The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  Pam had now been living at Grosvenor Square for almost a year (she said she was the only Englishwoman in ‘Eisenhower-platz’) and because of her friendships with top Americans from Eisenhower down – but particularly with Averell Harriman, who made frequent visits to London – she had become very Americanised in her opinions. She and Randolph quarrelled bitterly whenever he came home on leave: over the fact that, in his view, she worked far too much to allow her to see little Winston often enough; about his insistence on living a bachelor life whenever he wished; and not least because he now knew of her affair with Harriman. Sauce for the goose was not sauce for the gander, it seemed, but what most annoyed him was that a man he considered a friend of his had ‘betrayed’ him, as he put it. That he had himself conducted affairs with the wives of friends and brother officers, that he had recently all but proposed marriage to Laura – which could only take place after divorcing Pam – seemed not to occur to him. By the time Pam attended Winston’s birthday party Randolph had formally left her. This was a relief to her, for it meant that she was not blamed for the parting.

  When Pam saw Winston and Clementine to explain what had happened, they sided wholeheartedly with her. Mary believes that although this was mainly because they did not wish to lose touch with little Winston, they also genuinely loved Pam.34 Only a short time earlier Winston had written to Randolph that Pam was ‘a great treasure and a blessing to us all’, and this ‘favouritism’, in Randolph’s eyes, was the cause of much rancour between him and his parents. They invariably argued about it whenever he went to see them, and sometimes he was ordered to leave the house, not only by his mother but by Winston, too.

  Pam’s warmth and natural intelligence were recognised by others as well as by the Churchills. When her boring job at the Ministry of Supply came to an end and she began casting about for something more interesting to do in London, Brendan Bracken supplied the answer. The Churchill Club had been set up as a recreation club and morale-booster for all ranks, where Allied servicemen on leave could find relaxation and company in comfortable surroundings; they could also find books there, attend the odd concert and other cultural events. It was housed very near the Houses of Parliament in Ashburnham House, a fourteenth-century building that formed part of Westminster School – the boys had been evacuated since the outbreak of war. It was sponsored by top writers and politicians, including the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, who would sometimes give talks there. What was lacking was the right person to run it.

  Pam seemed made for the job, and before long she had become one of the reasons why people were drawn to the Churchill Club. She knew how and where to obtain spirits as well as food that was on ration, and it became one of the few places in London to obtain a decent dry Martini. In her mid-twenties, Pam was at the height of her considerable allure. ‘Mummie’ had been quite right: the puppy fat had disappeared. With her fresh colouring, red hair and blue eyes she seemed to glow. Her warm smile and innate kindness, her ability to charm men and make the club feel like a home from home, her knowledge of what top people expected to find in such an organisation, plus the fact that she knew so many celebrities who would come along and do an impromptu show for her, made the club a succès fou. There was no question of rank at the Churchill Club – although it was mainly patronised by officers, all men serving in the armed forces were welcome and everyone was supposed to be treated equally. Pam was as happy to flirt with or sit and listen to a young NCO as a five-star general.

  She moved from the flat in Grosvenor Square that she had shared with Kathy Harriman and into her own at No. 49, again inexpensively sited on the top floor that other people didn’t want. And it enabled her to bring two-year-old Winston and his nanny from Cherkley at last. The dormer windows overlooking Hyde Park provided the child with ‘an almost nightly fireworks display’.35 Little Winston recalled that he rather enjoyed air raids, not least being wrapped up and taken into a shelter at night when things got ‘hot’.

  When Averell was made Ambassador to the Soviet Union in October 1943, he and Pam were parted for several years. Their feelings for each other did not die – rather, they lay dormant. They wrote to each other constantly, and he arranged for regular luxury food parcels to be delivered to her. But she had always known he was a married man and had never expected their relationship to lead to anything permanent. After his departure she dated a number of men friends with whom, according to gossip, she slept with from time to time. In this she was very little different from other young married women of her class living in London during the war, but she had a lot more opportunity; while she was running the Churchill Club she was one of the most sought-after women in London.

  Perhaps her affection for ‘Papa’ Churchill encouraged her at least to try to maintain some discretion. Her supposed lovers during the last two years of the war included, according to her unofficial biographer, the British Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal, Edward R. Murrow, the famous CBS war correspondent, and William Paley, Murrow’s colleague, as well as John (‘Jock’) Whitney, who would be US Ambassador to Britain in the late 1950s. A full listing would take up more space here than is available – but, tellingly, there is no evidence that Winston was ever embarrassed by his daughter-in-law’s behaviour, or at least not in the way he and Clementine were by Randolph’s. Perhaps he understood and looked the other way because he recalled his mother’s numerous liaisons? As one friend put it, ‘[Winston] had not been brought up to be censorious about other people’s sexual extravagances.’36

  The most passionate of these affairs of Pam’s was undoubtedly with radio journalist Ed Murrow. It was an unlikely pairing, for they sprang from very different worlds. He was a self-made man from a poor family on the wrong side of the tracks; almost socialist in his ideology, he deplored the rich young drones of the circles in which Pam had grown up, though he worshipped Churchill. He had worked his way through college, and by sheer effort and ability scrambled to his pole position as the most respected CBS journalist. Like Churchill he had spotted the Nazi threat long before it was widely acknowledged, and his impassioned live coverage of the Anschluss in March 1938 catapulted him to international fame. He was able to persuade leading European personalities to give him interviews, and his reports seriously rivalled the NBC news programmes that had hitherto commanded the largest audiences. He recruited the journalist William Shirer to do a similar job in Europe, and together these two men forged the profile of future radio news broadcasting.

