*A notorious gunfight in January 1911 between the police and a politically motivated gang of criminals under a leader known as ‘Peter the Painter’. The gang had been tracked to their HQ at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney; they were known to have stocks of weapons and ammunition with which to fight off any attempt to arrest them. The gun battle began at dawn and lasted six hours, watched by Churchill. A heavy artillery gun had just been placed in position, on his orders, when the house caught fire. Suspecting a ruse, Churchill refused to allow the fire brigade to enter the building but the men made no attempt to escape. The remains of only two bodies were later recovered. Peter the Painter seemed to have somehow escaped. Churchill’s action sparked a major political row.
*Founded 18 May 1911. The original membership was 12 Liberals, 12 Conservatives and 12 non-political ‘distinguished outsiders’. Churchill is believed to have contributed rule 12: ‘Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics.’ Virtually every noted twentieth-century politician belonged to the club at one time or another – from Lloyd George to Oswald Mosley. It met fortnightly at the Savoy Hotel when Parliament was in session.
*Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first controlled heavier-than-air human flight on 17 December 1903.
*The 1st Duke, grandfather of the 2nd Duke (1879–1953), had owned the winner of the 1880 Derby, Bend Or, who was thought to have been a ringer. Shelagh Cornwallis-West was the first of the 2nd Duke’s four wives in a life crammed with drama, extravagance and excess. A right-wing Tory, he hoped to bring the Liberal Party into disrepute by ‘outing’ his bisexual brother-in-law (the 6th Earl Beauchamp – a Liberal peer whom Evelyn Waugh characterised as Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited). Homosexuality was illegal then, and the horrified King had exclaimed: ‘I thought men like that shot themselves.’
*Reginald Fellowes (1884–1953), second son of Rosamund Churchill (a sister of Lord Randolph) and her husband William Fellowes, 2nd Baron de Ramsey.
*Naval estimates provide Parliament with full details and costings of new ships that have been either commissioned or accepted into service during the current financial year.
*The dreadnought was a battleship armed with guns all of the same big calibre and noted for its great range and power.
*Puppy kitten and Chumbolly.
* Making Prince Louis First Sea Lord was Churchill’s first appointment at the Admiralty, but in October that year the Prince became the subject of a press hate campaign because of his German background, and was forced by public demand to resign from a post he had filled with great ability.
*That night Churchill dined at the Carlton Hotel in the Haymarket with Lloyd George and a few other members of the Cabinet. A little-known fact of history is that a trainee chef at the hotel at that time was a young man called Ho Chi Minh, who in 1941 became leader of the Viet Minh independence movement which established the Communist government of North Vietnam.
*There were rumours that this all began after the Kaiser’s racing yacht was roundly beaten at Cowes by that of his uncle, King Edward VII.
†A heavy battlecruiser, the Goeben was among the fastest and most powerful warships of its day. Manned by over a thousand crewmen, she was armed with thirty-four guns of various sizes, the largest of which could accurately target ships up to fifteen miles away.
*Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916; later 1st Earl Kitchener of Khartoum) had in 1892 been appointed Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, then been made a major general in the British Army. It was he who had led the British and Egyptian forces up the Nile to defeat the Sudanese at the Battle of Omdurman, for which he was acclaimed as a national hero.
*Prince Arthur (1850–1942), third son of Queen Victoria. He was appointed Governor General of Canada in 1911 and remained there until 1916.
*The Yeomanry camp, near Didcot.
*In 1914 she married John Fortescue (later Sir John), who was the King’s librarian and archivist at Windsor and later known for his standard history of the British Army. He was twenty-eight years older than Winifred but the marriage was happy. As well as being a noted actress, she went on to become a writer (her bestselling books included Perfume from Provence and Crushed Lilies) and a fashion designer.
*The Dardanelles (formerly called the Hellespont) are a forty-mile-long narrow strait in northwest Turkey connecting the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara. It separates the Gallipoli Peninsula from the mainland of Asia (see map).
*Later Admiral Sir Sackville H. Carden (1857–1930).
*Jack Churchill was mentioned in dispatches and was later awarded the DSO for his part in this action.
†What would have happened if they had been able to force the Straits and reached Constantinople without any land forces in place is another matter. Churchill had mooted this, but then opted for the purely naval operation.
*He is said to have once remarked: ‘Show me a man who never made a mistake and I’ll show you a man who never made anything.’
*Lavery (1856–1941), the Irish portrait painter, once said of Churchill’s artistic ability: ‘Had he chosen painting instead of statesmanship I believe he would have been a great master with the brush.’ He married his second wife Hazel Martyn, a beautiful and spirited Irish American, in 1909, and she was his model in over four hundred paintings. She also posed as the allegorical figure of Ireland, painted by Lavery for the Irish government to appear on Irish banknotes. No mean artist herself, Hazel Lavery is also noted for her many extramarital affairs. When her lover Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary, died, she attempted to throw herself into the grave and thereafter wore ‘widow’s weeds’.
