The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (135 page)

Like many another country gentleman, admiring his new estate, Winston decided to “live off the land”—to make Cosy Pig pay. The consequences were uniformly disappointing. Poultry, sheep, cattle, and pigs arrived healthy and then languished. He kept hoping for success; in the summer of 1924 he wrote Clementine: “The 9 elder swine are sold for £31. They have eaten less than £1 a week for 18 weeks of life—so there is a profit of £13. Not bad on so small a capital.” But he really knew nothing of livestock, and his wife regarded the creatures with great apprehension. He liked them; he remarked: “The world would be better off if it were inhabited only by animals.” Yet he resisted modern techniques of scientific farming, and was indignant when a prosperous breeder suggested artificial insemination. Churchill growled: “The beasts will not be deprived—not while I’m alive!” The fact is that he couldn’t bear to think of livestock exploited and then slaughtered. To him they were all pets, to be cherished and pampered: the golden orfe, a marmalade cat, Carolina ducks, chickens, sheldrakes, the swans, polo ponies, Canada geese, cygnets, assorted dogs, and bottle-fed lambs. One day Sarah and Mary came to him in tears. Mary’s pug, they cried, was desperately ill. Their father, almost as upset as they were, dashed off an incantation to be chanted whenever the dog fell sick:
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Churchill building a wall at Chartwell, 1928

Once he had said good morning to it, almost any creature at Chartwell was safe. An exception was a goose; his wife had it cooked for dinner. At the table he picked up the knife, hesitated, and handed it to Clementine. “You carve him, Clemmie,” he said. “He was a friend of mine.” The only animal to fall from grace was a ram named Charmayne. Winston had nursed Charmayne as a lamb, but when it grew up it turned vicious and butted everyone. A veterinarian was summoned. He performed an operation. If anything, the beast grew worse. The children were afraid of it; Clementine begged Winston to get rid of it. He scoffed at the idea. “How ridiculous. You don’t have to be frightened. It is very nice and knows me.” However, one day, to the secret delight of the children, Charmayne got behind Churchill, charged, butted the back of his knees, and knocked him flat. Before the sun set, the ram had vanished. How he had disposed of it he would not say, but Clementine hoped it had been sold, and for a good price; she wanted to see something at Chartwell pay for itself.
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Clementine was frequently absent from her husband’s Cosy Pig in those early years. The children always missed her terribly. “
DARLING, DARLING
Mummy,” Sarah wrote. “Don’t forget to come home sometime. Papa is miserable and frightfully naughty without you!” But she had other obligations. Lady Blanche was dying in Dieppe and needed her daughter by her side. Churchill, ever anxious if Clementine was unhappy, wrote her: “Yr mother is a gt woman: & her life has been a noble life. When I think of all the courage & tenacity & self denial that she showed… I feel what a true mother & grand woman she proved herself, & I am more glad & proud to think her blood flows in the veins of our children. My darling I grieve for you.” Back in London after the funeral, shopping in the Brompton Road, Clementine was hit by a bus, and although she took a taxi home without assistance, her doctor prescribed six weeks of rest in Venice. She wanted Winston to join her, but he declined to leave Kent. “Every day away from Chartwell,” he said, “is a day wasted.” He told her that “every minute of my day here passes delightfully. There are an enormous amount of things I want to do—and there is of course also the expense to consider.” Clementine was well aware of their expenses. It was one of her worries about Chartwell. The payroll alone was staggering: a cook, a farmhand, a groom for the ponies, three gardeners, a nanny, a nursery maid, an “odd-man” (dustbins, boilers, boots), two housemaids, two kitchen maids, two more in the pantry, Clementine’s lady’s maid, who also did the family sewing, and Winston’s two secretaries.
