First Lady

The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill

Sonia Purnell

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781781313077
• eBook ISBN: 9781781314708
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the personal and political upheavals of the Great War, through the Churchills’ ‘wilderness years’ in the 1930s, to Clementine’s desperate efforts to preserve her husband’s health during the struggle against Hitler, this is the inspiring but often ignored story of one of the most important women in modern history.

Without Churchill’s inspiring leadership Britain could not have survived its darkest hour and repelled the Nazi menace. Without his wife Clementine, however, he might never have become Prime Minister. By his own admission, the Second World War would have been ‘impossible without her’. Clementine was Winston’s emotional rock and his most trusted confidante; not only was she involved in some of the most crucial decisions of war, but she exerted an influence over her husband and the Government that would appear scandalous to modern eyes. Yet her ability to charm Britain’s allies and her humanitarian efforts on the Home Front earned her deep respect, both behind closed doors in Whitehall and among the population at large.

That Clementine should become Britain’s ‘First Lady’ was by no means pre-ordained. Born into impecunious aristocracy, her childhood was far from gilded. Her mother was a serial adulteress and gambler, who spent many years uprooting her children to escape the clutches of their erstwhile father, and by the time Clementine entered polite society she had become the target of cruel snobbery and rumours about her parentage. In Winston, however, she discovered a partner as emotionally insecure as herself, and in his career she found her mission. Her dedication to his cause may have had tragic consequences for their children, but theirs was a marriage that changed the course of history.  Now, acclaimed biographer Sonia Purnell explores the peculiar dynamics of this fascinating union.

Chapter One

The Level of Events

1885–1908

Fear defined Clementine Hozier’s earliest memory. After being deposited by her nurse at the foot of her parents’ bed, she saw her ‘lovely and gay’ mother, Lady Blanche, stretching out her arms towards her. Clementine yearned for the embrace yet was frozen to the spot by the sight of her father slumbering at her mother’s side. ‘I was frightened of him,’ she finally explained much later.¹ But by then the damage was past repair. That moment of spurned maternal love prompted long-lasting feelings of rejection within Lady Blanche, such that Clementine was never to gain a secure place in her mother’s affections. Nor would she conquer her trepidation of the forbidding Colonel Henry Hozier, who, she came to believe, was not actually her father anyway. For all the fortitude Clementine would show in adulthood, the instinctive insecurity that endured from her infancy never left her.

The Hoziers were then living in Grosvenor Street, central London, a far cry from the romantically haunted Cortachy Castle in the Scottish Highlands where Lady Blanche had grown up. Clementine’s mother was the eldest daughter of the tenth Earl of Airlie, whose ancient Scots lineage was enlivened by castle burnings and Jacobite uprisings. Her seraphic face belied her own rebellious spirit and her parents, their family fortunes much reduced by the Earl’s gambling losses, had been keen to marry her off. They were thus relieved when in 1878, at the age of twenty-five, she became engaged to Hozier, even though he was fourteen years her senior and only of come-lately gentry with limited means.

Lady Blanche’s mother, also called Blanche, was a Stanley of Alderley, a tribe of assertive and erudite English matriarchs who combined radical Liberal views with upper-class condescension. They thought too much food, new clothes, fires in the bedroom and – above all – jam, the epitome of excessive indulgence. Champions of female education, the Stanley women had co-founded Girton College in Cambridge in 1869. No less formidably clever than these eminent forebears, Blanche senior had later mixed with the likes of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, the Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, his bitter Liberal rival William Gladstone, and John Ruskin, the art critic, designer and social thinker. She had also made her ineffectual husband switch the family political allegiance from Conservative to Liberal and was equally forceful with her tearful granddaughter Clementine, who was not one of her favourites; it was evidently unfitting for a girl of Stanley blood to show her emotions.

Hozier’s family had made their money in brewing, gaining entrance to society through the profits of industry rather than the privilege of birth. Although his elder brother became the first Lord Newlands, a now extinct title, and Henry himself received a knighthood in 1903 for his innovative work at the insurance market Lloyd’s of London, the Hoziers remained essentially nouveau: middle-class stock who earned their own living.

