The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  In October a note had arrived from a Hungarian friend of Unity in Budapest, which still had postal communications with Britain. The writer advised that Unity was in hospital, safe, but very ill. It was not until late November that news was passed from the American Embassy that Unity had shot herself in the head in a Munich park when she heard that the two countries she loved were at war, and that she was still recovering, but that the bullet could not be removed. The news inevitably leaked out, and in December the newspapers were full of stories about ‘The Girl Who Loved Hitler’ and even on one occasion ‘Unity Mitford Dead’. Her old nanny was in London Christmas shopping – ‘The shops were empty,’ Nanny reported – when she saw this last headline written on a placard. She marched up to the astonished news vendor and told him vehemently, ‘That’s not true!’

  It was late on Christmas Eve when the phone rang in the Redesdales’ mews cottage in Knightsbridge. It was Unity, asking them weakly to come and get her. Hitler had arranged for her to be taken to Berne in neutral Switzerland in a specially fitted-out ambulance carriage attached to a train. She was accompanied by a doctor, a nurse and a friend. Although it was Christmas and all offices and government departments were closed, thanks to Winston the necessary travel permits and visas were obtained from the Foreign Office and two days later, on 27 December, Lady Redesdale and her youngest daughter, nineteen-year-old Debo, set off for Switzerland across a continent trembling on the brink of open warfare. It was midwinter, grey and freezing cold; no trains ran to schedule, but at least there was no fighting yet. They arrived on 29 December at the clinic where Unity was being treated. She was still very ill, had lost thirty pounds or so, her cheeks were sunken and her face was yellowish-white. ‘Her hair was short and matted…and her teeth were yellow: they had not been brushed since the shooting,’ Debo explained. ‘She couldn’t bear for her head to be touched. She had an odd vacant expression…the most pathetic sight.’19

  When they finally got Unity home, itself a nightmare journey, they were besieged with press and newsreel journalists. Unity was reviled, but for a change and to Clementine’s relief, the Churchill connection was not mentioned. Unity’s brain was permanently affected by the shooting. She would live out the war, a tragic figure with a mental age of eleven or twelve, lovingly cared for by her mother, until in May 1948 she developed meningitis at the wound site, from which she died.

  The phoney war came to an abrupt end in April 1940, when Germany invaded Norway and Denmark. Norway fought against the invader and asked Britain for help. Immediately, the truth of Churchill’s warning about the superior strength of the German Air Force became apparent. After three weeks of fighting all British troops were withdrawn, apart from a few commandos who attempted, unsuccessfully, to take back the port of Narvik. With them was Nellie’s son Giles Romilly.* He was a journalist for the Daily Express, reporting on the Army’s first real action of the war when, in early May, he was taken prisoner. He was the first British captive to be regarded as a prominente (special) prisoner, because of his relationship to Churchill, and he was shipped to Colditz for the duration.*

  Neither Giles’s capture nor his whereabouts was known for some weeks. His father Bertram died on 6 May at his family home, Huntington Park, near Kington in Herefordshire, from the long-term effects of serious war wounds sustained in the First World War. During their childhood, Giles and Esmond Romilly knew their father mainly as a semi-invalid in constant pain. Their mother, in giving continual support to her husband, had largely ignored the two boys, who ran amok. The Communist Esmond was now in Canada, having joined the Canadian Air Force soon after the outbreak of war, leaving his pregnant wife Decca to live with friends in Washington DC. Nellie was quite alone facing her crisis, so Clementine, already overstretched and anxious about Winston, went to her sister’s side. She stayed with Nellie for a few days, but immediately after the funeral rushed back to London.

  During her absence the fighting had begun in earnest. In the early hours of 10 May German forces invaded Holland and Belgium. Randolph had phoned his father late on the 9th and Churchill obviously knew what was afoot, for he told his son quietly, ‘I think I shall be Prime Minister tomorrow.’20 Clementine had been torn, wanting to support her sister for whom she always had a strong maternal feeling, but her desire to be with Winston prevailed – she knew he would be working round the clock, relying on power naps to top up his energy. She arrived home just in time to catch him leaving for the Palace, only a two-minute drive down the Mall from Admiralty House. Churchill recorded the occasion:

  I was taken immediately to the King. His Majesty received me most graciously and bade me sit down. He looked at me searchingly and quizzically for some moments, and then said: ‘I suppose you don’t know why I have sent for you?’ Adopting his mood, I replied: ‘Sir, I simply couldn’t imagine why.’ He laughed and said: ‘I want to ask you to form a government.’ I said I would certainly do so…I told the King that I would immediately send for the leaders of the Labour and Liberal Parties, that I proposed to form a War Cabinet of five or six Ministers, and that I hoped to let him have at least five names before midnight. On this I took my leave.21

  All had not gone smoothly for Churchill in those first months of war at the head of the Admiralty. He had made many enemies during the previous decade and not all had been won over, even now. Some blamed him squarely for the defeat in Norway, yet Cabinet documents indicate that had Churchill had his way and been allowed to act instantly and boldly, as he recommended, Narvik could well have been in British rather than German hands in spring 1940. He was essentially an old-fashioned leader who thought on his feet and reacted with lateral solutions to unfolding events. This would have worked well in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but he found he was constantly checked in Cabinet by Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, who wanted to take days debating decisions that needed to be taken in hours. Clementine was terrified that Narvik might prove to be another Dardanelles for Winston.