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Occasionally Churchill himself became alarmed. He sent his wife one long memorandum on economy covering fourteen points. Trips were to be curtailed, their only winter visits to Chartwell would be “picnics with hampers,” all livestock except two polo ponies would be sold, few guests would be invited “other than Jack and Goonie,” and “Item 14,” headed “
BILLS
,” was a detailed analysis of savings to be made in the consumption of cigars and wines, the number of dress shirts he should wear for dinner each week, and even a reduction in the boot-polish inventory. He also considered renting Chartwell for the following summer for eighty guineas a week, though he wasn’t really serious, and quickly backed off when Clementine took him up on it. She suggested they “establish the children in a comfortable but economical hotel near Dinard, go there ourselves for part of the time & travel about painting for you, sight seeing for me, or we could go to Tours & do the ‘Chateaux’ again—and we could go to Florence & Venice.” Churchill had an alternative. He thought he could put them in the black by “going into milk.” Dismayed, she sent him a seven-page letter pointing out that all his adventures in husbandry had been disastrous: “You will remember that the chickens and chicken houses got full of red mite and vermin; and you will also remember that one sow was covered with lice.”
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Invariably he became bored with issues of thrift and airily dismissed them. His wife couldn’t. She had to deal with the thickening backlog of unpaid bills and the local tradesmen who called for their money. It was mortifying and, at times, infuriating. Clementine aroused was formidable, and not just within the family. Their guests crossed her at their peril. Afterward Winston, rueful but proud of her, would say, “Clemmie gave poor Smith a most fearful mauling,” or “She dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree!” Yet she was never a match for her own husband. He was too verbal, too skillful in debate, so she usually wrote him, even when they were in the same room. Occasionally, however, she lashed out at him in exasperation; Mary recalls that “on one occasion she became so enraged that she hurled a dish of spinach at Winston’s head. She missed, and the dish hit the wall, leaving a telltale mark.”
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But that was unlike her. She usually pursued her objectives quietly, letting servants go and cutting household costs in ways Winston would not notice until it was too late to undo what she had done. In time she left her own imprint on their country home, if only because she couldn’t afford an interior decorator. Chartwell today reflects her simple, excellent taste: the clean colors—pale cream, pale blue, cerulean blue—bright moire on her four-poster bed, chintzes with bold floral designs, rush carpets, unstained oak chairs and tables, and other graceful furniture, inherited or picked up at auctions.

Hospitality was a constant source of joy to Churchill. He loved to show Chartwell off. Cyril Connolly wrote: “A man with a will to power can have no friends.” Winston was an exception. No man yearned for dominion more than Cosy Pig’s owner, and few have had more friends. They came to Kent in a constant stream: Lloyd George, Bernard Baruch, the Birkenheads, the Duff Coopers, Eddie Marsh, Bob Boothby, the Archie Sinclairs, Brendan Bracken, the Bonham Carters, cabinet members, publishers, writers—men and women who often shared but one trait: they were gifted, and therefore worthy foils for their host. Brendan Bracken, with his quaint spectacles and carrot-red hair flaming in a tousled mop, was particularly striking. Churchill had been amused when he heard that Bracken was rumored to be his illegitimate son; even more amused when he learned that Bracken wouldn’t deny it; and delighted when Bracken took to addressing him as “Father.” At Chartwell, Margot Asquith wrote, “every ploy became ‘a matter of pith and moment.’ ” Lord Rawlinson would come to discuss hunting and painting. Beaverbrook arrived with an enormous gift for Churchill’s fifty-first birthday, a refrigerator, so Winston could drink champagne without ice. T. E. Lawrence descended the stairs to dinner wearing—to the enchantment of the children—the robes of a prince of Arabia. Professor F. A. Lindemann, “the Prof,” looked dull in his bowler hat, but in his way he was more wonderful than Lawrence. In 1916 RAF pilots were dying daily in nose dives. At the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, Lindemann had worked out, with mathematical precision, a maneuver which, he said, would bring any aircraft out of a tailspin. The pilots said it wouldn’t work. The Prof taught himself to fly, took off without a parachute, deliberately sent the aircraft down in a spin, and brought it out so successfully that mastering his solution became required of every beginning flier. One evening at Chartwell, Winston said: “Prof, tell us in words of one syllable, and in no longer than five minutes, what is the Quantum Theory.” He produced his gold watch. Lindemann did it—and at the end the entire family burst into applause. But the children’s greatest thrill was provided by Charlie Chaplin. On first meeting Chaplin, Winston had written Clementine: “You cd not help liking him…. He is a marvellous comedian—bolshy in politics & delightful in conversation.” His evening at Chartwell began badly. He wanted to discuss the gold standard. Churchill lapsed into a moody silence. Suddenly his guest snatched up two rolls of bread, thrust two forks in them, and did the famous dance from his 1925 film
The Gold Rush.
