CHAPTER 9
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE
So let us pause now outside the Temple of Artemis, and adopt the sibilant whisper of a TV naturalist. We have come at the height of August to the vast and rolling park of Blenheim Palace, a noted breeding-ground for the English aristocracy. A light summer shower is falling. It is mid-morning. Inside that graceful little Ionic-porticoed temple the time-honoured mating ritual is coming, in theory, to its climax.
Sitting on the bench at the back are Winston Churchill, thirty-three, President of the Board of Trade, and a lovely female with large dark eyes, called Clementine Hozier. Notice how carefully the male has chosen the location: the palace, to display the wealth and power of his family, and the genes he has to offer; the view of the lake, to inspire feelings of romance; a scrunchy gravel path on either side, to alert him to anyone who might be coming.
Any minute now he is going to pop the question. Clementine is surely aware of the significance of the temple: Artemis is the virgin goddess of hunting, and here the virgin has been brought to bay.
Let us tiptoe over the moss behind the building, and see whether we can hear what they are saying. Shhh.
Churchill appears to be talking . . . and talking. The female is still sitting with her eyes downcast. In fact, she is looking not at the animated face of the male, but at a beetle on the floor. She is watching the beetle as it moves slowly from one crack in the flagstone to the next—and she is wondering, frankly, whether Churchill is ever going to get to the point. Churchill has had her on his own, in the temple, for half an hour—and still he hasn’t summoned up the courage to blurt it out.
Any biologist studying the romantic life of Winston Churchill might conclude that he makes the courtship of the giant panda look positively rash and impetuous. He first met Clementine four years ago, and made a not wholly favourable impression. He met her more recently, and things went swimmingly—and now he has sent her letters that make it pretty clear what he has in mind for her. He has plotted it all out, as he plots out so much in his life.
Five days ago, on 7 August 1908, he wrote to invite her to Blenheim, and he dropped a hint that no one could miss. ‘I want so much to show you that beautiful place and in its gardens we shall find lots of places to talk in, and lots of things to talk about.’ The next day he writes another letter, explaining which train she should catch, and refers to ‘those strange mysterious eyes of yours whose secret I have been trying so hard to learn’.
He goes on to warn her, with tactical self-deprecation, that he has difficulties with girls, being ‘stupid and clumsy in that relation and naturally quite self-reliant and self-contained’. By that path, he admits, he has managed to ‘arrive at loneliness’ . . . HINT! HINT! Clementine is being clearly given to understand—by all the forms and conventions of Edwardian England, where premarital sex was a no-no for respectable girls—that she is going to be made an offer.
Well, she has been here in Blenheim for three days, and nothing has happened. Churchill has not lunged; he has not pounced; he has not even coughed as they sat on the sofa, and suddenly draped an arm round her lovely shoulders. Poor thing, we feel: she must be starting to wonder whether she has failed some unspoken exam. Now is the morning when she has to leave, and Churchill has not even got out of bed. In fact (though she doesn’t know this) his cousin the Duke of Marlborough himself has had to go into Churchill’s room in order to rouse him, and tell him firmly that if he wants to propose to this girl, he had better get up and get a move on.
So at 11 a.m. Churchill has finally found her, and they have walked through the formal gardens, with their neatly shaven bushes and nude Greek statuary; they have turned left and wandered past the boathouse, where the water laps musically under the jetty. They have passed all sorts of bowery corners and bosky nooks of a kind that might have been specifically designed to prompt a marriage proposal.
Now they have been secluded in this temple for what must seem to the young woman to be an agonisingly long time—and still no action. She later describes watching that beetle, moving as slowly as Churchill himself. ‘I thought to myself, “If that beetle reaches that crack, and Winston hasn’t proposed, he’s not going to.”’ There were plenty of people who would have put money on the beetle.
If you go behind the Temple of Diana (or Artemis) today, you will find graffiti from those who have more recently enjoyed its tranquillity. Someone has charmingly inscribed a swastika, but there are a few love hearts. I bet ‘Dave’ didn’t sit for half an hour before announcing his feelings for ‘Sarah’. Knowing us British, I expect this has been the scene of quite a lot of alfresco lovemaking—and those happy fornicators would perhaps be mildly puzzled to hear of Churchill’s technique.
