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The Engagement

Churchill proposed marriage to three women in his twenties, all of whom said 'no' (although all of them remained his friends). He met Clementine Ogilvy Hozier, ten years his junior, at a party, the Crewe House ball, in 1904 but the meeting wasn't a success. Unusually for him, Churchill was tongue-tied and they hardly spoke.

When they met again, however, at a dinner party in 1908 (Clementine had been invited at the last minute, to fill a gap at her great-aunt's table), they clearly got on rather better. Impressed by her beauty, her intelligence and her ability to talk politics (she was an earnest Liberal and supporter of greater rights for women, Churchill began an ardent courtship.

They became engaged only a few months later, on Tuesday 11 August, when Churchill proposed to her while they were both staying at Blenheim Palace (Churchill had encouraged the Duke of Marlborough to invite her to a small house party). After failing to appear in the morning, and almost blowing his chance, Winston took Clementine for a walk in the afternoon to the Rose Garden and, sheltering from a shower in the Temple of Diana, he asked her to marry him. She agreed.

Less than a month after their engagement was announced, they were married at St Margaret's Church in Westminster, London (the parish church of the House of Commons), on 12 September 1908, with Lord Hugh Cecil as best man and David Lloyd George as one of the witnesses. So began one of the most enduring marriages in politics. The bond forged in 1908 was to remain unbroken until Churchill died in 1965 and was to be the firm foundation of a life of many ups and downs.

Winston Churchill, the greatest man ever fathered by England or mothered by America, Winston who in our most dread days armed us with a superhuman courage and endurance that we might respond to his words and actions, victoriously chose his wife with love, wisdom, and intuition.
– Lady Diana Cooper (Finest Hour 83)

Lady Clementine

Winston Churchill spent 57 years married to his wife, Clementine. And he loved her — deeply, fiercely, faithfully. He wasn't an easy man to live with.

He smoked cigars in bed and burned holes in his pajamas and sheets.
He drank — more than he should have.
His life was a roller coaster of victories, failures, battles, and comebacks.
He could be blunt, explosive, stubborn.
And quite often… he didn't hear what anyone was telling him. Literally and figuratively.
Churchill was not handsome, never athletic, and rarely gentle — but he adored Clementine. She was the one person he couldn't imagine life without, even if he didn't always listen to her.
So Clementine discovered her own quiet way to reach him.
Instead of shouting, arguing, or matching his temper, she wrote him messages — letters filled with affection, gentle corrections, encouragement, and subtle guidance. And sometimes she drew a little heart at the end. Just like we do in messages today. 
Churchill read every one of them.

"My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me"
– Winston S. Churchill

Of all Winston Churchill's achievements—saving the Western world, defeating Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, dropping some really effective one liners—he believed marrying Clementine was the greatest. He said, "My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me." He knew that he couldn't have accomplished what he did without her by his side. Just as Winston Churchill was one of the greatest leaders in world history, Clementine was one of the greatest wives.

In his book, My Darling Clementine, Jack Fishman wrote that Clementine's mother, Lady Blanche, "recognized that, although a natural rebel, her [Clementine's] disciplined modesty, her discretion, her gift of devotion, plus sense of duty, would make her the right woman for Winston. … Her sense of dignity would never allow her temperament to create domestic turmoil that would intrude into her husband's public or private life."

For our young men to be great leaders, they will need wives who possess these qualities that Clementine Churchill exemplified. Clementine had these five qualities before she married Winston Churchill.

https://pcg.church/articles/7564/the-wife-of-dignity

Marriage made in heaven

Winston Churchill was not at all the sort of husband that Lady Blanche Hozier had had in mind for her unusual daughter Clementine. He had no small talk and was not—to be frank— conventionally good-looking or athletic. He also lacked a title, a stately residence, and, above all, a suitably aristocratic pot of money. Lady Blanche came to realise, however, that despite these serious shortcomings, he was a practically perfect match.

Lady Blanche had given birth in some haste to Clementine Ogilvy Hozier on the drawing room floor of her London townhouse in Grosvenor Street on 1 April 1885 (eleven years after Churchill's equally precocious arrival at Blenheim Palace). Clementine was her second daughter, and the grand-daughter of a Scottish earl, and was apparently blessed with the usual trappings of her blue-blooded lineage. But all was not as it seemed in the Hozier household or Clementine's young life generally.

