After his talks in Washington, Churchill went on to Jamaica to join Clementine and Sarah, Mary and Christopher, for a vacation. While there, he worked at correcting volume six, the final part of The Second World War. Beaverbrook was on the island too, and the break recharged Churchill. He would need that renewed energy. As well as a double workload caused by the absence of Eden who was seriously ill, by the time Winston returned to London the country was gearing itself up for the coronation. For a short time, and mainly for a privileged few, the glittering and glamorous life that had vanished with the declaration of war in 1939 briefly resurfaced. But even for the masses of less privileged citizens the coronation offered a glorious moment of respite in a very bleak period. Winston and Clementine were in demand at numerous coronation balls and dinners, and they held a party at No. 10, Winston wearing the Garter star that had belonged to Lord Castlereagh in the time of Winston’s great-grandfather. Then, dressed in his uniform as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports,* he stood in for Anthony Eden and threw the Foreign Secretary’s banquet for 150 people at Lancaster House, which had been restored to its former glory, after bomb damage, at huge public cost.
On 2 June, the day of the coronation, Winston,† dressed in his full Garter robes, acknowledged the cheering crowds with his famous victory sign from a carriage that was part of the official procession. Next to the royal family he was probably the most popular person in this historic pageant; and the fact that he had begun his public life in the service of this young sovereign’s great-great-grandmother was not lost on him or TV commentators. His son and grandson were also involved in the ceremony. Young Winston acted as page to Lord Portal, who had been Chief of Air Staff from 1940–6. Randolph was a Gold Staff Officer.* Members of the Marlborough family also took part. The Duke and Duchess – Bert and Mary – were seated among the peers, but their daughter Lady Rosemary Spencer Churchill, granddaughter of Consuelo, had postponed her wedding to act as one of the six maids-of-honour who bore the Queen’s train. When the televising of the ceremony was first proposed Winston, backed by the Cabinet and the Archbishop of Canterbury, formally advised the Queen to make things easier for herself and avoid the heat of the lights and the intrusion of the television cameras. But the Queen, advised by Prince Philip, wisely overrode this advice in order that all her subjects would be able, for the first time ever, to feel as though they were somehow participating in the historic event.
The work and the entertaining took an inevitable toll on Winston, who ate many sumptuous dinners and took little exercise. On 23 June, three weeks after the coronation, he and Clementine held a dinner at No. 10 for the Italian Prime Minister. Winston made a brilliant short speech about the Roman conquest, and the diners had just moved to the drawing room when he was taken ill. He was helped to a chair by Christopher Soames, but when it became clear that he was unable to move from it, the guests were told that their host was very tired and they all departed earlier than planned. After a while Winston was able to get to his bedroom, leaning heavily on Jock Colville’s arm. The following morning he insisted on being taken downstairs to the Cabinet Room, where he was seated before anyone else arrived. He then presided over a Cabinet meeting during which, to Colville’s surprise, no one noticed anything wrong with the PM – except for Rab Butler,* who noted that Winston was ‘more silent than usual’.17 That evening his speech became slurred and he lost the use of his left leg and arm. It was evident that he had suffered a stroke. The next day he was driven down to Chartwell, to be treated in private. He had been due to leave for Bermuda for a meeting with President Eisenhower at the end of June; this was cancelled, and it was announced that the Prime Minister had been overworking and had been advised to take a complete rest.
Sarah was summoned from New York. She was warned at the airport by Mary that their father was in a bad way. Even so, she was shocked at his appearance – it was, she wrote, like seeing ‘a great oak felled…My father was in a chair. I went over to him quickly and kissed him on the brow, then said, “Darling, Wow!” [a childhood nickname for their father]…his eyes flashed brilliantly, but of course he could not answer and his face was [un]naturally distorted on the left.’18
At first, Winston was so ill that Lord Moran warned Clementine and Colville that he might not survive the weekend. He had suffered what Moran termed ‘a slow leak’, which could gradually get worse, and this accounted for the fact that he was able to carry on for the first twenty-four hours rather than being brought down in one blow. Because of this diagnosis Colville secretly discussed the matter with Party leaders Lord Salisbury and Rab Butler, and Sir Alan Lascelles† on behalf of the Palace. They proposed a caretaker government under Salisbury for six months, during which time they could decide whether Eden (who had undergone major gall-bladder surgery on the very day of Winston’s stroke and was expected to have to convalesce for six months) or Butler should lead the government.
