The rain came down on the Greek temple replica in Blenheim’s gardens, and there, sheltered from the storm, Winston Churchill asked Clementine Hozier to marry him. She accepted, but asked him to keep the engagement secret for now, until she could ask for her mother’s blessing. Winston promised he would. When the rain eased and the two walked back toward the house and encountered the other guests, Winston could not contain himself.
Taking Clementine by the hand, he ran toward them, shouting happily, “We’re engaged! ”
The woman who would become Clementine Churchill was born on the 1st of April 1885 in London. Her father was Colonel Henry Hozier, a man who served as secretary at Lloyd’s of London. Her mother was Lady Blanche Ogilvy, eldest daughter of the 10th Earl of Airlie.
Clementine’s sister, Catherine, called Kitty within the family, had hailed her arrival with excitement and glee. Just two years older, Kitty quickly developed a protective and loving attitude toward her little sister. No doubt Clementine and Kitty were each glad to have in the other a comrade and a confidant, because their parents’ relationship had been difficult and traumatic from the very first. When Colonel Hozier and Lady Blanche married in 1878, they knew little about each other.
Henry was a decently acceptable marriage prospect to Blanche’s parents, although her mother privately disliked him for being a bit of a bounder. Still, their willful and outspoken eldest daughter was 26 and as yet unmarried, and they thought it was time to see her settled. Henry was not rich, but his family was on the rise. He had had a distinguished military career and was doing impressive work developing modern international communications infrastructure at Lloyd’s of London.
Henry and Blanche’s acquaintance and engagement had been fairly short, and it did not take long after they were married for each to discover just how different they were from one another—and worse, how little they liked each other. Henry was forceful and autocratic with little or no sense of humor. A far more bitter revelation for Blanche was that Henry did not want children. As a man who seemed to enjoy only his work, neither did he care much for the social season or for entertaining.
Blanche, who had grown up with a large family of siblings in an aristocratic family with its traditions sunk deep in Britain’s upper-class social rituals, was deeply disappointed, and the two began fighting constantly within weeks. Clementine’s early childhood was thus constantly tense and fraught with her parents’ marriage being what it was. When she was three years old, her mother gave birth to twins, Bill and Nelly. Today, it is not generally believed that any of Blanche and Henry’s children were fathered by Henry himself.
Lady Blanche pursued several extramarital affairs. The only reason her infuriated husband could not divorce her was because he had also been regularly and demonstrably unfaithful to her. Clementine’s biographers believe that her real father was either Blanche’s brother-in-law, Bertie Freeman-Mitford, first Baron Redesdale, or perhaps Captain William George Middleton. Clementine’s parents finally separated for good in 1891 when she was just six years old.
After the separation, Lady Blanche continually found herself in straightened circumstances. Henry periodically neglected his duty to support his wife and children financially, and Blanche was often reliant on the charity of her family, particularly her brother, David, the 11th Earl of Airlie, and her mother, Lady Airlie. They did what they could for Blanche and her children, but their own fortunes were not nearly as generous as their old estate and titles implied. To make extra money, Blanche often wrote and submitted recipes for fine cuisine to newspapers and ladies’ journals.
Clementine had complicated relationships with both of her parents. She recalled that as a child she had always been frightened of her father, a distant and endlessly stern man with a terrible temper. One of her earliest memories was being brought into her parents’ bedroom by her nursery governess and seeing her mother open her arms to invite her into bed for a cuddle. Clementine remembered that she had begun to crawl up onto the bed but then froze with apprehension at the sight of her father’s sleeping form on the other side.
She would remain intimidated by him throughout her young life and rarely spoke in his presence. Her relationship with her mother was much healthier and more supportive, but certainly had its own problems. Kitty was Blanche’s favorite child, a fact readily apparent to both Kitty and Clementine. Yet it did not seem to affect their sisterly relationship.
“You mustn’t mind. She can’t help it,” Kitty would say to comfort Clementine in response to some example of Blanche’s favoritism. Though she could be patronizing at times, Clementine loved and admired her confident and pretty older sister. She could understand why Kitty lay closer to her mother’s heart.
Kitty was outgoing, quick-witted, and willful like Blanche, while Clementine was painfully shy, sensitive, and anxious. Knowing that her mother loved Kitty more no doubt contributed to Clementine’s anxiety and lack of confidence in herself, and she was to struggle to overcome these emotional problems for most of her adult life. Despite the lack of overt maternal affection and the complex family dynamics, Clementine knew her mother loved her and appreciated all of the concrete and tangible examples of Blanche’s care for her and her siblings. For a brief period after their separation, Henry Hozier temporarily gained joint custody of Kitty and Clementine, keeping them in the care of his sister, their aunt Mary, during his working hours.
Contrary to a promise he had made to Blanche not to send them away to school, he did so without her knowledge. Eight-year-old Kitty and six-year-old Clementine remembered the boarding school in Edinburgh as a bleak, austere, and unfriendly place. Neither was happy there and both wrote secretly to their father asking him to bring them home. But Henry did nothing, and both sisters were punished for sending their clandestine letter.
Blanche soon found out where her daughters were, and outraged, she traveled at once to Edinburgh. Henry had warned the staff that his wife might attempt to interfere, and accordingly they did not allow Blanche to remove the girls from the school. Instead, Blanche took lodgings right across the street, waved constantly to her children through the windows, and even began attending their classes with them. While she made the staff nervous and uncomfortable, the students loved her, and Kitty and Clementine felt protected and grateful for her presence.
