First Lady
Page 13
He nevertheless pleaded: ‘I have no-one but you to act for me,’ and Clementine continued to do her best to charm the men of influence. But she discovered, as an outsider, that ‘everyone “in office” seems to be unbelievably smug – Were we like that when we were in power?’ Reporting back in detail on 29 January on her supper with Winston’s friend F.E. Smith, now Attorney General, she attributed his apparently slavish (and unhelpful) support of the government to the ‘sedative effect’ of a ‘dignified position’ and ‘heaps of money’. She was equally waspish about putting on ‘3 layers of armour’ for lunch with Reginald McKenna, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who turned out to be a ‘noxious creature’ of ‘tepid counter-jumping calculation’.36 Winston’s successor at the Admiralty, A.J. Balfour, meanwhile, resembled under her close examination, a ‘shabby maiden aunt’s tabby cat’ and was, in common with all the others, ‘smug, purblind, indifferent, ignorant, casual’. With such uninspiring, complacent leadership, she feared that the war would ‘go on forever’.37
She also, understandably, wanted recognition for her efforts and was not afraid to seek it. ‘Now don’t scold your Kat too much for being a hermit. Here in two days I have hobnobbed with [Edwin] Montagu, [Augustine] Birrell [a Cabinet minister], Lloyd George & a South African potentate! Tomorrow night I am dining with [Sir Ernest] Cassel. Please send me home the Distinguished Conduct Medal at once & much praise.’38 Suitably impressed, Winston replied: ‘You have indeed been active . . . Persevere, the D.C.M. is yours.’39
For the first time, Clementine’s own work also won public acknowledgment. At Ponders End on 4 February 1916, Lloyd George (then Munitions Minister) came to open her biggest canteen yet – and Violet and Jennie turned out to watch. Alas, the workers had taken exception to some of Lloyd George’s more draconian labour policies, and had threatened a walk-out during his visit. But when the manager informed them that they would upset Clementine if they did so, they immediately desisted – a courtesy that made her feel ‘very superior’. To express their gratitude, the workers presented her with a bouquet of flowers and a shell-shaped brooch enclosed in a gold box studded with turquoises, pearls and even diamonds. ‘I nearly fainted with emotion,’ she wrote to Winston. ‘Don’t tell anyone about this as it sounds vain, but I want you to know about my small success. I really have worked hard but now I shall have to redouble my efforts to deserve all this. I feel I must give the men fat chickens every day to eat!’40
Winston’s not uncommon but undoubtedly selfish attitude to women working outside the home extended beyond Clementine. Back in October 1914, he had rebuked Violet Asquith on her plans to train as a nurse, instructing her that ‘the duties of women’ specifically included tending men ‘at the “apex” of responsibility’. ‘No, my dear,’ he had written to her sternly, ‘you must remain at your father’s side and mine . . . We who are directing these immense and complicated operations . . . need every comfort, care and cosseting . . . We are your duty. This is your war-station. I command you to remain here.’41
In the event, Violet did not go into nursing but, finally conceding defeat with Winston, decided at the age of twenty-eight to marry someone else. Maurice Bonham Carter, her father’s principal private secretary, had pursued her for years and eventually won her by promising to guarantee her freedom in marriage. Unfortunately for him, she took him literally; for years she was to conduct an affair with prominent economist Oswald Toynbee Falk, a close friend of John Maynard Keynes. In so doing, she proved just what an unsuitable match she would have made for Winston, who of course demanded undiluted attention.
Violet’s wedding, on 30 November 1915 (Winston’s forty-first birthday), had been a lavish occasion. Clementine told Winston that Asquith had looked ‘happy, sleek & complacent’, although the photographs carried by the newspapers captured a decidedly unsmiling bride. The event had briefly turned London ‘topsy-turvy in excitement’ and even Clementine had not been entirely impervious to all the pomp, bursting with pride at Randolph’s triumph as a page. ‘He looked quite beautiful in a little Russian velvet suit with fur . . . & at Downing Street afterwards he was surrounded & kissed & admired by dozens of lovely women.’42 Nevertheless, she was unable to resist a little jibe at Violet, noting that she and Maurice had looked ‘dreary & blue-stockingy’43 on their return from their honeymoon.
