Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill

by Sonia Purnell

I send this token, but how little can it express my gratitude to you for making my life & any work I have done possible, and for giving me so much happiness in a world of accident & storm. Winston to Clementine, on their fortieth wedding anniversary, September 12, 1948, Cap d’Antibes

Hozier’s family made its money in brewing, gaining entrance to society thanks to the profits of industry rather than the privilege of birth.

Although his elder brother became the first Lord Newlands and Henry himself received a knighthood in 1903 for his innovative work at Lloyd’s of London after a distinguished career in the army, the Hoziers remained essentially nouveau: middle-class stock who earned their own living.

Clementine (rhyming with mean, not mine)

The twins—Nellie and William (Bill)—came three years later. It is now thought that none of the four children was Hozier’s and that there may in fact have been more than one biological father. Although it was not unusual for upper-class couples in the late nineteenth century to take lovers, the custom was to wait until an heir had been born before playing the field.

Clementine had no knowledge of all this as a child, and the family has only in recent years publicly acknowledged the question marks over her paternity. Doubts were, however, well aired by others during her lifetime.

suggest that Clementine was in fact a Mitford. Her handsome and generous brother-in-law, the first Baron Redesdale, Bertie Mitford, was certainly a favored amour. Photographs of Clementine and Bertie—particularly in profile—suggest remarkable similarities, not least their fine aquiline noses.

Bertie’s legitimate son David went on to father the six renowned Mitford sisters: the novelist Nancy, the Nazi supporters Unity and Diana (whose brother Tom shared their fascist sympathies), the Communist Decca and Debo, later Duchess of Devonshire, and Pamela, who largely escaped public scrutiny.

Besides Mitford, the other prime candidate is Bay Middleton, an avid theatergoer of great charm and private melancholy.

“Je n’y ai pas tenue la chandelle.”

Kitty, by contrast, was puckish, pretty, shared her mother’s extroverted flamboyance and won Lady Blanche’s effusive love.

Waiting for them there were the four-year-old twins Bill and Nellie, who, after a year apart from their elder siblings, no longer recognized them.

Bill’s education at Summer Fields preparatory school in Oxford. Lady Blanche wanted him to benefit from the sort of schooling expected of the grandson of an earl, but her mother’s help extended only so far, and lawyers instructed to pursue Hozier by her brother Lord Airlie had drawn a blank. Lady Blanche’s financial straits had been worsened by illness.

Such was the haste of their departure that she had no time to plan what they would do once they reached France. Family lore has it that she chose where to go on arrival with the toss of a coin. What we do know is that she hailed a cab for Puys and, upon spotting an attractive farm, La Ferme des Colombiers, along the way, ordered the driver to stop so that she might ask the owners if they had spare rooms. Luck was on her side and the family stayed there for the next two months,

Walter Sickert,

For all Sickert’s reputation at the time as a figure of, at best, questionable morals known for his paintings of explicit nudes, Lady Blanche allowed her fourteen-year-old daughter to go unchaperoned to his house. (Later in life Clementine herself developed

a poor opinion of Sickert, once telling Cecil Beaton, “He was, without doubt, the most selfish human being I’ve ever come across,”13 and the crime writer Patricia Cornwell has recently suggested—though her thesis is much disputed—that he might even have been Jack the Ripper.)

larks-en-brochette

Kitty died a month before her seventeenth birthday. Her body was taken back to England, where Lady Blanche pointedly chose to bury her beloved daughter at the Mitfords’ home at Batsford rather than the family seat of Cortachy.

Seventy years after she left, Berkhamsted School was represented at her funeral.

A year after finishing school, during the summer season of 1904, Clementine attended a ball given by Lord and Lady Crewe at their home in Curzon Street. Among the guests in this Liberal household was Winston Churchill, now a rising young politician. Already a controversial figure, he was barred from most Conservative homes because earlier in the year he had defected from the party to join the Liberals over his opposition to tariff reform. (Winston was committed to the principle of free trade on the basis that it would keep food prices low, while the Conservative government was seeking to protect British industry with import duties.) Considered a renegade and class traitor

So Lady Randolph—whose supposed collection of two hundred lovers over her lifetime outnumbered even Lady Blanche’s—introduced Winston to Clementine. The great wordsmith was struck dumb, not even managing the customary invitation to dance. Clementine assumed

she had been introduced out of pity, and in any case did not care for what she had heard about this notorious publicity-seeker. He was, to boot, shorter than her and with his pale round face was not exactly handsome. Clementine signaled to a male friend, Charles Hoare, for rescue. He swept her away onto the dance floor, where he asked what she had been doing talking to “that frightful fellow Churchill.”

Pamela Plowden,

Before that he had flirted with the American actress Ethel Barrymore, who had caused a sensation in London when, in 1902, she arrived in a low-cut bodice pinned with flowers.