This episode eventually forced a renegotiation of their custody agreement, and Blanche was able to take her two elder daughters home with her for good some weeks later. The family had only a few more interactions with Henry Hozier in the ensuing years, most of them tense and deeply unpleasant. Henry even became physical with Blanche on one occasion, pushing her off his front porch when she attempted to collect Clementine from Henry’s house after a visit. Blanche eventually moved the family to France to avoid him.
Blanche Hozier was not a conventional Victorian mother by any stretch of the imagination. Separated from her husband and unwilling to keep herself on the shelf, she continued to pursue an active social life, including numerous romantic relationships. She frequently spent evenings out while her children would be fed a nutritious but cold supper and put to bed. Lady Blanche was, in fact, an excellent cook, but she wasn’t always in the mood for it.
She was a good housekeeper and did her utmost to make their home elegant and beautiful. These efforts involved considerable expense because the family moved around quite a bit from one short-term furnished rental property to another. But Blanche always bought fresh wallpaper and white dimity for her curtains, furniture covers, and cushion covers, no matter where they moved. Holidays were usually spent with Blanche’s family in Scotland, at the Ogilvy family seat at Cortachy Castle, or at Alderley Park in Cheshire with Lady Airlie’s family, the Stanleys.
Clementine’s cousin, Sylvia Stanley, would remain one of her few close friends throughout her life. Most children of the Victorian middle and upper classes spent no more than an hour or two a day with their parents. Clementine and her siblings were no exception and spent most of their childhood in the care of a long line of governesses. Because of the precarious and changeable nature of Blanche’s financial situation, sometimes their governess might be a well-educated and talented teacher and sometimes simply a housekeeper and babysitter.
Blanche nonetheless always made sure they were undergoing some sort of educational instruction with a hired tutor, if not their governess. Clementine studied literature, history, biology, French, and German, while Kitty, uninterested in academic subjects, was allowed to study music and art, largely to the exclusion of all else. Blanche raised her children with a curious mixture of progressiveness and conservatism. She herself came from a family that deeply valued the education of women.
Her Stanley relatives had co-founded Girton College at Cambridge in 1869 and, as a family with staunchly liberal views on the education of girls, saw their own daughters schooled accordingly. However, Blanche refused to allow her daughters to study arithmetic or mathematics, thinking it unseemly and improper for young ladies. Without Blanche’s knowledge, both Clementine and her younger sister, Nelly, secretly pursued studies in maths in their upper school years. Yet their mother was progressive in other ways.
Blanche’s own mother, Lady Blanche Airlie, had disapproved of young girls engaging in any kind of sport. Blanche Hozier instead encouraged her own daughters to pursue an active lifestyle. She allowed them to ride bicycles and learn to play croquet. She even secretly set up bicycle polo games for them one summer at Cortachy, well out of sight of their grandmother.
Clementine would continue to pursue and enjoy athletics and sport throughout her life. She became a particularly fine tennis player and golfer. She loved hiking, horseback riding, and also took up skiing in her middle years. In 1899, the family spent the summer at Seaford in East Sussex.
Fourteen-year-old Clementine and her siblings were thrilled when their mother announced quite suddenly near the end of July that they were moving to France. Within a matter of a few days, they had packed all they owned, vacated their lodgings, and boarded the little steamer that carried them across the channel to Dieppe. Blanche had reportedly been informed that Henry was about to make another bid for custody of Kitty and Clementine. It is a testament to the speed with which Blanche fled England with her children that when they landed in France, she was said to have quite literally flipped a coin in order to decide which village they should move to.
The family had a rather idyllic existence in Dieppe, and Blanche would return to live there permanently in her later years. It had a bohemian atmosphere with a healthy mix of social classes and a diverse community of native French and international expatriates. Many were intellectuals and artists with whom Blanche loved to socialize, some of them prominent ones like Oscar Wilde and Walter Sickert. Clementine and her siblings were enrolled in a local convent school.
In the autumn of that year, Henry Hozier, evidently horrified that Blanche had sent his children to a Catholic school, did finally pursue them to Dieppe. He arranged to meet his eldest daughters for lunch individually on two consecutive days. Kitty enjoyed her outing with her father, but when it was Clementine’s turn, she found herself nervous and frightened in her father’s company, as usual. She spoke little during lunch and watched the clock until it was time to go.
When Clementine’s chaperone arrived to collect her, Henry gruffly informed the woman that he would bring his daughter home later. He thrust a coin into her hand and quickly closed the door in her face. Clementine listened, terrified, as her father informed her that they would return to England together the next day. Plucking up her courage, she replied she was certain her mother would not allow it.
Clementine waited, frozen, until Henry had moved away from the front door. When he turned his back for a moment to light a cigar, she saw her chance and ran for the door. She escaped into the street, caught up with her chaperone, and the two soon outpaced the infuriated Henry, who had pursued them into the street, shouting and cursing before finally giving up. Blanche later learned that Henry did in fact mean to kidnap Clementine that day.
Henry Hozier died in 1907. By then he had been honored with a knighthood for his impressive career accomplishments, but was little mourned by his wife and children, who had little to no contact with him in the last years of his life. Four months after this traumatic episode, in February of 1900, Kitty fell ill with typhoid fever, and in just a few weeks it became clear that she would not recover. Blanche quickly sent Clementine, Nelly, and Bill to stay with one of her sisters in Scotland.
