The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (134 page)

L
ate in 1919, pressed for cash and not yet a wealthy writer, Churchill had sold his Lullenden estate to Ian Hamilton and moved his family in with the Freddie Guests, sharing expenses with his cousin while Clementine hunted for a new London home. A tall, handsome house at 2 Sussex Square, a block from Hyde Park’s Victoria Gate and adjoined by a mews which would serve as Winston’s studio, proved highly suitable, but he still yearned for a country home. Early in 1922 this became possible. On January 26 his first cousin once removed, Lord Herbert Vane-Tempest, died in a train accident. Lord Herbert had been a bachelor; Winston, as his heir, came into several thousand pounds. Clementine felt “like a cork bobbing on a sunny sea,” while her husband sought out real-estate agents. He looked at several properties and found the one he wanted near Westerham, in Kent, some twenty-five miles from London and just a mile north of Lullenden. The house itself was ugly. Built of pleasant red brick during the reign of Henry VII, the original structure had been charming, but during the nineteenth century its owners had added ponderous bays and oriels, two ungainly wings, stifling clots of ivy, and heavy flora: rhododendrons, laurels, and conifers. Its view, however, was magnificent. Sited on eighty acres above a combe, it overlooked the great Kentish Weald, with its smooth meadows, suave green slopes, and sheltering woods of oak, beech, and chestnut, watered here by a clear spring, the Chart Well, which gave the manor its name. Years later, looking down on it, Churchill said: “I bought Chartwell for that view.” At the time, however, he wondered if he could afford it. Clementine was in Scotland then, so he drove Diana, Randolph, and Sarah there, telling them he wanted to show them an estate he might buy. They adored it. Sarah recalled: “We did a complete tour of the house and grounds, my father asking anxiously—it is still clear in my mind—‘Do you like it?’ Did we like it? We were delirious. ‘Oh, do buy it! Do buy it!’ we exclaimed.” The asking price was £5,500. On September 15 Winston offered £4,800, explaining: “The house will have to be very largely rebuilt, and the presence of dry rot in the northern wing is I am advised a very serious adverse factor.” Norman Harding, the agent, told him his offer was unacceptable. “He strode up and down,” Harding recalled afterward, “using every argument he could think of…. Eventually, with very bad grace, he gave way.” They compromised on £5,000.
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Chartwell

