Clementine’s 57-year love affair

The Churchill’s marriage played out against European destruction in two world wars and the Cold War. At home, blow-ups and slamming doors were mere “summer storms”.

She was a born worrier who suffered hysteria and deep depressions. Her husband, a self-centred gambler who sipped morning “Papa cocktails” of Johnnie Walker and water, became “frightfully noisy when he lost his temper”.

Their youngest daughter recalled “blow-ups and boo-hoo and banging doors and then it was over and they were reconciled. Summer storms.”

Such was the 57-year love-story of Winston and Clementine Churchill, a romance that blossomed in 1908, bore children during his public castigation as First Lord of the Admiralty over the Gallipoli disaster, matured under criticism of his belligerence towards Germany, and endured his term as Britain’s wartime prime minister from May 1940.

Churchill was born almost two months prematurely, on November 30, 1874, at his paternal grandfather’s Blenheim Palace, the only English palace not held by royalty or the church. It was built to reward John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, for military triumphs in the War of Spanish Succession at the 1704 Battle of Blenheim.

Churchill’s father Randolph was a Parliamentarian and his mother, Jennie Jerome, an American heiress. His brother Jack was born in 1880.

Raised in Dublin by nanny Elizabeth Everest until sent to boarding school at seven, Churchill stuttered and performed poorly at schools, including Harrow where he joined the Rifle Guards but was bored by Greek, Latin and Mathematics, irritating his father.

Churchill wrote emotional letters to his mother, begging her to visit him at school, although she seldom did. Admitted to Sandhurst Military College after three attempts, he graduated 20th in his class of 130.

Churchill joined the Fourth Hussars in 1894, then travelled to Cuba to report on the Spanish campaign. His father died in 1895.

Churchill sailed with his regiment to India, then saw action in the 1898 Sudan Battle of Omdurman. He also wrote military reports for newspapers and two books. He left the army in 1899 to become a war correspondent for the conservative Morning Post newspaper. Captured by Boers while reporting on the South African war, his headline-snatching 500km escape to Portuguese Mozambique became a third book, London To Ladysmith (1900).

Joining the Conservative Party, in 1900 Churchill followed his father into politics, representing Oldham, near Manchester. Committed to social justice, Churchill switched to the Liberal Party in 1904, when he met attractive Clementine Hozier, 19, the down-at-heel daughter of an indeterminate father and divorcee Lady Blanche Hozier, a lifelong gambler already linked with nine lovers, at ball in London.

Re-elected in 1908, Churchill was appointed Board of Trade president, and in March again met Hozier when they were seated together at dinner. In April he wrote to her: “What a comfort and pleasure it was ... to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality and such strong reserves of noble sentiment.”

After their September 1908 wedding, the Churchills settled at Eccelstone Square, Central London, living on Churchill’s “modest parliamentary salary”, earnings from books and writing. Although life should have been comfortable, Churchill favoured luxuries and gambling, making money a constant worry for Clementine. Eldest child Diana was born in 1909, Randolph in 1911, and Sarah in 1914.

In 2001, the diaries of Jean, Lady Hamilton, wife of Churchill’s friend and Gallipoli co-planner General Ian Hamilton, revealed Clementine offered the childless couple her fourth child.

Jean, then 57, wrote in June 1918: “Clemmie asked if I’d like to have her baby; of course I said I would, and asked her when she expected it. She said ‘in November’ ... She said if she had twins I would have one.”

Mary, born in 1922, later explained the Churchills were in severe financial difficulty, battling to save their London home, in 1918.

Marigold was born in November, 1918. Left with a nanny in August 1921 as her mother holidayed at a country estate, she fell ill and died of septicaemia. Mary, raised by nanny Madeline Whyte, her mother’s cousin, recalled, “I was always in awe of Mummy, really quite frightened of her ... she was a goddess figure, though she was always accessible.”

Reflecting on childhood holidays, Mary explained “Mummy lost out because of the intensity of her life with Father. He always came first, second and third.”

The couple wrote to each other almost daily, with Clementine urging him to support womens’ sufferage in the 1920s, and chiding him for his bad temper as prime minister. Winston died in 1965. Still worried about money, Clementine lived another 12 years.

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