She did not tell them, or Kitty herself, that she was dying. In fact, when the children received a letter from their mother saying she was bringing Kitty home, they did not immediately understand and believed that Kitty must be better. Clementine was overwhelmed with shock and grief at the loss of her sister, who died just one month short of her 17th birthday. The beautiful, lively, and rebellious Kitty had always been her champion and protector, and Clementine’s relationship with her mother grew more distant and even less affectionate as the two grieved for Kitty quite separately from one another.
Thankfully, the next few years were relatively stable ones for the remaining Hozier children. The family moved to Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, where Bill was enrolled in the local grammar school while Clementine and Nelly attended Berkhamsted School for Girls. It was there that 15-year-old Clementine first began to come into her own. Berkhamsted School was staffed with gifted and progressive instructors.
The school’s headmistress, Miss Beatrice Harris, who was a supporter of women’s suffrage and an advocate of women’s education and independence, became a mentor to Clementine. Under Miss Harris’s tutelage, Clementine cultivated a great passion for learning, and it was during this period that she began to develop her most deeply held political and intellectual positions. She joined the school’s field hockey team and made many friends during her three years at Berkhamsted, later reflecting that her years studying there were some of the best of her life. Miss Harris believed that Clementine showed great promise and encouraged her in her academic career.
Clementine’s strongest subject was French. She achieved a top position in a nationwide French competition in 1901 and was awarded a silver medal by the French ambassador. Clementine soon conceived a desire to attend university, a dream which Miss Harris enthusiastically supported, but which Clementine’s mother most emphatically did not. The family could not bear the expense of sending a daughter to university when they needed to save their money for Bill’s tuition.
Most girls, even aristocratic wealthy girls, did not get a chance at higher education. Many considered the prospect a waste of money since it was automatically assumed that young women would only marry and have children rather than put an education to practical use. To Blanche, what was seemingly more important than the cost of education was that her daughter not become a bluestocking, a derisive term for a female intellectual. When Clementine achieved her higher school certificate, Blanche promptly took her daughter in hand and organized her work and social routines to encourage Clementine to enter the marriage market and the rounds of the social season rather than a university career.
This strategy succeeded insofar as Clementine did not seek a formal higher education, but it did little to dampen her love of learning or her desire to cultivate herself for the service of her country. She spent a good deal of time in Paris when she left school, visiting galleries and museums. She regularly attended lectures at the Sorbonne, though she was never officially registered there. Furthermore, though Blanche did succeed in guiding Clementine to a more conventional life path, Clementine nonetheless made it her own.
She was aided in this by another mentor, Lady St. Helier, one of Blanche’s Stanley cousins whom Blanche had enlisted to sponsor Clementine into the London social season. Lady St. Helier was a supporter of many other radical, liberal, and progressive causes besides women’s education and emancipation, and she strongly influenced the development of Clementine’s political perspective.
With Lady St. Helier at her side, 18-year-old Clementine began attending parties, balls, and receptions. Following the English social season was extremely expensive and difficult, especially considering the Hozier family’s ongoing financial woes. Going to a ball in town was one thing.
Clementine had a few suitable dresses as well as the means to borrow a more extravagant one in a pinch. But her wardrobe was not varied and she often had to do her own washing. She frequently declined invitations to weekend house parties because ladies were usually expected to change their outfits two or three times per day and never wear the same ensemble twice. What’s more, early 20th-century fashions were excessively elaborate, and it was nearly impossible to get dressed or undressed without a lady’s maid, which of course she didn’t have.
She attended society events at the urging of her mother, and she did enjoy the social round, but she was no idle miss. Almost as soon as she had left school, she had gone to work to help support her family. Clementine began giving private French lessons for two shillings and sixpence per hour in 1903 and soon took a second job working part-time for her cousin Lena White’s dressmaking business. She never became an expert seamstress, but she became adept at repairing clothing and producing simple garments, even hats.
Clementine’s youth was interesting. In an age of marked class divisions and stark wealth inequality, she constantly walked between class lines. She was connected to the most privileged members of high society through her family, but had experienced a rather lower-middle-class childhood in an economic sense. She had a mother with an aristocratic background, but who was yet frequently snubbed and blacklisted by members of her own class, and whose conduct in her romantic and sexual life Clementine frequently found embarrassing.
Unlike many of her relations and social contemporaries, Clementine worked with and befriended working-class people with whom she often had more in common than with her more aristocratic acquaintances. These experiences continued to influence her thinking later in life. When she was 19, Clementine became engaged to Sydney Cornwallis Peel. This arrangement was to be an on-again, off-again one for the next two years.
Clementine liked Sydney a great deal. He was kind, intelligent, devoted, and deeply in love with her. He escorted her to parties and to the theater, and sent her white violets every day, except for the few weeks out of the year when they were not in season. When Clementine finally broke off their engagement for the last time, it was a terrible wrench and she suffered from a sense of guilt.
But worse, she told herself, would be to marry him when she did not love him the way he deserved to be loved. Clementine had recently attended her cousin’s wedding, at which the bride had suffered a broken arm shortly before the ceremony. Rather than postpone the wedding, however, the bride had been determined to go ahead, her arm supported in a sling. Clementine had been inspired by this show of love, devotion, and eagerness, and realized how much more was needed to make a marriage successful.
Clementine first met Winston Churchill at a party in 1904, and the 30-year-old fledgling politician did not make much of an impression on her initially. For his part, Winston was transfixed by Clementine. She was tall—taller than he was, in fact—with an athletic figure, ash-blonde hair, large blue eyes with thick, bold brows, dimples, a cleft chin, and a lovely smile. Most photographs of Clementine, her contemporaries noted, failed to do her justice.
