Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill - Softcover

Clementine sat bolt upright in the Strangers’ Gallery, eyes fixed on her husband in the Commons Chamber below. For years the house had mocked Winston and his bellicose warnings about the Nazi threat. Now that his predictions had come true she saw how the house was finally uniting with him in a “temper for war.” At dawn that fateful morning—September  1, 1939—Germany had attacked Poland with brutal force. As the news grew worse by the hour, Neville Chamberlain  had finally made a somber and weary admission to Parliament: “The time has come when action rather than speech is required.” MPs waited feverishly for Winston to intervene, but he left without saying a word.
 
The following day—a Saturday—Clementine  was there again. Britain had at long last mobilized its forces; children were being evacuated from  London, and anxious crowds were gathering in the streets. Some seven hundred miles to the east, the Wehrmacht was smashing the valiant but ill-equipped Polish army and laying waste to towns and villages. Britain was honor-bound by treaty to defend Poland. Yet still the glacial Chamberlain failed to make a move. He finally rose to his feet at 7:44 p.m., nearly forty hours after the start of the Polish invasion. His brief, almost nonchalant statement about the government’s “somewhat difficult position” prompted such bed- lam in the House of Commons that two distraught MPs actually vomited. Once again Winston walked out of the chamber without speaking.
 
At 10:30 that evening at Morpeth Mansions he and Clementine played host to a stream of grave-faced members of Parliament including Anthony Eden, Bob Boothby, Diana’s second husband, Duncan Sandys, Alfred Duff Cooper and Brendan Bracken. Duff Cooper noticed how all those present were in a state of “bewildered rage” but also that Clementine was “more violent in her denunciation of the Prime Minister even than Winston.” Chamberlain had led them all to believe he was finally going to take a stand against Hitler, but still no word had come and it was now clear that he was once more back- tracking on his pledge. As rain pummeled the sixth-floor windows and thunder crashed angrily around the Westminster rooftops, the assembled men begged Winston to take a lead. At last he sat down to write, bluntly warning Chamberlain of the “injury” done to the “spirit of national unity by the apparent weakening of [Britain’s] re- solve.” Then a number of the MPs walked through the storm to Downing Street to deliver the letter in person.
 
By daybreak the skies had cleared and the air had cooled. Now finally the prime minister issued an ultimatum to Germany to halt its hostilities against Poland within two hours. As he famously broad- cast soon afterward, “no such undertaking” was received. At eleven a.m. on September 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany and that same day France, Australia, India and New Zealand followed suit.
 
After listening to Chamberlain on the radio Clementine joined Winston on their roof terrace at Morpeth Mansions. As they watched the first blimps rising slowly over the roofs and spires of London, they thought of the horrors to come. Yet they were far from down- cast. Yesterday’s finished man today stood at the threshold of a new beginning, and as Winston told a Commons sitting that afternoon the prospect of the “call of honour” thrilled his “being.”  He noted privately that Clementine was equally “braced” for whatever the future held.
 
Within minutes of Chamberlain’s announcement, the wailing of the first air-raid siren began outside their flat. Joking about German “promptitude and precision,” Clementine grabbed a bottle of brandy and “other appropriate medical comforts” before heading down the street with Winston to the makeshift shelter. A German refugee, sensing he would not be welcomed by the jocular crowd, hovered anxiously on the pavement outside. Clementine insisted he should come in—although it soon transpired it was a false alarm.
 
Winston’s newfound status as visionary man of action was such that Chamberlain could not possibly exclude him from the newly formed War Cabinet. Later that day the prime minister summoned him to Downing Street and, while Clementine waited in the car out- side, appointed him first lord of the Admiralty—a politically pragmatic decision (not one of the great offices of state but important nonetheless) that seems to have surprised Winston as much as his colleagues. He reported to his old desk at six that evening, and orders instantly came thick and fast—radar was to be fitted to naval ships, merchant ships were to be armed, the Prof was to run a new statistical department. Winston himself set about a quick-fire tour of naval bases, accompanied by Clementine as in the previous war. It was an early indication of how they would work during the years ahead.
 