But Churchill was far from finished. After a week of total rest he began to make an astonishing recovery, although there were periods of depression and tetchiness and he tired very easily. As usual, it was the devoted Clementine who pulled him through, but even Winston wondered if he could continue as Prime Minister. The decision to confine news of his illness, and allow him to remain in office if he felt able to do so, was coloured by Eden’s ill-health. Winston instructed Colville to ensure that no hint of what he called his own ‘temporary incapacity’ was leaked, and that the administration should continue as though he were in full control. Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken and Lord Camrose between them somehow prevented the press from even hinting at the nature of the Prime Minister’s condition. The Queen knew, of course: she expressed a wish to visit Winston at Chartwell, but Clementine decided that a royal visit would lead people to assume Winston was dying, so this was postponed. He still had the use of his right hand and was able to scrawl messages to Clementine – he wrote that she must tell the Queen that he would see her at the St Leger in September. And he did. Luck played a part, too: the media were kept fully occupied for a month when the story of the relationship between Princess Margaret and Captain Peter Townsend broke (after she had been seen to casually brush a piece of cotton off his jacket lapel.)
Four weeks after suffering the stroke, Winston was well enough to travel to Chequers, where he began to take up some light work. The few in the know were amazed at his resilience, especially when on 18 August he presided over a Cabinet meeting. Slowly, steadily, he took up his workload and was seen in public at the races, despite Clementine’s misgivings. During this time he was greatly helped by Christopher Soames who, Colville noted – not for the first time – ‘now held the place in Churchill’s heart so long reserved for Randolph who had been incapable of filling it’.19 As Parliamentary Private Secretary, Christopher did not have security clearance to read Cabinet papers or secret documents, but Colville bent the rules. It was an emergency, and he later concluded: ‘In the event the shrewdness of his comments, combined with his ability to differentiate between what mattered and what did not, was of invaluable help in difficult days.’20
Jock Colville gives Brendan Bracken – who was distraught at the thought that Winston might die – much credit for his remarkable recovery. Bracken’s ‘confident predictions were so convincing that he restored Winston’s spirits and helped to raise him from what his doctor feared was a deathbed,’ Colville recalled. ‘He galvanised [Winston’s] will and convinced him that as the world did not have the slightest inkling of the seriousness of his illness he had plenty of time to recuperate.’21
Before the end of July Winston was ‘sufficiently restored to take an intelligent interest in affairs of state’, Colville wrote. ‘Christopher and I then returned to the fringes of power, having for a time been drawn perilously close to the centre.’22 In September Mary and Christopher accompanied Winston to Beaverbrook’s Riviera villa, where he was able to rest and eventually take up his painting. On 21 September 1953, three months after the stroke, he wrote a long handwritten letter to
Clementine, which reveals that at this stage he had still not decided whether or not he would resign:
My darling one…I do not think I have made much progress tho’ as usual I eat, drink & sleep well. I think a great deal about you & feel how much I love you. The kittens [Mary and Christopher] are vy kind to me, but evidently they do not think much of my prospects…I still ponder on the future and don’t want to decide unless I am convinced…Please continue to love me or I shall be vy unhappy…Ever your loving & as yet unconquered, W.23
The same week, while speaking at a Foyle’s literary luncheon on the subject of ‘the standards of Fleet Street’, Randolph had hit the headlines by attacking the newspaper magnate Lord Rothermere (a friend of his parents as well as his own erstwhile employer). He had had a few drinks before he spoke, got carried away, and accused the Daily Mail of gaining sales by vicarious methods such as the use of sexy pictures and headlines. ‘I have known Lord Rothermere all my life, but I confess myself baffled that so rich and cultivated a man should hire people to prostitute a newspaper in this way – it must be a case of pornography for pornography’s sake.’ He got enough publicity from this outburst to encourage him to develop the theme, and used it on another public occasion, this time accusing Rothermere of ‘power without responsibility; the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’. His parents were embarrassed, but a few days later Rothermere called on Winston, who reported: ‘Esmond [Rothermere] came to luncheon yesterday and was very friendly & not a bit vexed about poor Randolph’s performance.’24 Clementine followed up: ‘Randolph lunched here & is with me now. I don’t think he has any idea of what we all think of his ill-natured blunder – He is such good company when in a good mood, & we have played highly competitive croquet…which we both enjoyed.’25
One of his friends elaborated on this characteristic of Randolph’s to his cousin Anita, explaining that what others would call ‘rage’ Randolph regarded as ‘warming to the subject…By normal standards he would appear to be in the throes of a blood row [sic], but if you came in during one of these performances to say lunch was ready, he would turn it off like a tap, and by the time we got to the dining room he would be talking about something else.’26 It seems his love of controversy, of shocking people, and his desire to take centre stage in any arena overrode any common sense or regard for others. And yet many of his friends, such as Diana Cooper, were devoted to him and wrote of his ‘warmth’. The plain fact was that the Randolph one could like for himself was a different man from the Randolph who had taken a few drinks.