She was warm and engaging, despite the innate shyness and low self-confidence she was still trying to conquer, with an infectious, throaty laugh that made others want to join in. Winston immediately enlisted his mother to introduce him to Clementine. For her part, Clementine knew only what she had heard about Winston, that he was a self-aggrandizing publicity hound. She was little predisposed to like him.
What was worse, once Jennie Churchill had made introductions, Winston found himself utterly tongue-tied and unable to think of what to say to Clementine, a truly rare occurrence for the legendary wordsmith. Clementine concluded that Jennie had introduced her son out of pity because she had arrived unescorted and no one had yet asked her to dance. Clementine misconstrued Winston’s nervous silence as a lack of interest, and embarrassed, she quickly made an escape. The two did not meet again for another four years.
One evening in the spring of 1908, 23-year-old Clementine arrived home from work to find a last-minute invitation to a dinner party given by Lord and Lady Crewe. Lady St. Helier had sent a message as well. Some guests had dropped out and the hosts needed to make up numbers.
Would she come? Clementine very nearly said no. She had worn her last clean dress to work that day, and had nothing suitable that was both starched and pressed. But Lady St.
Helier promised to lend her a dress, and so Clementine wearily consented. Winston very nearly decided not to go as well, lingering in the bath longer than he needed to, and arriving late as usual. He was immediately reinvigorated, however, when he entered Lord and Lady Crewe’s dining room and saw the empty chair next to Clementine. He monopolized her attention and conversation all evening, finishing with the men’s after-dinner rituals of brandy and cigars in record time so he could rejoin the ladies in the drawing room as quickly as possible.
The other ladies gently teased Clementine as the guests were taking their leave for the ardent and marked attention Winston had paid her all evening. This meeting had gone much better, and Clementine found that this time she had liked Winston immediately. He was brilliant, full of energy and conviction, with a playful and mischievous sense of humor and fun. He lived in a fast-paced and fascinating world of politics, statecraft, and public service, one she very much wanted to be part of, and about which she had many opinions.
More importantly, Winston seemed to admire her for herself. He expressed his admiration for the fact that she worked for a living, declaring that he had never met a society woman who did. He asked her opinions on political and social issues of the day and listened as if they had the weight of wisdom and authority behind them. The two began writing to one another regularly following the Crewes’ dinner party and saw each other several times in the company of family and friends throughout the spring and summer.
The two had much in common. Both had been raised by less-than-conventional mothers and had often felt neglected or left out of the circle of family love. Winston’s father had preferred his younger son Jack as Clementine’s mother had preferred Kitty. For all his dignity, pride, and passionate bluster, Winston had a deeply needy and sensitive side, one he gladly shared with those he trusted.
Violet Asquith, daughter of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, and whom Churchill had courted before he met Clementine, observed that Winston was armed to the teeth for life’s encounter, but also strangely vulnerable and in want of protection. In a letter to Clementine detailing the unfortunate news of his electoral defeat at Manchester, Winston wrote, “Write to me again.
I am a solitary creature in the midst of crowds. Be kind to me. ” No doubt Clementine, who had experienced little overt affection in her life, was disarmed by Winston, who both loved and needed her. She also admired his indefatigable spirit, for he picked himself up again to be successfully elected as MP for Dundee just one month after his loss in Manchester.
In August, Winston invited Clementine to a house party at Blenheim, his family’s seat and the home of his cousin and dear friend Sunny, the Duke of Marlborough. All of Winston’s assembled family knew that he intended to propose to Clementine that weekend. When she awoke on the first day, she dressed and came downstairs to meet Winston, who had promised to show her Blenheim’s rose gardens. Predictably, Winston was still in bed, and his cousin Sunny had to distract her by taking Clementine on an impromptu carriage ride around the estate until Winston was up and dressed.
Suitably apologetic and good-humored, Winston took Clementine for a walk in the garden that afternoon. They took shelter from a sudden rainstorm in a replica of a Greek temple, where Winston proposed and Clementine accepted. She asked him to keep their engagement secret for now, and Winston promised he would. But when the rain abated and the two came upon the other guests on their way back to the house, Winston could not contain his excitement.
Taking Clementine by the hand, he pulled her with him as he ran toward them. “We’re engaged! ” he shouted happily. The very next day, Clementine departed for London carrying a letter from Winston which formally asked Blanche Hozier for permission to marry her daughter.
At the last minute, Winston jumped on the train with Clementine and accompanied her home. Blanche received the news with pleasure and readily gave her consent. Winston was undeniably intelligent, ambitious, and charismatic, and Blanche could see that they loved each other. Winston was in no mood to wait and suggested they set the wedding date for the 12th of September, only a month away.
For Clementine, events had moved swiftly, and unsurprisingly, she had a nasty case of cold feet on the morning of her wedding. She had spent the night at Lady St. Helier’s house, who had kindly offered to host the wedding reception. When Clementine awoke on her wedding day, she initially could not recall where she was.
All looked cold and unfamiliar, and she simply could not assimilate the notion of getting married without first having breakfast with her family. The difficulty was that the only clean clothing she had to change into was her wedding dress. She slipped into her dressing gown and quietly went downstairs. She encountered a maid to whom she confided her anxiety and who seemed to understand her fears perfectly.
The maid kindly and discreetly fetched her best outfit. Clementine dressed quickly in the maid’s clothes, slipped out of the house, and boarded a bus. The driver, who knew it was her wedding day, inquired, “Ain’t you going the wrong way, miss? ” to which Clementine simply smiled conspiratorially.
