First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  Clementine was merciless in her criticism of Chamberlain’s complacency. Shored up by a large Conservative majority in the Commons, it recalled to her the lassitude of the Asquith administration during the first years of the previous war. Winston, by contrast, was magnanimous; now he had agreed to serve in Chamberlain’s government he would brook no disparagement of his ‘chief’. In this ability to leave rancour in the past he was remarkable; later in his life he would claim that the secret of his longevity was ‘carrying no hatreds’.19 In October 1939 he even invited Chamberlain and his ‘utterly vague’20 wife Anne to an intimate dinner for four in the Admiralty House flat. Clementine’s reaction is not recorded, but it is unlikely she responded well to the Prime Minister’s habit of remarking on the weather in order to avoid discussion of the situation in Europe.

  The so-called ‘phoney war’ was overall, however, a misnomer. The Navy had already been heavily engaged; huge losses of merchant shipping had occurred; several Army divisions had been sent to France and the Royal Air Force was conducting reconnaissance flights over enemy territory. Moreover, this ‘phoney’ phase came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1940, when the Germans invaded Norway, who appealed to Britain for help. The ensuing naval and military expedition was, however, badly bungled. Yet Winston seemed bizarrely willing to shoulder more than his fair share of the blame on behalf of a leader who had for years tried to write him off as mad. At the time, Clementine worried that the Norwegian fiasco would bring Winston down in the same fashion as had the Dardanelles. He himself considered his escape from censure a ‘marvel’, later attributing his good fortune to the fact he had been proved right about so much else.21

  On 7 May 1940, attention once again turned to the Commons, and a dramatic debate on whether, in the aftermath of its failure in Norway, the government was still fit to conduct the war. This time it was Anne Chamberlain who sat in the gallery. Dressed in a funereal black coat and hat, with a nosegay of violets, she looked ‘infinitely sad’ as her husband was interrupted, ridiculed and bitterly criticised from all sides of the House. Perhaps she expected to witness Winston mount a coup there and then. But it was Leo Amery, a Conservative backbencher, who stood up and, echoing the words of Oliver Cromwell to the Long Parliament, roared at Chamberlain: ‘You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, GO!’

  Although the government won the subsequent vote, it was clear from the thunderous cheers that greeted Amery’s speech that Chamberlain’s Tory administration was fatally damaged. An emergency cross-party coalition would have to replace it, but the Labour leadership refused to serve under Chamberlain. He would indeed have to go – providing Winston with his chance at last. The Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax appeared, however, to be the leading contender, and was the favourite of the King. So Winston played a waiting game and continued with what he called his ‘heavy business’ at the Admiralty.

  At this critical time Clementine received news that Nellie was in desperate need of her at her home in Herefordshire. Nellie’s husband, Bertram, had died on 6 May and her son, Giles, a Daily Express reporter, had been captured in Norway and taken prisoner by the Germans. Clementine felt desperately torn. It is all too clear that she would have preferred to stay in the thick of things with Winston and some historians have been critical of her for going to Nellie’s aid. But she also felt she had a duty to comfort her younger sister, and Winston himself was understanding. On 8 May, she decided she must go.

  Two days later the German army launched a brilliant and ‘lightning-fast’ offensive through Western Europe towards the Channel, invading Holland, Belgium and then France. Invasion of Britain by what Winston called an ‘avalanche of steel and fire’ could now be only a matter of weeks or even days away. Beaverbrook, once one of the staunchest appeasers, acknowledged many years later that ‘our peril’ at this point was ‘beyond comprehension’. Such was the febrile atmosphere in Downing Street that to this day there is some dispute as to the exact sequence of events within Britain’s seat of power. By Winston’s own account, at least, as late as ten on the momentous morning of the 10th, Chamberlain was still determined to cling to office. Within the hour, however, even this most stubborn of men had finally conceded that he could not command the support necessary in such a crisis for him to carry on as head of a National Government. At eleven, Winston later recalled that Chamberlain, still looking ‘cool and unruffled’, summoned him and Halifax in to Downing Street to announce his reluctant decision finally to stand down.