There was evidently a leak while Winston was in the South of France, for newspapers began printing articles about ‘the Prime Minister’s health’, querying whether he would be fit to resume work on his return from holiday and whether he might be considering retirement. Perhaps this was the spur Winston needed: in early October he addressed the Conservative Party Conference at Margate, delivering a long address that was incisive and amusing, betraying no hint of infirmity. A few days later while Clementine was in Paris he dined with Pam for the first time in years. ‘How agreeable she is!’ he wrote.27 He had always enjoyed Pam’s company and henceforward she became a regular visitor whenever she was in England. Indeed, she would be the last visitor he would have to lunch, on his final day at No. 10.
By December when he flew to Bermuda to attend the conference cancelled earlier in the year, Winston was back to dealing with his normal workload. The matter of his stroke came to light only in the summer of 1954 when he referred to it casually during a speech in Parliament. Meanwhile, Christopher accompanied him to Bermuda, and the support and confidentiality provided by this favourite son-in-law gave Churchill a tremendous sense of security.
When the family had gathered at Chartwell at Christmas 1953 it was not Winston who was below par, but other members of the family. Diana was very low-spirited (and would go on to suffer a nervous breakdown), Clarissa was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer, and Clementine was to suffer agonising pain from an attack of neuritis, not helped by the exceptionally cold winter. She spent the spring months of 1954 at a spa in Aix-les-Bains (which has specialised since the time of the Romans in the treatment of rheumatic complaints). As usual during any time that the Churchills were apart, tender letters flew between them.
Diana had always felt cut out of her parents’ affection by Sarah, whose constant ill health following glandular fever as a child had made her particularly needy of parental time. Moreover, Winston had clearly favoured Sarah, the more outgoing and daring of his daughters. When she grew up tall and slender it was easy to make her look presentable as a debutante. Diana had never been able to forget Clementine’s wounding comment: ‘Sarah is so easy to dress.’ Diana’s marriage, although outwardly happy, was not an easy one. Duncan was immersed in his successful career and he was also serially unfaithful to her.
Diana’s nervous breakdown at the end of 1953 was the result of her anxiety about her marriage. At one point Randolph was called to deal with her because she had run amok with a carving knife and was hiding near her house in some bushes. He told Laura afterwards that it was ‘like disarming a butterfly’.28 In the Fifties there were no effective drug treatments for depression and other psychiatric disorders; clinical observation in a hospital was available if you had the means, and therapy of the pull-yourself-together school. Beyond that there was only the horror of electric shock treatment (electrotherapy). Diana had suffered bouts of depression all that year. Churchill, who understood the condition, had tried to help her early on, but at that point he had become occupied with the coronation preparations, then was himself ill. Naturally, all Clementine’s energies (and she too had been unwell) were concentrated on Winston. As usual Diana’s problems took a back seat. Eventually she snapped.
