Everywhere Africans waited to pay the bwana tribute: “I was presented by the various chiefs with 108 sheep, 7 Bulls, about £100 worth of ivory, an ostrich egg, many fowls & some vy good leopard skins.” A glimpse of “the mighty snow-clad peak of Mt Kenya” was followed by stops at Nairobi, Lake Victoria, Kampala, the Ripon Falls, Gondokoro, and, after a leisurely journey by train and steamer, Khartoum, where, to Churchill’s dismay, his manservant fell ill with choleraic diarrhea and died. The Dublin Fusiliers, at Winston’s request, gave Scrivings a military funeral; “we all walked in procession to the cemetery as mourners, while the sun sank over the desert, and the band played that beautiful funeral march you know so well.” That put a damper on the rest of the trip; they hurried to Wadi Halfa, Aswân, Cairo, and home. But on balance the expedition had been a great success. Churchill felt fit and was in fact wealthier. After the last election he had left Mount Street and rented a small house at 12 Bolton Street, just off Piccadilly, two blocks from the Ritz, and during his absence his brother had sublet it for him. The Strand paid him £750 for four articles on his tour; Hodder and Stoughton advanced £500 against royalties for a book, My African Journey. Solvent and radiant, he was guest of honor on Saturday, January 18, 1908, at a dinner given by the National Liberal Club to welcome him home. He told them: “I come back into the firing line in the best possible health, and with a wish to force the fighting up to the closest possible point.”80
That wish was swiftly granted. During his absence Campbell-Bannerman’s health had deteriorated alarmingly. Aware that he had only a few weeks to live, C-B resigned on April 3. Asquith succeeded him—he crossed to Biarritz for his sovereign’s permission to form a new government; Edward let nothing interrupt his holidays—and on April 8 he wrote Churchill: “With the King’s approval, I have the great pleasure of offering you the post of President of the Board of Trade.” Thus Winston, at thirty-three, reached cabinet rank. Since the Restoration in 1660, custom had required newly appointed ministers to stand for reelection in their constituencies. The seat Winston had won two years earlier was traditionally Conservative. Now he had to run for it again. The Tories were elated. They had been waiting with red-baited breath for this chance to humiliate the “bounder,” the “opportunist,” the “traitor to his class.” The suffragettes also had him in their sights. His provocative wit was partly to blame. Although he had become an ardent social reformer, he said: “I refuse to be shut up in a soup kitchen with Mrs. Sidney Webb.” And when a militant feminist asked him what should be the role of women in the future, he replied: “The same, I trust, as it has been since the days of Adam and Eve.” She glared. Swiftly moving to recover lost ground, he assured her and her sisters that he was a convert to their cause. “Trust me, ladies,” he begged. They refused. They would campaign against him, they said, unless he could guarantee Asquith’s support of votes for women. He tried to explain that he could hardly speak for the new prime minister. They jeered; they didn’t believe it; they vowed to give him no peace.81
And they did. “Painful scenes,” he wrote, “were witnessed in the Free Trade Hall when Miss Christabel Pankhurst, tragical and dishevelled, was finally ejected after having thrown the meeting into pandemonium.” This continued to be their most dramatic stratagem. His speeches were interrupted by hisses and even physical assaults, his rallies thrown into turmoil by women hurling rotten eggs and ripe fruit. Sometimes they waited until he was approaching his peroration, or the most intricate point in his argument. Then feminine voices would shriek: “What about the women?” “When are you going to give women the vote?” He wrote: “It became extremely difficult to pursue connected arguments.” He toiled eighteen hours a day, organizing canvassers when he wasn’t on the stump, and when the feminists allowed it, he gave the opposition as good as he got. He pictured himself arrayed against “all the forces of reaction” and “every discontented irresponsible element in the community,” notably “old doddering peers, cute financial magnates, clever wirepullers, big brewers with bulbous noses… weaklings, sleek, smug, comfortable, self-important individuals.” The situation was complicated by a third candidate, representing the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. In an open letter, H. G. Wells, whom socialists trusted, urged workingmen to back Churchill, but the Liberal vote split. Winston lost by 529 votes. As he left the town hall a suffragette grabbed his arm and cried: “It’s the women who have done this, Mr Churchill! Now you will understand that we must have our vote.”82