The wedding had been set against the backdrop of the apocalyptic stalemate on the Western Front, which was to see the loss by the end of 1915 of 285,000 British lives to no obvious strategic advantage. In December, the evacuation of the Dardanelles began, countless more lives having been wasted. The disastrous failures of these two campaigns had prompted a massive fall in public support for the way in which the war was being conducted. Fewer were now prepared to volunteer for service and yet the need for men was greater than ever, leading to the introduction of conscription as a last resort in January 1916.
Clementine had felt Winston’s absence deeply at Violet’s wedding, but she was also fortified by her pride that, in such grisly circumstances, her husband was away serving at the Front by his own volition. ‘Since you have re-become a soldier I look upon civilians of high or low degree with pity & indulgence,’ she had written defiantly. ‘The wives of men over military age may be lucky but I am sorry for them being married to feeble & incompetent old men.’44 But she had also warned Winston against deliberately ‘over-exposing’ himself to danger as ‘the world might think that you had sought death out of grief for your share in the Dardanelles. It is your duty to the country to try to live.’
In December, Winston had toured different sectors of the Front, talking to friends and commanding officers, and had returned even more desperate at the thousands of lives being squandered through ineptitude and complacency at both the military and the political level. He poured out his frustration to Clementine in a series of letters, but she advised him to ‘try not to brood too much . . . If you are not killed, as sure as day follows night you will come into your own again.’ She recognised that his premature return from the war would harm his political prospects, perhaps fatally. When the war ended, they would be proud that he had spent much of it as a fighting soldier rather than a desk-bound politician, she told him presciently in January 1916. Soldiers and their wives were now, in her view, the only ‘real people’.
Clementine feared Winston’s rash streak. For her part, she was intent on showing a ‘detached & smiling face to the world’ – as she wrote pointedly – sharing her troubles only with the trustworthy Goonie, whom she described as her ‘safety-valve’. And she urged him to follow suit; to confide in Archibald Sinclair – ‘a safe & loyal’ friend – but no one else. She warned him specifically not to share his views on the ‘PM’s character or policy’ with ‘curious acquaintances’.
Winston replied that her letter had been ‘splendid’, but his restlessness soon overrode its counsel. After only two months at war he had already taken the decision to come back. On 16 January 1916 he instructed her to start spreading the word among his closest political associates. As if he had learned nothing, he asked Clementine to contact ‘the Fiend himself’ – their pet name for Lord Fisher – to discuss his return. She refused to do so but was, in truth, torn. Advising him to stay in the trenches would improve his chances of making a future political comeback; biding his time on the Front would show selfless courage and would win praise and respect – but he also might be killed.
The strain of so many responsibilities had begun to tell on her. Beneath the outer appearance of cheerful calm, privately she was struggling. This was one of the few times she mentioned religion in her letters, telling Winston that she could ‘see only miles & miles of uphill road’ and asking whether his men had faith. ‘Tell me if being near danger makes you think of Christ. Being unhappy brings Him to my thoughts but only, I fear, becos’ I want to be comforted not becos’ I want Him for Himself.’45 She started to talk of Winston coming back ‘D.V.’, standing for deo volente or ‘God willing’. It appears she had
begun to doubt that he definitely would. The crushing sadness of early 1916 was captured by Winston’s friend, the artist John Lavery, in a portrait of Clementine with her daughter Sarah, which still hangs in the study at Chartwell.