Lady Blanche's anxious parents (the tenth Earl and Countess of Airlie) had married off their willful child in 1878 to one Colonel Henry Hozier—an autocrat from a brewing family, who was cold to his wife, serially unfaithful, and dead set against having children. In the absence of an obliging husband, the sexy, bored, and lonely Lady Blanche decided to shop around, reputedly entertaining up to ten lovers at a time in search of a suitable mate. One of her favourite amours, the first Lord ("Bertie") Redesdale, most likely fathered Clementine (and possibly also her siblings Kitty, Bill, and Nellie).

That is where matters got complicated. Bertie— who was to become grandfather to the famous Mitford sisters—was married to Lady Blanche's sister Lady Clementine, with whom he had nine other children. Thus the industrious Bertie (who was also said to have sired yet more offspring by a Japanese geisha) was probably Clementine's father and certainly her uncle. It is likely that she was named in honour of the forbearance and generosity of her aunt Clementine.

The cuckolded Colonel Hozier, unsurprisingly, was not keen on this arrangement, and he sued Lady Blanche for divorce when Clementine was just six. She and her elder sister Kitty became helpless hostages in a bitter battle over custody and financial support. They were quickly wrested from their mother to live with Henry and his sister, the spinster Aunt Mary, who believed that children benefited greatly from being whipped.

Hozier soon tired of the responsibility, however, and so he parceled out his young charges to the care of a governess in the Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted, just north of London. Here Clementine lived a very modest life, in which she was expected to help in the housework for hours every day and never had quite enough to eat. It was the start of a life lesson in the hardships endured by those outside the charmed circles of the landed upper classes. Her experiences at a young age—so different from the opulent splendour of Winston's childhood at Blenheim—were to give both of them an invaluable political insight into the minds of the masses. She was not, of course, to know that at the time and just felt deeply unhappy.

Although the girls were eventually returned to their mother—after another stint in a "horrible, severe" boarding school—even then Clementine's problems had really only just begun.

Tight Money

Lady Blanche had her young family all together, but Hozier was refusing to help financially, and money was extremely tight. Over the next eight years, the family of five moved from one set of furnished lodgings to another every few months. In part this was out of financial necessity—and the need to stay one step ahead of the creditors—but the constant roaming also suited Lady Blanche's capricious nature.

It did not suit Clementine. By now a tearful, fearful little girl, she craved security and constancy and was granted neither. Lady Blanche continued to entertain her men-friends, and on the rare occasions when she was at home made her preference for the pretty and puckish Kitty all too obvious. Clementine, so often red-eyed with tears, was dismissed by her mother as plain, dull, and not even particularly bright. She slipped into the role of supporter and counselor to the star act Kitty; perhaps for a long time only the girls themselves realised that it was really Clementine that possessed the inner steel.

The first inkling for most came when the family moved to Dieppe in northern France to live even more cheaply and away from the moral judgements made by Lady Blanche's compatriots of her overtly promiscuous ways. She had by now been excluded from virtually every smart salon in London and was widely considered to be "mad." Clementine was beginning to excel at her studies (Lady Blanche was unusually progressive in viewing female education as essential, with the glaring exception of "unladylike" maths), but found it humiliating to ask for credit when she was sent out to the market for food, particularly when Lady Blanche, seen as an eccentric "milady" by the locals, was frequently losing what little money they had at the town's casino. Clementine longed for respectability and loathed the fact that her mother was also having an affair with the artist Walter Sickert. Sickert (a man of questionable morals and recently even thought by some to be the murderous Jack the Ripper) was also carrying on with the queen of the Dieppe fish market, one Madame Villain. The two women would vent their anger at each other in plain view on the streets—with the fishwife throwing things at her rival in a jealous temper—an indignity that Clementine found difficult to bear.

Colonel Hozier Returns

Now Hozier was changing his mind about the teenaged Clementine, perceiving from afar that she was emerging as clever, graceful, and accomplished, if still apparently unnecessarily timid. He decided to visit her in Dieppe and invited her to lunch at the Hotel Royal. Lady Blanche bid her reluctant daughter to attend, although their trusty maid Justine would accompany her there and back.

Little was said between Clementine and her forbidding putative father over lunch of omelette and larksen-brochette until Hozier broke the dreaded news that he intended to take his daughter back to England with him to live with the whip-happy aunt Mary once again. Faced with this unthinkable prospect, Clementine's shyness surrendered to a hitherto undetected determination and courage. While surreptitiously slipping on her gloves under the table, she announced calmly that her mother would refuse to allow her to leave Dieppe. The moment Justine returned, she rose from her chair and politely but firmly bade Hozier goodbye.

