Clementine the life of mrs winston churchill book club questions

When Winston Churchill took office as prime minister of Britain in May 1940, Nazi Germany had brought Continental Europe under its domination, and it seemed as if, barring a miracle, Britain would be next. Churchill couldn’t promise a miracle, he told the House of Commons: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He forgot to mention a possibly more potent weapon: his wife, Clementine, the subject of Sonia Purnell’s thorough and engrossing (if occasionally overdramatized) biography.

Tall, willowy and regal, Clementine Hozier had a rather slapdash upbringing for the wife of a prime minister, particularly one descended from one of Scotland’s most distinguished aristocratic families. There was some question about her paternity: Her titular father had been uninterested in procreation, and the “sexy, bored and lonely” Lady Blanche Hozier had looked elsewhere — reportedly, in Clementine’s case, to her own brother-in-law, Lord Redesdale (grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters). The Hoziers’ acrimonious divorce, which marked Clementine’s childhood, left Lady Blanche in straitened circumstances; and although Clementine showed great academic promise, her mother pushed her into society instead of university, hoping she would attract a suitable husband. Despite the lack of fortune that caused snickers among the upper-class mean girls, Clementine’s beauty enticed a number of suitors, but she backed out of two engagements because she found her prospective bridegrooms dull. She was 22 before a chance dinner invitation put her next to Winston Churchill, a rising young politician, son of the Duke of Marlborough’s third son, Randolph, and his dashing American wife, Jennie Jerome. Young Churchill was instantly smitten: “What a comfort & pleasure,” he wrote her, “to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality.” Not long afterward he proposed to her at his family’s ancestral seat at Blenheim, and she enthusiastically accepted: “My dearest One,” she scribbled in a note she sent him via one of Blenheim’s footmen, “I love you with all my heart and trust you absolutely.”

For the next 60 years that love and trust continued mostly unabated; Clementine Churchill became her husband’s essential confidante and adviser, vetting his speeches, smoothing over his faux pas, dealing with his constituents, “able to command civil servants, dress down generals, chivy cabinet ministers and face up to presidents on his behalf.” She stood by him when, as first lord of the Admiralty, he was blamed for the failed Allied incursion at the Dardanelles during World War I — an initiative led by commanders she mistrusted; she maintained his parliamentary constituency when, to recoup his reputation, he volunteered to serve in the trenches in 1915; she urged him to be open to social reform and women’s ­suffrage when he returned to government; and, despite her Liberal political beliefs, comforted him when, having rejoined the Conservatives in 1924, he lost his post as chancellor of the Exchequer in the “flapper election” of 1929.

Most spectacularly, she was his support and counselor when he returned to lead the government in the darkest hour of World War II. He made her privy to top secret information, including the Ultra decrypts of Nazi codes; and in addition to acting as his sounding board for policies and speeches, she helped him run what Purnell calls “Operation Seduction U.S.A.” — the charm offensive aimed at ­stimulating American participation in the anti-Nazi struggle. Not only did she cosset President Roosevelt’s envoy Harry ­Hopkins on his visit to London, leading him to promise help for Britain “even to the end”; she facilitated affairs between her own daughter Sarah and the American ambassador Gil Winant, and between her daughter-in-law, Pamela Digby Churchill, and both the American newsman Edward R. Murrow and the American envoy Averell Harriman. And she forged a sympathetic bond with Eleanor Roosevelt, although the first lady wondered what lay behind Clementine’s public submissiveness to her husband, while even the active Clementine was “bowled over by Eleanor’s boundless energy,” Purnell writes.

The Churchills’ quarrels were legendary — “She called me a bloody old fool,” Winston was once heard to mutter, retreating from one closed-door row — but they were devoted to each other, or, more accurately, to him. “Father always came First, Second and Third,” their daughter Mary said. Putting Winston first, Clementine concealed from him, and from the public, his potentially fatal cardiac condition during World War II; and when he suffered a series of strokes during his second term as prime minister in 1953, she and a trusted inner circle hid that fact as well.

In Purnell’s view, such efforts, and the displaced pain of repressing her own aspirations and feelings, resulted in episodes of full-blown depression. At the outbreak of World War I, pregnant and left alone by her husband to tend their two small children and her neurasthenic mother, Clementine “appears to have lost control and even to have attempted self-harm”; when their 2-year-old daughter Marigold died of septicemia in 1921 she became “an emotional and physical wreck”; in 1963 she was hospitalized and given electroconvulsive therapy. In between such incidents she frequently took to her bed, sometimes for a day or two, as a defense against the demands of her challenging but beloved spouse. It was probably no coincidence that in the years after Churchill’s death “all those nervous complaints largely disappeared.”

Sonia Purnell’s book is the first formal biography — apart from an account written by the Churchills’ daughter Mary ­Soames — of a woman who has heretofore been relegated to the sidelines, even in Churchill’s own history of World War II, which gives her a single mention. Purnell, a political commentator and biographer, has delved into the Churchills’ voluminous and candid correspondence, as well as the archives of her daughter-in-law, Pamela, and interviewed Clementine’s friends, family and personal ­assistants. It’s not clear from the notes or acknowledgments, however, what record Clementine might have left of her private thoughts and perspective. Quotations are annoyingly sourced only with the letters C.S.C.T. (“Clementine Spencer Churchill Trust”) and a date, and Purnell occasionally resorts to what seem like imaginative reconstructions (“Waking up at dawn on her wedding day in a large, chilly room . . . did nothing to boost Clementine’s spirits”). And ironically in a book intended to celebrate Clementine’s own story, she presents that story largely in terms of Winston’s career. Perhaps this is inevitable. Clementine’s life was given to that career, and given meaning by it: As she laid a bouquet on Winston’s grave, her granddaughter heard her say, “I will soon be with you again.”