Winston, however, appears to have been unfamiliar with the role Eleanor had pursued during her nine years as First Lady. Or, more likely, he wilfully failed to appreciate her work for the poor in order to make a point. Such activism smacked of a form of female emancipation characteristic of America, a phenomenon that he was unwilling to see spread to British shores (and especially to his own home). When Eleanor asked him over lunch what Clementine was doing for the war effort he mischievously expressed delight that his wife did not engage in any public activities, but stayed at home. A strained silence fell on the table as all eyes turned towards Mrs Roosevelt, but she never ‘batted an eyelash’.44 It was fortunate for Winston that Clementine had remained in England.
No doubt Winston also compared Eleanor unfavourably to Clementine – as had Harry Hopkins on his visits to Britain – when it came to the food served at her table. Ernest Hemingway once claimed the cooking at the Roosevelt White House to be ‘the worst I have ever eaten’ and the President himself remarked that it ‘would do justice to the automat’. Eleanor’s cook, Henrietta Nesbitt, was not yet restricted by wartime rationing as Mrs Landemare was in Britain but the US First Lady’s puritan streak blinded her to the sensory – and diplomatic – shortfalls of her cuisine. Her signature salads, for instance, were composed of ‘a mountain of mayonnaise, slice of canned pineapple [and] carved radishes’.45 Roosevelt never touched them, murmuring sadly ‘no thank you’ when offered one, although guests felt obliged to partake out of politeness. Winston was horrified to be presented with the sort of creamy soup he particularly detested, not once, but several times during his stay, including on Christmas Day. Evidently, Eleanor had omitted to research diligently her guest’s particular likes and dislikes, as her British counterpart would have done.
Occasionally the President would rebel, refusing to eat any more liver, string beans or broccoli, all of which he particularly loathed, and once turned away salt fish after it had been served for lunch four days in a row. By contrast, the under-cooked quail and pheasant he loved were kept off the menu. Eleanor herself took an ‘almost grim satisfaction in the austerity’46 but Roosevelt half-jokingly warned her that his unappetising diet did not ‘help’ his ‘relations with foreign powers . . . I bit two of them today.’47 Some observers said her stubborn attitude was a form of drawn-out culinary revenge for Franklin’s affair.
Whatever the case, Eleanor was clearly a determined woman who did not see it as her duty to pamper and indulge her husband, or to run a house with Clementine’s attention to detail. Visitors to the White House came away astonished to find their white gloves blackened by the dust, filthy threadbare carpets, and curtains in the process of rotting away.
Winston seems to have been too busy discussing strategy with the President to write home much during his trip, apart from one lengthy letter sent from the ship on his way over. He added a quick postscript on arrival, noting that ‘All is very good indeed . . . The Americans are magnificent in their breadth of view.’48 He did, however, telephone from the White House to establish Clementine’s foot size so that he could buy her some much-desired new stockings. She in turn mostly reported on domestic news, except for a gentle reminder to Winston that the American declaration of war was only the beginning: ‘I have been thinking constantly of you & trying to picture & realise the drama in which you are playing the principal – or rather it seems – the only part – I pray that when you leave, that the fervour you have aroused may not die down but will consolidate into practical & far-reaching action.’49
It was during Winston’s time with the Roosevelts – twenty-eight months into the war and beyond Clementine’s watchful gaze – that the pressures of his position finally caught up with him. During a ceremony in front of a large crowd on Christmas Eve, at which he helped Roosevelt light the Christmas tree on the White House’s South Lawn and delivered a moving speech, he began to feel palpitations. Then, on Boxing Day night, after addressing Congress for the first time, as he leant out to close a stubborn bedroom window he was gripped by an acute pain in his chest and found himself struggling to breathe.
His doctor, Lord Moran, suspected he had suffered a minor heart attack but decided not to tell anyone, especially not his sixty-seven-year-old patient. America had only just entered the war and there was ‘no one but Winston to hold her by the hand’.50 Nothing could be allowed to impede the success of the so-called Arcadia summit in drawing up a joint strategy – although the seizure was an ominous indicator of things to come.
