Winston’s cousin, the seductress ...and Soviet spy
She bedded Trotsky, was molested by Mussolini, got spurned by Hitler and ran off with Charlie Chaplin. But the oddest part? As a new show lays bare, she was...
AS THE People’s Commissar of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky was the second most powerful man in Soviet Russia after Lenin. A ruthless revolutionary and rabble-rousing orator, Trotsky was responsible for numerous mass killings, and was even rumoured to have shot his chauffeur for being late.
It was little wonder then, that his British visitor was nervous when she arrived late at his Kremlin office one afternoon in 1920, having been detained by sentries.
Her name was Clare Sheridan. She was a sculptor who had travelled from London to Moscow to produce busts of Trotsky, Lenin and other Soviet leaders.
Blonde, glamorous, aristocratic and bohemian, she represented everything that Trotsky should have hated.
But during that meeting he gazed at her in a way that left her in no doubt how attractive he found her. For her part, Clare was clearly mesmerised by Trotsky’s sparkling blue eyes and shock of hair above his trademark pince-nez. ‘When he talks his face lights up and his eyes flash,’ she wrote.
Their flirtation smouldered as the clay sculpture took shape over the following days. He praised her beauty, her halo of golden hair. At one point, he kissed her hands to warm them after she was caught in a snowstorm.
Another time, she asked him to unbutton his collar. ‘He undid his tunic and the shirt underneath and laid bare his neck and chest,’ she confided in her diary.
Trotsky was 39 and married, Clare was 35 and widowed with two small children back in London. A few nights later, Trotsky took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. Then, Trotsky’s biographer Robert Service believes, they became lovers.
What makes their affair all the more astonishing is that the woman being ravished by Trotsky in his Kremlin office was the first cousin of the arch-enemy of the Soviets, Winston Churchill, then the Secretary of State for War.
It is surprising that we do not know more about Clare, an alluring aristocratic beauty and surely one of the most bewitching, fascinating figures of the interwar period. She was brave and talented but utterly unconventional. Churchill himself called her ‘this wild cousin of mine’.
In an age when women had to at least appear virtuous, Clare saw no need to hide her beauty and devil-may-care sex appeal – and men from every background and race were only too keen to indulge it. Even the toughest men seemed to melt when fixed by Clare’s large, limpid eyes and air of helplessness, which belied a ruthless streak. Her own brother once described her as a ‘cad’ for the way she treated men.
Wherever in the world she travelled, she left a trail of lovers behind, not to mention a damning dossier of evidence collected by MI5, which suspected her of spying for the Soviets as well as sleeping with them.
Trotsky was not Clare’s first Bolshevik paramour. She had gone to Moscow at the invitation of his brother-in-law, Lev Kamenev, a diplomat whom she had met in London.
They too were lovers, and she had sculpted his bust at her London studio. When it was time for him to return to Moscow, he invited her to accompany him, promising that Lenin and Trotsky would sit for her.
Keen for adventure, and smitten by both Kamenev and the picture of a socialist paradise he painted, she agreed. Telling her brother Oswald not to breathe a word to their parents or to her cousin Winston – who had pressed the British Government to side with the Bolsheviks’ enemies in the Russian Civil War – she left for Moscow in September 1922.
When Churchill found out, he was furious and refused to speak to her on her return.
Clare was not the only Briton to make their way to Russia in those febrile post-revolutionary days.
A new exhibition at the British Library, marking the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, features artefacts, literature and art from that period, including material about several Britons involved in the revolution and its aftermath.
They included the writer and socialist HG Wells and the journalist Arthur Ransome – who would later write Swallows And Amazons, and who secretly spied for MI6.
But it was Clare Sheridan, the glamorous golden-haired beauty, who caused the greatest stir back in Britain, because of her connection to Churchill.
SHE was an unlikely communist. Born in 1885, her mother was Clara Jerome, who hailed from a wealthy American family and whose sister Jennie married Randolph Churchill. Winston was their son. Clare’s father Moreton Frewen was nicknamed ‘Mortal Ruin’ because his harebrained financial schemes bankrupted the family.
Clare was intelligent and harboured literary ambitions, but her adored cousin Winston – they were as close as siblings – advised her against a writing career. ‘Better to please and inspire the male sex,’ he wrote patronisingly. In 1910, at the age of 25, she married Wilfred Sheridan, a far from wealthy stockbroker.
In 1912 they had a daughter, Margaret. A second daughter, Elizabeth, died from meningitis. Devastated, Clare designed a statue of a kneeling angel as a memorial, sculpting it herself out of clay, and discovered that she had a talent for it.
In May 1915, with Clare pregnant again, Wilfred went to fight in France. But just days after their longed-for son and heir, Richard, was born, Clare’s letters to Wilfred were returned – with ‘Killed in Action’ scrawled across them. While most war widows of the age resigned themselves to a single life, Clare did not believe in celibacy.
In fact, she proclaimed that a woman should be able to choose her lovers and bear children with any man of her choice without having to marry him. Lord Alexander Thynne, the Marquess of Bath’s son, was the first in a long line of lovers and Clare was devastated when he too was killed in 1918.
Again she sought solace in sculpting. Among those who sat for her were the former Prime Minister, Lord Asquith, her cousin Winston, and his great friend Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor.
She and Birkenhead became lovers, and caused a scandal – because he was married. Her anguished mother appealed to Churchill to intercede but conceded in a letter to her sister: ‘He adores Clare, thinks she can do no wrong... so whatever scandal these two create together is in Winston’s view no scandal – they are splendid, and whatever they feel like doing is perfect.’