In a fury, Hozier suddenly barred his daughter's way, thrusting a cold coin into Justine's hand and pushing her violently out of the door. Clementine was now trapped and alone with this unpredictable man once more, but when he moved to fetch a cigar, she valiantly seized her chance. She flung the door open and ran full pelt towards Justine, who was waiting uncertainly outside. The two girls scrambled away as fast as they could on the icy pavements with Hozier, swearing angrily, in pursuit. Only once they neared the safety of the house where Clementine and her family were living did he finally give up on them and turn back.

The captain of the Dieppe-Newhaven steamer later confirmed that Hozier had been planning to kidnap Clementine and take her back to England that very afternoon. Her quick thinking had saved her. As her future husband Winston later put it, Lady Blanche's once timorous daughter had displayed an exceptional ability to "rise to the level of events." Indeed, the greater the challenge, the more impressive Clementine became. Hardships in her early life equipped her well for her future role at her husband's side at the centre of two world wars. Gradually she would reinvent herself as a formidable figure, no longer scared of anyone, not her father, her husband, and much later not de Gaulle, FDR, Stalin, or Hitler either. That day with her father started the process in earnest.

Runaway Bride

Her next great challenge back then, however, came soon afterwards when her beloved Kitty died suddenly from typhoid. Never had Clementine felt so alone, now fending almost entirely for herself. The family returned to England, where she was sent to a grammar school—again hardly the typical environment for an earl's grand-daughter. Yet it was here that an inspired headmistress, Miss Beatrice Harris, finally saw the potential in Clementine. She encouraged her to be confident, self-reliant, curious about the world and great events; to champion women's rights, including the female vote (something she would eventually convince Winston to support); to help improve the lot of the poor; and above all to stretch her mind way beyond the then normal domestic concerns of most women to politics and beyond. Clementine exulted in the respect and admiration she received at school. She thrilled in the intellectual rigour of her studies and the expectations laid at the feet of such a star pupil. She even threw herself into studying maths—albeit in secret so that her mother did not try to stop her. She laid out her textbooks on the gravestones and did her homework in a local churchyard, away from Lady Blanche's prying eyes. Nothing would stop her achieving the highest grades.

Miss Harris knew she had university material on her hands. Few women then studied for a degree but she recognised that Clementine was special. That, however, was a step too far for Lady Blanche. For Clementine had also now emerged as a stunningly beautiful young woman, attracting admiring glances from a bevy of rich and titled men. Here now surely was a chance of financial security and the social standing that Lady Blanche had long since lost. Clementine's sapphire eyes, slender figure and dazzling white-toothed smile would be the route for both women back into wealthy society where they rightly belonged.

All talk of university was banned. Clementine would be launched on the London circuit. Eligible suitors began to form an orderly queue. Clementine's younger sister Nellie kept a fat file of Clementine's offers of marriage under Rejected, Pending, and even Accepted. Indeed, Clementine was engaged three times—twice to the same man—but each time she broke it off to her own distress and to that of the gentlemen in question.

The problem was that these men were plain wrong for her—too comfortable and too compromising. They promised a life of indolence but also of stultifying restraint. One was Sidney Cornwallis Peel. The younger son of a viscount (and grandson of former Prime Minister Sir Robert), he was constant, fifteen years her senior, and rich. He took her to the theatre and sent her white violets every day. Lady Blanche thought her job was done. But Clementine knew there was more—or should be—to life. Poor Sidney was simply not exciting; his letters veered from pleading to peevish and were generally, as he conceded himself, rather dull. He offered security, money, respectability, and status. But she knew there was no passion; she was not in love. There was no intellectual spark, and without that she could not be happy. She parted from him a second and final time and began her search again.

She then agreed to marry another wealthy and older man, but again she knew he did not offer an exciting life of experience and adventure in the wider world. In short, he too was simply not clever enough. Now acquiring a reputation for inconstancy, Clementine began to think she would never marry at all.

Enter Winston

Meanwhile Winston Churchill was in hot pursuit of a wife. He was already a global celebrity—thanks to his escapades in India and Africa—and a rising political star. What he lacked in money, he more than made up for with brio, swagger, and prospects. By rights he should have made quite a catch for a woman already in possession of a fortune and he began to cast his eye round for contenders.

Churchill even devised a scheme to assess their suitability for marriage. If he judged a woman's face to be beautiful enough to launch a thousand ships, then clearly she would qualify. If merely worthy of two hundred ships, then she might have to do, but only if absolutely necessary. If, though, her looks would justify launching, at most, a small gunboat, then clearly she would be out of the question. There was, however, a problem with this approach. It did not take into account whether these women had anything in common with him. Indeed, when he proposed to a string of "thousand ships" women they one by one turned him down, sensing the incompatibility.

