The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  Throughout the war Sarah and Vic were seen together on her leaves, and she always made a point of going to his shows whenever she was in London; but at the end of the war there was a quiet, amicable divorce. Once at a dinner party attended by Vic, Churchill was asked to name someone he particularly admired. To everyone’s surprise he answered, ‘Mussolini.’ When asked why, he twinkled across the table at Vic, ‘Because he had the good sense to shoot his son-in-law.’* This little incident illustrates Churchill’s affection for Vic.

  When Mary announced her engagement to someone of whom she did not approve, somewhat surprisingly, in view of the fact that she disliked him so much, Clementine went to consult Max Beaverbrook rather than bother Winston about it. Acting on his advice, she insisted on Mary waiting a year before announcing her engagement. Within months Mary realised she had made a mistake. Soon after her father’s return from the USA she and her second cousin, Judy Montagu, joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In the meantime Clementine’s letters to Mary provide the details of her increasingly busy life as she went about London, always wearing her trademark headgear, a headscarf tied as a smart turban: ‘Yesterday I went to my Maternity Hospital & tried to buy a house for a Convalescent Home for the Mothers. But it was too expensive, so I am scratching my head and wondering what to do next…Today for 3 hours I have been trudging round the Borough of St Pancras looking at A.R.P. Canteens & decontamination centres till I thought I should drop…the King and Queen lunched alone with Papa & me last Tuesday…Papa tried to interfere with the Menu but I was firm & had it my own way and luckily it was good…The King did not say much – He looked rather thin, & rather tired…’19

  It was now almost Christmas – the third Christmas of the war – and although there had been a number of minor victories for the Allies the tide was not yet turning in Britain’s favour; nor was there any end to the fighting in sight. On Sunday 7 December Winston was dining alone at Chequers with the American Ambassador John (‘Gil’) Winant and Averell Harriman. Clementine, worried about Nellie, had retired early, leaving the men to eat alone. As in every house in Britain, the wireless was switched on for the 9 p.m. news bulletin, and this was how the three men heard the momentous news that the Japanese had attacked American ships in Hawaii. Churchill recounted that he immediately put a call through to the White House:

  In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. ‘Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?’ ‘It’s quite true,’ he replied. ‘They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.’ I put Winant on the line and some interchanges took place, the Ambassador at first saying, ‘Good. Good’ and then, apparently graver, ‘Ah!’ I got on again and said, ‘This certainly simplifies things. God be with you,’ or words to that effect…. My two American friends took the shock with admirable fortitude…They did not wail or lament that their country was at war. They wasted no words in reproach or sorrow.20

  One morning soon after Dunkirk, when there had seemed no possibility of defeating the Nazis, Churchill had been in his bathroom shaving and chatting with Randolph. ‘I think I see the way we can win,’ he had said. Randolph, incredulous, asked how. ‘We must bring the Americans in,’ Winston had told him. Now the strategy looked as if it might be accomplished. ‘I thought of a remark,’ Churchill wrote in his memoirs of the war years, ‘which Edward Grey* had made to me more than thirty years before – that the United States is like “a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.”’ In December 1941 he rejoiced:

  So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the air and the Navy we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war…after seventeen months of lonely fighting…we had won the war. England would live; Britain would live…How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care…We should not be wiped out…Hitler’s fate was sealed…I went to bed, and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.21

  His euphoria was short-lived. Three days later the First Sea Lord telephoned to advise him that the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, which had been sent to Singapore as a deterrent against Japanese aggression, had been attacked and sunk. ‘I was thankful to be alone,’ Churchill wrote. ‘In all the war I never received a more direct shock…How many efforts, hopes, and plans foundered with these two ships. As I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me. There were no British or American capital ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific, except the American survivors of Pearl Harbor who were hastening back to California. Over this vast expanse of water Japan was supreme and we were weak and naked.’22

  On 12 December Winston left London for Washington with a delegation of eighty people. He need not have hurried: HMS Duke of York took ten days over the voyage because of relentless storms, and instead of steaming proudly up the Potomac as he intended, by the time they reached the American coast Winston was so impatient to see President Roosevelt that he jumped ship at Chesapeake with his doctor, valet and Max Beaverbrook, and flew to Washington DC, ordering his entourage to follow him by whatever means they could. As the small team flew into the capital that evening, the city looked like an illuminated fairyland to the English visitors used to a total blackout at home.

  A few days before the news of Pearl Harbor, the family had received its own bad news. It was the reason Clementine had been too upset about her sister to dine with the American visitors and had gone to bed early on the night of 7 December. Five days earlier, Nellie’s son Esmond had been posted officially missing over the North Sea while part of a nine-plane flight on an RAF bombing raid of Hamburg. Her other son Giles, who had been captured in the opening weeks of the war, was still a prisoner in Colditz. Widowed in the previous year, she was desperate with grief and worry, and Clementine suffered deeply with her.

