![]() ![]() By one estimate cited by Purnell, the Churchills may have spent 80 per cent of their marriage physically separated, in part because Winston was attending to his career but also because Clementine needed time to recover from her bouts of depression and melancholia (p. Purnell rightly presents Clementine as the voice of reason that tried to talk her husband back from his worst impulses, often unsuccessfully. Churchill’s career lurched forward in fits and starts, most notoriously when he switched political parties twice (Clementine herself was a Liberal, as was much of her family) and faced public blame for the Dardanelles catastrophe. It was an unlikely match that aroused much commentary in aristocratic social circles and the popular press alike.įrom this point, the narrative becomes more familiar to devotees of Churchilliana. The courtship moved quickly and the pair married later that year. Purnell reports that Winston was immediately struck by her intelligence and precociousness while Clementine found him ‘interesting’. Winston was now in his 30s and, as a rising political star, had faced mockery in the press for being a ‘confirmed bachelor’ without ‘hairs on his chest’ (the unspoken implication, also unmentioned by Purnell, was probably that he was secretly homosexual) (p. ![]() The initial meeting led to nothing, but in 1908 they encountered one another once again. Lacking the money to enter high society in a big way, Clementine attended finishing school and met the young Winston Churchill at a ball in 1904. Clementine was just six when her parents divorced and over the next few years she endured an extended custody battle and serious financial hardship that taught her the importance of frugality in later years. Purnell reports rumours of altercations between Lady Blanche’s various lovers, who probably included Lord Redesdale, the grandfather of the notorious Mitford sisters and the man Purnell seems to endorse as the most likely father (pp. Raised as the daughter of Colonel Henry Hozier and his wife Lady Blanche, there is little doubt that he was not her biological father. Perhaps the most interesting come in the first chapters, which consider the young Clementine Hozier’s life. There are a number of important insights contained in Purnell’s book. Clementine deserves to have her story told, and this book is the first recent attempt to do so. Similarly, Purnell is correct when she writes that Clementine has been almost completely ignored by past writers, in part because the source material related to her life has been generally more restricted than that relating to her husband. On some levels, it is very hard to argue with this: Churchill was often mercurial, arrogant and self-destructive, and it was Clementine who talked him down from the brink of actions that might well have spelled the complete end of his career (particularly following the Dardanelles disaster in the First World War and during the 1930s when he was cast out of power for opposing his own party’s policy of appeasement). ![]() Without Clementine at his side – sometimes physically, but more often spiritually and through correspondence – Purnell argues that Churchill would have been a very different, and probably much less successful, political leader. Remove Churchill from the political scene in 1909 and it is at least conceivable – if not substantially more likely – that Britain in 1940 would reach an accommodation with Hitler’s Germany and the world map would look very different today.Īnecdotes of this type, and the resulting counterfactuals that are difficult to resist considering, are effectively the raison d'être for Sonia Purnell’s new biography of Clementine Churchill ( First Lady: The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill). Clementine Churchill’s intervention not only saved her husband’s life but, it is tempting to say, likely carried far-reaching consequences for the course of the country’s future. Had she failed to react so quickly that morning, the name Winston Churchill would likely be known to only a few historians of the early 20th century. Leaping into action as others looked on in horror at the unfolding scene, it was the young politician’s wife who pulled him back – literally by his coat tails – from almost certain death. Briefly stunned, he fell toward the station’s tracks at the same moment a train pulled out of the station. In late 1909, a suffragette attacked the Asquith government’s youthful President of the Board of Trade, slashing his face with a whip as he prepared to give a speech in Bristol station. ![]()
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