When Winston finally left Washington on 14 January, Hopkins handed him an affectionate note for Clementine. ‘You would have been quite proud of your husband on this trip because he was ever so good natured . . .’ She had been given a welcome respite from the gruelling task of looking after Winston but in her absence Hopkins had discovered the immensity of managing her husband as well as his own President, two men he referred to as the ‘prima donnas’.51 No wonder he collapsed shortly after the Prime Minister’s departure. The war was exacting a heavy price on everyone.
America’s entry into the war – however heartening – did nothing immediately to stem mounting discontent at home. In January 1942 criticism of the government’s prosecution of the war – not least the recent loss of two great battleships, reverses in the African desert and almost unchecked Japanese advances through British territories in South-East Asia – led to a vote of confidence in the Commons. Winston won by 464 to 1, but that success failed to silence the critics and the doubters. Even his once infallible use of rhetoric was losing its potency, and his ministers – some of whom were jealous at Winston’s trips away from the drabness of war to the bright lights of America – began to grumble about drift and detachment at the top. Winston, convinced that the ‘bulk of the Tories’ hated him, began to wonder whether his time in power had run its course. Victory in battle still seemed determined to elude him. And worse was yet to come.
On 15 February 1942, the Japanese took Singapore after the surrender of 60,000 British troops – a defeat Winston himself described as the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history. Clementine fretted about the effect this latest ignominy would have on his already battered morale. ‘Oh how glad I am that you are back once more to encourage, to cheer, to charm us,’ she wrote to Hopkins when he visited again in April 1942. ‘You can’t think what a difference it makes to Winston. He is carrying a very heavy load and I can’t bear his dear round face not to look cheerful and cherubic in the mornings … What with Singapore . . . we are indeed walking through the Valley of Humiliation.’52
Winston’s woes were exacerbated, in Clementine’s view, by Beaverbrook, who was destabilising the government with periodic threats to resign as Minister of Supply, or by demanding vastly greater powers to carry on. In her desire to protect Winston, she sometimes overreacted. Her view of her long-time enemy had recently softened, in part because of his pride in his gallant pilot son Max, and also because of his generosity to her numerous causes. But now she believed his impetuous behaviour was harming her husband; she even suspected he might have his sights set on toppling him. During a heated row with Winston in mid-February 1942 she unleashed an angry tirade about Beaverbrook, whom she feared would turn out to be another Jacky Fisher – then rapidly regretted it. ‘My Own Darling, I am ashamed that by my violent attitude I should just now have added to your agonising anxieties – Please forgive me,’ she wrote by House-post. But she refused to suppress her suspicions of Beaverbook completely: ‘Try ridding yourself of this microbe which some people fear is in your blood. Exorcise this bottle Imp & see if the air is not clearer & purer.’53
In the event, Beaverbrook was persuaded to become Minister of Production, only to resign a fortnight later, blaming his asthma. Pamela, despite being both Beaverbrook’s protégée and his intimate, backed Clementine’s judgment. Clementine knew ‘probably quite rightly. . . that Max would use Winston to the maximum but also throw him to the wolves if he felt inclined’.54 Ironically, Beaverbroo
k professed to be a great fan of Clementine, and of the ‘home life’ she created. Winston’s ‘relationship with Mrs Churchill’, he told a friend, ‘might be told in story form as a life-time of domestic content’.55
The military situation took a further dire turn in June 1942, while Winston was again staying at the White House. Devastating news came through of the fall of the strategically important port of Tobruk in North Africa and the surrender of 30,000 British and Empire troops to a German force half the size. The jibe from the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, a long-term critic of the coalition government, that Winston ‘won debate after debate, but lost battle after battle’ wounded him deeply.56 But all those months of wooing the Americans had paid off, as Roosevelt offered support in place of criticism, diverting vital Sherman tanks and guns from the US military to help the beleaguered British recapture lost ground.