“Immediately the atmosphere relaxed,” recalls Boothby, who was there, “and thereafter we spent a happy evening, with both Churchill and Chaplin at the top of their form.”
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Churchill building a snowman

Of these years Churchill would later write: “I never had a dull or idle moment from morning till midnight.” Even today one senses the Churchillian presence at Chartwell, in the vast study, by the dining room’s round table, in the solid brick walls, the seat by the fishpond where he liked to meditate, and the studio in which his stunning paintings stand row on row, awaiting eventual public display. Perhaps, as Mary says, his painting, writing, and manual labor “were sovereign antidotes to the depressive element in his nature.” If so, never was depression so thoroughly routed by activity and wit. One can almost hear the merry rumble of his voice when, introduced to a young man on the eve of his twenty-fifth birthday, Winston said: “Napoleon took Toulon before his twenty-fifth birthday,” and, whipping out the gold watch, cried: “Quick, quick! You have just time to take Toulon before you are twenty-five—go and take Toulon!”
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In fantasy one envisages long-ago summer afternoons here, with young voices calling scores from the tennis court, the middle-aged basking by the pool, and couples discussing imperial issues over tea and strawberries in the loggia. But if those who knew the Churchills could choose one moment of the year to relive, it would be Christmas. For them, in a nostalgic chamber of the mind, it will always be that magical eve when the entire family has gathered here, including Jack and Goonie and their young, with Randolph home from Eton, the girls rehearsing an amateur theatrical, Clementine helping the servants build a snowman, and Churchill upstairs writing one of his extraordinary love letters to her. (“The most precious thing in my life is yr love for me. I reproach myself for many shortcomings. You are a rock & I depend on you & rest on you.”) Presents, hidden all week in an out-of-bounds closet, the “Genii’s cupboard,” are about to appear. Fires crackle; the house is hung with holly, ivy, laurel, and yew; the Christ child gazes down lovingly from a large Della Robbia plaque. Now the double doors between the library and the drawing room are flung open and the Christmas tree is revealed in all its splendor, a hundred white wax candles gleaming, the scent of pine and wax like a breath of rapture, and Churchill, the benign sovereign in this absolutely English castle, leads the way across the threshold toward his annual festival of joy “with my happy family around me,” as he would later write, “at peace within my habitation.”
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T
he prickly marriage of convenience between Asquith’s Liberals and Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government lasted less than a year. In the suit for divorce, bolshevism was named as correspondent. MacDonald had recognized Lenin’s regime, lent it money, and dropped charges against a Communist editor who had incited mutiny among British troops. Asquith thereupon withdrew his support, and Labour lost a vote of confidence, 364 to 198. The campaign which followed became known as the “Red Letter Election” because a few days before the polling the Foreign Office published a letter allegedly written by Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Third International, calling on British socialists to organize an armed rebellion. Labour bitterly renounced it as a fake. Churchill shed crocodile tears. Many Labour MPs, he said, were politicians “of high reputation” who “stood by their country in the war” but whose position now was “pathetic. They have been unable to keep their feet upon the slippery slopes on which they have tried to stand.” Down they slid, the way greased by the Red Letter; in October 1924 the Conservatives won 419 seats, Labour 151, and the fading Liberals a mere 40.