Chartwell

Churchill had been right; the rot was advanced, and the mansion had to be reconstructed from the ground up. An architect was engaged, a friend of his aunt Leonie’s who had just finished a country place at Churt for Lloyd George. The ivy and Victorian trimmings were stripped away, high crowstepped gables were added, and also a new wing for a drawing room, dining room, and Clementine’s bedroom. The job took more than two years. Winston grew impatient. Clementine didn’t. Her husband had committed a grave error. He had made the purchase without consulting her. And when she saw it, she disliked it. “At first,” she told Martin Gilbert, “I did not want to go to Chartwell at all. But Winston had his heart set on it.” Mary remembers that her mother “tried very hard to love the place which so enthralled Winston. She worked like a Trojan to make it the home and haven for us all that he dreamed of. But it never acquired for her the nature of a venture shared; rather, it was an extra duty, gallantly undertaken, and doggedly carried through.” Among other things, she was concerned about the expense. The cost of rebuilding the house rose to £13,000, then £15,000, and finally £18,000. Winston wrote her: “My beloved, I do beg you not to worry about money, or to feel insecure. On the contrary the policy we are pursuing aims above all at
stability
(like Bonar Law!). Chartwell is to be our
home.
It will have cost us £20,000 and will be worth at least £15,000 apart from a fancy price. We must endeavour to live there for many years & hand it on to Randolph afterwards. We must make it in every way possible economically self contained. It will be cheaper than London.” He contemplated selling the house in Sussex Square: “Then with the motor we shall be well equipped for business or pleasure. If we go into office we will live in Downing Street!”
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During the reconstruction of “Cosy Pig,” as he called it, he leased Hosey Rigg, a nearby house where, he was delighted to learn, Lewis Carroll had written
Alice in Wonderland
. On weekends he would prowl around his new property, the children tagging along. He wrote his wife: “I am going to amuse them on Saturday and Sunday by making them an aerial house in the lime tree. You may be sure I will take the greatest precautions to guard against their tumbling down.” Sarah would remember the tree house as “a two-storeyed affair; it was a good twenty feet high, and was reached by first shinning up a rope and then climbing on carefully placed struts between the four stems of the elm.” During the Easter holiday of 1924 he and the children began sleeping at the manor in what Mary calls “camping” style. To Clementine, who was laid up, he wrote: “This is the first letter I have ever written from this place, & it is right that it shd be to you. I am in bed in your bedroom (wh I have annexed temporarily) & wh is sparsely but comfortably furnished with the pick of yr two van loads…. You cannot imagine the size of these rooms till you put furniture in them. This bedroom of yours is a magnificent aerial bower. Come as soon as you feel well enough to share it.” The children, he said, had “worked like blacks.” He added a couplet: “Only one thing lack these banks of green—/ The Pussy Cat who is their queen.”
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Under his supervision—and his straining muscles—the grounds began to take shape. To Cosy Pig’s natural setting he added three hundred asparagus plants, two hundred strawberry runners, and a large consignment of fruit trees: apple, pear, plum, damson, and quince. For Clementine he created a water garden, and, beyond it, a fragrant azalea glade. White foxglove was planted, then blue anchusa. Carp swam in a warm pond. Black swans, a gift from the Australian government, cruised across a large, pleasant lake which a previous owner had created by damming the spring. “Why only one dam?” Winston asked. He wanted a place to swim. Another site was excavated and water diverted into it. Sir Samuel Hoare, in the neighborhood, wrote Beaverbrook: “I had never seen Winston in the role of landed proprietor,” and described him as engaged in “engineering works” which “consist of making a series of ponds in the valley.” He added: “Winston appeared to be a great deal more interested in them than in anything else in the world.” But both lakes, Churchill decided, were too weedy and muddy for swimming, so he decided to abandon one to wildfowl, drain the other, scoop out a third, waterproof its bottom, and build another dike, hiring a crew of workmen and pressing Detective Thompson into service. Thomas Jones arrived and found Churchill “attired in dungarees and high Wellington boots superintending the building of a dam by a dozen navvies. This is the third lake, and the children are wondering what their father will do next year, as there is room for no more lakes.” Writing Clementine on August 19 of his first Chartwell summer, Winston mentioned—fleetingly, almost impatiently—that Conservatives in the Epping constituency, “one of the safest seats in the country,” were actively courting him, and then hurried on to what was, for him, more exciting news: “Work on the dam is progressing…. The water has been rising steadily. We have this evening seven feet. It will be finished by next Tuesday, or eight weeks from its initiation. I am at it all day and every day.” A foot of mud remained in the old lake, and he was clearing it out: “Thompson and I have been wallowing in the most filthy black mud you ever saw, with the vilest odour, getting the beastly stuff to drain away. The moor hens and dab chicks have migrated in a body to the new lake and taken up their quarters in the bushes at the upper end.” Thompson recalls pulling on rubber waders each morning before going out to “the dig” with Winston, shoveling, patching, lining the bottom of the new excavation with bitumen, “thick slimy mud everywhere,” and one occasion of rare mirth when “I dropped a dollop of mud on his pate.”
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It was all in vain. The bitumen leaked, and the new dam, though built of cement, threatened to slide down the hill. Undaunted, Churchill built a circular pool by the house, fed by the Chart Well, whose waters came purling down through fern-fringed channels and rocks fetched by train from Cumberland. The spring was supplemented by an electric pump, which sent water to and from the ponds “rather like a stage army,” in Sarah’s phrase, or, in Winston’s, “filtered to limpidity.” It was a heated pool, then a novelty; a visiting engineer assured him that the boilers were big enough to heat the Ritz. The uselessness of the dams was frustrating, but erecting them had not been a complete waste; the lakes were comely, and the work, like his landscaping and gardening, had been a diversion from politics. Thompson believes it was good for Churchill “to get close to the ground and the fine smell of it, and to work it and plant it and make it bloom and yield.” After the voters of Westminster had rejected him Winston wrote a friend: “I am content for the first time in my life to look after my own affairs, build my house and cultivate my garden.” Once the mansion was completely finished and the family had spent two strenuous days moving in, he continued to toil outside, devising rookeries, miniature waterfalls in the water garden, elaborate waterworks for the golden carp, and planting bamboo, wisteria, and acers on the banks of the carps’ pool. Then, after putting up a garden wall of Kentish ragstone, he decided to become a bricklayer. Returning from London one evening, he paused in Westerham to visit Quebec House, General James Wolfe’s birthplace. After examining the wall, with its dentils surmounted by a sloping top, he said: “That’s what I want.” Shortly thereafter James Scrymgeour-Wedderburn, an early Chartwell guest, scribbled in his diary: “Winston is building with his own hands a house for his butler, and also a garden wall!”
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He built much more than that. Altogether he finished two cottages, several walls, and a playhouse for Mary. Scrymgeour-Wedderburn wrote: “He works at bricklaying for hours a day, and lays 90 bricks an hour, which is a very high output.” He himself never claimed more than one a minute, but his craftsmanship was admirable; the sturdy results stand today. He wrote Baldwin: “I have had a delightful month building a cottage and dictating a book: 200 bricks and 2,000 words a day.” Stories about his skill reached James F. Lane, an official of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers. Lane wrote Winston, proposing that he join the union. Winston replied: “Would you mind letting me know whether there is any rule regulating the number of bricks which a man may lay in a day; also, is there any rule that a trade unionist may not work with one who is not a trade unionist; and what are the restrictions on overtime? I may say that I shall be very pleased to join the union if that would not be unwelcome to your members.” As it turned out, he was unwelcome. Lane sent him a union card and a certificate of membership, and addressed him as “Brother Churchill,” but a Manchester local protested that his recruitment invited “public contempt and ridicule.” The executive committee voted that Churchill was ineligible. He kept the certificate, however, and framed it.
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