Some people have gone so far as to claim that there is no evidence that by the age of thirty-four Churchill had even lost his virginity; and they suggest that this may perhaps help to explain his bashfulness in the temple. There has long been a widely held view that women, or at least sexual relations with women, were less important to Churchill than they are to some other world leaders, or that he had fewer notches on his bedpost than you might expect for a man whose appetites—for praise, food, drink, cigars, excitement, etc.—were generally so titanic. By the time of his engagement one newspaper had already described him as a ‘confirmed bachelor’; which didn’t carry quite the implication it has these days, but reflected the way he was seen.
‘I always hear that no one can nail Winston down to any particular lady,’ one woman wrote to Lloyd George, ‘and the opinion is that “he is not a lady’s man” . . . and that he had a rather curious way of looking at a woman. Winston would become a million times more popular if it could be thought that he cared enough for some woman to risk even a little discomfort for her sake. Perhaps it will come but I doubt it.’
Was he sexist? One group of women who certainly felt that he looked at them in a curious way were the suffragettes. ‘You brute!’ cried prominent suffragette Theresa Garnett as she attacked him with a dog whip. ‘Why don’t you treat women properly?’ The suffragettes could not forgive his early opposition to their cause. They punched him, knocked him to the ground, and mercilessly heckled and interrupted his speeches, sometimes by ringing bells as he reached his perorations.
Churchill responded with unvarying politeness; and most people now accept that he was a bit hard done by. His initial reservations about female suffrage appear to have been motivated not so much by male chauvinism as by a straight calculation: that polling evidence suggested women would tend to vote Tory. In any case, he eventually changed his tune, and in 1917 he supported the extension of the franchise to all women over thirty.
Nor do most historians now accept the picture of Churchill as some sort of asexual Edward Heath-like character; in fact, the notion is utter nonsense. All his life he loved the company of women, appreciated their beauty, sought them out and tried to show off to them. Even in his mid-seventies we find him doing somersaults in the sea in the south of France, and hoping to impress some Hollywood starlet—slightly to the irritation of Clementine.
For a man who is supposed not to have been much interested, he has a long list of youthful dalliances and entanglements of one kind or other. There is ‘the beautiful Polly Hacket’, who appears when he is eighteen. They go for walks in the park and he gives her a packet of sugar plums—who are you calling unromantic, eh?
Then he pursues a showgirl of some description called Mabel Love—though history is blushingly silent on what happened between them. He falls head over heels in love with Pamela Plowden, the daughter of the Resident at Hyderabad, and declares she is ‘the most beautiful girl I have ever seen’. He takes her on an elephant; does all the right things—it is hardly his fault if she turns him down.
He has a bit of a thing with a married woman called Ettie Grenfell. He makes advances towards Ethel Barrymore, of the showbiz dynasty. He pursues one Muriel Wilson, and spends a week driving around France with her; and then there is the romance with Violet Asquith, who seems to have fallen more or less in love with him, and whose feelings were so strong that he needed to go up to see her, at Slains castle in Scotland, and propitiate her only two weeks before his marriage to Clementine (perhaps because he feared that there would be political consequences from treating her badly: he depended on her father for promotion, after all).
There are some who now think his relationship with Violet was much more significant, and physical, than has been previously allowed. Who knows what really happened between them? Or between Churchill and the others, and women whose names we don’t even know? And frankly who cares?
There are all sorts of reasons why Churchill was not held by his contemporaries to be a modern Casanova, but the most obvious is surely that he was too darned busy. In habits he superficially resembled a Bertie Wooster figure—rising late, living on his own in a flat, smoking cigars with cronies in clubs, surrounded by lissom and intelligent girls who never quite count as girlfriends, and with his devoted secretary Eddie Marsh hovering around like Jeeves. But in industry and output he is the polar opposite. (You will recall Bertie Wooster’s credentials as a journalist rested entirely on a single article on ‘What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing’ that once appeared in the periodical edited by his Aunt Dahlia called Milady’s Boudoir.)
