For all her various contributions to the war effort, Clementine remained rigidly focused on Winston; she was, quite literally, always there for him. His staff kept her informed of when his meetings were likely to finish so that she could return home with military precision shortly beforehand, and she was almost unfailingly present at mealtimes. Often he assumed she had been waiting for him all day. It was not until after the war that he became aware of the full extent of her activity in the time they had spent apart.
Whenever possible, she tried to relieve him of avoidable strains, including the incessant demands from friends and relations for special favours. While Clementine went out of her way to help people in genuine difficulty, she could be fierce with those who sought to exploit their relationship with Winston. Her niece Diana Mitford, a personal friend of Hitler, and her husband, the British Blackshirt leader Sir Oswald Mosley, had been incarcerated as potential security risks. In November 1943 Diana’s mother Sydney Mitford (Lady Redesdale), another Hitler fan, visited Clementine to plead for her daughter’s release on compassionate grounds: Diana had a young baby and Mosley was suffering from phlebitis, an inflammation of the veins exacerbated by lack of exercise. Clementine had been a bridesmaid at Sydney’s wedding forty years previously and Diana had, of course, been a favourite at Chartwell, but she told Sydney bluntly that the couple were better off in prison as they might otherwise be lynched.
Soon afterwards, a Home Office doctor warned that Mosley might die in custody, and so the more forgiving Winston authorised their release. Despite her blood ties to the Mitfords, Clementine still felt little sympathy. Her perspective was simple: the Mosleys and Mitfords were fascists and should not be indulged. As Pamela explained, Clementine ‘was Presbyterian’ and ‘a very good woman’ who put ‘morals . . . above any emotion’.51
There were few outward signs in autumn 1940 of the effects on Clementine of her immense workload and the interminable pressures she was under. Her growing popular appeal was recognised by the Ministry of Information, which in September commissioned the society photographer Cecil Beaton to take pictures of her at Downing Street. As he waited for her, Beaton inspected the ‘delightful’ reception rooms where the sun streamed in on bowls of sweet peas from Chartwell and the pale-coloured walls were covered with Sickert sketches, Nicholson still-lifes and family photographs. Particularly appealing was the white-panelled passage room used for dining in small groups. Then Clementine, whom he described as ‘a bright, unspoilt and girlish woman’, appeared and sat on the sofa, elegantly pouring tea in evening dress with her hair glamorously set like ‘Pallas Athene’, the Greek goddess of courage. They chatted amiably and even toured the residence together, Beaton admiring the pretty rooftop bedrooms that gave the place the feel of a country manor.
The photographs duly appeared in Picture Post in November 1940. However the accompanying profile of the ‘little known, seldom seen, rarely pictured’ prime ministerial spouse implied the Churchills’ marriage was not a love match but had been arranged by Jennie. The unsigned feature, titled ‘The Lady of No. 10’, claimed that Clementine had been ‘chosen for her son (so it has been estimated) by his mother Lady Randolph Churchill’.52 Then a supposed friend took it upon herself to inform her that the pictures made her look like a ‘hard-bitten virago’ on drugs. When Beaton called in again soon afterwards, this time to show Winston some other photographs he had taken of the Prime Minister and his grandson, it was clear that Clementine had taken the feature as a personal attack. Working herself into a ‘nervous hysteria’, she poured out her frustration: ‘It isn’t as if my life has been too easy. It hasn’t but when I married Winston he loved me!’ Beaton tried to comfort her, kissing her forehead and holding her hand, but the stopper had been removed. ‘I don’t know why it is, but I suppose my friends are not exactly jealous but they think that other people could do the job better and that I shouldn’t have been married to Winston. After all he is one of the most important people in the world.’