  It was now a question of whom Chamberlain should advise the King to appoint as his rightful successor. A long, tense silence ensued, with Winston remaining uncharacteristically tight-lipped. At last, Halifax spoke only to rule himself out of the running, conceding that a war leader needed to be a member of the Commons. As Winston later wrote, it was now clear that the ‘duty’ of saving his country had ‘fallen’ on him.

  Immediately afterwards, he hurried to phone Clementine to tell her the news and she boarded the first train back to London. After a frantic afternoon dispatching battleships to positions off the Dutch coast from where they could open fire on the German invaders, Winston duly received his summons to attend the King at the Palace. At the same time he heard that Clementine was ‘safely home’, and he insisted on first dashing back to their quarters in the adjoining Admiralty House before making his way up the Mall. There, she was waiting excitedly for him in the drawing room, still wearing her hat. Her prediction had finally come true: at the age of sixty-five, Winston had been called on to serve the nation as its leader. Their true life’s work together could now begin – and she would barely leave his side again until it was done.

  In Washington, President Roosevelt told his Cabinet that he ‘supposed Churchill was the best man England had, even if he was drunk half the time’. For his part, Winston soon made clear to the British people, to Germany, and to the US that appeasement was over. Britain was going to fight. ‘You ask what is our aim?’ he declared to the Commons on 13 May as German forces plunged deeper into France. ‘I can answer in one word – victory. Victory at all costs.’

  This bulldog oratory was, of course, to become his greatest weapon. Even when he was still at the Admiralty, secretaries had bustled down the corridors, ferrying drafts of his speeches to Clementine – who would duly make suggestions, remedy omissions and point out political necessities. Significantly, together they agreed that, in order to rally people’s spirits most effectively, he should stick to simple vocabulary. Now more than ever, the power of his speeches would be weakened if most listeners needed dictionaries to understand them.22 Ordinary words – beaches, streets, finest hours, beginnings and ends – were to work extraordinary magic on Britain’s morale during those early months. Later on, he made similar broadcasts to occupied Europe in French. Many of those who listened were inspired by these stirring messages from the free world, but few knew that Clementine coached Winston before he spoke. After he had delivered a speech, he would often turn to her and ask ‘Was that all right?’

  From day one Winston knew that American support was critical if Britain were to survive. A week after his father became Prime Minister, Randolph burst into his bathroom one morning, while Winston was shaving, just in time to hear him say, ‘I think I see my way through.’ Astonished at this display of optimism, Randolph asked him whether he thought that Britain really had a chance. ‘Of course we can beat them,’ Winston replied as he threw his Valet razor into the basin and swung round to emphasise his point. ‘I will drag America in.’23 But US public opinion remained largely isolationist – considering yet another European conflict across thousands of miles of ocean to be someone else’s problem. Why should Americans spill their own blood to save a decadent Britain interested only in maintaining its empire? America’s ambassador in London until October 1940, the pro-appeasement Joseph Kennedy, whipped up further anti-British sentiment by declaring to an audience in Boston that ‘this is not o
ur fight’ and that in any case Britain was finished as a democracy.

  Clementine was worried that Winston remained surrounded by defeatists and appeasers at home as well, men who had done so much to belittle him in the past. Although he had immediately invited key Labour figures to join his government – including the leader Clement Attlee who later became his Deputy Prime Minister – his first ministerial line-up retained virtually every ‘guilty man’, including Chamberlain himself. Churchill even kept the Tories’ chief whip, David Margesson, who had earlier led a campaign to spy on him and other rebels with the aim of breaking them politically and emotionally. Once again Clementine struggled to comprehend her husband’s gift for clemency – or perhaps she underestimated the precariousness of his position in those early days of his premiership. Her blood up, she targeted Margesson for one of her notorious dressings-down, and when Winston invited him for lunch, she pointedly refused to attend and went out for a walk instead.24