*He spent some months at Ploegsteert in Belgium, two miles north of the French border, where the fighting was very fierce. The soldiers nicknamed it Plug Street. It is now the site of a military cemetery.
*In 2009, over ninety years later, when the Cabinet Papers were available to researchers, an Australian writer on the subject insisted: ‘Churchill was, in fact, the architect, which is why his fall from grace was so marked.’
*Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) was Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909 and 1917 to 1920, and one of the prime movers of the Versailles Treaty.
†She had talked Paris Singer, of Singer sewing-machines, into allowing his palatial home near Paignton to be used as a convalescent home for officers for the duration of the war. It is now open to the public.
*Stella (or Mrs Pat, as she was known) refused to give George a divorce. After her death in April 1940 he married for a third time, but this marriage failed too. Stricken with Parkinson’s disease and alone again, he committed suicide in 1951.
†Owned by the Horner family for many generations. An early member of this family, John Horner, is reputed to have been the ‘little Jack Horner’ of nursery rhyme fame.
*Born Marguerite Decazes de Glücksbierg (1890–1962), she was the daughter of a German Duke and the heiress of the Singer sewing-machine company. Her first marriage in 1910 to Prince de Broglie ended when she discovered her husband in bed with the family chauffeur. Of her Broglie children the notoriously caustic Daisy once said, ‘The eldest is like her father, only more masculine. The second is like me, only without the guts. And the last is by some horrible little man called Lischmann.’
*Millions were not so fortunate. The postwar flu pandemic – Spanish flu, as it was known, although it originated in China – may have claimed as many as 15 million lives worldwide. In Britain the deaths were 250,000, in France 400,000. In the USA some 28 per cent of the population caught the flu, and between 500,000 and 675,000 died. In common with the present-day swine flu, the Spanish flu was of the H1N1 virus strain, and those worst affected were the young and otherwise healthy members of the population.
†Tory politician and editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.
*Lilian Grenfell was the younger of Sunny’s two sisters (the elder was Norah Birt). Lilian had always liked Consuelo and named her own daughte
r after her. Consuelo was the child’s godmother.
*The Radziwills were the richest and most influential family in Poland. Remarkably, newsreel coverage of this wedding can be found on an Internet site, with a skittish Gladys showing off her gown.
†An American interior designer whose clients included royalty and high society. She was married to the diplomat Sir Charles Mendl.
*Known as the Hussein–McMahon letters, the agreement could not be made to stick because the wording of the promise by McMahon was open to interpretation, and Hussein could only speak for the Hashemite tribes, not other Arabs.
*Winston inherited under the will of his great-grandmother, Lady Londonderry, when two heirs with prior claims died childless. The last of these was Lord Herbert Tempest-Vane in a train crash at Abermule in Montgomeryshire, North Wales, on 26 January 1921.
*The details of Porch’s business are sketchy – he termed it ‘investment opportunities’.
*Montague Porch died in November 1964. He never spoke of his marriage to Jennie to anyone, but after his death when the new owners moved into his old house they found his room contained ‘floor to ceiling’ pictures of her. During the Second World War he applied to Winston to keep his Italian manservant out of an internment camp on his own cognisance. Winston complied.
*He and Shelagh (his first wife, the sister of George Cornwallis-West) had divorced in 1919.
*The simple headstone reads: Here lies Marigold dear child of Winston and Clementine Churchill Born Nov 15 1918 Died Aug 23 1921 RIP.
*An early form of battery.
*Volume 1 was published in 1923.
*Winston was amused to discover that the vendor was a contemporary of his at Harrow, with whom he had regularly competed for bottom place in the fourth form.
*Churchill did not always agree with Lloyd George, and there was considerable disharmony between the two men when Churchill attempted to involve Britain in a campaign against the Bolsheviks after the First World War.
*Younger daughter of Mrs Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress.
*The sphinxes can still be seen at Blenheim today.
†Father C. C. Martindale. For an account of the Duke’s conversion, see W. S. Churchill and C. C. Martindale: Charles, IXth Duke of Marlborough: Tributes.
*The author spent her honeymoon there in 1992.
*The book was published by Cassell & Co. in 1932 under the pseudonym Anna Gerstein.
*Physicist (1886–1957), later Lord Cherwell. He advised on scientific matters, especially on nuclear physics.
*Irish-born businessman who became a Conservative politician. On the strength of having spent three years in Australia as a youth, he returned to England claiming to be an Australian orphan related to the headmaster of Winchester College. He seems to have carried this masquerade off and was accepted as a former public schoolboy. It was his ardent anti-Nazi speeches and his frank admiration of Churchill that earned him a place at Chartwell.