In the eyes of many in the City, Henry was a ‘gay, flamboyant’ personality, but the Lloyd’s archives suggest a darker nature. He was a ‘born autocrat’ with an ‘excessive love of power’ and an absence of humour, one report states. He also suffered from an equally ‘excessive’ fondness for spending the Corporation’s money. An internal investigation in 1902 revealed that his business methods, while apparently productive, were of ‘doubtful ethics’. Some of his soi-disant successes were, in truth, exaggerated or unfounded and, after he challenged one persistent critic to a duel in 1906, his reputation inside the upper echelons of Lloyd’s never quite recovered.² Clementine was probably unaware of these stains on his character, admitting in a booklet she wrote for her own children, entitled My Early Life, that she knew very little about the Hoziers.

The Earl, too, considered his son-in-law a ‘bounder’, and Lady Blanche discovered to her horror that Hozier’s previous career giving orders in the Army had led him to expect the same unquestioning obedience at home. Far from liberating her from parental control, marriage to the splenetic and vengeful Henry proved even more restrictive. Before her wedding, Lady Blanche had assumed that she would become a notable political hostess in her own right. True, Hozier briefly dabbled in public life – standing unsuccessfully in 1885 as the Liberal Unionist candidate for Woolwich, and also helping to pioneer the idea of an Intelligence Service – but he had not the remotest interest in hosting his wife’s freewheeling aristo friends. Nor did he want children, whereas Lady Blanche decided not only that she did, but that she would take the matter into her own hands if he refused to oblige her. It was not unhelpful that Hozier was frequently away on business and unfaithful himself. Sexy, bored and lonely, Lady Blanche saw no reason not to shop around for a worthy mate of her own.

Five years after her wedding day, on 15 April 1883, she gave birth to her first child Kitty. Two years later, on April Fools’ Day, Clementine (rhyming with mean not mine) was born in haste on the drawing-room floor. The twins – Nellie and William (Bill) – arrived after another three years. Of the four children, it is now thought likely that none was Hozier’s and that there was probably 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 at least until an heir had been born before playing the field. Discretion was also demanded. Lady Blanche, though, ignored all the rules and there were rumours of altercations between rivals. Indeed, the blonde, blue-eyed Lady Blanche is reputed to have juggled up to ten lovers at once – a feat of athletic organisation she was pleased to advertise quite widely.

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. The doubts were, however, well aired by others during her lifetime. Her mother’s own, albeit inconsistent, confessions to friends suggest Clementine was in fact a Mitford. Lady Blanche’s handsome and generous brother-in-law, the first Baron Redesdale, Bertie Mitford, was certainly a favoured amour. Photographs of Clementine and Bertie – particularly in profile – suggest remarkable similarities, not least their fine aquiline noses. Perhaps it was in tribute to her sister’s forbearance in sharing her husband in this way that Lady Blanche named her second daughter after her. Bertie’s legitimate son David went on to father the six renowned Mitford sisters, most famous among them the novelist Nancy, the Nazi supporters Unity and Diana (whose fascist sympathies were shared by their brother Tom), the Communist Decca, and Debo, later Duchess of Devonshire.

Besides Mitford, the other prime paternal candidate is Bay Middleton, an avid theatregoer of great charm but private melancholy. He later broke his neck steeple-chasing but was a frequent visitor to Lady Blanche during the years when she conceived her eldest two daughters. She dropped hints to notable gossips about his involvement, although some have since suggested that this was a fig-leaf for her sister’s sake. Such was the complexity of Lady Blanche’s sex life we shall probably never know the truth. Even Clementine’s daughter Mary Soames said she found it ‘difficult to take a dogmatic view . . . Je n’y ai pas tenue la chandelle’ (colloquially translated: ‘I wasn’t playing gooseberry’).³

The excitable younger Mitfords relished their great-aunt’s racy reputation, unlike the rest of Lady Blanche’s family who thought her ‘mad’. London’s more respectable drawing rooms were similarly scandalised by the public uncertainty over the bloodline of the Hozier enfants, with the result that Lady Blanche was regularly snubbed. Meanwhile, her children were cared for by a succession of grumpy maids and governesses who vented their frustration by swishing their wards’ bare legs with a cane. The one kindly soul in those early years was sixteen-year-old Mlle Elise Aeschimann, a Swiss governess who arrived when Clementine was three. She thought the infant girl starved of attention and took to carrying her around everywhere, despite Lady Blanche’s admonitions against spoiling her. Mlle Aeschimann started Clementine and Kitty on their lessons, especially French, and though she stayed only two years her warm-heartedness made a lasting impression. Clementine later went to visit her in Switzerland and even helped her financially when in old age she fell on hard times.