Churchill had written five books, and become a Member of Parliament, and reported from multiple war zones, and written innumerable articles, and given many well-paid lectures, by the time he was twenty-five. He was one of the half-dozen youngest people ever to hold cabinet rank. When he sat down on that bench with Clementine, he was already the author of millions of published words, many of them popularly and critically acclaimed. The miracle is that he found any time to see girls at all.
Read his correspondence, and you will find all sorts of tantalising clues about his early romantic career—what does Pamela Plowden mean when she writes in 1940 to congratulate him on the premiership, by referring back fondly to ‘our days of hansom cabs’? Was he Not Safe In Taxis? But in the end such speculations are not only impertinent; they are irrelevant. All that matters is that Churchill beat the beetle; he proposed to Clementine, and, as he put it, they ‘lived happily ever after’.
Clementine was twenty-two; her background was relatively impoverished and a little bit rackety—in the sense that her mother, Lady Blanche Hozier, had enjoyed so many extramarital amours that Clementine was not entirely sure as to the identity of her father. Clementine had been engaged three times before, and though many newspapers commented on her beauty, her rival Violet Asquith was prepared to be splendidly bitchy about her other qualities.
Here is the seething Violet, writing about the impending marriage to a friend:
His wife could never be more to him than an ornamental sideboard as I have often said & she is unexacting enough not to mind being more. Whether he will ultimately mind her being as stupid as an owl I don’t know—it is a danger no doubt—but for the moment at least she will have a rest from making her own clothes & I think he must be a little in love. Father [the Prime Minister] thinks that it spells disaster for them both.
There speaks a bruised young woman. Clementine was not a sideboard, but wise as a tree full of owls, and the marriage was not a disaster but a triumph. She gave Churchill nothing but the most flabbergasting loyalty and support; and made his achievements possible.
These days we have more or less dispensed, thank goodness, with the concept of the political wife—the woman who serves as a kind of proxy for her husband, a utensil for the projection of his ambitions. But Clementine not only believed in her husband—and endlessly discussed politics with him. She believed in him so fiercely that she would go into battle for him, sometimes physically.
When a suffragette tried to push him under a train, Clementine was there to whack the woman with her umbrella. When he was laid up with appendicitis during the election campaign of November 1922, she went up to Dundee to campaign on his behalf. She bravely informed a sceptical public that her husband was not a warmonger; and though that campaign failed (as Churchill put it, he found himself ‘without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix’), she was at it again soon after in West Leicester. Again, she contended: ‘A lot of people think he is essentially military, but I know him very well, and I know he is not that at all. In fact one of his greatest talents is the talent of peace-making.’
That was surely a well-judged appeal to every man and woman in the audience who knew the importance of the skill of peace-making, not just abroad but in the kitchen and the bedroom. If Churchill had begun his career as a Tory, and ended a Tory (and indeed was, fundamentally, a Tory), Clementine was by background and temperament a confirmed Liberal. She had nothing to do with his move to the Liberal Party—that happened long before they were married; but she has been rightly credited with softening and tempering her husband’s natural aggression.
In 1921 she wrote to him warning that ‘It always makes me unhappy and disappointed when I see you inclined to take for granted that the rough iron-fisted hunnish way will prevail.’ She cared for him and watched him—and was sufficiently respected by him—to be able to write the following superb letter. It is 1940, the Battle of Britain is under way, and the anxiety must be terrible; and it has started to show in Churchill’s behaviour.
10 Downing Street,
Whitehall
June 27, 1940
My Darling,
I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know.
One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner—It seems your Private Secretaries have agreed to behave like school boys & ‘take what’s coming to them’ & then escape out of your presence shrugging their shoulders—Higher up, if an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming. I was astonished & upset because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you—I said this & I was told ‘No doubt it’s the strain’—
My Darling Winston—I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.
It is for you to give the Orders & if they are bungled—except for the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury & the Speaker, you can sack anyone & everyone—Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm. You used to quote:– ‘On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme’—I cannot bear that those who serve the Country and yourself should not love as well as admire and respect you—
Besides you won’t get the best results by irascibility & rudeness. They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality—(Rebellion in War time being out of the question!)