Back in London Clementine immediately set about bringing together Winston’s supporters—around a dining table, of course. The day after he took office, she arranged a lunch for twenty-four. Alas, Winston had to rush off to deal with a crisis and the meal was abandoned after ten minutes. So began a life with “less schedule than a forest fire and less peace than a hurricane,” in the words of their bodyguard Walter Thompson. He confessed to wondering “a thousand times” how Clementine could “endure the almost unvarying smash-up” of all her plans. Never would there be “one meal without a phone call; even one good-morning kiss not witnessed by waiting courtiers. The mere matter of menus [was] the most awful madness! But Mrs Churchill never showed that she was troubled.”
 
And so, for the second time, Winston Churchill was galvanizing the Admiralty for war with his wife at his side. He worked up to six- teen hours a day, seven days a week, and was soon immersed in every detail of naval operations. He also expected his department to function around the clock—a shock for many senior Whitehall staff, who were unaccustomed to starting at their desks before eleven a.m. Unfortunately, only a fraction of Winston’s fizzing energy would be put to good use. Although war had been declared, Downing Street vetoed most of his more audacious plans lest they antagonize the Germans. Some within the government were still intent on finding a peaceful solution. Winston was adamant that the navy under his command should ruthlessly hunt down German submarines and battleships, but when he ordered their sinking—“not without relish”— many in the government felt ill at ease. The torpor of appeasement still hung over Whitehall.
 
It was a virus from which Winston’s Admiralty was free, but his stock suffered when Britain’s early naval engagements failed to go his way. The sinking on October 14, 1939, of the old battleship HMS Royal Oak, while anchored at the navy’s chief base, Scapa Flow, in the Ork- ney Islands, cost 833 lives.  It also handed the Nazis a public relations coup by demonstrating that even supposedly “impregnable” harbors were vulnerable to U-boats. Over the course of the next month,
 
60,000 tons of British shipping were sunk by magnetic mines alone. Billboards may have proclaimed, “Talk Victory,” but Clementine wrote to Nellie on September 20, 1939, that the news was “grim be- yond words,” saying “One must fortify oneself by remembering that whereas the Germans are (we hope) at their peak, we have only just begun.” Fortunately the evening of December 17 brought better tidings, with the scuttling of the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off the River Plate estuary in South America following a ferocious sea battle with three British cruisers.
 
Yet despite this mixed record, many now believed that Winston’s fanatical drive made him the only politician capable of leading Britain through the darkness of another war to victory. Crucially, word of his prescience in peacetime and exuberant determination in war had reached the White House and on September 11, the US president Franklin D. Roosevelt had cabled him at Morpeth Mansions asking to be kept “in touch personally” about events. In doing so, he broke all the normal protocols, bypassing the prime minister, the Foreign Office and even his own ambassador.
 
In public President Roosevelt was denying that he had any intention of sending Americans to fight foreign wars, but in private he had now established a direct connection to the one man in Europe he thought capable of resisting Hitler. The beginnings of this relation- ship were not auspicious. Winston had snubbed Roosevelt at that London dinner in 1918 and was known across the Atlantic both as “hostile” to America (from his time as chancellor in the 1920s) and as a “drunken sot.” On the Churchills’ side, Randolph had declared himself “anti FDR” after meeting the president in 1936 during Roosevelt’s campaign for a second term. Randolph had been invited to tea at Hyde Park, the Roosevelts’ estate in upstate New York, when he went over to try to save Sarah from Vic Oliver. He had reported back that the American could not match Lloyd George for magnetism or charm. Now, of course, such equivocation would need to be put firmly in the past.
 
Clementine masterminded the move from Morpeth Mansions into Winston’s beloved Admiralty House. In this new age of wartime austerity, the Office of Works had converted the attics into a modest flat for the first lord’s use, so she no longer needed to worry about the cost of running the staterooms. Clementine decided to keep the curtains with red and blue seahorses hung by Lady Diana Cooper when Duff had been at the Admiralty, but few other remnants of naval foppery survived. When Diana visited, she mourned the disappearance of her bed that “rose sixteen feet from a shoal of gold dolphins and tridents,” its blue satin curtains held up by ropes. In its place Clementine had installed a monastic single bunk for Winston and she had covered the walls with battle charts in pastel shades (bright colors gave him headaches).7
 
Under her orders, the first lord’s office was transformed into a no-nonsense modern command center. She arranged his desk at an angle so that he would not be distracted by views of the park, and made sure his chair was practical and uncushioned. But she also had two armchairs, upholstered in comforting red leather, positioned beside the coal-burning fire and placed a constantly replenished cookie tin and soda siphon for his whiskies on a nearby table. She did every- thing she could to ease her husband’s burden—he was not to be bothered by domestic cares.
 