On his return to Britain Winston defiantly won another confidence vote in early July 1942 (this time by 477 votes to 25), but in his speech to the House he offered a rare glimpse of his own suffering – an admission that bore all the signs of Clementine’s gift for reading the public mood: ‘Some people assume too readily that, because a Government keeps cool and has steady nerves under reverses, its members do not feel the public misfortunes as keenly as its independent critics,’ he said. ‘On the contrary, I doubt whether anyone feels greater sorrow or pain than those who are responsible for the general conduct of our affairs.’
Family grievances also weighed heavily on the Churchills at this time – not least Randolph’s bitterness towards them. One night in spring 1942, father and son rowed so violently about ‘condoning’ Pamela’s affair with Harriman that Clementine feared Winston might have a seizure; she banned Randolph from Downing Street for the rest of the war. ‘I think the greatest misfortune in R’s life is that he is Papa’s son,’ Mary recorded in her diary of the time. ‘Papa has spoilt and indulged him & is very responsible.’57 Nevertheless, Mary and her sisters were outraged at Pamela’s adultery and never really forgave her.
Not long after this distressing confrontation, a humiliated Randolph volunteered to leave a safe staff job in Cairo to join the Special Air Service (SAS) and operate behind enemy lines. It seemed as if he could do no right for his mother; Clementine was furious with him for what she perceived as gross selfishness at a time when Winston was ‘bearing not only the burden of his own country but, for the moment, of an un-prepared America’. She raged at Randolph’s decision, saying he should simply have ‘quietly and sensibly’ rejoined his old regiment rather than choosing a highly risky operation that would cause Winston ‘agony of mind’. Pondering whether she should send Randolph an ‘affectionate’ cable begging him, for his father’s sake, to rejoin his old regiment, she concluded plaintively: ‘He might listen to me, as though he does not care for me, I know he respects me.’58 Wisely, she did not cable him and Randolph went on to sign up with the SAS as he had desired. It was an occasion when her concern for Winston perhaps blinded her, as her daughter Mary reflected, to the interests of her children.
Not that she was unwilling to confront Winston when she had to. One instance was his order in early November 1942 for the church bells to be rung to celebrate the British Army’s first major victory at El Alamein in Egypt, where Lieutenant-General Montgomery’s troops had irreversibly broken the German line and secured the Suez Canal. She shared his joy at for once receiving good news – made possible in large part by those Sherman tanks Roosevelt had delivered after the fall of Tobruk – but the bells had remained silent since the outbreak of war in case they were needed to signal an invasion and Clementine feared that ringing them now, to mark a single triumph, would be both premature and hubristic. Mary, who was at home on leave, remembered her mother being ‘violent’ in her argument and in her view ‘quite rightly’.59 In the face of such formidable opposition, Winston backed down – at least until British forces had triumphantly re-entered Tobruk a few days later.
It was natural for him to be ebullient, even overbearing, in victory. Perhaps Clementine also reminded him of the sentiments in her 1940 letter about treating his staff well. One of his secretaries in those weeks, when the war finally seemed to be turning in Britain’s favour, recalled how ‘once he began to bark he quickly stopped himself’.60
Clementine took particular pains to ensure Winston was on his best behaviour when they welcomed Eleanor Roosevelt to Britain at the end of October for a three-week trip to find out more about women’s experience of the war and to visit American troops. Once again, they pulled out all the stops: after spending her first few days at Buckingham Palace with the King and Queen, Eleanor was to join Winston and Clementine for a weekend at Chequers. ‘I confide my Missus to the care of you and Mrs Churchill,’ wrote Roosevelt, who had encouraged the trip as a way of soothing Eleanor’s obvious discontent at her reduced political role. (She now felt so distanced from him that she had just rejected a rare request to come back and live with him again as his wife.) ‘I know our better halves will get on beautifully.’ He sent as a gift to the Churchills a Virginia ham, prompting the diplomatic response from Clementine (who was now accustomed to receiving one from almost every visiting American): ‘I so love Virginia hams.’