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Churchill in the garden at Chartwell

Among the triumphant candidates was Churchill, who became the member for Epping, a seat he was to hold for the rest of his public life, although in 1945 the constituency boundary was changed and it became the Woodford constituency. He was once more a supporter of Tory policies. In May, accompanied by Clementine, he had entrained to Liverpool and, for the first time in twenty years, addressed a Conservative party rally. Afterward he introduced his wife to their hosts. She was somewhat subdued, and he said: “She’s a Liberal, and always has been. It’s all very strange for her. But to me, of course, it’s just like coming home.” Presently the party’s chief parliamentary whip sent him congratulations “upon your brilliant speech.” He had spoken to a public meeting in Epping, coming down hard on MacDonald’s friendly overtures to Russia, “unquestionably one of the worst and meanest tyrannies in the history of the world.” Nominally he was a “Constitutionalist,” but the local Conservatives had adopted him as their nominee, and he won by nearly ten thousand, polling almost 60 percent of the votes cast, whereupon he accepted the Tory label. The
Sunday Times
reported that in Trafalgar Square “the great cheer of the day was reserved for Mr Winston Churchill’s victory at Epping.” T. E. Lawrence wrote him, “This isn’t congratulations, it’s just the hiss of excess delight rushing out,” and Ivor Guest, now Lord Wimborne, wrote: “I hope to goodness the Tories have the good sense to offer you high office. It will be reassuring to think of a progressive mind among their counsels, as a majority such as theirs is hardly conducive to a programme of social reforms.” But Churchill doubted there would be a ministry for him: “I think it very likely that I shall not be invited to join the Government, as owing to the size of its majority it will probably be composed only of impeccable conservatives.”
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He was wrong. Baldwin, a shrewder politician than Churchill, very much wanted him in the cabinet. Despite the size of his party’s majority, he was afraid that Churchill and Lloyd George might form a center party and persuade Birkenhead to back them in the Lords, thus pitting the prime minister against Parliament’s three most eloquent speakers. Therefore he decided to separate Winston and George. Opportunity unexpectedly presented itself when Austen Chamberlain’s half brother Neville, who had only recently entered politics at the age of forty-nine but shared old Joe’s political legacy, declined the chancellorship of the Exchequer. Tory indifference to tariff reform had soured him; he preferred the Ministry of Health. Actually, it was Neville who suggested that Winston run the Treasury. Baldwin replied that the party would “howl.” Neville said that the howl would be louder if Churchill were returned to the Admiralty. Upon reflection the prime minister agreed; summoning the Epping turncoat he asked him if he would serve as “Chancellor.” Winston asked: “Of the Duchy?” “No,” said Baldwin, “of the Exchequer.” Churchill later wrote that he had been tempted to ask: “Will the bloody duck swim?” Instead, he replied: “This fulfills my ambition. I still have my father’s robes as Chancellor. I shall be proud to serve you in this splendid office.” He also pledged his loyalty to Baldwin and said: “You have done more for me than Lloyd George ever did.”
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When Winston told Clementine, he wrote afterward, he had “the greatest difficulty in convincing my wife that I was not merely teasing her.” Convinced, she made him vow he would keep it from the press, letting the announcement come from No. 10. That was asking too much, however—it was like his pledge to keep their engagement a secret. That evening Winston dined at Beaverbrook’s home with Freddie Guest and Birkenhead, who had been appointed secretary of state for India. They all asked Churchill: “Are you in?” He said he was, but when pressed to name the ministry, he said: “I am sorry, but I would prefer not to disclose that just now.” He was obviously bursting to tell them, and they were indignant that he wouldn’t, but he didn’t want Beaverbrook to turn it into headlines. Finally he cried: “I am Chancellor of the Exchequer!” The phone rang; another source confirmed him; Beaverbrook decided to break the story. Birkenhead thought Winston had behaved badly by not sharing the tidings at once. According to Beaverbrook: “Suddenly a kind of flash of intuition came to me and I made a wild but shrewd guess. ‘I don’t believe Churchill is really to blame. He promised somebody he wouldn’t tell me before he came—yes—he promised his wife.’ Churchill said, ‘You are right. She drove me to the door of your house.’ ”
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The howl Baldwin had predicted followed. The
Morning Post
sourly observed that “the idea of scrapping the Conservative Party in order to make a home for lost Liberals and returning prodigals does not appear to us to promise success.”
