children, Julian and Edwina, along with their nanny. The Morpeth Mansions flat was disposed of.
When they first took over Admiralty House in 1911, three years after they were married, Clementine had worried about their ability to afford living in the graceful Georgian mansion overlooking Green Park and Horse Guards Parade. Now, twenty-eight years later, she was still worried about their ability to afford living there, but she had learned a good deal about managing houses in the intervening time. The two top floors, formerly the nursery and attics, were converted by the Ministry of Works into living accommodation and the huge state rooms beneath them were to be closed off. When the Churchills had time to spend in the country they would be able to use the three-bedroom cottage built by Winston, with love, in the orchard at Chartwell.
Rushed weddings were in vogue; no one had time to organise huge white weddings when the bridegroom might be posted at any minute. Pam’s parents told her they were worried she was too young, that she and Randolph had no money and nowhere to live. Winston – who had organised his own marriage to Clementine in under a month – blithely advised her that all they needed to be married was champagne, a box of cigars and a double bed. His father’s overt approval of his choice of bride thrilled Randolph – at last he had got something right! Clementine was cool. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Pamela; she liked her very much, but she was unsure of Randolph’s motives and so was not optimistic about the outcome. However, on reflection she thought that Pam, unlike Laura, was a nice, happy, uncomplicated girl without a past, and might make Randolph settle down. When the wedding date was set, a seemingly impossible three weeks away, she immediately contacted Pansy Digby and the two mothers set to work. The state rooms at Admiralty House were opened up and a reception organised. On 4 October 1939, just a month after war was declared, Randolph in the full dress uniform of a cavalry officer escorted his bride from St John’s Church in Smith Square under an ‘arch’ created by the swords of his brother officers. Pam, beaming confidently, wore a deep-blue, fur-trimmed coat and dress and a matching velvet hat with a jaunty feather. The colours perfectly suited her fair skin and complimented her blue eyes and gold-red hair.
The Digbys met Randolph only once before the wedding. Eddie Digby remembers that he was ‘very attractive and had great charm when he wanted to charm. But he loved putting the cat among the pigeons.’16 A month after the wedding, since Winston had to go to Weymouth to inspect naval establishments there, he and Clementine took two days off – his first rest in months – and went to stay at Minterne with Pam’s parents.
By the time the Churchill family met in London for Christmas everyone was already ‘doing their bit’. As well as running things smoothly at Admiralty House, where Winston conducted much of his business across the dining table, Clementine had become involved in welfare work for Navy wives and in a maternity unit for the wives of serving men in all three services. Sarah and Vic Oliver, now assimilated into the family as a couple, were both still working on the stage – a much appreciated form of service in those sombre years. All theatres were closed when war was declared because of the initial fear of bombing, but by December they had opened again, and Sarah and Vic were appearing together in Black Velvet at the Hippodrome. Duncan Sandys had reported to his Territorial Army unit and was stationed in London with an anti-aircraft regiment; Diana was an officer with the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the WRNS). But they were able to get leave and together with their two children Julian and Edwina, who had come up from the country, they joined in the Christmas festivities.
Mary, who had just left school, was doing some Red Cross work and helping in a canteen, while happily joining in the social life of the adults. The Prof and Brendan Bracken, the latter largely ignored by a jealous Randolph (because Winston seemed to give Bracken the sort of attention and affection he craved for himself), were there, too; their job was to support Winston in any way they could. It was still the time of the ‘phoney war’ and there was great apprehension. Most people had expected German activity in the skies as soon as war was declared, but when nothing happened they could only wait anxiously wondering when the conflict would begin.
Randolph was still stationed at the Army camp at Beverley in Yorkshire, where Pam had now moved into a guest ho
use to be near him. She revealed years later that on their wedding night at Belton near Grantham, Randolph had insisted on reading out to her some extracts from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, though she did not remember which extracts or why he read them out. His intention was probably to illustrate some point about the course the war was taking, but it was not quite what the young bride expected. When, in the spring of 1940, Pam announced that she was pregnant there was no one in the Churchill family who was not thrilled. Pam’s parents reacted with an affectionate letter of congratulations, thanking her for twenty years of being a wonderful daughter. Pam replied, ‘You shouldn’t have thanked me for my twenty years with you, that’s for me to do, to thank you for putting up with my tiresome self so gallantly and for so long. Darling Mumsie, I do love you.’ She added that everyone had been so sweet to her, especially Randolph, Vic and Sarah, while she was suffering horribly with morning sickness.17
When the Churchill family gathered at Admiralty House for that first Christmas of the war it was business as usual for Winston – he worked the same hours as ever, and he expected his staff to do the same, except that on Boxing Day he worked for only fourteen hours and then went to the cinema with Clementine. On Christmas morning he had received an anxious phone call from David, Lord Redesdale, father of the Mitford girls. Unity was still in Munich when war was declared on 3 September and her family could get no news of her, despite Churchill’s inquiries through official sources. There was a rumour that Unity had been interred in a concentration camp for Czech women, ‘which much as I deplore it has a sort of poetic justice,’ her sister Nancy wrote.18
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