Blanche, Bill, and Nelly were all surprised to see her, not least because it was her wedding day, but also that she was dressed in someone else’s clothes. Breakfast with her family was full of laughter and merriment and perfectly allayed her fears. She promptly returned to Lady St. Helier’s to prepare for the ceremony.
Clementine arrived that afternoon at St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, on the arm of her brother, Bill. She wore a white satin gown with a tulle veil held in place by a coronet of fresh orange blossoms and carried a small prayer book along with a bouquet of white tuberoses. Winston spoke his vows in a strong, clear voice, while Clementine’s voice, overcome with emotion, could barely be heard by spectators.
Crowds cheered them as they emerged from the church. The couple honeymooned in Italy, and less than a month after their return, Clementine was pregnant with the first of their five children. Winston once remarked that after their wedding he and Clementine had simply lived happily ever after. This was patently untrue.
The two rowed frequently about many things: politics, Winston’s professional conduct, the children, finances—the usual suspects in any marriage. Winston was usually quick to apologize and mend matters. Clementine, who found Winston exhausting to spar with verbally, as most people did, expressed herself better in writing and would write him a letter of apology and explanation. They usually refused to let the sun go down on their anger.
While she loved Winston, Clementine initially showed difficulty adjusting to married and family life. Her experience and state of mind seems to have been similar to that of many women before the advent of second-wave feminism. Now that she was married and settled with children, she ought to be happy, but suffered depression, boredom, restlessness, and dissatisfaction. This problem without a name was easily improved upon when Clementine resolved to commit herself fully to her husband’s cause and ambitions.
In early 20th-century Britain, women could not vote and there were no female members of parliament. Nonetheless, Clementine set herself out to be Winston’s partner, surrogate, and adviser in all of his professional and political endeavors. She read works on politics, history, and philosophy constantly in order to maintain an intellectual grasp of the current political situation and became an extremely talented political operative. Combining the talents of diplomat, lobbyist, spy, specialist, activist, and spin doctor, she cultivated social and working relationships with journalists, parliamentarians, ambassadors, military officials, and ordinary people alike to keep her husband informed and to represent and promote his initiatives.
For his part, Winston welcomed her active participation wholeheartedly and quickly came to rely on her constant presence at his side throughout his storied and frequently stalled climb to the office of prime minister over the course of the next three decades. Winston and Clementine had many political differences, but they shared in their early years an equal zeal for social reform to benefit poor and working-class citizens and championed taxes to pay for it, which largely affected the wealthiest. This earned Winston the label of class traitor as well as party traitor for his defection from the Tories to the Liberals. A great many elites now refused to acknowledge the Churchills in public.
Their stance on Ireland also made them controversial to some of their more conservative contemporaries. Clementine accompanied Winston to Ireland in 1912 during the campaign for Home Rule, where their car was viciously attacked by unionist protesters in Belfast but warmly welcomed upon arrival in a Catholic stronghold. One area of politics over which the couple strongly disagreed was women’s suffrage. Winston made good-natured fun of Clementine for her pinko beliefs, particularly regarding votes for women, but she held firm to her conviction that women had a right to political participation.
Winston would eventually come around to Clementine’s point of view on women’s suffrage. When he finally gained election as prime minister in 1940, Clementine did not fail to point out just how crucial the support of women voters had been to his ultimate electoral success, a fact which he wholeheartedly conceded. As radical as she appeared to be from the Tories’ perspective, however, Clementine was not a supporter of the suffragettes. She was a suffragist, a firm believer in the rightness of the cause, but deplored some of the suffragettes’ more extreme and violent tactics.
On one occasion in 1914, Winston was attacked in a train station by a suffragette protester with a whip. Winston stumbled off balance when the woman aimed her attack at his face. Clementine unhesitatingly scrambled over a pile of luggage, grabbed Winston by the shoulders, and pulled him backward before he could fall onto the tracks and into the path of an oncoming train. The first five years of their marriage had seen Clementine and Winston become a remarkably cohesive political partnership.
She was constantly at his side through confidential meetings and major public events alike. She reviewed and gave him feedback on his speeches beforehand, advised him on delicate negotiations, and served as his surrogate whenever he could not be present. She made many public appearances and speeches on his behalf, campaigned for him during elections, and entertained political, military, and diplomatic officials at luncheons, dinners, and parties in Winston’s absence, never failing to represent and promote his interests. When they were apart, they wrote to one another almost daily.
Officials who dealt with Churchill quickly came to understand just how much he relied on Clementine and trusted her implicitly to speak and act for him. In fact, when people were too apprehensive or uncertain about how to approach Winston about a particular issue, they automatically went to Clementine, likely the only person who could broach any subject with him. Sadly, while this power couple loved their children, their family life was perhaps what suffered most from Winston and Clementine’s political ambitions and commitment to public service. It was still the convention to only spend an hour or two per day with the children, just as it had been in Winston and Clementine’s childhood.
Neither had grown up with parents who were nurturing or regularly involved with their emotional development, and it seems that in turn both Winston and Clementine also struggled to bond with their own children. They tried to mark holidays and special occasions with memorable celebrations and gifts, but three out of the four surviving Churchill children overall felt rarely noticed and fairly inconsequential to their parents when they were young. Their three eldest—Diana, born in 1909; Randolph, born in 1911; and Sarah, born in 1914—all suffered from depression and alcoholism in their adult years and managed no less than seven marriages between the three of them. Randolph remained particularly angry and estranged emotionally from his parents, whom he felt had chosen loyalty to the national interest above their own children.