Clementine’s charm offensive with the Asquiths was going well, however, and in mid-February she was invited to spend a ‘useful’ weekend with them at their country residence, The Wharf. Those childhood games in Seaford now stood her in good stead, as she gave Asquith an enjoyably challenging game of golf – although, perhaps fortuitously, the Prime Minister narrowly won. Clementine had astutely surmised that a little well-planned sport would not only serve to entertain and relax the Prime Minister but would also provide uninterrupted time alone with him to press Winston’s case. Despite her tactful enquiries, Asquith resolutely refused to discuss the war, even as they heard the boom of shellfire from across the Channel. She gauged from their conversations, however, that he was still fond of Winston and would actually like him back in the government – ‘if it could be done without a row’. So she suggested Winston write friendly private letters to him, as with Asquith ‘it is so much out of sight out of mind’. She strongly advised against ‘letting him see that you consider he has behaved badly: he only waddles off as quickly as possible & avoids you in future’.46
On 25 February, she raised the stakes by issuing a reciprocal invitation to dinner at her house. She knew success depended on securing eight acceptable, amusing bridge players for the Prime Minister’s ‘comfort & happiness’. After working ‘like a beaver’ on this and every other aspect of the evening, she was able to proclaim the event a triumph. The ‘old sybarite thoroughly enjoyed himself’ and the Churchill family ‘presented a solid & prosperous appearance’. She made sure to sit next to Asquith himself and he duly went home some time later in ‘high good humour’.47
As Clementine continued to battle for her husband night and day, she ventured to ask for just a little family life in return. For once, she mentioned what ‘sweet companions’ the children had become and talked about looking ‘forward with longing to the time when you come back to me’ and how they would once again have a ‘country basket’ (their name for a rural retreat). ‘Only you must not become too famous or you won’t have time for these pastoral joys!’ She asked him to promise that in future he would keep an hour of every day, a day of every week, and six weeks in every year for the ‘small things of Life . . . and Leisure with a big L’.
When Winston was granted leave in early March he suggested she meet him at the Lord Warden Hotel in Dover. He would have just ten days back in England, and he gave her precise instructions on how to arrange them for him – expecting her to arrange one dinner at his mother’s, at least three at home, two plays alone with her and one ‘man’s dinner out somewhere’. She was also expected to ‘work in all my friends’ at lunches, arrange a day’s painting and find a servant to look after him. ‘I put it all in your hands my dearest soul.’ His orders were carried out to the letter, of course, and when he arrived at Dover on a destroyer there she was, waiting patiently for him as commanded.
Despite Clementine’s efforts, the leave did not go as planned. The diary was changed or abandoned as Winston was swept up by events in the Commons and decided to take part in a major debate. He was now being urged by several associates – most of whom she thought ‘wrong-headed’ – to give up soldiering and return to politics forthwith. They included F.E. Smith, the editor of the Observer J.L. Garvin, and a newer confidant, the newspaper tycoon Sir Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook). Incredibly, and to Clementine’s great dismay, Winston also made time, on more than one occasion, to see the ‘malevolent’ Lord Fisher. Although he had in effect caused Winston’s ejection from the Admiralty, Fisher was now forcefully urging him to come back and lead an attack on the government over its patent mismanagement of the war.
His advice – and that of Winston’s other counsellors – could not have been more opposed to Clementine’s, or to the step-by-step rehabilitation campaign she had waged so tirelessly over the preceding months. When Winston invited Fisher to lunch at Cromwell Road, Clementine rounded on the old rogue with: ‘Keep your hands off my husband. You have all but ruined him once. Leave him alone now!’48
It was to no avail. The suggestion that he alone could take the government to task appealed to Winston’s vanity and his sense of frustration. He decided to make a dramatic intervention in a Commons debate on naval spending – a move that jeopardised all Clementine’s painstaking work to ease his eventual return. She had managed to arrange another supper with the Asquiths on 6 March – by coincidence, the evening before the debate – but now the reunion was to be a far more combative affair. There was unseasonably heavy snow, and Clementine made sure the fires were banked up regardless of the expense. She went to great trouble over the food and, as it was the lustful Asquith, her own appearance. Conversation over dinner was tense, however, and took a sharp turn for the worse when Clementine and Margot left the men to their brandy and cigars. Winston informed Asquith that the next day he intended to denounce his successor at the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, as inept. Knocking back another large drink, Asquith expressed his strong disapproval, thinking such a theatrical move premature and unwise. Winston ignored him, too.