But capricious Clare soon moved on from Birkenhead to Kamenev, whose talk of Bolshevism, equality and freedom sounded like the perfect antidote to the class-ridden, money-obsessed society in which she was struggling to survive.
Her brother Oswald was sceptical, writing in his diary: ‘She has got Bolshevism badly, she always reflects the views of the last man she’s met.’
When she returned from her Russian foray, her diary was serialised in The Times, causing outrage due to the rosy light in which she depicted the Bolshevik regime – although she did also complain that the Russians stank due to the scarcity of soap.
She wrote of Lenin’s dedication while Trotsky, she rhapsodised, was ‘a man of wit, and fire and genius, a
Napoleon of peace.’ She failed to mention that she had taken both Trotsky and Kamenev as lovers. It was even rumoured that she had slept with Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the feared Cheka (secret police).
Her family was appalled. These men, with their ‘terrible little beards and dripping with blood’ had killed millions, noted Jennie Churchill, Winston’s mother, acidly. And she was right. Dzerzhinsky had ordered the torture and murder of thousands while her ‘peaceloving’ Trotsky was responsible for mass executions and massacres. Both wanted to bring down Western democracy.
It was not just naivety: she was too intelligent not to realise that the people she praised were murderous monsters, their hands drenched in blood.
As for Churchill, who had spent the preceding years arguing for British intervention to overthrow the Bolshevik regime, he was so furious he could not speak to her.
For all her rebelliousness, Clare was hurt when friends and family ostracised her. So she went on a speaking tour in America, lecturing about her Russian trip.
In Hollywood she met Charlie Chaplin, who was magnetised by her allure. They went camping together in the Californian desert. But the press tracked them down and the affair was plastered across the front pages.
When asked if it was normal for respectable women in Britain to take lovers, Clare responded flippantly: ‘As many as they can get.’
Back in England but still hungry for adventure, Clare left her children and embarked on a European tour. She interviewed republican leaders in Ireland and, in 1922, travelled to Switzerland, where she met Mussolini at a conference.
Hoping to interview him, she described him as ‘marvellous’. He duly invited her to Rome where one British spy sent to monitor her reported that she ‘aired her views... especially in connection with free love.’
But she also declared loudly that ‘Mussolini had converted her from Bolshevism to Fascismo,’ perhaps to curry favour. It worked. He invited her to his Rome hotel room, where she tried to persuade him to be interviewed or sculpted.
One night Il Duce, as he was known, agreed to sit for her but then, apparently inflamed by lust, he grabbed her, snarling: ‘You will not leave till dawn, and then you will be broken in.’
Punches and slaps were exchanged, they wrestled furiously. Clare was taller than him, but Mussolini had bull-like strength.
At last she made a dash for the door and managed to unlock it, but as she opened it, he threw his weight against it slamming it shut on her elbow.
When the telephone rang, distracting him, she managed to escape, though badly bruised. His violence and ‘bestiality’ that night was, as she recalled in her memoir, ‘unwriteable’. She got her revenge by describing him in print as a ‘grotesque tyrant in white spats.’
Yet still her escapades were not over.
In 1923, she went to Germany to hear Hitler speak. An MI5 informant reported: ‘She was very much impressed with the extraordinary enthusiasm that von Hitler aroused amongst an audience of some 10,000 people, with an extraordinarily blood-thirsty speech.’
But he noted: ‘I gathered that she found the German was nothing like so responsive to her personal charms as was the Russian, a fact she deplored.’
Back in London, her MI5 dossier was growing thicker. They watched her, tapped her telephone and photographed her mail, which confirmed their suspicions: Clare was feeding information to the Soviets via two Russian agents, the Daily Herald journalists George Slocombe and Norman Ewer.
She fed them snippets of conversations she had had with Churchill, by then Chancellor of the Exchequer, about sensitive subjects such as foreign affairs.
When MI5 informed Churchill, he replied that he was not prepared to stand by her if she got into trouble with the law. And all the while Clare continued to collect lovers.
In the space of a few months she had affairs with a French general, a French socialist politician and an Albanian activist named Ismet Bey.
MI5 noted: ‘Her energies were being used in every way for the furtherance of Soviet schemes.’
RESTLESS, she moved to Algeria, where she was briefly engaged to a philandering old Etonian, Major Ronnie Bodley, who dressed in Arab clothes. She broke it off, but settled in the Saharan desert where, according to her MI5 file, she seemed to be suspiciously wealthy for a sculptor and novelist. They surmised that the Russians were paying her as an informant.
MI5 continued their surveillance of Clare into the 1940s.
She remained good friends with Churchill, despite her betrayal, and visited him at Chartwell during the war. He invited her to Downing Street to sculpt his bust.
She was exasperated by his inability to sit still during the sessions in 1942. ‘He never gives me a chance. Always that blasted cigar in his mouth which twists his face,’ she complained. After two weeks of sittings – they chatted about Mussolini as she moulded the clay – Churchill professed himself delighted with the result.
Clare died in 1970, five years after Churchill. Her forgiveness, it seems, was complete.
Was she really a Soviet spy? Katya Rogatchevskaia, lead curator of the British Library exhibition, believes she was curious but ‘not a convinced communist’. What is certain is that she fed information to the Soviets, and took their money.
Certainly, MI5 felt that her actions were damaging, embarrassing both Britain and Churchill, due to her almost pathological ‘desire to figure in the limelight’ and her attraction to powerful men.
Yet she was allowed to remain free, neither punished nor imprisoned for her treachery, probably because she was so well-connected. The class system she despised had saved her after all.
Her energies were being used in every way to further Russia