Q: Did Churchill conduct business in bed?

“I am a criminologist currently researching my next book and I need to know something about Churchill briefing colleagues from his bed. Is this true?  Did Churchill work from his bed? I rather get the impression that he did, but why was this not seen as odd behaviour, the bedroom being private?” —D.W., England

A: True if odd

Churchill occasionally received visitors in bed, more at Downing Street than at Chartwell, where he had better control of visitor timing. The following is from Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary, by Anthony Montague Browne (1995), 114. “Toby” is described below.

During the morning, Ministers (or those he knew well enough) were received at his bed. R.A. Butler (“Rab”), the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had a large bald head that Toby* found particularly attractive as a perch, with inevitable avian consequences. Butler mopped his head with a spotless silk handkerchief and sighed patiently: “The things I do for England.”

Ministers who sought to call on WSC were not always welcome, particularly if he was working on a speech. On these he lavished more concentration and more anxiety than any other business. On my way up to WSC’s bedroom on one such morning, I was intercepted by Butler and Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, who had just come in unexpectedly. “We must speak to Winston urgently,” said Eden….

They stopped outside the open bedroom door while I went in. “The Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor are here and say they must see you urgently,” I announced portentously. WSC looked up irritably: “Tell them to go and bugger themselves,” he ordered and returned to his speech notes.

I retreated, pondering on a suitable paraphrase. (“The Prime Minister hopes that you will forgive him for the moment as he has reached a crucial point in his speech,” perhaps.) A shout followed me from the bed: “There is no need for them to carry out that instruction literally!” From the faces in the corridor it was all too clear that they had heard both messages.”

*Toby: Sir Winston’s airborne assistant

Toby was a budgerigar (parakeet) presented to WSC in 1954 by Dido Cairns, sister of Christopher Soames, his parliamentary private secretary. See The Churchill Documents, vol. 23, Never Flinch, Never Weary, November 1951- February 1965 (Hillsdale College Press 2019).

Toby quickly insinuated himself into Churchill’s affections and traveled everywhere with him. He learned to drink, and WSC once had to fish him out of a brandy glass. He perched on visitors’ heads, leaving tokens of esteem—“hoping to be remembered,” according to Churchill.

The bird often nibbled at books and manuscripts, Piers Brendon wrote, “thus indicating, in his master’s view, that he had read them. A secretary showed Churchill a set of nibbled page proofs: ‘Oh! Yes, that’s all right,” said WSC—”give him the next chapter.’”

In 1960, to Churchill’s great distress, Toby flew out of a Monte Carlo hotel window. An urgent search failed to recover him. A replacement could not match Toby’s personality. (See Churchill’s Bestiary, 54.)

Further reading

For more on Winston Churchill’s daily routine and animal companions:

Cole Feix, “Churchill’s Character: A Rigid Daily Schedule,” 2019.

Richard M. Langworth, “Churchill’s Daily Routine (Or: ‘You Can’t Get Good Help Anymore’),” 2020.

Review: “The Brendon Bestiary: Churchill’s Animals as Friends and Analogies,” 2019.

(Any reader bored by pedantic, picayune, obscure meanderings about nothing of importance should stop reading now. For my review of Paul’s book see: “Book of the Year.”)

“Paintatious” was artist Churchill’s word for a scene worthy of his brush. He found many such venues on the French Riviera, which Paul explores so well. But this is a tricky question because “paintatioius” not a real word. It’s a “Churchillism.” (My book, Churchill by Himself, Chapter 3, is full of them.) So the answer to how you spell is: Any way you like!

We thought we could establish his spelling if Churchill used “paintatious” in writing. So we plumbed all his 20 published million words in the Hillsdale College digital archive. Alas, like other famous invented Churchillisms, he mainly used it in conversation. Like “Admiralissimo, Bottlescape, Cantellopolus, Destrigulate, Namsosed, Non-undisinflation” and “Unsordid,” they were mainly in speech or conversation, not in print.

Version 1: “Paintatious”

This was my choice, following WSC’s daughter, Lady Soames. In Churchill by Himself I list as a “passim” this quote: “This is a most paintatious place!” (41) Reference is to Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (1979), 204 (U.S. edition 268). She writes of a holiday in 1921:  “…he continually felt drawn to “paintatious” (his own adjective) places, where the sun might be expected to shine brightly and continuously.” She uses it again on page 407 (English edition):

In the summer of 1948, Winston and Clementine stayed for several weeks in Aix-en-Provence; I had married Christopher Soames in 1947, and we were both included in this lovely holiday. We all stayed in the Roi René Hôtel at Aix, the weather was perfect, and almost every day we used to set out, equipped with a delicious picnic, to spend the day in some lovely and “paintatious” place.

