Woman behind Winston
FIRST LADY: THE LIFE AND WARS OF CLEMENTINE CHURCHILL
by Sonia Purnell
(Aurum Press, £25)
WHEN it comes to thankless unelected roles in the public eye, that of monarch is probably the most trying, for it offers no release but death (or abdication — an escape route mal vu by the current incumbent). Next on the list of jobs no one would willingly choose is surely that of prime minister’s spouse.
Over the years a succession of prime ministerial consorts have taken a variety of different approaches. All, in different ways, doubtless provided invaluable support, as well as a necessary conduit to the world outside the cabinet room. But perhaps none was more intimately involved in the business of government than Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine.
In character and background, Clementine and Churchill were strangely similar — Clementine’s biographer, Sonia Purnell, describes them as “two insecure people with much in common”.
Both came from backgrounds of social privilege but disastrous emotional deprivation. Churchill’s mother, Jennie, and Clementine’s mother, Blanche, were prone to “frantic sexual intrigue”. Blanche was divorced by her husband, Colonel Henry Hozier, when Clementine was six years old. He was in any case almost certainly not her father — the most likely candidate was Blanche’s brother-in-law, Bertie Mitford, grandfather of the notorious Mitford sisters.
Purnell writes that as children, both Churchill and Clementine “eventually developed strategies for self-protection — in his case naughtiness, in hers reserve.”
As an adult, Clementine suffered from an explosive temper fuelled by lacerating perfectionism. She was 24 when she married Churchill in 1908. He was 10 years older, already a successful politician, and she anticipated that marriage to him would be “tremendously stimulating”.
Her married life got off to a difficult start: she returned from honeymoon pregnant and irked by Winston’s continuing intimacy with his old flirt, Violet Bonham-Carter, who had entertained strong hopes of marrying him herself. But she seems swiftly to have realised that “her sole course of action, if she wanted their marriage to work, was to join him in his ‘trade’.” For the next 56 years, until his death in 1965, Churchill would rely on her, infuriate her and occasionally drive her to thoughts of divorce.
Purnell’s contention is that while Britain would not have survived the Second World War without Churchill’s leadership, Churchill would not have survived without Clementine.
Through the catastrophe of the Dardanelles campaign in the First World War, for whose failure he bore the blame, the wilderness decade after 1929 when he was out of office and financial ruin loomed, and the strain of wartime, Clementine was a largely unacknowledged but increasingly potent presence.
The cost to her, and to their five children, was appalling. Purnell argues that “it was she, rather than Winston, who succumbed to the horrors of full-blown depression and the miseries of its treatment”. One daughter, Marigold, succumbed to septicaemia at the age of two, having been left in the care of an inexperienced young nanny. Diana, Randolph and Sarah Churchill had fractured relationships with their parents. All suffered from alcoholism and eventually died from its effects. Only the youngest child, Mary, lived a “rich and full life”.
In our own era of sturdy individualism, it is remarkable and sometimes disturbing to read of Clementine’s resolve to subordinate her own desires and her children’s happiness to her husband’s cause. Purnell describes their relationship as “the ultimate coalition”, but she gives a vivid, often psychologically harrowing, account of Clementine’s struggle to sustain it.
Her breezily written biography doesn’t quite succeed in making its subject appealing, but it is an intriguing study of a character both deeply flawed and, in her way, magnificent.