First Lady

by Sonia Purnell

  This success did not greatly endear her to Winston. He constantly dodged her requests for meetings or to appear with her on television in America. Clementine was more forthcoming, especially following Eleanor’s trip to London in 1948 for the unveiling of a statue of her husband outside the American Embassy. ‘Your visit has given me joy as it has to so many,’ she cabled afterwards, signing off with ‘Love’.32 Mostly it was Eleanor who kept the relationship alive, however. She was assiduous in sending the Churchills her good wishes at Christmas and agreed to appear as Sarah’s first guest on the younger Churchill’s American television chat show in 1951, providing her with a gratifying scoop.33

  Eleanor’s globe-trotting was a far cry from her counterpart’s largely domestic existence. Clementine was therefore pleased in 1949 to be invited to chair the YWCA’s National Hostels Committee. It was hardly the UN but it gave her the chance to exercise her talent for organisation, and she soon became an effective scourge of hard mattresses and inadequate bathrooms. Nearly a decade later she would involve herself in an appeal for World Refugee Year, and another for the building of New Hall, Cambridge, the university’s third college for women. Never forgetting how her old headmistress, Miss Harris, had wanted her to go on to university, she maintained a keen interest in women’s education even if none of her own daughters took degrees. She argued strongly that the new Cambridge college founded in Winston’s honour in 1960 should be co-educational. Contrary to some reports she initially lost that battle, but Churchill College was one of the first all-male colleges to vote to admit women a few years later.

  While she lacked a prominent public role of her own, she at least found a new and perhaps unexpected purpose in her grandchildren. In February 1947, Mary married Christopher Soames, an ebullient young diplomat. Although Clementine was initially untrusting of this new arrival (and perhaps a little jealous), over time she grew to like and rely on him. Fearful of losing Mary as a companion, she suggested the young couple move into the house at Chartwell Farm, which Winston had just bought. Until it was ready, they could stay at the big house. The couple’s noisy lovemaking34 was soon to be heard by everyone, amusing Clementine but driving the noise-averse Winston – who marched down from his study to order the embarrassed couple to keep quiet – to distraction. Although never a nappy-changer, Clementine doted on the grandchildren who soon followed, enjoying nursery teas in a way unthinkable with her own brood. Mary recalled how at one family picnic her mother remarked, ‘You have so much fun with your children that I now realise how I missed out.’35

  Making up for lost time, she enjoyed taking her eventual tally of ten grandchildren to Christmas pantomimes in London. And when Edwina Sandys, her eldest granddaughter, made her society debut in 1957, Clementine arranged a dance for her at Claridge’s. (She and Winston even tapped their feet in time to Chubby Checker’s ‘The Twist’ when it was played at younger sister Celia’s turn a few years later.) But even the diplomatic Mary admitted that she had learned from Clementine’s mistakes. ‘I made a conscious decision to put my children first because I did feel something had been . . . yes, missing at home.’36

  Diana and her husband Duncan Sandys, with their three children, were also frequent visitors to Chartwell and both got on well with Winston. Clementine disliked Duncan, however, and there remained ‘an atmosphere of watchfulness’37 whenever she spent time with Diana. Nor had relations with Randolph improved; he continued to upset Winston with his drunken barracking. Clementine found the arguments impossible to bear and would either erupt angrily or withdraw into a chilly silence. Underlying the tension was Randolph’s continuing bitterness at his parents’ collusion in Pamela’s infidelity. Clementine nevertheless insisted on continuing to see her former daughter-in-law. She felt that Pamela had suffered unfairly since the war, in part as a result of outsiders’ jealousy. There were those who accused her of having lived ‘high on the hog’, and from certain quarters came ridiculous suggestions that she had in some way collaborated with the enemy. Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course, but perhaps only the Churchills really understood the importance of her ‘war work’ and the injustice of its consequences.