It was the first time these redoubtable women had met, and both were curious. They certainly looked different: Clementine beautiful and immaculate, Eleanor plain and slightly windswept. More significantly, their public personas stood in marked contrast: Clementine avoided voicing her views publicly and remained at her husband’s side almost throughout the war, whereas Eleanor maximised her own status, travelled widely without the President (to the point that the Washington Star once ran the ironic headline MRS ROOSEVELT SPENDS NIGHT AT WHITE HOUSE), and confidently aired her own opinions in newspaper columns. Eleanor had learned to use her position as America’s First Lady to further causes she believed in and was frequently credited with having become the ‘most influential woman of her age’.61 She was even sometimes referred to, half-jokingly, as ‘Madam President’. Clementine was merely (if incorrectly) viewed as just Winston’s wife.
These apparent differences masked an astonishing number of parallels in their lives. They were of a similar age and upper-class background; they shared a concern for the poor and a dislike of gambling and extravagance that led some to consider them ‘crashing bores’. (Roosevelt in particular felt the constraints of ‘living with a saint’.) Both had also been schooled in England – in Eleanor’s case after the early deaths of her parents – and each had been taken in hand by an inspirational headmistress. They had endured difficult and fearful childhoods, and as girls had been considered plain (Eleanor’s mother had called her ‘granny’). Their lives had been touched by family tragedy and left them plagued by self-doubt, sometimes even depression. Neither, perhaps, was conventionally ‘feminine’; one of Clementine’s former employees, for instance, thought she ‘would have made a very good man’. Like Clementine, Eleanor also thought herself an inadequate mother and had lost an infant child and, like Winston, Franklin was unwilling to impose discipline. Their respective broods were often unhappy and sometimes unpleasant: the four Roosevelt sons who reached adulthood were to rack up eighteen marriages between them; Clementine’s offspring would blunder through eight (although Mary was successfully happy in hers).
They also shared the chronic loneliness and isolation that often afflicts the wives of ambitious men. Their husbands had dealt with huge personal crises – the humiliation of the Dardanelles had brought Winston to his lowest ebb; polio had crippled Roosevelt – and had bounced back stronger. Winston and Franklin were implacable optimists who, in some ways, had never entirely grown up. Now Fate had chosen them to carry the immense burden of saving the world, and neither man’s spouse found her supporting role easy; although in divergent ways each ‘shattered the ceremonial mould’62 and went far beyond what political wives had achieved before. Eleanor had never wanted to be First Lady; there was much in Clementine that did want to be marr
ied to the Prime Minister, but it was tempered by her insecurity. The two women were keepers of their husbands’ consciences, safeguarding the ‘ordinary’ citizen’s interests; both were brave and stoical. On occasion, they shored up the Anglo-American alliance when Roosevelt and Winston fell out. Ultimately, however, one was to prove considerably more influential during the war than the other. Although not perhaps the woman observers at the time might have guessed.
Eleanor arrived in London at Paddington station on the evening of 23 October 1942. A large crowd had gathered to greet her. People were grateful to the Americans for entering the war and impressed by stories of Eleanor’s commitment to the poor. The King and Queen were there too, to ‘welcome you with all our hearts’. At Buckingham Palace she was put in an enormous suite, specially restored after a bombing raid. She was also given her own ration card and assigned a bed in the converted cellar that served as a royal air-raid shelter. A five-inch mark had been drawn in the bath to show the maximum depth of water permitted and she was told there would be no heating, whatever the weather, until 1 November. Though First Lady of the most powerful country on Earth, Eleanor felt intimidated by the grandeur of her surroundings, and on her first night she stumbled round in the dark because she could not find the light switches.63 Uncharacteristically, she even fretted about her wardrobe and her hair.
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