The real victors, of course, were the Tories. In what passed for humor in Balfour’s set, an ill-wisher wired him: “What’s the use of a W.C. without a seat?” The Morning Post rejoiced that Winston, “though a Cabinet minister, is a political Ishmaelite wandering around as an object of compassion and commiseration. Manchester has washed its hands of him. The juveniles have for days past been singing to a popular air ‘Good-bye, Winnie, you must leave us,’ and Winnie has gone. On the whole Manchester appears to be taking the sorrowful parting with composure.” So was Churchill. Even before he left the city, telegrams had arrived offering him eight safe Liberal seats. He chose Dundee, one of whose MPs had just been elevated to the peerage. To his mother he wrote: “It’s a life seat and cheap and easy beyond all experience.” The Manchester defeat didn’t rankle. He wrote a woman friend, not a militant feminist, who mourned his loss: “It was a real pleasure to me to get your letter & telegram. I am glad to think you watched the battle from afar with eyes sympathetic to my fortunes…. How I should have liked you to be there. You would have enjoyed it I think. We had a jolly party and it was a whirling week. Life for all its incompleteness is rather fun sometimes.”83
The friend was Clementine Hozier, whom he had disconcerted with his rude, silent stare four years earlier. Now twenty-three, Clementine was at the height of her beauty. Violet Asquith, seeing her for the first time, thought she had “a face of classical perfection” and “a profile like the racing cutter in George Meredith’s novel Beauchamp’s Career,” or “the prow of a Greek ship.”84 Her social credentials were acceptable, if not spectacular. She belonged to one of those landed gentry families which lived on tight budgets. Descended from Scots whose lineage could be traced back to the twelfth century, she was a granddaughter of the Countess of Airlie. Jennie had once known her mother well; Winston’s uncle Jack Leslie had been one of her godfathers. Men said she was a good hunter for a woman; women said that she had rightly decided her hair was her crowning glory, and on formal occasions she always wore it up. But there was much more to Clementine than that. The child of a shattered marriage, educated at the Sorbonne, she was a strong-minded young woman of firm likes and dislikes (she did not like Jennie), and her politics were rather to the left of the Liberal establishment. Although she never invited arrest or shouted down cabinet members, she believed women were entitled to the vote and was prepared to say so anywhere, to anyone, at any time. She was not, in short, a paradigm of an upper-class Englishwoman. Most youthful patricians would have found her a difficult wife, and she had already broken an engagement she knew was unwise. Yet there were deep reservoirs of love in her. For the right husband, she would be magnificent.
“Where does the family start?” Winston once asked rhetorically. “It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl. No superior alternative has yet been found.” But first they must be thrown together, and both he and Clementine almost missed their second meeting. It came in March 1908, two months after his return from Africa. They had been invited separately to a dinner being given at 52 Portland Place by her aunt, Lady St. Helier, formerly Lady Jeune, who had been Winston’s benefactress when he wanted to ride with Kitchener to Khartoum. At the appointed hour, however, he was in his bath. Eddie, bursting in on him, said: “What on earth are you doing, Winston? You should be at dinner by now!” Churchill said he wasn’t going, that it would be a great bore; Eddie told him he couldn’t do that to Lady Jeune, and, grumbling and scowling, Winston emerged from the tub, dressed, and caught a cab. Meanwhile, at 51 A
bingdon Villas in Kensington, Clementine and her mother had exchanged similar words. Clementine had spent the afternoon giving French lessons at a half crown an hour. She was tired and didn’t want to go out, but Lady Blanche scolded: “That is very ungrateful of you. Your Aunt Mary has been extremely kind to you. Let’s have no more nonsense; go upstairs straight away and get dressed.”85