  When Pamela was abandoned by Ed Murrow, who returned to his wife, Clementine sympathised. She was however uneasy when Pamela took up with the Italian Gianni Agnelli, heir to the car manufacturer Fiat. She was even more perturbed when Agnelli – followed by a series of other wealthy lovers – showered Pamela with gemstones and couture but omitted to marry her. ‘One has to remember that Clementine was very Scottish,’ explained a younger member of the family. ‘I remember going with Pamela to lunch with Clementine, and going up in the lift she took off all her jewellery and put it in her handbag. She didn’t want Clementine to see what she had as she thought it would upset her.’38

  Only in his rare reflective moments did Randolph concede how his mother had gone out of her way to help him. As chairwoman of a trust Winston had set up at the end of the war to look after his children and grandchildren, she quietly bailed out his heir’s extravagances. Randolph married again in November 1948, and Clementine bought the newlyweds a house. A year later his new wife, June Osborne, gave birth to a daughter, Arabella. But by then June was also already finding her husband’s bullying, drinking and temper unbearable.

  Sarah returned to acting after the war, and in the autumn of 1946 signed up with an Italian film company in Rome. Still hell-bent on stardom, she excitedly sent a synopsis of her latest movie to all her family but ‘the only person who really took trouble to read it was my father’.39 Gil Winant, who had been ‘let go’ by the less appreciative Truman administration, was still devotedly in love and planning to divorce his wife to be with her. She knew him to be a good man, but recoiled from the idea of entering into wedlock again so soon. ‘It seems that I must always hurt the person who loves me,’ she wrote in despair to her father.40 On 3 November 1947, a distraught Winant took a pistol out of his dressing-gown pocket at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, and shot himself. Clementine sent four dozen yellow roses to his funeral and made Winston accompany her to Winant’s London memorial service at St Paul’s. She was rigid with grief at the loss of her friend; Sarah was riven with guilt.

  Sarah returned to America to work in theatre and television and later hitched up with the handsome British photographer Antony Beauchamp. Winston took an instant dislike to Beauchamp when they met in Monte Carlo in January 1949. Clementine also had her doubts after she heard him shouting at Sarah in her hotel room and gently tried to persuade her daughter against committing herself. But in October Sarah and Beauchamp took a holiday together in Sea Island, Georgia, and decided to marry there and then. Sarah cabled her parents but by the time her message arrived they had already read about it in the newspapers.

  Despairing at what she considered her daughter’s stubborn folly, Clementine ignored Sarah’s pleading letters, or replied with brief, businesslike telegrams. Eventually, Beauchamp wrote angrily to Clementine that her disapproval was making Sarah ill. Urgently apologising, she begged Sarah to ‘forgive me and believe in my love . . . for you’.41 Mother and daughter were joyfully reunited in England in May 1950 and the following year she bought a London ‘nest’ for the couple in Pimlico. Sarah understood that Clementine was trying to ‘crush’ her doubts about Beauchamp and doing ‘everything she could to make us happy’.42 Clementine could not, however, conceal her fears about the marriage, or about Sarah’s increasing dependence on alcohol to get her through.

  Needing to escape the troubles of family life (and restore their strength), in the years immediately after the war Winston and Clementine resumed their enthusiastic holiday-making of the 1920s. As so often before, many of these trips were taken separately. In August 1949, Winston went to stay without Clementine at Beaverbrook’s cliff-top villa, La Capponcina, near Monte Carlo. While playing cards late one night with friends he suffered a stroke. When informed, Clementine chose to stay at home, in the apparent belief that the media storm her su
dden appearance would provoke might be worse than her absence. Fortunately, the stroke was mild and Winston flew home a week later. Even so, it was a sign of things to come.