He showed marked behavioral problems as a boy and struggled with a gambling addiction as an adult. Only Mary, the youngest, born in 1922, seemed to grow up without these issues, perhaps owing to the closer relationship Clementine and Winston were able to cultivate with her during childhood. It is true that both Winston and Clementine prioritized the collective health and benefit of the nation above personal concerns in general, and both worked constantly toward that effort, often at the very real expense of time with their children. It is also true that Clementine’s and Winston’s letters to one another rarely referred to their children.
In their early childhood years, Clementine’s letters when Winston was away usually mentioned the children only in passing with few details. Their relationship with one another was a far more dominant theme across their correspondence. More than 1,700 letters written by Winston and Clementine Churchill to one another survive, and virtually all testify to their love and devotion to each other. Pregnant with her second child and nursing a bad cold during 1910, and thus unable to join him on campaign, Clementine awoke from a nap to find her bedroom full of flowers.
“You are a sweet darling Lambbird,” she wrote to Winston. The two conceived pet names for each other. She was Cat and he was Pug. Clementine often drew a little cat at the end of her letters, sometimes snuggled up with kittens, sometimes with ears back or tail up to playfully indicate her mood.
Most of all, their surviving letters are full of the details of their ongoing political collaboration. Over the years, Winston sometimes took her advice and sometimes ignored it, and often he was the worse for it, to his detriment. He eventually learned to value her strategic sense, coming to recognize over time that she sometimes had a better sense of character or a better understanding of the popular mood than he did. When the First World War broke out, Winston was immediately engaged in military preparations and strategy.
Anxious to break the terrible stalemate of trench warfare, Winston proposed the Dardanelles campaign, whereby the Allies might take Constantinople and knock the Turkish alliance out of the war. It turned out to be one of the most notorious failures in British military history, with 200,000 casualties. The fault for the episode lay with many who had formulated and carried out the plan, but Winston proved a handy scapegoat for the more powerful in government who wished to avoid being blamed. Clementine was furious at Prime Minister Asquith, Admiral Fisher, and Lord Kitchener, who seemed prepared to let Winston sink into public disgrace and lose his position in the war cabinet to avoid sharing responsibility for the failure of the Dardanelles campaign.
Winston would have to wait years for the relevant documents to be declassified before he could clear his name, and for years afterward would often hear the word Gallipoli shouted angrily at him in public. Determined to serve if not in government, he rejoined his regiment in France and saw frontline action in the trenches, a prospect which terrified Clementine to no end, but which she understood was necessary to rehabilitate Winston’s public persona. She worked ceaselessly on the home front to keep Winston and his men supplied with necessities and comforts at the front and kept him cheered with loving letters and assurances that she was campaigning assiduously on his behalf for his triumphant return to politics. The rest of Clementine’s time was taken up with war work.
Just like most other British women on the home front in the Great War, with the men fighting in the trenches, women had gone to work in their thousands. Clementine was actively involved in the running and logistics of canteens for workers in the manufacturing sector. At her busiest, she organized and directed the daily activities of nine canteens, which fed thousands of munitions workers several times per day. As the war dragged on and more men were sent to the front, more and more women entered the workforce, changing the face of labor in Britain for good and altering perspectives on the role of women in public life.
Clementine was one of 8 million women who met the qualifications to vote when women’s suffrage was first promulgated in 1918. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire the same year in recognition of her work for the war effort. The end of the Great War brought enormous relief and glad tidings. Just four days after the armistice in November of 1918, Clementine gave birth to her fourth child, Marigold.
David Lloyd George was elected prime minister the following year, and Winston was restored to a cabinet post—and none too soon. The family had been quietly struggling financially for years. While Winston supplemented his income with his prodigious work as a writer of frequent articles and many books, his ministerial salary of roughly £5,000 annually did not cover much more than basic living expenses. Unlike many of their political contemporaries, the Churchills had no fortune of their own.
They moved residences quite often, wherever there was an affordable rental or kind offer available from a friend. In fact, after Winston lost his position over the failure in the Dardanelles, the family had to move in with Winston’s brother Jack and his wife Gwendeline, whom everyone called Goonie, for the duration of the war. Thankfully, Winston’s new job came with a house in London. Then in 1921, Winston quite suddenly inherited the estate of an Irish cousin worth £4,000 per year.
Clementine breathed a sigh of relief, but their sorrows were about to descend in battalions. In the spring of 1921, Clementine’s brother, Bill, died in a hotel room in Paris. The reasons were unclear to the family, but Bill was a frequent gambler and may have sustained ruinous losses. Winston’s mother died only a few months later when her injured foot became gangrenous.
To his eternal regret, Winston had not been at her side. Though he had run out of the house and through the streets, wearing only his dressing gown when he heard the news that Jennie had hemorrhaged, he did not make it in time to say goodbye. Worse still, two-year-old Marigold developed septicemia during the late summer of 1921 and died three months before her third birthday. Winston and Clementine were both at her side when she passed.
It nearly broke both of them, and they found it near impossible to talk about in the years ahead. Nearly a year after Marigold died, in 1922, Clementine gave birth to her fifth and last child, Mary. The next decade would test both the strength of Clementine’s marriage and her love for Winston. The Churchills’ money troubles had always been compounded by Winston’s luxurious tastes and his refusal to live without them.
Clementine, on the other hand, was quite frugal, owing to a lifetime of experience with tight budgets, and managed her household expenditures admirably. She always prided herself on finding ways to get any household necessities for a song. It aggravated her that Winston seemed not to worry about how he spent money, and floored her even more when he lost money gambling as he regularly did. Her mother and brother had both been incurable gamblers, and Clementine had thus developed a highly critical attitude toward the pastime.