Please forgive your loving devoted & watchful
Clemmie
I wrote this at Chequers last Sunday, tore it up, but here it is now.
She signed off with a little drawing of a cat—an allusion to the pet names they had for each other. She was ‘pussie’ and he was ‘pug’ or ‘pig’, and would accordingly finish his letters with a drawing of a pig. Indeed, when Churchill opened the door at Chartwell they used to greet each other with pleasurable animal noises—he ‘wow-wow’ and she ‘miaow’.
We have the impression of a woman totally bound up in her husband’s life and career—not just loving towards him, but a positive battleaxe towards his detractors. She was travelling in a railway carriage with a group of friends in the 1930s, when someone on the radio made a derogatory remark about Churchill. One of the party was an upper-class woman who shared the widespread pro-appeasement views, and who murmured ‘hear, hear’. Clementine instantly marched out of the carriage and refused to return until she had received an apology. She was at a lunch party in 1953 with Lord Halifax, who said something mildly deprecatory about the state of the Tory Party. ‘If the country had depended on you,’ she said, applying the sledgehammer to the old appeaser, ‘we might have lost the war.’
Clementine Churchill paid a price for her commitment to Churchill’s life, and she knew it. She once said that her epitaph would be ‘Here lies a woman who was always tired, Because she lived in a world where too much was required’. She confided in her daughter Mary that she felt she had missed out on the joys of bringing up her own four children (a fifth, Marigold, had died in infancy).
She gave up almost all her time for Winston, who came—as Mary Churchill put it—‘first, second and third’. This was a sacrifice, and it can be argued that both Clementine and her children suffered from feeling themselves to be minor celestial bodies, condemned to perpetual orbit around the roi soleil of Chartwell. He was so busy that sometimes she felt neglected.
He could write to her with unmistakable ardour (there is a letter about wanting to grab her naked out of the bath, for instance); but there is also a plangent letter she writes to him in March 1916, when he has gone away to the trenches. ‘We are still young, but time flies, stealing love away and leaving only friendship which is very peaceful but not very stimulating or warming.’ Uh-oh.
On at least one occasion she threw a plate of spinach at his head. Given his immense capacity for self-obsession, I expect there will be many people who will cheer the gesture—and be thankful that she missed. Both of them had parents who were serially unfaithful; both had grown up in households that were unhappy in one way or another. Did Churchill or Clementine ever feel the temptation to stray, in fifty-six years of marriage?
I would be surprised—whatever the occasional rumours—if we found that Churchill had done any such thing himself. He was not only devoted to Clementine, it just wasn’t the way he was made. There is the story of Daisy Fellowes, described as ‘a figure of panache, chic and somewhat heartless beauty’, who bumped into Churchill when he was at the Versailles peace conference in 1919. She invited him round to tea ‘to see my little child’. When Churchill rolled up for tea, he found no little child, but a chaise longue on which had been stretched a tiger skin, and on the tiger skin stretched his hostess. She had no clothes on. He fled.
As for Clementine, well, much has been made of the tale of the Bali dove. Such was the general stress of living with Churchill that she used to go on quite long holidays—to the south of France, or the Alps, or the West Indies. In 1934 she went on an absolute odyssey—30,000 miles across the South Seas aboard a luxurious steam yacht belonging to the Guinness heir, Lord Moyne. She went to Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas, New Caledonia, New Hebrides and the island of Bali, from where she wrote to her husband: ‘It’s an enchanted island. Lovely temples embedded in green vegetation in every village. Lovely dancers. The inhabitants lead an Elysian life. They work for about two hours a day—the rest of the time they play with musical instruments, dance, make offerings in the Temples of the Gods and make love! Perfect, isn’t it?’
At this time Churchill was waging hand-to-hand warfare with the government over the India Bill—struggling home exhausted after late divisions—and one can see that the life he offered Clementine back home was not always paradise; nor, perhaps, was daily lovemaking as high on the Chartwell agenda as it was among the happy tribes of Bali. Clementine had all sorts of mementoes in her luggage on her return in April 1935, having lost weight and looking well.