  The next general election, in February 1950, saw Labour returned to power by the narrowest of margins. Voters had grown tired of living in a grey world of housing shortages and continued rationing while defeated countries seemed to be recovering from the war more swiftly. Despite his stroke, growing deafness and a hernia operation, Winston’s health appeared surprisingly robust and his attacks on Labour’s record were beginning to draw blood. Clementine too was feeling better about life, until in May 1951 she endured the first of a series of invasive operations when she was admitted to hospital for a major gynaecological ‘repair’. This time she could afford not to stint on her convalescence, and spent weeks resting at Chartwell before embarking on extensive holidays in south-west France, Paris, the Alps and Venice. A snap election was called on her return in early October and now the Tories, after waging an upbeat campaign, came home with a majority of seventeen seats. Just short of his seventy-seventh birthday, Winston was once again Prime Minister.

  Of course there was satisfaction that he had been restored to power after the ignominy of 1945, but she thought him too old and his health too compromised for high office, and she could muster little enthusiasm for an all-Conservative administration – even if it specifically avoided rolling back many of the Attlee reforms. Being in the thick of things again no doubt offered some compensation, though. Winston consulted her, as usual, on appointments – including his plan to offer the prestigious role of War Secretary to Duncan Sandys. She quickly warned that he would be exposing himself to allegations of nepotism and Sandys was duly downgraded to the more junior post of Minister of Supply. This intervention aside, however, Clementine struggled to summon her old enthusiasm for government. The mould she had broken in 1940, becoming Britain’s first First Lady, contracted back into a more conventional (and perhaps constitutionally correct) shape during Winston’s second term. She involved herself more with hospitality and ceremony than in helping to run the country. Her hands-on tours in February 1953 of the East Anglian coast – where floods had killed hundreds and made thousands more homeless – were a rare public reminder of her wartime role.

  Clementine rented out Hyde Park Gate to the Cuban ambassador to move into a Downing Street that had also physically changed since her previous residency. Abandoned by the Attlees – except for large official functions – the staterooms on the first floor were now looking drab. The imitation silk curtains installed by the dreaded Ministry of Works had shrunk five inches from the floor and the sofas had been re-upholstered in unflattering greens and browns. Clementine knew better than to spend public money on a lavish redecoration, but she somehow worked wonders on the fine Georgian rooms. The Bristol glass chandeliers were scrubbed to sparkling perfection and the addition of simple bunches of flowers, family photographs and William Nicholson paintings in muted colours, displayed in bevelled frames, banished the austerity-era dreariness.43 She planned to live in the modest self-contained flat in the attics that the Attlees had created for their own use, but it was not an arrangement that commended itself to Winston, and despite her initial objections about convenience and staffing she eventually gave way. Citing the need to entertain foreign dignitaries before, during and after the coronation of the new Queen (George VI died on 6 February 1952), the Churchills soon moved back downstairs into their customary grandeur, with Clementine compensating as far as possible for what the aesthete Cecil Beaton described as the ‘puky’ new colour scheme.

  A couple of weeks after the King passed away, Winston suffered from a spasm of the cerebral arteries that caused temporary confusion in his speech. The condition was kept secret outside a small inner circle but it raised questions about how long he could carry on. At the same time, Clementine was also weakening. Suffering from an overwhelming sensation of fatigue, she cancelled her public engagements that summer and resorted to her old pattern of taking ‘cures’. This escape from the grind of tending to Winston perked her up – as did another holiday afterwards with Sarah and Antony on the island of Capri – so when her niece Clarissa announced she was to marry Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, she immediately offered to return from Italy to host the wedding at Downing Street only a week later.

  Large-scale entertaining became the dominant chore of Clementine’s second life at Number 10, particularly in the lead-up to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953. There was a succession of state visits, a Commonwealth Conference, a banquet for the heads of state and government attending the coronation, and a whirl of other lunches, dinners and receptions. On the great day itself Clementine draped herself in the satin robe of the Order of the British Empire and borrowed a tiara from a friend. Riding beside Winston in a coach during the procession she looked radiant, but the strain of the preparations had taken its toll. Though barely noticeable, her arm was encased in a sling because of neuritis, a painful inflammation of the nerves that would in time drive her once again to near-collapse.