  Winston arrived in Washington on 23 December 1941 and he spent two full days in talks with the President discussing the progress of the lend-lease programme, and how Allied cooperation in North Africa now might turn the course of the war in Europe. On Christmas Eve he made a public appearance with the President, and some thirty thousand people gathered to see them light the White House Christmas tree, followed by carols. Knowing what Winston hoped to achieve on that mission, Clementine wrote that she was constantly thinking of him. With their children all in the armed forces – even Mary could not get leave – she planned to spend Christmas alone with Cousin Moppet at the Downing Street annexe. She was too unhappy to celebrate.

  It was Christmas Day before Winston had any free time, and as soon as he could he dispatched a message to Esmond’s wife Decca, who was living with friends at Seminary Hill just outside Washington. He asked her to come and see him at the White House and, assuming that he could give her some news of Esmond, Decca duly arrived bringing their ten-month-old daughter.

  She found him in bed surrounded by papers and books, with a secretary tapping briskly at a typewriter in an adjoining room – absorbed in his normal routine, in other words. He was working on the speech he was to deliver to Congress that afternoon, which included his famous sally: ‘I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.’ ‘He looked marvellous,’ Decca recalled, ‘like some extravagant peacock in his bright silk dressing gown.’23 All she knew for certain, through cables from the RAF, was that Esmond was missing. Now Winston told her that on Nellie’s behalf he had had the most thorough inquiries made about Esmond’s disappearance, and there was no longer any doubt that he was dead. He saw that this ‘lovely young woman’, sitting with her pretty baby in a white woollen suit, was crushed by what he had told her, and in an attempt to mask the emotion of the moment and to help her, he began awkwardly to talk about her family.

  Decca was so
stunned with the news that she could hardly take in what Winston was saying – until he mentioned Diana Mosley and explained that he had tried to help make Diana’s life in prison a little more comfortable. Decca, herself a committed Communist by now (more so than Esmond had ever been), felt an uncontrollable anger sweep over her at the thought that while Esmond had been killed fighting Fascism her ‘ghastly Fascist sister’ was safe and being well looked after. Diana should be put up against a wall and shot, she exclaimed furiously. Churchill, realising it was time to be quiet, let her rage on, the tears spilling down her face. When she grew silent he told her he was full of admiration for Esmond and that he had died a hero’s death. He advised her to remain in the USA for the remainder of the war, but that if she wished to return home to her family she was to let him know and he would facilitate it. As she rose to leave he handed her an envelope with her name written on it. Later she found it contained $500. As Decca wrote, ‘It was a lot of money then.’ Back in the UK a rumour went around the family that she had thrown the money in Winston’s face, but this was not so. She took it and later, regarding it as ‘blood money’, she bought a pony for a friend’s daughter and gave the rest to the Communist Party.

  It had been a particularly difficult interview for Churchill, who was always emotional about any matter concerning his family, but he realised he could do nothing more to help Decca. Just as the Fascist sister Diana blamed him for her imprisonment and for parting her from her baby son, the Communist Decca would always regard him as personally responsible for Esmond’s death. Back at home Winston would sigh as he reported the interview to Decca’s brother Tom Mitford, reflecting, ‘Decca is as fanatical a Communist as ever.’24

  Churchill was engaged at this time in trying to merge the efforts of the British and American forces in North Africa against the German Army there. A few days later he left Washington accompanied by his doctor Sir Charles Wilson,* his Private Secretary John Martin and his private detective to spend five days resting in the Florida sunshine. He was in need of some rest, and having been loaned an isolated cottage at Pompano near Miami by one of the President’s administrators he could relax in the warmth of the Gulf Stream. ‘Oranges and pineapples grow here,’ Wilson noted in his diary. ‘And the blue ocean is so warm that Winston basks half-submerged in the water like a hippopotamus in a swamp.’25 So isolated was it that he was able to bathe naked (disregarding reports of a fifteen-foot shark in the area).26

  While in Florida he visited Consuelo and Jacques at their Palm Beach home. Having made their way from France and Spain to Lisbon, the Balsans had been able to fly on a Transatlantic Clipper to New York, with seats arranged for them by Consuelo’s brothers. After their arrival the Balsans bought houses on Long Island and Palm Beach and commuted between the two, living the life of rich Americans though always longing for their former life in France. Balsan was now seventy-four, but as a former national hero he was deeply uneasy at not being involved in the fight to save his country. He remained in the USA for Consuelo’s sake, always hoping (until the Vichy government capitulated to the Germans) that Marshal Pétain would somehow save France. He tried unsuccessfully to persuade President Roosevelt to allow him to set up a sort of Foreign Legion of French exiles who would join in the fight. As he left the Balsans’ house, after basking in peacetime luxury in the company of guests specially selected by Consuelo for his entertainment, Winston, who had observed Jacques’s frustration, remarked under his breath to Wilson: ‘Wealth, taste and leisure can do these things, but they do not bring happiness.’27

  By the following year Jacques felt no longer able to remain on the sidelines. He got himself to London to join the Free French, but he was to face further aggravation when, ostensibly because of his well known love of children, the Free French deputed him to return to the USA to raise funds for the relief of poor French children. What he did not know was that Consuelo, afraid that Jacques would develop pneumonia during the harsh English winter, had initiated and financed this plan to return him to the USA, even involving Winston in the scheme.28

  In mid-January 1942 after his short vacation in Florida, Winston flew home in a Boeing flying boat, having been away for five weeks, still unaware of the outcome of his talks with Roosevelt concerning US cooperation with the Allies in North Africa. The next weeks were probably the hardest of the war for him, with bad news piling in daily from Europe, North Africa, and now from the Far East as well.