So the two unwilling guests arrived late. Seated next to Clementine, Winston was all courtesy this time, though as usual he wanted to talk about himself. He asked her if she had read his biography of Lord Randolph. She hadn’t. He promised to send her a copy and then forgot. But he didn’t forget Clementine. He asked his mother to invite her and her mother for a weekend at Salisbury Hall, the Cornwallis-West country home. Clementine was impressed with him; in her letter thanking Jennie, she wrote of his “dominating charm and brilliancy.” Maddeningly, Lady Blanche, who couldn’t afford it, chose this spring to take her daughter abroad for six weeks. Winston’s letters pursued her. Having just called on the King to “kiss hands”—receive royal sanction for his new office—he seized “this fleeting hour of leisure to write & tell how much I liked our long talk on Sunday and what a comfort & pleasure it was to me to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality & such strong reserves of noble sentiment.” He wrote her of his brother’s marriage to Lady Gwendeline Bertie, or “Goonie,” as everyone in the family called her; he wrote of politics and the fire at Burley-on-the-Hill. To this last, Clementine replied: “I have been able to think of nothing but the fire & the terrible danger you have been in…. My dear my heart stood still with terror.”86
Clementine Hozier at the time of her wedding
Thus interest grew on both sides, fomented by aunts and cousins, Lady this and Lady that, until, on August 7, the Duke of Marlborough invited Clementine to a small party at Blenheim. The same mail brought a note from Winston. He hoped she would come because “I want so much to show you that beautiful place & in its gardens we shall find lots of places to talk in, & lots of things to talk about.” His mother would act as chaperon—there were royal chuckles when the King heard that—with F. E. and Margaret Smith the only other guests. The next day he wrote her again; he thought she would like Sunny, and would “fascinate him with those strange mysterious eyes of yours, whose secret I have been trying so hard to learn…. Till Monday then & may the Fates play fair.” Clementine could have had little doubt of what awaited her at the palace, and she felt, she later said, a “sudden access of shyness.” She was down to her last clean cotton frock. The other women would have maids, and she would have to stand for fear of crumpling her skirt. Nevertheless, she arrived at Blenheim outwardly poised on Monday, August 10. That evening the stage for his proposal was set. After breakfast in the morning they would walk in the rose garden.87
In later years Churchill said that “at Blenheim I took two important decisions: to be born and to marry. I am happily content with the decision I took on both those occasions.”88 He neglected to mention that Clementine had had something to say about the second, and that his dilatoriness had nearly lost her. Always an early riser, she was prompt at breakfast Tuesday. Winston wasn’t there. She waited for him. And waited. He was fast asleep. Mortified, she considered returning to London immediately, and no one who knew her doubts that she meant it. Luckily, Sunny intervened. The duke sent his cousin a sharp note and, in his role as host, asked her to join him in a buggy ride around the grounds. They returned a half hour later to find Churchill yawning at the horizon.
The walk was postponed until late afternoon. They were in the middle of it, and Winston was just about to clear his throat, when the skies opened and wrapped them in sheets of rain. Fortunately an ornamental little Greek temple overlooking the palace’s great lake offered refuge, and there, drenched and shivering, he asked her to marry him. She said yes, but swore him to secrecy until she had her mother’s consent. He couldn’t keep his word. The skies cleared, they strolled back to the palace, and the moment he saw his friends he broke into a run, waving his arms and shouting the news. That night in her bedroom Clementine wrote him a love letter, addressing it by drawing a heart with “Winston” lettered inside it—the first of the endearing missives they would exchange throughout the rest of their long life together. The next day he picked a bouquet of roses for her to take home and, to make amends for breaking his pledge, wrote his future mother-in-law asking her “consent & blessing.” He told her, “I am not rich nor powerfully established, but your daughter loves me & with that love I feel strong enough to assume this great & sacred responsibility; & I think I can make her happy & give her a station & career worthy of her beauty and her virtues.” He never mailed the letter—he was apt to do this—but Lady Blanche took him into her heart anyway. She wrote Wilfrid Blunt: “He is gentle and tender, affectionate to those he loves, much hated by those who have not come under his personal charm.” At the moment he was also busy; the wedding was scheduled for Saturday, September 12, less than three weeks after the formal announcement, and there was much to do. Congratulatory notes required answers (two were from Pamela Plowden and Muriel Wilson). He picked Linky Cecil as his best man, and asked Welldon to speak at the service. Presents had to be acknowledged. In the happy English tradition of political civility, gifts arrived from Balfour and the Chamberlains. The King sent a gold-headed walking stick; Sir Ernest Cassel, £500.89