  Three weeks later Clementine hosted a dinner for thirty-eight at Downing Street in honour of the Italian Prime Minister, Alcide De Gasperi. The occasion was conducted with her usual élan. As the guests were leaving the first-floor Pillared Room, however, she glanced back to see Winston struggling to rise from his chair. Christopher Soames quickly informed De Gasperi that the Prime Minister was over-tired, and others present apparently attributed the slur in his speech to the wine. Winston seemed to improve a little once he was helped to bed, but it was confirmed in the morning that he had suffered another stroke. Incredibly, he still held Cabinet, at which his colleagues noticed little untoward, while it took all Clementine’s strength to persuade him not to take questions in the House that afternoon as well. Some excuse would have to be found, though, as his illness was to be kept utterly secret; Winston wanted nothing to get in the way of an impending conference in Bermuda with US President Eisenhower. But the following day he was much worse and had to be bundled out of town down to the seclusion of Chartwell. Now the Queen and the Cabinet were informed about the nature of his illness while Lords Beaverbrook, Bracken and Camrose took it upon themselves to gag the press.

  In reality, Winston was losing the use of his left leg and arm and needed constant nursing. Moran feared he would not last the weekend, and the family, including a subdued Randolph, swiftly gathered around him. For once Randolph marvelled at his mother’s capacity to deal with a crisis, not least because she had a fall and broke several ribs. ‘I thought you were magnificent on Saturday & doing everything possible to maintain Papa’s morale,’ he wrote to her soon afterwards. ‘So long as that persists no miracle is impossible.’44 In fact Winston did start to improve, albeit slowly, but he was still far from capable of running the country. Unavoidable decisions were being taken by Colville and Soames on the basis of what they thought he would have done, and it is more than probable – for she was in constant attendance – that they did so after occasional consultation with Clementine. Such was the blanket secrecy about his condition and the small, makeshift (and certainly undemocratic) band running the country that only carefully selected visitors, such as Violet Bonham Carter, were permitted. These the ever-alert Clementine waylaid beforehand, making them promise not to offer him unrealistic hopes of staying at Number 10.

  ‘Clemmie said that she felt sure he ought to retire in the autumn & begged me not to urge him to stay on,’ Violet noted in her diary.45 She also observed how difficult Winston was to handle, having become prone to sudden and unreasonable rages ‘like a violent child’. Later Violet wrote to her old rival, with what sounds like genuine praise: ‘I must tell you darling, what intense admiration I felt for your courage, wisdom & dispassionate judgment.’46 She was right: Clementine was taking an unsentimental view – understanding more clearly than others that the ailing Winston would no longer command the same status, either at home or abroad. The problem was that everyo
ne else was either too scared, or did not appreciate the need, to suggest to him directly that he should step down; and Clementine was reluctant to make herself a lone voice on this most sensitive of subjects. The unresolved question of his future was thus to overshadow their lives for the next two years.

  As Winston gradually recuperated, so did his impatience rapidly increase; she thought him rashly intent on projecting himself as somehow indestructible. They argued bitterly over whether he should accept an invitation from the Queen to go horseracing in September and then stay with her at Balmoral. True to form, Winston quickly apologised for losing his temper, although he also got his way. He and Clementine duly joined the royals at the St Leger Stakes at Doncaster where their forty-fifth wedding anniversary was celebrated joyfully, and then took the train up to Scotland. Perhaps Clementine had been unreasonably pessimistic; after the strain of the past couple of months Balmoral proved to be an uplifting break.

  Shortly afterwards Winston flew to the south of France for another holiday at Beaverbrook’s villa. Clementine took the opportunity to spend a few quiet days with Nellie at the theatre in Stratford. Rather than begrudging her this brief respite from him, he acknowledged he was more dependent on her than ever; in private he begged: ‘Please continue to love me or I shall be very unhappy.’