Clementine remained an anxious child, however, and was tormented by a perfectionist streak. According to her daughter Mary she had a ‘most sensitive conscience, and suffered untold miseries if the immaculate white of her lace-edged pinafore was marred by spot or stain’.⁴ She also took endless pains over forming the neatest handwriting, a trait that led the adult Clementine to describe her younger self as a ‘detestable little prig’.⁵ Her principal emotional crutch was a large, black pet poodle, which devotedly listened to her troubles, until it died under the wheels of a train in an accident. Clementine had been ordered to leave the dog behind at the family’s new home, a country house outside Alyth in Scotland, but it had pursued her to the station and tried to jump on board. ‘I do not remember getting over this,’ she told her own children many years later.⁶ Such emotional neediness – and a continuing fear of adults – earned her much maternal scorn. Her elder sister Kitty, by contrast, was puckish, pretty, shared her mother’s extrovert flamboyance and won Lady Blanche’s effusive love. Unsurprisingly, Kitty became accustomed to getting her own way – even once threatening to burn down the house to stop a governess from reporting her latest misdeed. Devoted to her always, Lady Blanche’s preference for her firstborn was brazen and consistent.

In autumn 1891, Hozier sued for divorce and the two elder girls became ‘helpless hostages’ in a bitter battle over custody and financial support. Clementine was just six when she and Kitty were wrested from their mother to live with Henry and his sister, the spinster Aunt Mary, who believed children benefited greatly from being whipped. Hozier found the girls an inconvenience, though, so parcelled them out to a governess in the Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted. Rosa Stevenson advanced her charges little academically but both girls observed her fastidious housekeeping, including two hours every day polishing the oil lamps: ‘They burnt as bright and clear as stars,’ Clementine remembered fondly.⁷ She also recalled the delicious sausages, ‘although the slices were too thin and too few’.

Sadly, Aunt Mary considered Mrs Stevenson too soft, and uprooted the girls again by dispatching them to a ‘horrible, severe’⁸ boarding school in Edinburgh. The odour of yesterday’s haddock and the crumbs on the floor offended Clementine’s precociously high standards, and like her sister she felt desperately homesick.

Finally admitting defeat, Hozier allowed Lady Blanche to extract her unhappy daughters and whisk them back to her rented house in Bayswater (a district then known among the smart set as the west London ‘wildlands’). Waiting for them there were the young twins Bill and Nellie, who, after a year apart from their elder siblings, no longer recognised them. Hozier came for tea on a couple of occasions but his awkward visits were not a success and soon stopped altogether; once the divorce was finalised, so too did almost all of his financial support. Lady Blanche may have had her children back together, but she was now dependent on her own cash-strapped family for handouts.

Over the following eight years, Lady Blanche and her brood led a peripatetic existence, moving to one set of furnished lodgings after another. In part this was out of financial necessity as her creditors caught up with her, but the constant roaming also suited her capricious nature. Even so, she ensured every new home was elegant and fresh, with snowy white dimity furniture covers (always two sets so they could be kept spotlessly clean) and fine muslin curtains at the windows. Clementine was enraptured by her mother’s ability to spin comfort out of the least promising circumstances, writing in My Early Life: ‘She had very simple but distinguished taste and you could never mistake a house or room in which she had lived for anyone else’s in the world.’ Lady Blanche’s exalted standards even inspired a new verb: to ‘hozier’ became synonymous among her daughters’ friends with ‘to tidy away’. Unfortunately the cost of such stylish home-making pushed the family ever further into debt.

In an effort to earn her keep, Lady Blanche (who was also an excellent cook) wrote culinary articles for the newspapers, but she sometimes found herself too bored or distracted to put food on the table for her own offspring. She was frequently absent as well (presumably with her many lovers). Yet if her children sometimes wanted for maternal attention they rarely went short of learning. Their mother employed full-time Francophone or German governesses and other teachers were brought in as required. The only, rigidly observed, omission from their education was arithmetic, which Lady Blanche deemed ‘unseemly’ for girls.