On the appointed Saturday the guests, including Sir Bindon Blood, Ian Hamilton, and Lloyd George, gathered in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. Even here the groom could not elude controversy; Tailor and Cutter described his attire as “one of the greatest failures as a wedding garment we have ever seen, giving the wearer a sort of glorified coachman appearance.” Blunt wrote in his diary that Churchill had “gained in appearance since I saw him last, and has a powerful if ugly face. Winston’s responses were clearly made in a pleasant voice, Clementine’s inaudible.” Appropriately, the reception was held in Lady St. Helier’s home. In his new post Churchill had defended the right of costermongers to trade in the street, and “Pearly Kings and Queens,” cockneys whose costumes were adorned with pearl buttons sewn in elaborate patterns, danced outside in Portland Place.90
Winston later wrote that he and Clementine “lived happily ever afterwards.” It was, in fact, a great marriage, but few brides have had to adjust so quickly to their husband’s careers. She was given a glimpse of the future immediately after the wedding ceremony, when she found him with Lloyd George in the church vestry, earnestly talking politics. At Blenheim, where their honeymoon began, he revised the final text of his book on Africa, and in Venice, their last stop, he was toiling away at official papers and memoranda, belying his letter to his mother from there: “We have only loitered & loved—a good & serious occupation for which the histories furnish respectable precedents.” In Eichorn on the way back they stayed with an old friend of Winston’s, the Austrian Baron Tuty de Forest, who had been educated in England. Winston and the baron had a marvelous time shooting, but Clementine found the household stiff and the baroness dull. She was glad to be headed home, and was excited by the prospect of being presented to her husband’s constituents in Dundee. Her oddest experience on the wedding trip had been her first encounter with Winston’s underwear. She wore cheap chemises, but his underclothes, she whispered to a wide-eyed Violet Asquith when they returned and dined at Downing Street, were made of pale pink, very finely woven silk; they came from the Army and Navy Stores and “cost the eyes out of the head”—about eighty pounds a year, she calculated. When Violet “taxed him with this curious form of self-indulgence, he replied: ‘It is essential to my well-being. I have a very delicate and sensitive cuticle which demands the finest covering.’ ” He invited her to examine the texture of the skin on his forearm. It was, he proudly told her, “a cuticle without a blemish, except for one small portion of my anatomy where I sacrificed a piece of my skin to accommodate a wounded brother officer on my way back from the Sudan campaign.”91
Like othe
r lovers, they invented pet names for each other. Clementine was “Cat” or “Kat”; Winston was “Pug,” then “Amber Pug,” then “Pig.” Drawings of these animals decorated the margins of their letters to each other, and at dinner parties Winston would reach across the table, squeeze her hand, and murmur, “Dear Cat.” After a garden luncheon, Blunt entered in his diary: “He is aux plus petits soins with his wife, taking all possible care of her. They are a very happy married pair. Clementine was afraid of wasps, and one settled on her sleeve, and Winston gallantly took the wasp by the wings and thrust it into the ashes of the fire.” She became pregnant the month after the wedding. Not knowing the child’s sex, they created the name “Puppy Kitten,” then shortened it to simply “P.K.” The imminent arrival of the P.K. made a move from the little house on Bolton Street imperative, and early in 1909 Churchill took an eighteen-year lease, at £195 a year, on a house at 33 Eccleston Square, in Pimlico, between Victoria Station and the Thames. Clementine was economizing wherever possible; on April 27 she wrote Winston: “I had a long afternoon with Baxter & carpets. The green carpet is lovely & will do beautifully for the library. It looks like soft green moss… I tried hard to make the red stair carpet do for the dining room, but it is really too shabby.” A “green sickly looking carpet” from Bolton Street “does Puppy Kitten’s room.” One servant’s room could “be done for about £2.” She had “written to the people who are making the blue stair carpet to ask what it will cost to cover dining room entirely with the blue—(4/6 a yard).”92