During these months Winston drove himself to breaking point, and he expected others to work at the same punishing pace. He was too busy to offer praise, was constantly irritable, and often found fault when his staff did not or could not measure up to his exacting standards. They appealed to Clementine who, following their lifelong practice when something was seriously amiss, broached the matter with him in a remarkable letter:
My Darling,
I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know. One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner – It seems your Private Secretaries have agreed to behave like schoolboys & ‘take what’s coming to them’ & then escape out of your presence shrugging their shoulders – Higher up, if an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming. I was astonished & upset because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you – I said this & I was told ‘No doubt it’s the strain’ –
My Darling Winston – I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be. It is for you to give the Orders & if they are bungled – except for the King the Archbishop of Canterbury & the Speaker you can sack anyone and everyone – Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm…I cannot bear that those who serve the Country & yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you – Besides you won’t get the best results by irascibility & rudeness. They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality…please forgive your loving devoted & watchful
Clemmie.27
In a postscript she added: ‘I wrote this at Chequers last Sunday, tore it up, but here it is now.’
That Chequers weekend had been a typical one – family, friends and important contacts gathering for lunch and conversation. Jock Colville, one of Churchill’s Private Secretaries, gives a fascinating description of it in his diaries. He tells how Winston filled every hour, discussing with Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken the evacuation of the Channel Isles; then on to the need to increase aircraft production; then the position of the Duke of Windsor, who was presently in Madrid and attempting to impose conditions, ‘financial and otherwise’, about his return to England. Colville wrote:
Winston proposes to send him a very stiff telegram pointing out that he is a soldier under orders and must obey. The King approves and says he will hear of no conditions, about the Duchess or otherwise…We had tea in the morning-room upstairs and while we were there the Sandyses arrived. Shortly afterwards came Randolph Churchill and his wife. I thought Randolph one of the most objectionable people I had ever met: noisy, self-assertive, whining and frankly unpleasant. He did not strike me as intelligent. At dinner he was anything but kind to Winston, who adores him…In reply to a request from the P.M., the Home Secretary sent a list of 150 ‘prominent people’ whom he had arrested. Of the first three on the list two, Lady Mosley and Geo Pitt-Rivers,* were cousins of the Churchills – a fact which piqued Winston and caused much merriment among his children.28
Oswald Mosley had been taken into custody on 23 May. This could not have been a surprise because the party he had founded, the British Union of Fascists, was, rightly or wrongly,* regarded as sympathetic to Hitler, although Mosley denied this. He was arrested under the infamous rule 18B of the Emergency Powers Act, which had been rushed through Parliament in order to allow the Home Secretary to detain without trial anyone ‘of potentially hostile origin or association’ when it was considered necessary for the defence of the realm. Churchill had reluctantly agreed.†
The new government had decided to arrest and detain enemy aliens, known Fascists and Communists on the grounds that they were a potential security risk. Under an amendment (18B/1a) this was extended to include any member of an association which, in the view of the Home Secretary, was subject to foreign control or whose leaders were known to have had association with leaders of the enemy powers. The matter was regarded as justice by some, for although Mosley argued hotly and eloquently that his arrest and incarceration went against the rights of habeas corpus derived from Magna Carta, there is good reason to believe that had his own party ever come to power those rights would have been sacrificed by him for the sake of expediency. He had, after all, proposed similar legislation in 1931 to combat protesters against mass unemployment. In those days, however, he had still been ‘respectable’, a friend and colleague of Churchill.