†T.[Thomas] E.[Edward] Lawrence used several pseudonyms. As well as T.E. Shaw he used the name John Hume Ross, under which he published an account of life in the Air Force, The Mint.
*The Air Ministry imposed conditions in agreeing to Lawrence’s wish to remain in the Air Force under his assumed name: he was not allowed to fly, and he was not to speak to anyone of national importance (which would have included Churchill, F.E., Sassoon and Lady Astor – many of the people he met at Chartwell).
*Amy’s personal fortune at that time was rumoured to be $1.9 billion.
*Amelia had no experience with multi-engine aircraft. The plane, the Friendship, was to be flown by a pilot and co-pilot, and it was agreed that only if they met with totally calm weather would Amelia be allowed to take the controls. In the event it was a rough passage and Amelia, as she stated frankly, was ‘simply a passenger’ on that 1928 flight. The Friendship landed in Burry Port, South Wales, where it refuelled before flying on to its destination Southampton where there was a seaplane ‘runway’ well marked out on Southampton Water. Four years later she would cross the Atlantic alone, becoming the first woman and only the second person (after Lindbergh) to fly solo across the Atlantic.
* Bernard M. Baruch (1870–1965) was an American financier, statesman and consultant to Presidents Wilson and F.D. Roosevelt on economic matters. He was also a successful racehorse owner and was renowned for his witty remarks.
†Robert Boothby (later Baron Boothby), 1900–86. A former stockbroker, he became a Conservative MP in 1924 and went on to hold a number of senior ministerial offices.
*Daughter of Lady Maude Ogilvy Whyte.
*Esmond Cecil Harmsworth, 2nd Viscount Rothermere (1898–1978), was from 1919 to 1929 Member of Parliament for Thanet. He served as ADC to the PM at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. From 1932 until his death he was manager, president and director of the family-owned Associated Newspapers, which included the Daily Mail.
†Maxine Elliott was a rich American, formerly a classical actress who had made a fortune by taking the advice of her good friend the financier J.P. Morgan. She was about seventy at this time, and was always immensely kind to Churchill. Château de l’Horizon was a luxurious palatial villa on the Riviera. Built by Elliott in the early Thirties, it was close to villas owned by Max Beaverbrook and, later, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
*Overlooking the Mall and St James’s Park. The Marlboroughs lived at No. 7, which retained its original Nash interior.
*Alva died on 26 January at 9 Rue Monsieur, Paris, with Consuelo at her bedside.
*Later Lady Beit, Clementine Mitford was born after her father’s death in action. Had she been a boy the child would have succeeded to the title of Lord Redesdale; as it was, her father’s brother (‘Farve’ in Nancy Mitford’s rollicking novels) was next in line.
*Lord Moyne (Walter E. Guinness, 1880–1944) was the father of Bryan Guinness who married Diana Mitford. A British statesman and businessman (CEO of the Guinness Brewery empire), he was a great friend of the Churchills, who took a number of cruises aboard the Rosaura, a converted 700-ton ferry.
*Sandys: pronounced ‘sands’.
*The Young Ladies were well-educated young women from good backgrounds who were always heavily chaperoned. Whenever they appeared in public they were obliged to wear very smart clothes including hats and gloves. Among the more famous were Anna Neagle, Jessie Matthews and Florence Desmond, whom I interviewed in 1987. She told me that the ‘young ladies’ were highly respected and considered ‘as untouchable as debutantes’.
*In 1932 Churchill acquired a long lease on this two-storey maisonette with four bedrooms. Half a mile from the House of Commons, it overlooks Westminster Cathedral. The family lived there until 1939.
*Née Venetia Stanley (of the Stanleys of Alderney), she was the young woman who had been the love of H.H. Asquith (see Chapter 15) until she married Edwin S. Montagu in 1915 after converting to Judaism. Her marriage to Montagu, who was Secretary of State for India from 1917 to 1922, was not happy, and she had a number of lovers including Beaverbrook. Her daughter Judith, born in 1923 shortly before Montagu’s early death, is generally assumed not to have been Montagu’s child though she bore his name.
†Clementine had been with him early on in the holiday but she returned home while he stayed on with Maxine Elliott at Château de l’Horizon.
*The Spitfire was a spin-off of the Supermarine Seaplane S6B, which won the Schneider Trophy race at Calshot, Hampshire, in 1931, and a few weeks later set the world speed record at 407.5 mph.
*Moyne, a member of the Other Club, was one of Churchill’s greatest supporters in the 1930 s when his warnings about Germany fell on mostly deaf ears. He was rumoured to have refused the offer from Adolf Eichmann, in charge of the Nazi deportation of Jews, to release a million Jews from the concentration camps in return for trucks and money from the Western Allies with the reply, ‘What can I do with a million Jews?’ He was probably not the man who made this remark; however, he was assassinated in November 1944 by a Jewish u
nderground group.
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