  Soon, though, there was little doubt as to who was now in charge. Never before or since has a prime minister accrued such wide powers or exerted similar control over the operation of a conflict. Winston was not only the King’s First Minister, but Minister of Defence as well. ‘Thus . . . he became virtually a dictator,’ as one close observer put it.25And, like all dictators, Winston invoked fear. He terrified ministers, military commanders and officials by his sheer force of will; even by his family’s account, his leadership style was ‘tyrannical’. The same qualities of single-mindedness that made him the right man to take on Hitler were in danger of working against him; the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King noted with alarm that ‘he cowed his colleagues . . . He had a way of stifling discussion when it was critical.’26

  Having observed Winston’s mistakes during the Great War, Clementine understood the hazards of his tendency to browbeat opposition. She had warned him since before the Dardanelles disaster that a culture of passive acquiescence was potentially dangerous, and now she took it on herself to act as a corrective. One by one key staff were invited to take tea with her, alone – first at the Admiralty flat, where they continued to live for a month, and later in the White Drawing Room at Downing Street (which she made her private retreat). Here she made them feel appreciated; giving them her undivided attention, but all the while sounding them out for signs of trouble. She ‘wanted honour and glory for Winston . . . and she was always, always fending off things that might be difficult for [him]’, explained Pamela, who was now observing events from close quarters.27

  One private session with a member of his ‘entourage’ in mid-June 1940 took place against the backdrop of a critical moment of the war. France, Britain’s only major ally, was on the point of capitulation, and German troops were already marching down the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The outnumbered British Expeditionary Force had retreated to Dunkirk, from where some 338,000 troops had been evacuated by the British and French navies between 27 May and 4 June. Despite the miraculous rescue of many men against the odds, Army commanders had been forced to leave behind, according to Winston’s own figures, 7000 tons of ammunition, 90,000 rifles and 120,000 vehicles. The huge loss of materiel would take up to nine months to replace. Meanwhile, Germany was massing up to 2500 bombers and fighters a few miles away across the Channel; all that the RAF could muster were a comparatively meagre 650 Spitfires and Hurricanes. Day after day the weather was glorious, but many were to look back on the days before the Battle of Britain as the most anxious period of the entire war. Nerves were so frayed, according to Mary, that it was difficult even to ‘breathe’. Winston warned on 18 June that ‘the whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us’. Yet while he unified his country by painting an all too terrifying picture of the imminent perils of a Nazi invasion, he seemed oblivious to the dangers closer to home.

  Clementine learned from the unnamed ‘devoted friend’ she met in her Drawing Room that Winston risked, if not outright ‘rebellion’ from his staff, then a dangerous and hostile ‘slave mentality’. She tore up her first attempt at confronting him – his family knew better than not to ‘tidy one’s mind’ before addressing Winston on something serious – but on 27 June, after a few days of further reflection, she took to paper again. ‘I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know,’ she began. There was a ‘danger’ of him being ‘disliked’ because of his increasingly ‘rough, sarcastic and overbearing manner’, which was so unpleasant that his private secretaries had taken to behaving like ‘schoolboys’ enduring a teacher’s beating before escaping as soon as they could ‘from his presence’. Senior colleagues complained that Winston was so ‘contemptuous’ of their ideas that few now dared to venture any, good or bad. ‘It is for you to give the orders and if they are bungled – except for the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Speaker you can sack anyone and everyone,’ Clementine advised. ‘Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm. Besides you won’t get the best results by irascibility and rudeness. They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality (Rebellion in War time being out of the question!) . . . your loving, devoted and watchful Clemmie.’28

  No answer to her letter exists, but Winston did change. While his staff continued to find him on occasion impossible, his ‘ill-tempered phase’, recalled his private secretary Jock Colville, was a ‘passing one’.29 He quickly learned the conciliatory power of small gestures, once laying his hand on the shoulder of another private secretary after a fraught few hours and saying ‘I may seem very fierce, but I am fierce only with one man – Hitler.’30 Living above the shop in Downing Street, Clementine thereafter closely monitored his behaviour. As Pamela observed, her intervention demonstrated to others ‘that she was an enormously important component in the whole thing . . . and a very important balance for him’. She was ‘rightly’ convinced that ‘if anything happened to her, Winston might run amok’.31