But it was not Oswald Mosley about whom Winston was concerned so much as his wife, Diana. Winston had always been fond of Diana Mitford. He knew that she had given birth to a son only a few weeks earlier and must still be nursing him. When Mosley was arrested the Home Secretary was bombarded with letters about Diana, informing him that she was as dangerous as her husband. Three of these informants in particular stood out. One was Diana’s sister Nancy (before she became a successful writer), who called on Gladwyn Jebb* at his request to tell him what she knew of Diana’s frequent visits to Germany between 1932 and 1939. ‘I advised him to examine her passport,’ she wrote. ‘I also said I regard her as an extremely dangerous person. Not very sisterly behaviour but in such times I think it one’s duty.’29 Another informant was Lord Moyne, one of Winston and Clementine’s closest friends, who had been Diana’s father-in-law during her first marriage to Bryan Guinness. Moyne wrote a two-page memorandum based on the testimony of the nanny of Diana’s two Guinness sons who were now living with the Moynes in Ireland. The nanny had repeated to him things she had overheard at Diana’s house, and his covering letter stated that he considered Diana ‘an extremely dangerous person’. The last informant was Irene, Lady Ravensdale (who had introduced Pam Digby to Popsie Winn in Munich). She wrote saying more or less the same: that in her opinion Diana was as dangerous, if not more so, than Mosley. Of course one must view Lady Ravensdale’s opinion with circumspection. One of the Curzon sisters, Irene Ravensdale was Mosley’s sister-in-law during his first marriage to Lady Cynthia (‘Cimmie’) Curzon. Within weeks of Cimmie’s death she was Mosley’s lover;† that relationship had ended when Diana took Mosley from her.
The authorities felt they had sufficient evidence to arrest Diana – in effect separating her without a moment’s notice from her twelve-week-old unweaned baby – and incarcerate her in Holloway prison. As a politician Churchill knew a thing or two about the conditions in Holloway, and though he did not approve of Diana’s political sympathies he was concerned about her plight and that of her abandoned baby. He attempted to ensure that she got at least one bath a week – but even this proved impossible in practice.
Diana’s mother Sydney Mitford (Lady Redesdale) visited Clementine to beg for assistance to get her released on compassionate grounds. Sydney had been one of Clementine’s bridesmaids; the two families were not only cousins but had been friends for forty years. Clementine, as usual, had only one concern: Winston’s position in the matter. Just as with Esmond Romilly, whenever the activities of Diana or her sister Unity were noticed in the press, their relationship to Clementine and Winston was always featured in headlines: Esmond was invariably ‘the Red nephew of Mr Churchill’ and Unity the ‘Nazi-loving cousin of Mrs Churchill’. Clementine hated Winston’s reputation to be sullied by constant association with the universally disliked Mosleys. She began the interview with Sydney carefully, remarking that Winston had always been ‘so fond of Diana’. She then suggested that Diana and Mosley were probably better off in prison, for they would almost certainly be lynched by the mob if they were released. Sydney, who had been firmly in Chamberlain’s appeasement camp and had come to regard Winston as a warmonger, replied frostily that they would be willing to take the chance. But she left, her mission unaccomplished.30
In the four years that Diana Mosley was
incarcerated she never became accustomed to the squalor in which the women prisoners were obliged to live. She blamed Winston for this and for her imprisonment without trial, although wartime documents in the National Archives indicate that he did all he could to obtain her release and to mitigate the worst conditions for her. With some difficulty he eventually contrived to have the Mosleys reunited in a mixed prison, and later they were released under house surveillance (to howls of public protest), for none of which did Diana ever give Winston any credit.31
Since most people, like Colville, who worked for Churchill during the war years remained devoted to him, it would seem that Clementine’s letter of gentle reprimand forced Winston to reexamine his behaviour. He was often overbearing, he did not bear fools gladly, and he overworked his staff as he overworked himself. But he was essentially a kind man. His impatience with others reflected his acute anxiety as the country faced the Luftwaffe, then the Battle of Britain, followed by blitzing raids on London and other major cities. From 7 September 1940 onwards London was bombed for fifty-seven consecutive nights. Randolph’s wife Pamela, then heavily pregnant, had been staying at 10 Downing Street to be near a maternity unit, but that month she was sent away from the bombing to await her confinement at Chequers.