Lady Soames continues the use of “paintatious” in her Winston Churchill: His Life as a Painter (1990). Dr. Capet thought Churchill might have spelled it thus when writing to the British Consul in Madeira, looking for a suitable hotel in 1949. Alas not: he only asked for a “paintable” location.

Version 2: “Paintaceous”

I spelled it thus several times in old articles, but only one other author did: Barbara Leaming, in her superb account of his years after 1945, Churchill Defiant. (We rated that the “Book of the Year” in 2010. Haven’t issued another such bouquet until Rafferty’s, although there were some deserving titles.)

Ms. Leaming wrote of WSC’s Lake Como painting holiday in 1945: “They drove along the lakefront while Churchill scouted for what he liked to call a “paintaceous” scene.” (40) Of his sojourn in Miami Beach before his “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946, she added: “Seated beside a bed of red poinsettias near the pink brick seaside house his wife had arranged to borrow from a friend, Churchill contentedly scanned the coconut palms overhead in search of a ‘paintaceous’ angle.” (60)

Version 3: “Paintacious”

We finally hit upon the one and only instance where Churchill actually spelled the word in print—introducing a third variation! It was in a letter to Clementine from Marrakesh—yet another painting holiday—on 19 December 1950. (Martin Gilbert, Never Despair, page 577; The Churchill Documents vol. 22, Leader of the Opposition, August 1945-September 1941, page 1976. Speaking of painting destinations he wrote:

Alas Timbuktoo is 1500 miles, so it cannot be considered. However the British Consul at Casablanca, a young man, who met me at the airfield here and came to dinner afterwards, says there is a far better trip the other way—left-handed instead of right. When you go through the mountains you come to two lovely native cities with extraordinary springs of blue water and rocky gorges, which seem by all accounts to be most paintacious.

Madelin Evans at the Churchill Archives Centre kindly answered our request to look at the letter itself (Baroness Clementine Spencer-Churchill Papers 2/38). She confirms the spelling. But this was a typed letter, and they were dictated—so a secretary did the spelling! Still, Churchill himself signed the letter. If he didn’t approve, he would likely have corrected it—as he did the odd word in typed letters. He did so in this one, Madelin says, but did not correct “paintacious.”

Which is Correct?

To be absolutely pedantic, WSC’s only written occurrence, “paintacious,” is correct. But this appeared exactly once, so I don’t think it is dispositive.

Mary Soames’s strikes me as the most melodious version. Also with her spelling, I don’t have to modify my entry in Churchill by Himself.

A great joy of reading The Churchill Documents is their trove of historical sidelights. Volume 22 (August 1945—September 1951, due late 2018) covers the early Cold War: the “Iron Curtain,” the Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift and Korean War. It reminds us of the political battles swirling around the Anglo-American “special relationship.” The issues seem very clear in hindsight. Seven decades ago, the future was unknowable. Take Governor Dewey and the question of America’s commitment to world security.

The Dewey Lament

In late 1950, Churchill received a letter from twice-unsuccessful presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey. The New York governor took issue with his fellow Republican, former President Herbert Hoover:

I have hesitated for a long time about burdening you with this [but] I am taking the liberty of imposing upon you…. Mr. Hoover made a speech night before last, the implications of which are appalling to me. The press reports today it has had wide and unhappy repercussions in Great Britain and on the Continent.

I am still not quite sure why I ran again [for president in 1948] but in any event, having no ambitions or expectations of having any other office I am free to proselyte to the limit of my capacity for the point of view expressed in my speech and intend to do so. [Churchill, a lover of concise English, must have blanched at that.]

If you find any spot on the horizon more cheerful than I do, I should appreciate hearing of it. The world is filled with gloom and almost in extremis.¹

Not “another man or dollar…”

Probably a lot of people beside Dewey wondered why he had run again (he had lost to FDR in 1944).  But to me, the surprise was to find Dewey, a former Republican nominee, taking issue with Hoover the last Republican president. They certainly didn’t like each other. Hoover reportedly said Dewey had “no inner reservoir of knowledge on which to draw for his thinking…. A man couldn’t wear a mustache like that without having it affect his mind.”