Around 1898, when Clementine was thirteen, Lady Blanche decamped from London for rooms near the railway station at Seaford, just east of the Channel port of Newhaven. There she lived with her dogs Fifinne and Gubbins on the first floor at 9 Pelham Place, a terrace of modest grey houses, while Clementine, Kitty, Nellie, Bill and their ‘feather-headed’ governess stayed at number 11. Lady Blanche refused to muzzle her dogs, in contravention of strict new anti-rabies laws, and was once summoned to the magistrates’ court in Lewes. Although she emerged from the trial with the desired ‘not guilty’ verdict, perhaps due in part to the fact that one member of the bench was a personal friend, Clementine was troubled about her mother being ‘not very law-abiding’.⁹

This rackety existence could not have been in starker contrast to the four weeks the children spent every summer in the historic splendour of Airlie Castle. Here Lady Blanche’s mother, the Dowager Countess of Airlie, kept an unblinking vigil against lack of gratitude – a subject on which she had written an essay – insisting on the need to instil the virtue in young children as ‘otherwise they grow up louts’.¹⁰ She believed in fasting to ‘awaken the gifts of the Spirit’ but loathed unladylike pursuits; Lady Blanche, by contrast, allowed Kitty and Clementine to play croquet (practice that would later prove extremely useful) but only behind the gardener’s cottage out of Grannie’s sight. Lady Blanche may have had a fiery temperament but her natural rebelliousness permitted what were then unusual freedoms for her daughters. Not only did she hire bicycles for them back in Seaford (these being too expensive to buy), she allowed them to play bicycle polo on the rough grass opposite their lodgings too. Another beloved, unfeminine pastime was cricket, at which Clementine would in time become a decent player. She was also taught locally to play a creditable game of golf.

By now Clementine and Kitty were quite different: the former plain and awkward; the latter pretty and flirty – albeit impudent and ruthless with it. Clementine stood in her boisterous sister’s shadow, but never showed any jealousy towards her. In fact she found Kitty to be a comfort in a bewildering world. The star turn relied on a devoted support act, and while this role was far from easy it was nonetheless one in which Clementine came to excel. Like Lady Blanche, she was ‘dazzled’ by her sister, while Kitty shared her younger sibling’s ‘unspoken contempt’ for their mother’s ‘violent, ungovernable partiality’. ‘You mustn’t mind it,’ Kitty would counsel Clementine. ‘She can’t help it.’¹¹

Clementine’s plight won sympathy from at least one of Lady Blanche’s friends – Mary Paget, a tender-hearted woman who often invited the girl to stay at her nearby home, West Wantley. Clementine adored the sixteenth-century manor with its ducks, chickens and boating lake, and envied the Pagets their stable family life. She considered Mary, who was her only real childhood friend, to be the most beautiful woman in the world. In truth, Mary was handsome, but plump with it and sometimes her stays would burst open while she was gardening. She also pinned into her rather sparse bun false grey hair which would habitually fall out among the flowerbeds.

Clementine’s fondness for this generous woman made her returns to Seaford all the more of a wrench at the end of the golden weeks spent in her care. Many tears would be shed and, noticing Clementine’s reddened eyes, Lady Blanche once angrily accused her of loving Mary Paget more than her. To which Clementine rashly replied: ‘Of course I do.’¹² The Wantley trips were stopped.

With no real home or father, scant money and precious little maternal love, it is perhaps unsurprising that on the cusp of her adolescence Clementine entered an emotionally religious phase. She yearned for respectability and certainty and, in November 1898, she was confirmed in Kirriemuir Church, near Lady Blanche’s family seat, watched by her mother, grandmother and Mary Paget. Her piety became so fervent that on one occasion, after listening to a sermon on charity, she donated a pendant given to her by a relative, only to be admonished for giving away such a valuable gift and compelled to ask for its return.

By the summer of 1899 Lady Blanche was deeply in debt. Hozier had defaulted on even the meagre allowance he had agreed following the divorce, but governesses still had to be paid, and then there were the annual fees for Bill’s education at Summer Fields preparatory school in Oxford. Lady Blanche had wanted him to benefit from the sort of schooling normally expected by the gra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 The Level of Events
• 2 More Than Meets the Eye
• 3 The Pain and the Pride
• 4 I Believe in Your Star
• 5 Married Love
• 6 Loss Unimaginable
• 7 A Chandelier’s Life and Sparkle
• 8 Temptation and Redemption
• 9 World of Accident and Storm
• 10 Operation Seduction USA
• 11 From FDR to Stalin
• 12 A Private Line
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Illustrations
• Copyright