During the summer of 1922, Winston took her to visit Chartwell, an estate for sale that had formerly housed an orphanage. She admired the property, but the condition of the house promised to make any needed renovation or improvements exorbitantly expensive. Clementine was furious to discover that Winston had already gone ahead and purchased the property without consulting her. The two also grew further apart politically and ideologically as Winston jumped back into the Tory camp with the rise of the Labour government.
She still supported him and worked actively to promote his career and political agenda, but she was still a Liberal at heart, agreed with several Labour initiatives, and disliked what she perceived as the lack of care for ordinary people and the elitism of Tory politics. The eldest Churchill children came of age in the early 1930s, but seemed quite lost. Diana married in 1932, a marriage that broke down within a year, and Randolph was already drinking heavily and gambling frequently. Clementine began to suffer from what can only be described as depression.
She regularly needed short holidays away from Winston and the children, and periodically checked into health or medical spas for a few weeks at a time. Winston often described his black dog temper as all-consuming, but his melancholy never left him unable to face his family or public life in general as it did for Clementine. In the spring of 1935, when she was invited on a yacht trip by the Guinness heir, Lord Moyne, she may even have had an affair with a society man named Terence Philip. Clementine stayed away for nearly two months on this trip.
Prior to her departure, she had told Goonie, her sister-in-law, that she was going to ask Winston for a divorce. The two had disagreed vehemently over their daughter Sarah’s marriage and Winston’s refusal to accept her choice, which Clementine believed had driven Sarah away. Apparently, the last straw had been Winston’s determination to publicly support King Edward VIII in his desire to marry Wallis Simpson. Clementine’s anger probably had less to do with any moral stance on the marriage itself than with the fact that Winston was once again damaging his career against her advice to the contrary.
In this instance, Clementine again proved more adept at reading the national and broader political mood than Winston was. Likely sensing that he was about to lose both his wife and his daughter, Winston reconciled with Sarah and convinced her to come home. Whatever their differences, Clementine ultimately returned to Winston in April of 1935. The first sign of the next European conflict, the rearming of Germany, was underway, and the Churchills resolved to face the coming cataclysm together, united.
While Neville Chamberlain’s government pursued a policy of appeasement, Winston and Clementine provided a base for those who saw the danger that Hitler’s Germany truly posed. They quietly welcomed, entertained, and worked with ambassadors, military officials, and political operatives of all sorts over the next few years, determined to remain vigilant and ready to respond to Germany’s undoubtedly imperialist intentions. When his conviction was vindicated and he became prime minister in 1940, Clementine and Winston found they had finally reached their goal, but in a darker hour than either could ever have imagined. Both worked seven days a week for the war effort.
When Clementine was not at Winston’s side, she was fundraising for the Red Cross to benefit Russian Allied troops or undertaking morale-boosting visits to factories. She visited and comforted people in London neighborhoods devastated by the Blitz, listening to their stories and distributing aid. She received an enormous mailbag full of letters from both desperate and grateful people every week and tried valiantly to answer as many of them as possible. With Winston utterly absorbed in managing and directing the war, Clementine was much more attuned to domestic matters and advised Winston accordingly and ably.
All of the Churchill children served in some capacity during the Second World War, which made Clementine immensely proud. Indeed, for her, no resource was too precious to be marshaled for victory. In consultation with Winston’s doctor, Dr. Moran, she made the command decision not to inform Winston that he had had a heart attack while visiting the Roosevelt White House during Christmas of 1941, and yet another in 1943.
She thought the knowledge might be too much for him and would compromise his efforts to conduct the war. Clementine even looked the other way when her daughter-in-law, Randolph’s wife, Pamela Digby, pursued an affair with a prominent American diplomat during their campaign to persuade the United States to join the Allies. Clementine had always been accused of being prudish by her contemporaries. She had been shocked in her younger married years to hear some political wives suggest to her that she might take a lover from among the powerful in order to help her husband’s career.
Now, with the fate of Britain, Europe, and perhaps the world hanging in the balance, she became much more practical and encouraged Pamela to continue cultivating such relationships if it meant ultimately persuading the Roosevelt administration and the United States to join Britain in the war. Randolph never forgave his parents, but Winston and Clementine defended Pamela, and she became a crucial diplomatic figure in the war, if a rather unconventional, unofficial, and racy one. Pamela eventually married the former American ambassador, Averell Harriman, in 1971. Clementine wrote to her daughter-in-law that she was pleased to see an old flame reignited for her.
On the evening of June the 5th, 1944, Clementine and Winston tried to enjoy a candlelit dinner at 10 Downing Street. Amidst the maelstrom of preparations for D-Day, Clementine had been privy to every secret detail of one of the largest and most elaborate invasions in history, and both she and Winston were overcome with nervous energy and dread. “Do you realize,” he asked her, “that by the time you wake up in the morning, 20,000 men might have been killed? ” No doubt he was recalling the horror of the Dardanelles campaign during World War I and all the countless slaughtered troops that still haunted him.
Clementine did what she could to keep his spirits up. Victory in Europe made Winston virtually certain he would win reelection as prime minister. But Clementine, who was much more attuned to the domestic popular mood, didn’t hold out much hope. While Winston was still in foreign-policy mode and saw the confrontation of Soviet communism as all-important, Clementine understood that the Labour Party’s message was resonating strongly with a country that yearned to see ordinary people’s rights and poor standard of living addressed—and did not like Winston seeing the Labour Party as dangerous socialists.
