The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (15 page)

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).