The Times
agreed. At the Admiralty Sir William Bridgeman, the new first lord, wrote his wife: “I am afraid that turbulent pushing busybody Winston is going to split the party. I can’t understand how anybody can want him or put any faith in a man who changes sides, just when he thinks it is to his own personal advantage to do so.” Austen Chamberlain, unaware of Neville’s role, wrote his wife: “Beloved: S. B. is mad!… I feel that this particular appointment will be a great shock to the party.” Sir John Simon told an amused audience: “There is a new piece of jazz music now being played which has been called ‘the Winston Constitution.’ You take a step forward, two steps backward, a side step to the right, and then reverse. You can see that the piece is well named.” His faithful old Liberal ally, the
Guardian,
commented mournfully: “Mr Churchill for the second time has—shall we say?—quitted the sinking ship and for the second time the reward of this fine instinct has been not safety only but high promotion.”
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The Exchequer was the highest gift a prime minister could bestow. Keeping the Sussex Square house was no longer an issue; it was sold, and the family moved into No. 11 Downing Street, sharing the garden behind it with the Baldwins at No. 10. Gladstone’s famous red dispatch case was entrusted to Winston. Lord Randolph’s Exchequer robes, put away in tissue paper and camphor by Winston’s mother on Christmas Day, 1886, were aired and donned by him for his first official function, the “Pricking [selection] of the Sheriffs” on November 13, 1924. Afterward he lunched with Reginald McKenna, who wrote Beaverbrook: “He tells me he means to master the intricacies of finance and I think he will succeed, though he will find it more difficult than he imagines.” Actually, he appears to have had no concept of the challenge. Lord Boothby recalls that Churchill “soon discovered that the Treasury was not congenial to him, and that he was basically uninterested in the problems of high finance.” After a meeting with Treasury officials, economists, and bankers, Winston told Boothby: “I wish they were admirals or generals. I speak their language, and can beat them. But after a while these fellows start talking Persian. And then I am sunk.” As an MP, Boothby became Winston’s parliamentary private secretary. After it had become clear that Churchill was having difficulties in his new office, Boothby asked P. J. Grigg, a senior civil servant at the Exchequer, why that should be. Grigg replied: “There is only one man who has ever made the Treasury do what it didn’t want to do. That was Lloyd George. There will never be another.”
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Certainly Winston wasn’t one. Late in life he remarked: “Everyone said I was the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever was, and now I am inclined to agree with them.” But that was going too far. To be sure, he had no economic convictions apart from his blind faith in Free Trade, and it was disconcerting to hear the seigneur of British finance say loftily: “The higher mind has no need to concern itself with the meticulous regimentation of figures.” He was far from being the worst chancellor, however, or even one of the worst; unlike his father, he knew what “those damned dots” meant, and he had a vision, a revival of the social strategy he and Lloyd George had conceived in the first decade of the century. Welfare legislation was very much on his mind. He envied Neville Chamberlain at the Ministry of Health, telling him: “You are in the van. You can raise a monument. You can leave a name in history.” Drafting his first budget at Chartwell, he wrote Clementine: “I have been working all day (Sunday) at pensions & am vy tired.” In a Treasury minute two days later he wrote: “It is when misfortune comes upon the household, when prolonged unemployment, or old age, or sickness, or the death of the breadwinner comes upon this household, that you see how narrow was the margin on which it was apparently living so prosperously, and in a few months the result of the thrift of years may be swept away, and the house broken up.” Addressing a skeptical audience—the British Bankers’ Association—he said that economic aid for “every class and every section… is our aim: the appeasement of class bitterness, the promotion of a spirit of cooperation, the stabilisation of our national life, the building of the financial and social plans upon a three or four years’ basis instead of a few months’ basis, an earnest effort to give the country some period of recuperation after the vicissitudes to which it has been subjected.”
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