It was at this point that Beaton’s patience ran out: ‘The moment had come for her to behave with more dignity. She was entirely abandoning herself to a complete stranger. It was really rather reprehensible.’ Then, as she could so often do after one of these extraordinary lapses, she recovered her composure and snapped back into the collected Clementine most people knew. After he left, Beaton sent her a ‘bouquet to touch any heartstrings’, consisting of dark red and white roses, violets, orchids and carnations, along with an ‘affectionate’ note. Her telegram in response was ‘ecstatic’.53
For a rare, cathartic moment she had let slip her private feelings of chronic self-doubt and inadequacy. She was right, however, to think that many still held her in low regard. ‘The line on Clemmie among all the clever women whom Winston had known was still that she was foolish and not very clever,’ explains her niece Clarissa. Her feelings that she was ‘inferior in some curious way’ never really left her. ‘But she knuckled down and behaved impeccably all through the war.’54
After the RAF’s victory in the Battle of Britain in the autumn of 1940, the immediate threat of invasion receded, but the Blitz that followed killed 44,000 civilians and rendered the centres of the target cities almost unrecognisable. Clementine displayed similar resolve (if not the same physical excitement) during the raids to her notoriously fearless husband, sometimes calmly finishing her cup of tea in the Downing Street garden even while the warning sirens wailed beyond.
Number 10 was, of course, an obvious target and in October a bomb narrowly missed the rickety seventeenth-century building, killing four people nearby. The explosion shattered most of the Downing Street windows (which were fixed up with brown paper), tore doors off their hinges and covered everything with grime. Mercifully the residence did not catch fire, but the Churchills were left without gas or hot water. Now heavily pregnant, Pamela was living with them while Randolph was away at a training camp. The company suited her, as did the proximity to her doctor, but the bedrooms were particularly exposed to blasts. So at night they traipsed down to the wine cellar, which had been reinforced with steel props. Here one room had been equipped with two bunk beds and another with a single bed. Clementine instantly bagged the single room for herself, leaving Winston to share with his daughter-in-law ‘and the Baby Dumpling’. Pamela quickly discovered why: ‘I used to fall sound asleep until 1 or 1.30 in the morning when Papa would come down’ and climb into the top bunk. ‘That was the end of my sleep because within two minutes of arriving . . . he started to snore.’55
After the near miss, the Churchills moved their beds from Downing Street into the Annexe flat, created from the more solidly built government offices round the corner at Storey’s Gate. Visitors were greeted by guards in steel helmets and escorted to a tiny lobby where a door opened onto what had once been a utilitarian Air Raid Precautions office. Inside Clementine had the walls painted pastel colours and enlivened the décor with soft lighting, good furniture, a George Romney painting over the fireplace and a George Frederic Watts portrait of a young Lady Blanche. Next door, with the help of chintz hangings, she had softened another office space into her bedroom.
Within these peaceful rooms, the war seemed far away. Unfortunately, the flat’s main passage also led to various government offices, including the Home Command HQ, and so officials passing through day and night would regularly bump into Clementine on her way to or from the bathroom, an experience she confessed to finding quite ‘unnerving’.
The Annexe, although protected by thick metal shutters at the windows, was probably not much safer than Downing Street; but it was located directly above the heavily reinforced Central War Rooms thirty-five feet below ground, which were designed to protect the War Cabinet including Winston (and Clementine) from aerial attack. Even in these cramped underground conditions, however, she insisted on sleeping apart from her husband. Down here her whitewashed bunker room contained little more than a single bed under a pink counterpane and, of course, a chintz armchair. Along the corrid
or Winston’s own, green-covered bed was surrounded by maps, a basin, and a large desk with a telephone. The whole place ‘looked and smelt like a battleship and one emerged in the morning gasping for fresh air’, Jock Colville recalled.56
Winston loathed sleeping underground (he did so only three times), preferring to work through the air raids at ground level. As the bombing intensified, this greatly alarmed the Cabinet, who alerted Clementine. One lively evening she made Winston promise to go below and, knowing that he rarely broke his word to her, left it at that. When the raid began he gathered his papers and ‘proceeded to the basement in an exemplary manner’. His bodyguard was ‘mystified by this unusual docility’ but a few minutes later, Thompson found him on his feet again in his dressing gown clutching a stash of papers. ‘A mischievous grin spread all over his face. “Well Thompson,” said he. “I have kept my word. I came downstairs to go to bed. Now I am going upstairs to sleep.”’57
Winston became what Clementine called ‘rather naughty’ in all sorts of ways. During night raids, while the bombs were still falling and fires raging, he would go out with a torch to see the damage for himself. Naturally these excursions provoked alarm among his private secretaries, ministers and the military top brass, but Winston simply rushed past them all to the front door, stubbornly refusing to stop. General ‘Pug’ Ismay, his dismayed chief of staff, told colleagues ‘in the language of the barrack room’ that anybody ‘who imagined that he could control the Prime Minister on jaunts of this kind was welcome to try his luck on the next occasion’.