As it happened, she was right, and Clement Attlee took the reins of government with the Labour Party’s victory in 1945. When the war was over, Clementine was invited to visit the Soviet Union. Stalin wished to induct her into the Order of the Red Banner of Labour in recognition of her war work for the Red Cross on behalf of Russian troops. She met Stalin in person, gifting him with a gold fountain pen from Winston.
“My husband hopes you will write him many friendly messages with this,” she told him. Stalin promptly put the gift aside and replied dismissively that he usually used a pencil. The growing chill between Russia and Great Britain was already palpable. Despite her decidedly cool welcome from Stalin, Clementine was received joyfully by Russian troops and citizens who cheered her and lined up to shake her hand during her hospital visits and public speeches.
On the 8th of May 1945, Clementine celebrated VE Day in the British Embassy in Moscow. In a burst of high spirits, she climbed onto a chair, raised a glass of champagne, and proclaimed loudly to all assembled, “We will drink to victory. ”
Both Winston and Clementine were honored many times for their service to Great Britain and all the Allied countries in the years following the end of World War II. Prime Minister Attlee made Clementine a dame in 1946, and four months after Winston’s death, she was made a life peer in the House of Lords by Prime Minister Wilson with the title of Baroness Spencer-Churchill of Chartwell.
She happily attended sessions of Parliament until her health began to decline more significantly in the late 60s. Winston returned to power as prime minister once again at the impressive age of 76. But the now 65-year-old Clementine was far less active in policymaking during his second stint in government than she had been in his first. Still, she campaigned for him and remained a dependable partner, adviser, and clever operator.
After the frenetic crises they had weathered together—two world wars and more than four decades of marriage—Winston and Clementine lived a much quieter life in their later years. They finally got the chance to fully renovate and improve Chartwell, to build better and closer relationships with their children, and to enjoy their grandchildren. They continued to be dogged by money troubles, particularly since the ongoing renovation and upkeep of Chartwell had cost them dearly, as Clementine had known it would. Still, she had grown to love the estate, making it her own as well as a home for her family.
Luckily, friends of the Churchills fundraised and lobbied to have Chartwell purchased by a National Historic Trust for preservation, with the understanding that Winston and Clementine could still live there until their deaths. The 1960s were a time of terrible loss for Clementine. Her eldest daughter, Diana, killed herself in 1963, just one year before Winston finally died at the age of 90. Their son Randolph died of a heart attack in 1968.
With her husband and three out of her five children gone, Clementine’s health declined rapidly, and she cleaved all the closer to her daughters Sarah and Mary and to her grandchildren. On the 12th of December 1977, Clementine died of a sudden heart attack while at lunch with one of her secretaries. Her funeral and burial were private, attended only by family and close friends, and she was laid to rest next to Winston at Bladon, as she had instructed. Clementine had lived to be 92 years old, having been honored many times for her service to a grateful nation.
Perhaps the tribute that meant the most to her came from Winston himself, who wrote to Clementine on the occasion of their 40th wedding anniversary: “I send this token, but how little can it express my gratitude to you for making my life and any work I have done possible and for giving me so much happiness in a world of accident and storm. ”
At the memorial service held for Clementine at Westminster in January 1978, her grandson Randolph read an oddly far-seeing quote from the sermon which had been preached at her wedding to Winston all those years before: “There must be in the statesman’s life many times when he depends upon the love, the insight, the penetrating sympathy and devotion of his wife. ”
Clementine’s role in Winston’s life as his closest adviser and greatest influence was overlooked for many years. It seems nearly impossible to tell Clementine’s story without talking about Winston, and yet she practically disappears from most of Winston’s biographies.
In this she stands in stark contrast to her contemporary Eleanor Roosevelt, who was also one half of an extraordinarily important political partnership, but is considered one of the most consequential and influential women of the 20th century. Eleanor managed to carve out a political and public presence in her own right, but she began to do so as Franklin began to shut her out of a political role in his administration. Winston, on the other hand, drew Clementine closer to his work during his career, sharing the burden, responsibility, and strategy-making with her and placing her in a position of ultimate trust. Because of this, Clementine perhaps felt less need than Eleanor to strike out on her own.
Perhaps she was held back by a distrust for self-aggrandizement. Either way, she never courted the press or public opinion for her own benefit. It had all been for Winston. “My darling,” Clementine had written to her husband on their 11th wedding anniversary in 1919, “You have been the great event in my life.
You took me from the straitened little bypath I was treading and took me with you into the life and color and jostle of the highway. ”
Unlike the United States, Britain had never had a formally or even informally defined role for the wife of the leader in government. Today, first ladies are constantly scrutinized in the media and perform various roles from the official to the unofficial. Few have taken on a role as active as that taken by Clementine Churchill.
In fact, it’s fair to say that she pioneered the role of first lady in Britain. She managed to persuade an initially reluctant government to help her, and usually seemed surprised when anyone noticed or praised her efforts on behalf of Winston’s government or her service to the nation. Importantly, Clementine was probably the only person who was unafraid to reprimand Winston for his often terrible behavior or to reproach him for opinions she disagreed with. Throughout her marriage to one of the most larger-than-life figures of the 20th century, she softened his more undeniably autocratic edges and likely prevented him from becoming the tyrant he could have been on many occasions.
Despite a lifetime of disagreements, shared tragedies, and exhaustive efforts for the public good, she loved him deeply while he doted on and utterly depended on her. As Clementine’s biographer Sonia Purnell wrote, “The question should not be, what did she do for him, but rather, what could he have done without her? ”