  At the end of February Mary wrote in her diary: ‘Papa is at a very low ebb. He is not too well physically – and he is worn down by the continuous crushing pressure of events.’29 Clementine took the brunt of this stress, trying to protect Winston where she could, and when in April she heard that Randolph had volunteered for an SAS mission, all her irritation for her difficult son overcame her and she began to despise him for the damage he was causing the family. In one of her letters to Winston:

  My darling, please don’t think I am indifferent because I was silent when you told me of Randolph’s cable to Pamela saying that he was joining a parachute unit…but I grieve that he has done this because I know it will cause you harrowing anxiety, indeed, even agony of mind. I feel this impulse of Randolph’s is sincere but sensational. Surely there is a half-way house between being a Staff-Officer and a Parachute Jumper. He could have quietly & sensibly rejoined his Regiment & considering he has a very young wife with a baby to say nothing of a Father who is bearing not only the burden of his own country but for the moment [that] of an unprepared America.30

  She wanted to cable Randolph and ask him to give up the scheme, but decided not to. She probably knew that Winston, who had seen Randolph during a brief visit to Cairo a few weeks earlier, would not have allowed it, anyway. But despite his anxiety for his son he would have fully understood Randolph’s desire to see action, just as he had understood Jacques Balsan’s frustration.

  What Winston did not know was that, far from considering his young wife and baby, Randolph was behaving like an unattached bachelor. He was still in love with Laura Charteris, and his occasional brief letters and cables to Pam contrasted with the twenty or more love letters he wrote to Laura during 1942–3. ‘Don’t expect to hear from me for some time,’ he wrote to Laura in one early letter, as he waited for the news that he was off to the Middle East. ‘As I told you the other night it pains me deeply that I should not be in a position to say to you the things I would like to say.’ A few days later he was writing while at sea, telling her he was on an exciting venture ‘of which you will soon be reading more in the papers’. When he learned from Virginia Cowles that Laura had obtained a divorce from her first husband Lord Long and planned to marry the much older Earl of Dudley, Randolph persuaded Virginia to put his case to Laura. ‘Randolph is here,’ she wrote, ‘and you are very much on his mind. He talks of nothing else. He is looking very thin and handsome and wishes you to think seriously before taking the plunge with the Earl! Life with Randolph I am sure would be far more glamorous and exciting…Why not really consider Randolph?’31 Later Randolph would write again: ‘You know what decision I pray that you will reach, although I think it would be wrong of me to press you to it. We could be divinely happy together.’32* Clearly, Pam was not even a consideration in his plans.

  Randolph’s SAS mission – a sabotage raid on a German supply depot at Benghazi in Libya – was a success, but during his return journey there was a road accident in which he dislocated his back, and he was shipped home to London to recover. Evelyn Waugh reported on a visit by Lord Digby who travelled to London to attempt to reconcile what Pam had told her father were ‘differences’ between her and Randolph. Pam and her father disappeared for a long time into the bedroom of Pam’s flat to confer. ‘Randolph was exuberant & vociferous. Panto [Pam] hates him so much,’ Waugh reported, ‘that she can’t sit in a room with him but paced up & down the minute hall outside the door after her father had gone.’ When at last Waugh persuaded her to come back into the room, ‘she could not look at him & simply said over h
er shoulder in acid tones, “Ought you not to be resting?” whenever he became particularly jolly. She was looking very pretty & full of mischief,’ he wrote.33

  On 23 October 1942, the 8th Army under the command of Lieutenant General Montgomery attacked at El Alamein, delivering the heaviest artillery barrage of the war. After twelve days of heavy fighting they had taken thirty thousand prisoners and trounced the crack German and Italian desert troops of Field Marshal Rommel. Churchill always liked to say that it was the turning point of the war: ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.’ He wanted the church bells rung in celebration, but Clementine was worried it might lead to undue optimism. However, two weeks later when the victorious British captured Tobruk from the Vichy French, Churchill did not hesitate to order the bells rung as a sign that progress was being made after the long struggle.

  Winston’s sixty-eighth birthday on 30 November was a family occasion, and all those who could get to the Downing Street annexe, which was suitably decorated with masses of flowers, celebrated with him and Clementine: Diana, Sarah, Mary and Pam, brother Jack, Venetia Montagu and Brendan Bracken (Minister of Information since July 1941) gathered to toast Winston, who was dressed as usual in one of his signature one-piece ‘siren-suits’* which Clementine had made up for him. For off-duty wear, some were made of velvet and other softer materials.