The person who could best have helped Diana was Sarah, to whom she was always very close. But Sarah was living in the USA, and her infrequent visits to Chartwell were always stiff and awkward on account of Winston’s antipathy towards Antony. The Beauchamp marriage was, in fact, over in all but name, but Sarah had not yet told her parents; she had intended to, when her father’s stroke intervened.
Randolph had achieved one of his ambitions by 1954. He had known for some time that he needed to leave London and get away from clubs such as White’s, where he could never stop himself running up huge gambling debts. For a while in 1953 he and June had lived in Oving House near Aylesbury courtesy of the Churchill Trust. There he worked on the authorised biography of Lord Derby,* who had died in February 1948. Randolph imaginatively called him ‘the King of Lancashire’. He was lucky enough to get a good research assistant and aide in Alan Brien (later the celebrated journalist) to do all the necessary paperwork with which Randolph could not have coped, but the writing was Randolph’s and the result was a very readable and critically acclaimed book. Evelyn Waugh wrote to the recently widowed Diana Cooper – Duff Cooper had died in January 1954 – that Randolph had been ‘tremendously patronising since a lunatic gave him £3000 to write the life of the late Lord Derby. “You must study the market, Evelyn”,’ Randolph told him grandly. ‘“It is no good writing to please yourself.”’29
Randolph hoped that the trustees of the Churchill Literary Trust would note this literary success and approve him to write his father’s biography, but he could never quite bring himself to ask directly – especially when the trustees made it clear that after he had completed the Lord Derby project he must move from Oving House, as it was too costly for them to pay for him to remain there. Finally, after years of searching, he and June found the sort of country property of which he had dreamed; and to his relief, the trustees agreed to purchase it for him. It was Stour House in the village of East Bergholt, Suffolk. Not far from Colchester, East Bergholt lies in the shade-dappled, gently rolling countryside of the beautiful Stour valley. It was the birthplace and sometime home of that most English of painters, John Constable.* Stour House is a short stroll from Flatford Mill and Willy Lott’s cottage (which appears in The Hay Wain
), and across the river is Dedham church, another of Constable’s subjects. There was much to do in the lovely Georgian house and garden, which had fallen into neglect during the war years, but Randolph left the running of the house to June; a room on the top floor overlooking Dedham church was allocated as a nursery for their small daughter Arabella.
Randolph envisaged restoring the seven-acre garden but it is clear at first, at least, he had no idea of how to set about it. He had seen his father ‘pottering’ at Chartwell, where things seemed to get done, but he did not recognise that Winston had a feel for nature and was happy to labour alongside the men he employed. Still, Randolph loved Stour. This, he decided, was what he had always lacked in his life: a home of his own. If enthusiasm alone could have achieved what he wished to achieve, it would have gone smoothly. At Stour, Randolph felt, he could write in peace, with none of the temptations of London. But not much really changed: the terrible domestic rows continued as before, and Evelyn Waugh continued to note from time to time that Randolph had blacked June’s eye or that she had gone to stay with friends.
There are snippets in diaries and letters detailing, for instance, the time June flung her clothes out of a window, screaming that she was leaving him. There was a huge falling-out at Chartwell on one occasion after Randolph, drunk, had upset everyone at dinner by his familiar extreme rudeness. He called Christopher Soames ‘a shit’ and Eden ‘a jerk’. Winston was so ‘shaken with fury’ that Clementine and June feared he would suffer a seizure – according to June, it was a ‘gruesome’ scene. Later Randolph stormed up to his bedroom, vowing that he was leaving and would never see his father again. He forced June to start packing, setting off another noisy row between the two of them. Eventually, at 1 a.m., Winston came plodding wearily along the corridor in his pyjamas to tell them: ‘I am going to die soon. I cannot go to bed without composing a quarrel and kissing [you] both.’30 Then there were the wild scenes at London parties where physical injury sometimes resulted. Once, in a restaurant, a drunken Randolph had silenced the other diners by yelling at June a string of abuse amongst which he called her ‘a paltry little middle-class bitch always anxious to please and failing owing to her dismal manners’.31 By the summer of 1954 June was unable to take any more. She took Arabella and left Randolph for good.
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