So, as he approached his midthirties, he was still to marry or, as the newspapers liked to point out, grow a mustache or hairs on his chest. The press began to label him with that undesirable tag “confirmed bachelor.”26

At twenty-two, she knew far more about life than the ladies of cosseting privilege he normally met, and she was well educated, sharing his love of France and its culture. Through the influence of her aunts and her schooling, here was a woman who was actually interested in politics, if still unversed in its cut and thrust. She was receptive to new ideas, especially, it seemed, from him. For her, his gauche behavior at the ball four years previously had seemingly given way to a maturity and eagerness to please. She found his idealism and

his promotion to the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade (at the precocious age of thirty-three) was announced during her stay.

“What a comfort & pleasure it was to me to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality & such strong reserves of noble sentiment,” he wrote, adding that he hoped they would lay the foundations of a “frank & clear-eyed friendship” with “many serious feelings of respect.”

Indeed, in all the seventeen hundred letters and notes that Winston and Clementine would send to each other over the next fifty-seven years, isolation among people would prove the most persistent theme.

The Daily Telegraph, which had never forgiven him for abandoning the Tories for the Liberal Party, reported: “We have all been yearning for this to happen . . . Winston Churchill is out, Out, OUT.”

his cousin Sunny, the Duke of Marlborough,

“[Sunny] is quite different from me, understanding women thoroughly, getting into touch with them at once,” he wrote rather naively. “Whereas I am stupid and clumsy in that relation . . . Yet by such vy different paths we both arrive at loneliness!”

Winston; Jennie; the Duke; Winston’s great friend F. E. Smith and his wife, Margaret; plus a private secretary from the Board of Trade. It was clear this was to be no low-key visit.

Winston asked at last if she would marry him. Without any further unnecessary hesitation she agreed, on condition that he promise to keep their betrothal secret until she had asked for her mother’s consent. But as they were leaving the temple, a seemingly intensely relieved Winston spotted Sunny and could not help himself, shouting: “We’re getting married! We’re getting married!” Despite this minor betrayal, she later sent him a note via the footman: “My dearest One, I love you with all my heart and trust you absolutely.”33

In an approving letter to her sister-in-law, she said: “I do not know which of the two is the more in love.”34

Even so, he would not brook a long engagement. A date was fixed for the wedding at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, for a month’s time.

The newspapers were now following her every step. She was young, beautiful and marrying a celebrity; she was news, with all the personal invasion that entails.

Photographs of her face were everywhere. The Daily Mail took a particular interest in a dress fitting that lasted, by its calculations, six hours. By contrast, Winston—tied up with his politics as ever—was rarely to be seen.

already broken off at least two engagements and that she could not humiliate a public figure like Winston Churchill.

Over the past year he had become close friends with Violet, the slender-waisted twenty-one-year-old daughter of his relatively new boss, the Liberal prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith.

Winston was not in search of a female version of himself. Upon learning of the engagement on August 14, Violet had reputedly fainted and then written a venomous letter to Clementine’s cousin Venetia Stanley, who was to be a bridesmaid at the wedding. Winston’s new fiancée, said Violet, was as “stupid as an owl,” no more than “ornamental,” and incapable of being “the critical reformatory wife” Winston badly needed in his career to “hold him back from blunders.” Venetia replied by noting that the Manchester

Clementine’s accomplishments six languages, music and brilliant conversation, adding, “I think he must be a good deal in love with her to face such a mother in law.”40 Even

Winston’s mother, Jennie, competitively dolled up in beaver-colored satin and a hat decorated with dahlias. A fading beauty of fifty-four, she was now married to a man a mere fortnight older than Winston by the name of George Cornwallis-West.

Draped in shimmering white satin, a veil of tulle clipped to her hair by a coronet of fresh orange blossom, she wore diamond earrings from Winston and clutched a bouquet of fragrant white tuberoses and a white parchment prayer book. Behind Clementine were five bridesmaids—Nellie,

Many thought Winston fell short as the dashing groom in the presence of such elegance, and flanked by his dapper best man, the mustached Lord Hugh Cecil. He was losing hair and gaining weight, his face “settling into the attitude of pugnacity it was to become famous for.”1 Tailor and Cutter magazine branded his morning suit “one of the greatest failures as a wedding garment we have ever seen,” claiming that it lent him the appearance of a “glorified coachman.”

It can only be guessed who was the more nervous. Both were almost certainly virgins and at nearly thirty-four, Winston’s manly pride was at stake. He had been worried enough beforehand to seek advice from an expert—his mother. By the time they left Blenheim a couple of days later for Baveno on Italy’s Lake Maggiore, it appears the young couple had got the hang of things. On September 20, Winston was able to report to Jennie that they had “loitered & loved,”2 and with surprising candor he described sex to his mother-in-law as “a serious and delightful occupation.” Perhaps Winston applied the same energy and attention to the details of lovemaking as he did his other “occupations.” Within a month of their return from their honeymoon Clementine was pregnant.

Violet’s father, the prime minister, feared more unhelpful attention and had to intervene personally to stop her racing off to meet Winston when he arrived back in Britain. With time, her mood calmed, and she finally returned to London. But Winston was still concerned, and in November he arranged for her to have lunch with him and his new wife.

Her bosom pal Venetia, Clementine’s super-confident Stanley cousin, could finish the Times crossword without needing to write in a single letter.

Clementine could barely conceal her horror; she now considered her mother-in-law a “trial.”6