They wanted luxury—he could not guarantee it; they wanted parties, balls, and gossip—he found them boring; he wanted to talk day and night about his political career—they found the subject baffling and even tedious, preferring his undivided energies to be devoted to them. If only he could find a thousand-ships woman who shared his love of affairs of state, of the cut and thrust of politics, of ideas, policies, and politicians. If only he could find a woman not just unfazed by his intellectual prowess but dazzled by it, a woman who understood his potential for greatness and would help guide him towards it, a woman whose mind was alive to the realm beyond the domestic and who was not afraid to spar with him intellectually. In short, if only he could find a woman who would be his partner not only in life but also in politics, who would use her own talents to enhance his. But did such a woman exist?

In the spring of 1908 Winston Churchill was lingering in his bath one evening at home in Mayfair. He was grumpy about the prospect of a dinner party he fully expected to be a "bore." His private secretary Eddie Marsh tactfully reminded him of the many kindnesses of Lady St. Helier, the grand society hostess who had invited him, and, after making more fuss, he rose from his bathwater to dress.

He arrived late when the other guests were already eating their main course of chicken. Amongst them was Clementine, who had been invited at the last minute to make up the numbers after another woman had fallen ill. She had been reluctant to accept, feeling tired after a day earning her living teaching French and was also worried about having nothing suitable to wear. The only spare seat at table was the one next to her, and so Churchill sat down rather grumpily at her side.

Soon, however, the pair were deep in animated conversation. They explored the current ructions and rifts in politics and the issues and characters involved. They debated the then novel ideas about establishing a proper welfare state to help the poor. They shared thoughts and observations on France, a country they both loved with a passion. They discussed history, biography, and philosophy and yet always there was more to say. Soon, the rest of the table seemed to fade away as they had only eyes and ears for each other. The other diners looked on in amazement. Churchill was ignoring all the (male) dignitaries present to talk exclusively to Miss Hozier, who looked as if she were in raptures. Much later Clementine would be asked if she thought Churchill handsome that night. She replied tactfully—but tellingly—that she had found him very "interesting." Looks counted for little with her. Here at last was a man who led an exciting life on the public stage, one that she was excluded from on her own account because of her gender. But if she could help him perhaps she could still be a part of it too. Perhaps she too could make a difference.

Emotionally, too, there was an instant connection. Both had endured largely loveless childhoods—Winston's mother Jennie had also often been absent and, like Lady Blanche, engaged in a life of frantic sexual intrigue at the expense of her children. Both had had cold and distant fathers. Both had become adept at hiding their consequent insecurities behind a façade—his behind apparent unfailing self-belief, hers behind a carefully maintained distance. They were both in search of comfort as well as excitement; both had endured hardships and heartache and yet were ready for great challenges in life. Six months later, they were married, and Lady Blanche was canny enough to realise that Clementine might not be destined for a rich and easy life. But she had nevertheless finally found her perfect match.

https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-175/women-churchill-loved-clementine/

Chartwell

Chartwell remained the family home for forty years (although the Churchills moved out during the war and shut the house (between August 1939 and January 1946). From September 1945 the Churchills also kept a London house at 28 Hyde Park Gate, and it was here that Churchill died on 24 January 196

After the Second World War, in the 1940s, a consortium of wealthy benefactors, led by Lord Camrose, bought Chartwell from the Churchills and presented it to the National Trust on condition that Churchill and Clementine would have the right to live there for the rest of their lives. A trust was established, the Chartwell Trust, to manage his income from writing; for the first time in his life Churchill was able to indulge in the 'best of everything' without any worries that the money would run out. In his years as an 'elder statesman' he bought up agricultural land around Chartwell and settled down to life as a gentleman farmer, looking after pigs, sheep and cows, while continuing with his writing and his passion for painting.

Visit Chartwell: you can now visit Chartwell yourself and see the house and grounds very much as they were when the Churchills lived there.

Fraugh relationship with son, devout grandfather

All the Churchill's children supported their father. The children, to varying degrees, served him – and their country – in the Second World War, too. Diana served in the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS), Sarah with the Photographic Interpretation Unit of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and Mary served in the armed forces in mixed anti-aircraft (AA) batteries with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). Mary also attended the Quebec conference of 1943 as an aide to her father, while Sarah played a similar role at Teheran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945. Randolph served as an Intelligence Officer in the Middle East, was attached to the newly formed Special Air Service (SAS), and undertook missions in the Libyan desert and in Yugoslavia. However their relations have been fraught.