  Ed Murrow had been married to Janet (a journalist who became a friend of Clementine) for almost a decade when he became involved with Pam. By then his vivid reports of London under siege, delivered in his unmistakable slightly gravelly voice, had become a feature of the war on two continents. He always began with his signature opening line: ‘This is London’ – emphasis on ‘This’, followed by a slight pause before ‘is London’. He always ended with his own catch-phrase: ‘Goodnight, and good luck.’ He interspersed his news reports of the Blitz (often recorded during the height of the attacks from the top of a tall building and against a background of sirens, aircraft engines, exploding bombs, breaking glass, burning buildings and the shouts of anxious fire-fighters) with graphic coverage of the raids and of the personal heroism of individual London citizens. He flew on bombing raids over Germany. He punctuated his pieces with homespun philosophy: ‘Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar’, ‘No one can terrorise a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices’, ‘I saw many flags flying from [flag]staffs. No one told these people to put out the flag. They simply feel like flying the Union Jack. [Pause.] No flag up there was white.’ One of the great figures of the Second World War, he played a major part in the victory by involving Americans personally in the fight going on in Europe. President Roosevelt once sent him a cable that read: ‘You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that
the dead were our dead…were mankind’s dead, without rhetoric, without dramatics, without more emotion than needed be. You have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond 3000 miles of water is not really done at all.’*

  In 1944 Pam and Ed Murrow were moving in the same circles – Harriman’s and Churchill’s – and though it was an attraction of opposites it was a passionate relationship for all that. He was twelve years older than her: confident, successful, intelligent, powerful – all the elements that attracted Pam in a man. Money was useful, but it did not spark passion on its own. For the year that they were lovers Pam was as happy as she ever was in her life.

  23

  1943–5

  Weathering the Storm

  From 1943 Churchill’s leadership took a different form. He was no longer the beleaguered ageing warrior leading a nation standing alone against the world. Following the Allied victories in North Africa the tide had turned favourably for Britain, but by then Winston’s problems were changed rather than eased. He had worked relentlessly to bring the United States into the war, and when America – and Russia – joined Britain’s fight, a lesser man than Winston might have lost control of the direction of events. Yet he still conveyed the impression that he was at least the equal of Roosevelt and Stalin, the other leaders of the Grand Alliance that convened in Tehran in November 1943, and even that it was his ‘show’. It helped that he was a Victorian, for during his youth and young adulthood the British Empire was the greatest empire the world had ever known, four times the size of the Roman Empire, covering a quarter of the earth’s surface. To Churchill, Britain was still essentially the mother of a great empire.

  Winston had, though, been feeling the effects of age and stress when on 12 November he set off on this supremely important state mission aboard the battlecruiser HMS Renown. There was an element of royal progress about it: he was surrounded by a court of expert advisers such as the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, the commanders of the three services, backed by ambassadors and leading ministers and politicians. His personal team included his doctor and Private Secretary; and Sarah and Randolph, both in uniform, acted as his ADCs. He was unwell with a heavy cold when he set off, and spent most of the voyage in bed working on his papers, dispatches and speeches; he did not go ashore until they reached Malta five days later. Another big hitter, Harold Macmillan, had joined them at Gibraltar.1 By the time they reached Cairo the rest and the warm air had revived Winston, and the British team joined the American delegation (which included Averell Harriman and US Ambassador Gil Winant) for talks with Chiang Kai-shek, China’s Commander-in-Chief, about the war in the Far East. Then they all flew to Tehran, where Sarah felt that the affair was almost a gathering of old friends, since she had met so many of those present around the dining table at Chartwell.

  When the gathering toasted Winston on his sixty-ninth birthday at the British Residence in Tehran, although he had not yet achieved his ultimate goal – victory over the enemy – he had reached a peak in both his life and his career. At that moment he had delivered all the promise of his star: he knew that, provided he, Roosevelt and Stalin could deal with each other, given time the war was all but won and it was his leadership that had put them in a position to achieve this. In his war memoir he reflected on the significance of his position as he hosted a dinner at the British Legation for the two other leaders:

  This was a memorable moment in my life. On my right sat the President of the United States, on my left the master of Russia. Together we controlled a large preponderance of the naval and three-quarters of all the air forces of the world and could direct armies of nearly twenty millions of men in the most terrible of wars that had yet occurred in human history. I could not help rejoicing at the long way we had come on the road to victory since the summer of 1940.2

  Sarah wrote to Clementine to pass on her father’s apologies for not writing. ‘Papa’s cold is much better and he loves the bright sun. He is working very hard…he really doesn’t stop for one minute.’3