There, at the Prime Minister’s official country residence, the Churchills spent most weekends – not relaxing, but at least Winston could work in a calmer environment. During September Randolph was invited to stand, unopposed, as MP for Preston. After having unsuccessfully fought three parliamentary contests, he found himself elected without difficulty. Winston (in tears), Clementine and Pam proudly watched him take his seat in the Chamber that his father and grandfather had dominated successively for seven decades. Two days later Randolph and Pamela’s son, ‘little Winston’, was born. That weekend Pansy Digby stayed at Chequers to be with Pam, and Randolph and the Churchills had their first sight of the new baby. It was a joyous family occasion on which Winston and a still-dubious Clementine may have felt for the first time that things might at last come right for their difficult son. Randolph was married, had a pretty and charming wife and a healthy son, and he was a Member of Parliament as well as a serving officer. Pamela had always said that all he needed was to be ‘given a chance’.
Cecil Beaton was asked to photograph the new infant and there was a huge public demand to see pictures of Churchill’s namesake, who seemed to embody the country’s hopes for the future. Churchill looked down at his new grandson and – always sentimental at such family moments – said with tears in his eyes: ‘What sort of world are you being born into?’32
When Beaton took the proofs round to Clementine for approval before they were sent out to the press, he was taken aback to find her quite overwrought. She was disinclined to allow the photographs to be published, she told him, because in a recent article about her, in which his photographs of her had been used, it was implied that her marriage to Winston had been arranged by Lady Randolph. Without warning she suddenly attacked Beaton, blurting out that he must have known about this. To his astonishment, she was working herself into an almost hysterical state. ‘Her face flushed, her eyes poured with tears,’ he wrote. ‘“Really it’s too damnable,”’ Clementine had wept, sobbing to him that her life hadn’t been an easy one. ‘“It hasn’t, but when I married Winston he loved me”…I held her hand and comforted her,’ Beaton wrote in his diary. ‘But he still does…We all know that.’ At this Clementine became even more upset, weeping uncontrollably and eventually confiding: ‘I don’t know why it is…I suppose my friends are not exactly jealous but they think that other people could do the job better and that I shouldn’t have been married to Winston. After all he is one of the most important people in the world. In fact he and Hitler and President Roosevelt are the most important people in the world today.’33 It was all too much for Beaton. He manfully brought the conversation around to the baby and, having received permission to publish the photographs, rushed off to a florist and purchased a huge bouquet to be sent to Clementine.
This was virtually the only public display of Clementine’s insecurity and sense of inadequacy. But it was a constant thread running through her life. There are many hints of sympathy in Winston’s letters to her. He loved her deeply and devotedly throughout his life (as she did him), but, as noted earlier, he had recognised in the early years of their marriage that Clementine found it hard to cope with the energy fields he created around himself. The sense of inadequacy that she suffered from was patently a delusion. One has only to consider her war work, the entertaining she did, and the style in which she met all the challenges that came her way to see that there could not have been a better wife for him. This outburst may have been cathartic for her, for there is no hint of anything similar in contemporary letters or diary entries of those in Churchill’s entourage. And there is little doubt that Clementine was always the force behind Winston that made him the success he was; she was never afraid to tell him an unwelcome truth, she was somehow a link between him and ordinary people; and he knew that whatever else might happen, Clementine’s love for him was steadfast.
Winston was now totally immersed in the battle not merely to survive the war but to win it, and one of his most important tasks was to motivate, to convince people that victory could be achieved. During the Blitz he sometimes went for walks around London, with his detective trailing him. He was given to visiting Regent’s Park Zoo from time to time to see a lion called Rota,* which had been a gift to him from a visiting African dignitary as a symbol of Winston’s attitude to life. On one of these occasions he walked out of Regent’s Park and up Primrose Hill to look out over London. No observation was ever wasted. It was at this point that the phrase ‘London can take it’ was born; in the next speech he delivered to MPs, despondent about the bombing, he advised: ‘Take a walk up Primrose Hill, and look over London.’ A pause, a confident grin as he looked at them over the top of his spectacles: ‘It’s still there.’34 One evening he went to inspect an underground shelter at Down Street near Piccadilly. It was an unused Underground station and was thought to be a safe place for the Prime Minister during air raids. He drove to it through a bombardment, and when he arrived was bemused to find it crowded with well dressed people drinking champagne and oblivious to the raid. His official biographer recorded how he marvelled at the relentless spirit of the British; he was later advised that he had walked in on the wedding reception for the daughter of the chairman of the London Underground service.