Winston had always been attracted to the scent of danger. He also enjoyed being mobbed as soon as he stepped out of his car and was moved to tears by the courage he witnessed amid the unimaginable desolation. Buoyed by the people’s cheery resilience, he would walk miles through the debris until well into the night. One bombed-out woman, seeing his eyes brimming, called out, ‘Look, he really cares,’ prompting huge cheers.
Clementine was again approached to restrain Winston, so when the urge to go out in a raid took him next, she was ready in coat and scarf to join him. ‘This time, concerned for her safety, he returned home before nightfall,’ recalled Ismay. ‘This was her technique. She knew precisely how to handle him.’ Her presence also made his impromptu visits all the more popular. Women were particularly cheered by her arrival and would surge forward to greet her. She smiled confidently at them, shook their hands, asked them about the practicalities of their lives and tried to help with food, shelter or clothes wherever officialdom had failed. In response Union flags would be mounted defiantly on piles of rubble, and now both Churchills’ names were shouted out as heroes.
The trust shown in them on these occasions was overwhelming and frightening. This was a time when Britain stood alone without major allies, when its ‘military cupboard’ was practically ‘bare’, its cities under the heaviest bombardment in history and the government so short of cash it had seriously considered requisitioning wedding rings to melt down for the gold.58 Winston was often easily moved, but Clementine, despite her normal rigid self-control in public, was also sometimes overcome. On one bombsite visit, with eyes welling up, she was heard to murmur: ‘Pray God, we don’t let them down.’59
Clementine saw it as her first duty to keep Winston alive. His recklessness spurred her to establish what became known as her ‘espionage’ network, whereby his staff would tip her off if he was planning something unduly dangerous. Winston’s refusal to travel in his specially armoured car during a raid was one example brought to her attention. She responded, ‘We’ve got to look after the Prime Minister. He’s being rather naughty,’ and then issued the ‘line’ to feed the ‘boss’: the next time he planned a trip during an attack – in this case to inspect guns in Richmond Park – all official cars except the armoured one were to be hidden and he was to be told that it was all that was available. Outmanoeuvred, a furious Winston got into the armoured car, which indeed protected him from the shrapnel raining down as he drove across town – but later ‘naughtily’ broke free by commandeering an unarmoured Army vehicle parked at the side of the road. Clementine reverted to travelling with him on such occasions and he soon took the point.
The stalwart Inches, his valet, was once ordered to hide Winston’s boots in another bid to stop him going out during night raids. Winston was livid, of course, but Inches stuck as long as he could to Clementine’s scripted line, claiming the boots were being repaired. On this occasion, the Prime Minister simply ordered him to fetch them and the poor man complied. At other times Winston sought the compliance of his staff by asking them simply not to tell ‘Mrs C’ or ‘she’ll scold me’. But Clementine knew his doughty public image belied weaknesses in his health, in particular a susceptibility to colds that had the potential to develop into something more dangerous. As cars were not then heated, she placed rugs on every back seat he might conceivably use and instructed staff to find ever more imaginative ways of ensuring he wrapped up in cold weather. The fact was that Winston was a man in his mid-sixties who smoked, drank and took no exercise and she fretted that he would not last the war.