  Despite his elation Winston was still weak. The previous year, a serious chest infection had lowered his spirits and drained him physically. His doctor had told Clementine that during the Washington visit in 1941 he had sustained a mild heart attack, but it was so mild that he had made the decision not to tell his patient. But now, because of the constant stress and the long hours he worked, it was possible that Winston could suffer another heart attack, especially if he undertook any long flights at high altitude. Clementine decided that, since he would not let up anyway, he did not need this extra worry and so should not be told. Apart from confiding in Mary, Clementine nursed this secret throughout the war, constantly anxious because Winston was in the air almost as often as in a car or a train. He always flew when possible, no matter the potential danger from the enemy, such as when he attended a conference in Algiers in May 1943. He had also, with Clementine, made a draining but necessary visit to Canada and the USA that summer, and they were in Washington DC on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary when he told Clementine that he loved her more and more every year.4 Because he refused to spare himself he became as prey to constant bronchial infections, as he was when a small boy.

  Sarah had noted that her father was apprehensive until he reached Tehran, where a good deal of energy and friendly bombast were then required in order to dominate the proceedings; but somehow he found sufficient reserves. ‘I have noted a curiously touching thing about the President when he is with Papa,’ Sarah confided to Clementine. ‘He forgets he cannot walk.* Once after some lunch, Papa sprang up from the table to go and arrange something…and the President very nearly got up too – he leant forward on the arms of his chair, just like a man about to rise quickly. It’s this feeling [of energy] that Papa gives to everyone – this quality which he takes with him everywhere.’5 Any feelings of jubilation over the agreements reached by the three leaders were blunted for Churchill when he learned that Roosevelt and Stalin had met together privately and made deals that did not include any British input.† Sarah saw that her father felt wounded by this because he considered Roosevelt to be a personal friend. It was not just a personal hurt, however: Churchill worried about how these deals might affect Britain. In fact, as history shows, they had far-reaching effects that would dominate European history for almost half a century after 1945.

  Also at Tehran, Sarah had noted a welcome change in Randolph’s demeanour. During dinner ‘a new restraint kept Randolph seated’, she wrote to Clementine. ‘I couldn’t help thinking how a few years ago he would never have been off his feet! He is trying you know – there is a big change in him.’6

  Churchill was a supreme military strategist who never found any glory in war and killing – his raison d’être was to preserve a way of life and a culture that meant everything to him. He wrote about this on a number of occasions, and it was vividly demonstrated at one dinner in Tehran. During the evening the subject was raised of what was to be done with the German military leaders when the war ended. Stalin stated that there were only about fifty thousand German military men and they should all be executed. Churchill was appalled. He retorted: ‘I would rather be shot myself than agree to such a plan.’ When a member of the American delegation appeared to support Stalin’s suggestion Churchill rose and walked out of the room. He was only persuaded to return when he was assured that this was not a serious proposal.*

  After Tehran the delegation flew to Cairo where, in a moving ceremony, Churchill inspected his old regiment, the 4th Hussars. Afterwards, the men were allowed to break ranks and crowd around him, chatting and shaking his hand – just as during the stop-over in Malta on the journey out, he had been mobbed by the Maltese. He also visited the Turkish mission to try to persuade them to end their position of neutrality, and that night as Sarah tucked in his mosquito net, Winston – ‘looking just like a rubicund, naughty baby,’ she wrote – said to her, ‘“The president of the Turks kissed me!”’, and as he fell into a sound, contented sleep, he murmured, ‘“T
he trouble with me is that I’m irresistible.”’7 What Sarah did not relate in her memoirs was that she and Ambassador Gil Winant had fallen in love during that tour. As they were both married they knew it was something that must never come to light; but others in their party knew of it, including Jock Colville, and it is inconceivable that Winston was not informed. The affair was the elephant in the room: no one spoke of this doomed relationship and Sarah knew that it could only continue in secret as yet another wartime romance.

  While Winston was away the contentious Rule 18B was debated in Parliament with a view to amending it. He had been opposed to its introduction at the start of the war, but he had no power at the time to contest it. He loathed the fact that it overruled the right of a citizen not to be imprisoned without a trial, in contravention of the spirit of Magna Carta. He deprecated the fact that Diana and Oswald Mosley had been kept in captivity under this rule during the entire course of the war, with no trial and no opportunity to defend themselves in court. Now he wrote to Clementine that he burned to take part in the debate. ‘If I were at home now I would blow the whole blasted thing out of existence. So long as Morrison* presents the case for exceptional treatment for Mosley naturally he is on difficult ground and people can cry “Favour!” He really would lose very little to sweep the whole thing away.’8

  When he had carried out all his current duties, the willpower upon which Churchill had drawn so heavily seemed to evaporate. He was so exhausted that he collapsed, and his personal physician, Lord Moran (formerly Sir Charles Wilson), announced that his patient had been ‘profligate of his resources’. As he rested, Winston and Randolph quarrelled over Randolph’s failed marriage and who was responsible. Winston still blamed his son – and as always, he found family problems far harder to cope with than complicated world matters.