My grandmother, the ONLY person who dared stand up to Winston
As the acclaimed movie Darkest Hour finally highlights the pivotal role of Churchill’s wife Clementine, their granddaughter Emma (that’s her on the great man’s knee) says about time too!
THE earliest vivid memory I have of my grandmother, Clementine Churchill, is of her sitting up in her beautiful four-poster bed, her hair perfectly groomed and wearing something glamorous that certainly did not look slept in. My mother and I — then all of the age of four — would walk up the hill from our home at Chartwell Farm to visit Clementine while she enjoyed breakfast in bed, eating toast and marmalade and reading the newspapers in a pair of white gloves to protect her hands from printers’ ink.
With my mother Mary — the youngest of Clementine’s five children — perched on the end of the bed, they would talk of grown up matters, while I played around in her boudoir, an elegantly decorated dressing room with chintz at the windows. On her table, there was scented powder in glass bowls and lipsticks aligned in perfect order — all of them banned from my attentions.
Or I would wander on to the terrace outside her bedroom that commanded the glorious views of the Weald of Kent.
Later, I realised this morning ritual was, for my grandmother, a moment of respite from a daily life packed with great events and demands as she fulfilled the role of loving consort to the extraordinary man she’d married 45 years earlier.
My grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill, was then 79 and in his second and final term as prime minister.
Much of what Clementine endured, both personally and as the wife of Winston, would have pole-axed a lesser woman. But luckily for him — and, indeed, for all of us — she was so much more than a dutiful wife.
And now at last she is portrayed as a powerful force in her own right, in the new film, Darkest Hour, which looks afresh at the events of 1940 when Churchill became PM, and all his worst fears about the rise of Nazi Germany — about which he had warned throughout the Thirties — come to fruition.
Gary Oldman delivers an Oscarworthy performance in which he inhabits, rather than plays, my grandfather, but he is matched in uncanny resemblance and bearing by Kristin Scott Thomas as Clementine. Scott Thomas captures her rather rigid posture, her nervous tics at moments of tension, and her elegant style.
The affection between them is vividly brought to life in charming scenes where Churchill is more puppy than bulldog and Clementine an affectionate playmate. For our family it is thrilling to see her no longer in the shadows, but rather as my grandfather’s confidante and cheerleader — and also his equal.
In 1908, aged just 23, she had committed herself to a complex and brilliant man with a love of action, whose ambitions were high but whose early career was uncertain. His personal sense of destiny was only fully vindicated when he became Britain’s wartime leader.
In the course of their 57-year marriage, Clementine saw Winston through desperate days of political humiliation and disfavour, episodes of the ‘black dog’ — the crippling depression and self- doubt that haunted him periodically — and the tragic loss of the fourth of their five children, Marigold, who died aged three.
And of course, she was at his side through the war years when his need for support was never greater.
So who was this woman, whom history has rather consigned to the wings, unfairly diminished by the long shadow cast by her husband, and whose impact, until now, never been fully portrayed on film?
Clementine Hozier was born in 1885, the daughter of Blanche and Colonel Henry Hozier. Her father was a thorough scoundrel, whose business activities at Lloyd’s were regarded with horror even in those unregulated days. Privately he was a bully and an authoritarian — his children were terrified of him.
Even before their separation, the Hoziers had what would now be called an open marriage, and their four children (Kitty, Clementine and twins Nelly and Dick) are assumed to have been fathered by Blanche Hozier’s several lovers. (She once boasted that she was juggling ten men at once.)
Clementine’s father is thought to have been Bertie Mitford, Lord Redesdale, grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters.
Following her divorce, Blanche Hozier took her children to live in Dieppe where, as a foreign, titled beauty, she embraced the bohemian lifestyle of a group of expat writers and artists which included Oscar Wilde.
But this idyll came to a sad end in 1900 when her eldest daughter and Clementine’s confidante, Kitty, died of tuberculosis. The heartbroken Blanche moved back to England where the family lived in a state of impoverished gentility in Hertfordshire.
Clementine attended Berkhamsted High School for Girls at a time when girls of her class were usually taught by governesses. As a result, Clementine was far better educated than many of her peers. She also mixed with girls from a variety of social backgrounds, another rarity in those far- off days, which stood her in great stead as the wife of an MP.
She first met my grandfather in 1904 at a society ball where he was, uncharacteristically, dumbstruck by her beauty. She was not impressed by his small stature or his silence and soon escaped to dance with someone else.
Their next meeting, in 1908, was more auspicious when Winston arrived late to a dinner party to find Clementine Hozier seated next to him.
He was enamoured from the start — here was a girl, not just of great beauty but also intelligence, one whom he could talk to rather than just worship from afar. She was more guarded but increasingly captivated as he lay siege to her by daily letters.
Soon after, during a weekend at Blenheim Palace, Winston’s birthplace and home of his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough, he proposed to her. She wrote to his mother Jennie: ‘I feel no one can know him without being dominated by his charm and brilliancy.’
Their early married life was idyllic and their love for one another shines through their letters.
Clementine proved to be an eager student of politics and was thrilled by her husband’s work, first as president of the Board Of Trade and then as home secretary. In the first two years of their marriage there were two babies, and she fought the first of 14 election campaigns at his side.
Winston was most definitely a rising political star — until the disaster of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I. In 1915, as First Lord Of The Admiralty, Churchill
Clementine was by his side for 57 years