In December all the family gathered at Chequers for the second Christmas of the war: Pam and baby Winston, Diana and Duncan and their children, Sarah and Mary. On Christmas Eve Randolph and Vic arrived. The usual close friends, Cousin Moppet and Winston’s private detective joined in the celebration, and despite the bombings and the terror of war it was the happiest Christmas Mary could remember. She wrote in her diary: ‘I’ve never seen the family look so happy – so united.’35
It would be many years before they would all be together again.
22
1941–4
The Long Slog
After the birth of baby Winston, it was agreed that Randolph and Pam must find a house. Their first year of marriage had been turbulent, for which Pam blamed the fact that they had no home of their own and that whenever they were together they were not alone. Randolph’s regular drinking, gambling and rowing were a constant worry to her but she made excuses for him, not knowing about his womanising at that point. When Randolph ran up bills and didn’t bother to pay them she took them along to Winston, who stumped up, but she hated this trait of Randolph’s. Her sympathy was with Clementine when Randolph was ordered from Chequers after a stormy scene between the two men had upset both women.
Pam still believed at this point that she could recreate the ambience of life at Minterne in her own house, and that given a happy home life Randolph might change and become a more normal husband. When Brendan Bracken (Minister of Information from July 1941) found them a pretty rectory t
o lease at £1 a week at Ickleford, near Hitchin in Hertfordshire within easy reach of London, she wrote hopefully to her husband: ‘Papa [Churchill] came and saw Winston this afternoon & was very sweet with him…Oh Randy, everything would be so nice if only you were with us all the time…soon, so soon now, I shall be settled in a home of my own, our home – yours & mine & baby Winston’s. – Oh my darling, isn’t it rather thrilling – our own family life – no more living in other people’s houses?’1
Randolph was stagnating in a life that consisted either of hanging around at camp or engaged in whatever devilment he could come up with during bachelor sprees in town. He desperately wanted to prove himself in battle but suspected (as did everyone else) that the reason his unit was not ordered into battle was that his father was protecting him. This is probably true; Churchill had told Army chiefs that if Randolph was killed he would not be able to go on. So when Randolph heard of a unit being formed to train for special operations, No. 8 Commando, under David Stirling who would later become the founder of the SAS, he did not hesitate and got himself transferred. Soon after he left it, his old regiment was posted overseas.
It was February 1941 before No. 8 Commando got away from England. The unit was famously top-heavy in its ratio of officers to men – the lower deck was adorned with the slogan: ‘Never before in the history of human endeavour have so few been buggered about by so many.’2 One of his brother officers was Evelyn Waugh, who kept a diary of the voyage and wrote about the high-stakes gambling and carousing that went on in the mess when they were not training. They had been posted to Egypt where they were to do battle with the German–Italian enemy, but because of the danger of U-boats and the Luftwaffe cover of the Mediterranean it was not possible to sail there by a direct route. So they were sent the long way, around the Cape of Good Hope and up the East African coast through the Indian Ocean to the Suez Canal, a journey of nearly six weeks during which Waugh recorded: ‘We did very little except PT and one or two written exercises…There was very high gambling, poker, roulette, chemin-de-fer, every night.’3 To his wife Waugh added: ‘At the last settling day for gambling, Randolph was £800 down [in two evenings]. Poor Pamela will have to go out to work.’4
The Churchills Page 48