Winston Churchill’s darling Clementine endured his darkest hours
The “terrifying storms” of Clementine Churchill’s angry outbursts kept Winston on track during his darket hours.
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IN disagreements with her grumpy, domineering, self-absorbed and depressive husband, Clementine Churchill reputedly opened her frequently oppositional opinions with “If I were doing it ...”
Being an avowed emancipationist and politically Liberal, in contrast to husband Winston’s Tory persuasions, heated debate punctuated the Churchill marriage.
But with a lifestyle that Clementine’s biographer Sonia Purnell estimates kept the couple separated as much as 80 per cent of the time, much of her chiding arrived by mail.
In the weeks after Churchill’s “darkest hour” in May 1940, when he replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister and assumed leadership of the Tory Party in the face of overwhelming political and royal opposition, Clementine still pulled him into line.
On June 27, 1940, she wrote, “My Darling, I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know.
“One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because
of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner. I was astonished & upset because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you — I said this & I was told ‘No doubt it’s the strain’ — My Darling Winston —
I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be ... Please forgive your loving devoted & watchful Clemie.”
The strain as Churchill pondered Chamberlain’s determination to negotiate with Adolf Hitler as Nazi forces invaded France and Belgium, or standing alone to fight Germany when France capitulated, is explored in British movie The Darkest Hour, opening in Sydney tomorrow.
Churchill was already a writer and politician in 1904 when he met Clementine Hozier, the beautiful daughter of earl and former army officer Henry, and socialite Blanche Hozier, who divorced when she was six. She grew up in London’s Mayfair before relocating to Dieppe in France, with her mother.
“Winston just stared,” she recalled of their first meeting at a ball. “He never uttered one word and was very gauche — he never asked me for a dance; he never asked me to have supper with him.”
Reacquainted at a dinner in 1908, he then 33 and she 23, they married in September 1908. He considered she held “pinko” ideas, while she saw it as her duty to act as Churchill’s social conscience. Their ideals aligned early in their marriage, when Churchill worked alongside prime minister David Lloyd George to set up the foundations of Britain’s welfare state.
But like Churchill, Clementine was prone to melancholy, perhaps as a consequence of her troubled childhood and the early loss of a beloved older sister to typhoid. Although legally Hozier’s daughter, both parents were known for their infidelities. Blanche named Clementine’s biological father as horseman, Captain William George “Bay” Middleton. Another of Clementine’s biographers, Joan Hardwick, speculated that, partly due to Hozier’s reputed sterility, Blanche’s four “Hozier” children were fathered by her sister’s husband, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, grandfather of the Mitford sisters.
Clementine likely suffered her first breakdown in 1909 after the birth of daughter Diana, who she immediately ignored, fleeing to a cottage near Brighton. She apparently also had a distant relationship with four younger children. Often mentally and physically exhausted from meeting Churchill’s standards on a tight budget, she would leave to take “the cure” abroad. Self-centred to the degree that fellow Tory Arthur Balfour noted of Churchill’s WWI opus, “I hear Winston has written a book about himself and called it the World In Crisis,” Churchill accepted that Clementine’s breakdowns resulted from “the work & burdens” he imposed upon her. During travels to Malaysia late in 1934, Clementine is believed to have fallen in love with art dealer Terence Philip. Churchill was believed to be aware of her affections, although the infatuation was likely unconsummated.
But all his life Churchill wrote of his wedding that he “lived happily ever after”. Contradicting this was the observation of Wendy Reves, wife of his publisher Emery, after entertaining Churchill at her Cote d’Azur villa in the 1950s, who described the Churchill marriage as a “myth”.
Observers noted Clementine could “display an acidity of tongue before which the tallest trees would bend, and she would occasionally give vent to uncontrollable temper. The storms were terrifying in their violence.”
Against this, Churchill’s chief of staff, General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, opined that without Clementine the “history of Winston Churchill and of the world would have been a very different story”.
Originally published as Winston Churchill’s darling Clementine endured his darkest hours
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