Another great danger was, of course, the threat of assassination. Hitler knew all too well the incalculable importance of his survival to Britain’s chances of victory. It seems incredible now that no one betrayed the whereabouts of the Annexe, although it was on street level, overlooking St James’s Park. But the tight security held. Every member of staff and almost all visitors were investigated by the security services, and any mention of the building’s location (or even Winston’s sudden absence from it) was forbidden. Even inside, conversations with most friends and relations were stilted. Winston confided everything in Clementine; she was briefed on the most secret military matters, including the ULTRA decrypts of Nazi military ciphers by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park (the ‘golden eggs’, as Winston called them). As a result she knew more than the Cabinet and found it difficult to relax with outside company, so they entertained less and less and hardly ever went out.
‘Outsiders’, as the Churchills called friends and relations without the highest security clearance, were grouped together for occasional dinners to minimise the risk of accidental indiscretion. But others with whom they had been close in the past they now avoided completely; so many had expressed pro-German sentiments, or were related to others who held such opinions. Clementine’s relations were particularly tricky, and not just the Mitfords. Rosalind, daughter of her cousin and greatest friend Sylvia Henley, had married George Pitt-Rivers, a prominent eugenicist and an open Nazi sympathiser. They had separated in 1937, but Pitt-Rivers was considered such a risk that he too was incarcerated or kept under close surveillance for much of the war, while Sylvia felt that Clementine literally ‘pushed her away’.
More and more it became natural to spend time with only the ‘small golden circle of trusted colleagues known to be “padlock”’ and to whom that trust was ‘sacred’.60 Then, at least, conversation flowed freely. But it meant that Clementine became a virtual prisoner, isolated from her own friends and afraid to open her mouth. Goonie, her confidante during the First World War, was away in the country being treated for cancer. (When Goonie died in July 1941 Clementine took in her daughter Clarissa, but despite this and other acts of kindness the two never became close.) Generally the only people Clementine saw were Winston’s cronies, such as Bracken and the Prof, whom she invited to join the children and their spouses for Christmas 1940 at Chequers. It was the last Christmas all the family would spend together for four years, but one of the happiest.
One securely ‘padlocked’ relative – albeit a recent addition to the family – was Pamela. She was sufficiently trusted to be present at many highly sensitive discussions – particularly over the dinner table – and became exceptionally well-informed as a result. Sadly, her marriage to Randolph had done little to improve his boorish behaviour, which – to Clementine’s great shame – he frequently exhibited in front of Downing Street staff and guests. Colville thoug
ht ‘Randolph one of the most objectionable people I had ever met: noisy, self-assertive, whining and rankly unpleasant’.61 At a military dinner in June 1940 at Chequers ‘he made a scene . . . [about the] inefficiency of the Generals . . . I felt ashamed of him for Winston’s sake.’ Yet when Randolph, who had been kept in training for months without seeing action, asked to be allowed to fight, Winston replied that if he were killed ‘he would not be able to carry on’.62
With Winston’s reputation more important than ever, Clementine lived in fear that any or all of her eldest children might dishonour it. ‘Mary was the child that she adored,’ recalled Pamela. ‘Mary never embarrassed Winston; she was too young, and then she was too good . . . the other children were an irritant to her . . . I mean Clemmy really didn’t like her [other children] . . . because they were . . . very difficult characters.’63
Clementine’s attempts to rein Randolph in continued to meet with little success. ‘It was always a joke in the family that when she was angry about anything, she would put on her white gloves,’ Pamela recalled. So she knew things must be bad when, one morning in 1940, Clementine summoned her to her Downing Street bedroom. There she was, wearing the gloves while eating breakfast from a tray on her bed. ‘Darling, where was Randolph last night?’ Clementine asked. Not having any idea, the heavily pregnant Pamela burst into tears. Clementine had received word that Randolph had arrived ‘dead drunk’ in Downing Street at six that morning and had left secret military maps in his car. She ‘was in a fury and rightly’ as she knew the security breach could be a ‘terrible scandal’ for Winston. She ordered Randolph to leave the house immediately and spend the day at his club.64 The incident, which largely passed Winston by (as she intended), did nothing to reconcile mother and son.
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