The following afternoon, Winston spoke in the Commons at some length. At first, it went quite well, as he made a powerful and valid case against the Navy’s inactivity. But then, to Clementine’s despair, Winston committed one of his intermittent acts of folly. Disregarding all her counsel and apparently any sense of reason, he called for Fisher, the chief architect of his downfall, to be returned to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord. To this day, it remains unclear how Fisher exercised such fatal power over Winston. The result of this unfathomable move was the loss of any residual parliamentary support and despondency among his small circle of friends; Eddie Marsh sat watching Winston from the Strangers’ Gallery in tears.
There was now a suspicion that the horror of the trenches was beginning to affect the balance of his mind. Even Violet asked herself if Winston was ‘deranged’. Indeed, many thought his career had been destroyed – like his father’s – by some strain of insanity. What is stranger still – given all Clementine’s warnings about the consequences of such a move – is that he appeared astonished at the hostility of the reaction. It was as if Winston had not listened to a word she had said. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Hedworth Meux, also an MP, summed up the feelings of many on the floor of the House when he roared: ‘We all wish him a great deal of success in France, and we hope that he will stay there!’49
In the ensuing furore, Clementine had hardly any time alone with Winston and, perhaps ashamed at having ignored her advice, he chose this moment deliberately to avoid her and seek comfort instead from Violet. He specifically asked for a meeting away from home to ask whether Violet was ‘against’ him ‘like the rest of them’. She replied she could ‘never’ be against him, but neither could she support Fisher’s return. What was also beyond her was to urge him to go back to the Front. Only Clementine possessed the steel for that.
On his departure a week later from the pier in Dover, Winston nevertheless handed her a letter for Asquith requesting to be released from his military duties so that he might return to politics full time. Clementine stayed at the Lord Warden Hotel again that night, writing a covering note for the Prime Minister and pondering her next move. Exhausted after days of what she described as an ‘inferno’, she finally crept into bed and ‘prayed for happier days & calmer waters’. She considered Winston’s letter extremely ill-advised, and felt that a delayed return from France was more essential than ever if he was to repair his freshly damaged reputation. Her spirits did not improve when her car broke down several times in the pouring rain on the way back to London. Perhaps the sea air drove some sense into Winston, however, for he telegraphed Asquith to ignore the letter Clementine was to send him. This came as a relief, although she feared that when once more alone in France he would
again weaken.
She longed for him to come back, she wrote to him on 13 March when he returned to the Front, but only when he would be ‘welcomed & acclaimed by all, as you ought to be and as I know you will be very soon’. She closed with the very Clementine touch: ‘Whatever you finally decide I loyally agree to.’50 ‘You have seen me vy weak & foolish & mentally infirm this week,’ he confessed in a letter written at the same time in France. Although his words bore traces of resentment, even self-pity, he acknowledged ‘how sweet & steadfast’ Clementine had been ‘through all my hesitation & perplexity’.51 Suffering from bronchitis, she now became more blunt than usual. She told him that his speech on Fisher had done him ‘harm’ and that without it the demand for his return would perhaps have ‘come sooner’, before finally reassuring him: ‘But come it will – It must.’
Clementine knew what she was advocating – that he should stay at war – could well end badly, with ‘a wicked bullet’ finding him. She felt ‘lacerated’ by his dilemma and dreaded one day returning home from ‘canteening’ to a telegram with ‘terrible news’. But she also knew that without a political career he could never be happy. It was therefore in his interest to come home by way of others’ demands rather than his own sense of impatience. She cited in support a conversation with the former Attorney General Sir Edward Carson, who had echoed her views about the folly of a precipitate return. The words ‘come back’ must be spoken by others, she said, and if he returned merely to criticise the government his own star would suffer all the more. ‘The Government may not wage war very vigorously,’ she observed, ‘but when on the defensive they are very strong.’52