  Colville, who had already worked for Chamberlain, was just twenty-five when he became Winston’s private secretary. He had dreaded serving under his new boss, with his reputation for boastfulness, recklessness, even instability. The arrival of his ‘myrmidons’ – notably Bracken and the Prof – was equally feared. Yet over time Downing Street became an unusually cohesive if frenzied place to work where Clementine and Winston went to great lengths to treat Colville and others as if members of the family. Most of his staff became very fond of them both.

  It was not that Winston became any less demanding. He summoned people from their baths with trivial questions; kept them so long they missed all hope of dinner; and despite religiously observing his own mid-afternoon nap, so that he could keep working until two or three in the morning, expected his staff to stay on call even though they had worked right through. Colville, moreover, found that of anyone he had ever known, Winston ‘was the least liable to be swayed by the views of even his most intimate counsellors’.32 The difference was that Winston now strove to make life entertaining and colourful when he could, and even remembered to show gratitude from time to time. His principal private secretary Eric Seal noted how he had ‘sobered down, become less violent, less wild, less impetuous’.33 Colville eventually decided that Winston was ‘lovable’ – it was a remarkable turnaround.

  It was also clear that there was an alternative authority to appeal to if difficult decisions needed to be made. In June 1940 Winston resolved to fly to France through rough weather to try to convince its leaders to continue fighting. Having exhausted other avenues in their effort to persuade him it was too risky, the Air Staff petitioned Clementine. She listened and then asked: ‘Are the Air Force flying today?’ They answered: ‘Yes, of course – on operations.’ She replied, ‘Well, isn’t Winston going on an operation?’ Her decision was final.34

  She had, of course, always greatly feared Winston taking off in dangerous conditions – and he himself was no longer a fearless flyer, but had become strangely nervous in the air, disliking going th
rough clouds in case ‘they contain mountains’.35 But whereas she had once tried to dissuade him, now she hid her terrors and focused on ensuring everything ran smoothly in his absence. Clementine chose her moments to intervene carefully. During intense discussions with military chiefs, for instance, Winston would sometimes become ‘difficult’ and start stomping round the room, at which point Clementine might say: ‘Now, Winston, that’s all right, the subject can be let rest for the moment. We are going to have luncheon.’ General Sir Frederick Pile, chief of Anti-Aircraft Command, witnessed her mediation skills on many such an occasion and recalled that ‘she bossed him – but in the most delightful way – with great affection and with the deepest understanding of his nature. I was always amazed that this great man could be led along like a sheep by her whenever she thought it necessary.’ General Pile attributed this quiescence to Winston’s admiration of her many qualities, including her judgment and loyalty. ‘She [had] a first-class brain [and] everything she did was, above all, for his good.’36

  Despite these evident skills, it took Clementine longer than Winston to gain acceptance, let alone affection, in government circles. In 1940, Downing Street – like the rest of Whitehall – was run almost entirely by public-school-educated men with a certain narrow worldview. Few took kindly to the fact that Clementine was no ordinary, biddable political wife, but a force in her own right; she was certainly nothing like the quietly domestic Mrs Chamberlain. Despite lacking the mandate of the ballot box, Clementine saw it as her duty to help Winston win the war in any way she could, and was often both opinionated and forceful as a result. After discussing ‘a good deal of politics’ with her, the traditionally minded Colville dismissed Clementine’s admittedly quite radical views with the assessment that they were as ‘ill-judged’ as they were ‘decisive’.37 He thought it inappropriate for her to be, as he put it, ‘outspoken’, and considered her – not wholly without cause – to be excessively partisan about Winston. In those days he was not unusual in regarding it ‘a waste of time and exasperating to talk to most women on serious subjects. Sex, the Arts and the Abstract seem to me the only topics to discuss’ with them.38