Winston’s war had begun “from the first hour” with the sinking of the passenger liner SS Athenia by a German U-boat on the evening of September 3. It had become immediately obvious that the navy faced a monumental challenge in protecting British merchant ship- ping from marauding enemy submarines. Winston’s days were long and arduous, but he made a point of joining Clementine—and their guests—for both lunch and dinner. He also kept her constantly in- formed. If news—good  or bad—came in of a battle he would often rush over to tell her. She joined him on the quayside at Plymouth when victorious ships sailed in and she would accompany him to speak to the relatives of those who had lost their lives. It was her idea, when battle survivors were being honored, to set up a special enclosure on Horse Guards Parade for the families of the bereaved in order to show them respect and consideration. More than twenty years since she had last launched a ship, she was invited back to do the honors for the aircraft carrier Indomitable. A photograph of Clementine joyfully waving the vessel away became a favorite of Winston’s and the inspiration for a portrait.
 
Winston’s appointment as first lord paid £5,000 a year and even more important provided a defense against creditors, who were suddenly reluctant to be seen pursuing a figure so vital to the war. Moving into Admiralty House allowed the Churchills to sell Morpeth Mansions for much-needed cash. They were thus—for now at least— financially secure. The outbreak of hostilities had not only energized Clementine, it had liberated her from one of the constant strains of Winston’s wilderness years.
 
Not that she was solely occupied with the ceremonial and the domestic: she threw herself into all aspects of the war effort and it visibly thrilled her. Clementine was “more beautiful now than in early life” and was as “fearless and indefatigable” as her husband, noted Lady Diana Cooper in March 1940. “She makes us all knit jerseys as thick as sheep’s fleeces for which the minesweepers must bless her.”8 Clementine also raised money for those minesweepers (mainly civilian trawler crews whose boats had been commandeered and converted). The way she helped run Fulmer Chase maternity hospital for officers’ wives in Buckinghamshire (where she made a point of visit- ing almost every expectant mother herself ) was deemed “ beyond praise” by a midwifery magazine.9 Sadly her attempts to press Chart- well into service proved less successful. Initially she offered the house up for the use of evacuees, whereupon two mothers with seven children duly traveled down from London to take residence—only to leave after three weeks, having found the countryside boring. She then suggested it should be used as another maternity home or hospital, but the medics considered the house unappealing and impractical and turned her down. Eventually the main building was shut up completely; only Orchard Cottage was kept open for family use. Out of sight did not mean out of mind; her diary records as many as fifty visits to inspect for dampness during the war.
 
Conscious of the need to set an example to the nation, Clementine expected  all members of the family to do their duty. Mary, just out of school, worked in a canteen and for the Red Cross, and so as to avoid creating an unserious impression she was, temporarily at least, forbidden to attend dances. Sarah continued acting for a while but was keen to distance herself from Oliver (he charged her with desertion in 1941 and they divorced at the end of the war). She joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and was assigned to the Photographic Interpretation Unit, where she became a “quick and versatile” analyst of aerial surveys at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire, to the northwest of London. Only Diana, now the mother of two children (and, from 1943, a third) by her second husband, Dun- can Sandys, struggled to find a significant role: she became an officer with the Women’s Royal Navy Service (WRNS) but resigned her commission for “family reasons” (although later she became an air- raid warden). Diana never accompanied her father on his foreign travels, as Sarah and Mary later did. Both of his younger daughters carried out  their duties as aides-de-camp  with efficiency and aplomb—and in doing so influenced for the better Winston’s views of women’s capabilities.
 
Diana’s meek domesticity held no interest for her father and was anathema to her mother, who could not abide the way Diana spoke more about her children, and even the idea of sending them to the safety of America, than about the war effort itself. Clementine believed the war came first; when...