She had pretty seashells that they put into the ornamental ponds, and which turned a bit yellowy-green. Her prize trophy was a Bali dove. Her daughter Mary described it as an enchanting pinky-beige little bird, with coral beak and feet. ‘He lived in a beautiful wicker cage rather like a glorified lobster pot. He would crou crou and bow with exquisite oriental politeness to people he liked.’ The dove was a present from a chap who was with Clementine on the boat. He was an art dealer named Terence Philip.
We have a hint of the feelings this fellow aroused in Clementine, because when the dove eventually wheezed its final crou-crou, she personally designed an inscription to go on the sundial, in the rose garden at Chartwell, which serves as the grave stele.
HERE LIES THE BALI DOVE
It does not do to wander
Too far from sober men.
But there’s an island yonder.
I think of it again.
The lines were not by herself, but taken—at the suggestion of the travel writer Freya Stark—from the works of the nineteenth-century literary critic W. P. Ker. Some people say it is pretty blindingly obvious what this is supposed to be driving at.
Churchill is the sober man from whom she wandered, and she admits that she was wrong. But the dove—the bird of Venus, the symbol of love—is the reminder of the other life she almost had on a tropical island half a world away. The dove has been so ceremoniously interred not just because it was a jolly little bird, but because it reminds her of the time when she was billing and cooing herself. It is a symbol of her fling—her first, her last, her only fling.
Is that right? Did she have a thing with the art dealer? Well, it is possible, I suppose—though others have pointed out that Terence Philip was in fact supposed to have homosexual leanings. We know that he came several times to Chartwell in the next two years; but whatever it was that existed between them died as dead as the dove—and Philip himself died during the war, working for the art dealer Wildenstein in New York.
Perhaps there was something a little bit more than a flirtation between Clemmie and this suave fellow; perhaps not. But there are two points about the Bali dove business. The first is that whatever the bird signified, Churchill knew about it and understood it and forgave it: how else could he allow a shrine to this holiday romance to be erected in his own garden?
The second is that whatever Terence Philip did for Clemmie—whatever he made her feel—did absolutely nothing to affect the love affair between herself and her husband. Here she is, writing to him from the yacht, as she heads back home. ‘Oh my darling Winston, the Air Mail is just flitting and I send you this like John the Baptist to prepare the way for me, to tell you I love you and I long to be folded in your arms.’ Does that sound like a woman in the grip of a red-hot affair with another man? Possibly, of course—but unlikely, I think, in her case.
Here is what Churchill wrote to her:
I think a lot about you, my darling Pussie . . . and rejoice that we have lived our lives together and still have some years of expectation in this pleasant vale. I have been sometimes a little depressed about politics and would like to have been comforted by you. But I feel that this has been a great experience and adventure to you and that it has introduced a new background to your life and a larger proportion; and so I have not grudged you your long excursion; but now I do want you back.
You sense from this letter that Churchill knows the awful demands he has made on his wife. We also understand that he has had more than enough of her absence, and badly needed her with him. Why did Churchill forgive her flirtation with Terence Philip, assuming there was anything to forgive? Because he loved her, that’s why. The world owes her a huge debt—a point the British government recognised after Churchill’s death, when they made her a peeress in her own right.
He could not have done it without her. She gave his life a pile-driven domestic foundation, and not just in supplying the management of Chartwell and its nine servants and two gardeners; and in meeting all the vast emotional and logistical demands of four children. Here, too, her efforts must be counted a success.
It cannot have been easy to bring up the four of them—Diana, Randolph, Sarah and Mary—and though they were not all of them always happy in their lives they were all to become remarkable and courageous individuals: a credit to Winston (he was a loving father, when time allowed) and above all to Clemmie.
She curbed his excesses, she made him think more of other people, and to be less self-centred, and she helped to bring out what was lovable and admirable in his character. That was important, in 1940. The country needed a leader the public could understand, and who was likeable, and who seemed wholly ‘grounded’ and authentic.
If Churchill was to lead his country in war, he needed to be able to relate to people, and they needed to be able to relate to him; and in Churchill’s case it helped that they could go farther, and actually identify themselves and their country with his personality.