  Chamberlain had resigned after the withdrawal from Norway because he believed a coalition government supported by all parliamentary parties was essential to the war effort; but the Labour and Liberal parties would not join a government headed by him. He was publicly asked to resign by Leo Amery,* who quoted Oliver Cromwell’s ringing demand to the Long Parliament which he considered unfit to conduct the affairs of the nation: ‘You have sat too long for any good; Your troops are most of them old, decayed, serving men and tapsters…Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’ Churchill was not necessarily the natural successor. For most politicians the choice was between him and Lord Halifax, and even the King was not at first an outright supporter of Churchill; he and the Queen had not quite forgiven him for supporting brother David during the abdication crisis. What swung the balance was the level of support for Churchill among the people, and in the press. The politicians and even the King had to go along with public opinion.

  On 10 May Churchill became Prime Minister, and in his memoir of that day he wrote: ‘As I went to bed at about 3.a.m. I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been a preparation for this hour and this trial.’ It is extraordinary that Churchill, who had anticipated such a call all his life and almost given up on it, now, on the brink of old age, could be the right man at the right time. Among the hundreds of telegrams and letters of congratulation he received the next day was one he especially treasured. It was from his first love, Pamela Lytton: ‘All my life I have known you would become PM, ever since Hansom Cab days! Yet now you are the news sets one’s heart beating like a sudden surprise.’22

  Three days later, when he rose to speak for the first time in the House of Commons as Prime Minister, he had already formed his coalition government. It was now that he made his famous ‘blood, sweat and tears’ speech. He could promise them only ‘many long months of struggle and of suffe
ring…You ask, what is our policy? I will say: it is to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.’

  It is easy for modern-day critics and academics, with the passage of time and from the safety of a relatively peaceful era in our history, to dissect and criticise individual decisions taken by Churchill under stress. But in the dark days of the Second World War most ordinary people believed that Churchill was a leader in whom they could safely entrust their uncertain future. He never lied to them and promised very little, but he welded the nation into a fighting machine as no one else could have done, and he imbued them with the spirit to fight the enemy to the death, if necessary. This scion of a noble house, who knew very little of the way working-class people lived, nonetheless correctly read the pulse of the nation. ‘Winston will see us through’ would become a popular saying, even after five years of unrelenting toil, shortages and loss of life. And reading the papers and letters of those times, it is at once evident that this was an honest man who, while calling on the nation for every last ounce of effort, never spared himself in the fight to save Britain from the hated enemy.

  One of the first men Winston summoned into the Cabinet was Anthony Eden who had been a Conservative dissenter and a leading anti-appeaser in the late Thirties. Eden headed a group of men who, like Churchill, were opposed to dealing with Hitler, and who – because of Eden’s good looks – were sometimes mockingly called ‘the glamour boys’, while Winston’s supporters were known in the House as ‘the old guard’. Winston wrote in his memoirs that he had lost sleep on the night Eden resigned, at the time of the Munich Agreement; now, the two men were to work closely together for the next fifteen years.

  There was no honeymoon period: a few days after Winston was called to the highest office France capitulated after bombs fell on Paris and Lyons, and Brussels was captured. Until then he had made regular flights to France to meet the Supreme War Council in Paris. Before the last visit he had asked Thompson to return his Colt revolver, which he placed in his overcoat pocket. ‘One never knows,’ he told his detective reflectively. ‘I do not intend to be taken alive.’23 From then on he always had his revolver to hand.

  Within a week German tanks had swallowed much of Europe and reached north-east France, cutting off the Allied force of almost 400,000 British, French and Canadian soldiers and leaving them with their backs to the Channel and no escape route. Hitler would have been justified in thinking he had already won the war. In Britain, although the full details were not generally released, news that the British Army faced annihilation was spreading. People cried openly in the streets, and church services were held for ‘our soldiers in dire peril’.

  Churchill called the events in France ‘a colossal military disaster’ and announced gravely: ‘The House should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings.’ Then he introduced a plan, codenamed Operation Dynamo, which was a seemingly impossible attempt to rescue 45,000–50,000 men from the beaches of Dunkirk. Possibly he recalled how in the 1914–18 war he had overseen the massive transfer of the British Army to the French coast in two days without the loss of a single man. So he knew that, with reasonable luck, part of the Army might be recovered. In the event, what was otherwise a military rout was turned by 4 June into nothing short of a miracle, brought about when every craft that could float, from small yachts, fishing boats, trawlers, pleasure boats, river barges and ferryboats to naval destroyers, formed a great Armada of rescue vessels. Eventually a total of 338,000 men were picked up and returned to England, to fight another day. However, all their guns, tanks, vehicles and munitions had been left on the shores of France; a grave strategic loss.