Randolph perhaps epitomises the difficulty of being the son of a famous father. In his twenties, he veered between adoration of his father and bitter accusations of being treated as a 'wayward and untrustworthy child', interspersed with periods of excess drinking and ill-considered political initiatives.

Randolph duly stood for parliament in the 1930s but despite the obvious advantage of his father's support, he was defeated each time, being seen – in true Churchill style – as a political maverick. He was elected as MP for Preston in 1940 but lost his seat at the 1945 General Election. While he had his father's weaknesses (notably, obstinacy, arrogance and bad temper), he did also inherit some of his strengths, including a gift for writing and considerable personal bravery, serving with the newly formed Special Air Service (SAS) and conducting dangerous missions in the Libyan Desert and Yugoslavia. Yet, ultimately, he lacked his father's political skills, charm and charisma.

Churchill no doubt loved his son, but sometimes despaired of him. Their strong personalities would often clash.

Their father–son love–hate relationship was never entirely resolved, although there was seemingly a reconciliation in later life when Churchill approved Randolph's appointment as his official biographer in the early 1960s.

And it's clear that, despite their lifelong differences, Randolph never stopped worshipping his father, just as Churchill had worshipped his father a generation earlier.

Randolph married twice, first to Pamela Digby (later Harriman) in 1939, with whom he had a son, Winston, and then to June Osborne in the late 1940s, with whom he had a daughter, Arabella. Neither marriage was a success. He went on to carve out a name for himself as a gossip columnist and writer, but died in 1968 without having fulfilled his father's expectations – and before he could complete his father's biography (though he did see the first two volumes published).

Devoted grandfather

Churchill was a devoted grandfather. He lived to have ten grandchildren and two great-grandchildren and both he and Clementine took great pleasure in being surrounded by their family, with the swimming pool and croquet lawn as great attractions.The Churchill family today continues to be very active in the fields in which Winston distinguished himself. Among Winston and Clementine's grandchildren and great-grandchildren are family members who have achieved distinction in their own right as biographers and authors, in journalism and in art, and in serving their country in politics, government and the armed forces, and who carry forward the many aspects of the Churchillian legacy with pride.

'Time passes swiftly, but is it not joyous to see how great and growing is the treasure we have gathered together, amid the storms and stresses of so many eventful and to millions tragic and terrible years?'

Letter from Churchill to Clementine, 23 January 1935, quoted in Official Biography by Gilbert

Mary Churchill, Lady Soames

The following September, in 1922, the Churchills' fifth and final child, Mary, was born. Mary later wrote, in the prelude to A Daughter's Tale, that she was 'perhaps … for my parents, the child of consolation'.

Unlike her elder siblings, she didn't cause her parents any significant worries. She supported both her mother and father throughout their lives and, during the Second World War, worked for the Red Cross and the Women's Voluntary Service from 1939 to 1941 and served in mixed anti-aircraft (AA) batteries with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), serving in London, Belgium and Germany, rising to the rank of Junior Commander and being awarded the MBE (Military).

Mary also accompanied her father as aide de camp on several of his overseas journeys, including his post-VE trip to Potsdam.

Mary married Christopher Soames, then Assistant Military Attache in Paris, in 1947. Christopher became a firm friend and ally of Churchill's in the wake of Jack Churchill's death and when he and his wife moved into a cottage on the Chartwell estate ('Honeymoon Cottage'), he became farm manager – and introduced Churchill to horse-racing, a hobby that was to provide pleasure and delight for many years.

Christopher went on to have a successful parliamentary and diplomatic career, elected Conservative MP in 1950; he became Churchill's Parliamentary Private Secretary during his second premiership and subsequently served as Ambassador to France (1968–72) and as the last Governor of Rhodesia (1979–80). Mary supported him in these posts.

Later in life, Mary Soames served as Patron of the International Churchill Society, later The Churchill Centre (as well as of the Royal National Theatre Board of Trustees and the National Benevolent Fund for the Aged) and was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a Lady Companion of the Order of the Garter in April 2005. Lady Soames died, aged ninety-one, in May 2014.

To read an interview with Mary Soames, click here. 

https://www.winstonchurchill.org/the-life-of-churchill/life/415-an-interview-with-mary-soames?pr-partnerid=churchill-centre-us