  To counteract jubilant headlines, Churchill warned, ‘We must be very careful not to assign to this delivery the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations. There was a victory in the deliverance, which should be noted.’ Then followed his famous ‘we shall fight on the beaches’ speech.

  Churchill received not only a first-hand account of what conditions had been like on the beaches, but also a clear visual impression. Jack’s son Johnny had been one of the first men rescued from the Dunkirk beaches. As soon as his train got to Victoria Station he went to the Grosvenor Hotel to shave, then took a taxi to see his father who was living with Winston and Clementine. Jack was assisting Winston in his self-effacing way after his and Goonie’s London home had been made uninhabitable by bombing; Goonie was presently being treated for cancer and living quietly in the country. Winston and Clementine were about to move to No. 10 Downing Street but were still at Admiralty House that day, and as it was scarcely 8 a.m. they hurried down in dressing gowns to greet their nephew.

  The excitement and relief of the moment were overwhelming for them all, not least for Jack. Johnny was wearing his filthy battle-dress, still barely dried out from having waded out into the Channel to be picked up. ‘Johnny!’ Winston cried delightedly, ‘I see you have come straight from battle…Have you come straight out of the sea?’ ‘Yes,’ his nephew replied, ‘and I will be pleased to go back again in a fast motorboat to give everyone encouragement.’ Johnny, who had once tried his hand with a signal lack of success at his father’s profession in the city, was a talented artist. He was quickly put to work to illustrate the events he had witnessed.

  Later that month Mary joined her parents at 10 Downing Street, where an air-raid shelter had been constructed in the basement. Randolph, keen to see action, was at last posted overseas and his pregnant wife Pam also moved into No. 10. Jack’s daughter Clarissa had grown into a striking young woman. After going through the finishing and debutante procedures in the same years as Pam Digby, she had very unusually decided to apply for Oxford University, where she read philosophy for two years. She had a first-class brain and saw Oxford as a way not only of continuing her education but of breaking away from Goonie’s influence, which she found stifling.

  Bert and Mary Marlborough, having turned over most of Blenheim to Malvern School, retreated with their family to rooms in the east wing. Duke Bert had become a military liaison officer. Despite giving birth to her fifth child (a surprise late pregnancy) in 1940, Duchess Mary, the possessor of extraordinary organisational skills, eventually became a senior officer in the ATS, thereby out-ranking her husband. During those years Bert always referred to Mary as ‘the General’.24 She was also President of the Oxfordshire Red Cross and the Women’s Voluntary Service. Their daughter Lady Sarah, for whom the spectacular coming-of-age party had been held the previous year, became a machinist at the Morris Motor Company factory in nearby Oxford. Her immediate supervisor had formerly been a servant at Blenheim. Her siblings were too young to be involved in the war effort in the early war years. Her brother Lord Blandford was still at Eton.

  Consuelo and Jacques were still living in the remoteness of Saint Georges-Motel amid the forests of Eure, wondering what would happen to them and the children in their sanatorium if (or when) the Germans came. In her memoir Consuelo recalled how every day brought fear of invasion. As the Germans advanced rapidly across France the estate was overwhelmed with refugees, and Consuelo instructed her maid to pack an emergency valise and stow it under her bed. Eventually, when the Balsans had placed as many of their small patients as possible in safer accommodation, when the German troops were just an hour away they abandoned their lovely home and left for Pau, where they hoped to find accommodation for the remaining children. It was a hot, still day as they drove off down the drive: the pretty pink and white stone chateau with its blue slate roof was reflected in the still waters of the moat and the fountains were sparkling in the sunlight. Those children who remained, unaware of the gravity of the situation, were still playing happily in the gardens. Consuelo could only trust that the invaders would respect her beautiful historic chateau.25

  When, that summer, France fell, Britain stood alone. Immediately the thoughts of the British naval c
hiefs flew to the French fleet, lying in the port of Oran on the coast of North Africa and preparing to demobilise under the terms of the armistice agreed between the French and the Germans. If this fleet fell into the hands of the enemy it would remove the single advantage Britain had over the Germans: superior naval power. It was a serious problem, and the Cabinet recognised that drastic action was called for. Hitler had announced that Germany had no intention of using the French vessels for its own purposes during the war. Yet, Churchill wrote, ‘who in his senses would trust the word of Hitler after his shameful record and the facts of the hour?’26 It was, he later admitted, the most hateful decision he ever had to make, ‘the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned’. On 3 July French commanders were informed that they must sink their ships themselves before darkness fell, or they would be sunk. This signal was ignored. That evening with a heavy heart Winston approved the order and the British Navy opened fire on the French ships. Three battleships at Oran were sunk, and in other North African ports too the French Navy was annihilated with the loss of 1297 French lives. It was a necessary act in the circumstances; but many Frenchmen would never forgive Churchill.

  The following day Churchill reported to the House, giving a full account of the events, the effects and the outcome. At the end he was surprised by a response unique in his experience: he received a long standing ovation, the entire House cheering him. The action had made it clear to Germany, and to the world, that the British War Cabinet feared nothing ‘and would stop at nothing’.