I asked Professor George Nash, Hoover’s biographer, what Dewey was referring to. Dr. Nash referred us to Hoover’s broadcast of 20 December 1950, the text of which he sent. He also helped us compose a footnote to Dewey’s note to Churchill:

On December 20, Hoover gave a speech to advocate a Western-hemisphere-oriented “Gibraltar” geopolitical strategy, a buildup of American air and naval forces, but not of its army, focused on defending the Western Hemisphere and the free island nations on the Pacific and Atlantic rims, like Taiwan and the UK “if she wishes to cooperate.” Hoover would also refuse to send “another man or dollar” to continental Europe for its defense until​ the non-​communist nations there strengthened their own military forces. His advice (denounced by his critics as isolationist) differed from President Truman’s plan, announced just the day before, to send more U.S. troops to western Europe to assist in NATO’s defense preparations.²

“Some great common bond…”

As World War II had wound down, America’s attitude toward the postwar defense of Europe was a major concern of Churchill’s. The Churchill Documents contain many examples of this. ³ Churchill’s worries continued after Roosevelt’s death. What would be the attitude of the new president? In May 1945 Churchill wrote Truman, asking for a “standstill order” on the movements of U.S. forces. Truman replied, “I must not have any avoidable interference with the redeployment of American forces to the Pacific.”⁴

To Churchill’s relief, Truman adopted a robust attitude toward Soviet aggression. The President tacitly (though not publicly) approved of Churchill’s forceful 1946 message about the Iron Curtin. He responded vigorously to communist challenges in Greece and Turkey. When the Russians seemed to hesitate in withdrawing troops from Iran, Truman sent a naval task force led by the battleship Missouri into Sea of Marmara.⁶

In 1948, Stalin threatened to cut off Allied access to Berlin. Truman and Prime Minister Attlee defied him with the Berlin Airlift. In the House of Commons, a jubilant Churchill congratulated Labour with gusto.⁷ He even hoped for “some great common bond of union, like we had in 1940.”⁸ It was typical of Churchill’s lifelong preference for coalitions at times of crisis.

“We cannot buy [Europe] with money…”

Hoover was not proposing American isolation. He wanted America armed to the teeth, able to repulse any challenge. Like Churchill, he voiced “the need to preserve Western Civilization on the Continent of Europe [and] our cultural and religious ties to it.”⁹

They diverged in two critical areas. The first was the atomic bomb, which the Soviets had by then acquired. Hoover said the bomb was “a far less dominant weapon than it was once thought to be.”¹⁰ Churchill differed profoundly. “It may well be,” he had declared in 1946, “that in a few years this awful agency of destruction will be widespread, and the catastrophe following from its use by several warring nations will not only bring to an end all that we call civilization but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself.”¹¹

Hoover also balked at helping a Europe that refused to help itself. “The test is whether they have the spiritual force, the will, and acceptance of unity among them by their own volition. America cannot create their spiritual forces; we cannot buy them with money.” Churchill was doing his best to create unity of purpose and collaboration, but this view was anathema to him. With the best spiritual will and unity, he declared again and again in those years, Europe could not defend itself. It was America’s obligation to do everything to help.

Otherwise, however, the Hoover and Churchill theses run parallel. Hoover like Churchill favored peace through strength. He advocated a joint naval and air strategy, a unity of minds between the United States and the British Empire and Commonwealth. That is what Churchill had worked for most of his life.

“I would denounce such a plan scathingly”

Churchill’s 1950 reply to Dewey was brief: “It is a comfort to me that you felt Hoover’s speech was ‘appalling.’ I think that your own declarations are of far more consequence.”¹² But two years later Eisenhower was elected. And Eisenhower, like Hoover, seemed betimes to regard the atomic bomb as just another weapon.

Oddly or ironically, Dewey now proposed a defense posture much like Hoover’s. He and Churchill met in New York in January 1953, before Eisenhower took office. They were joined by John Foster Dulles, about to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.

The details of that meeting will appear in the final volume 23 of The Churchill Documents. We already know much of it from Never Despair 1945-1965, Martin Gilbert’s final Churchill biographic volume. On 7 January Churchill cabled his Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and Chancellor of the Exchequer R.A. Butler:

Dewey proposed a scheme for a Pacific Treaty between all Pacific powers including the Philippines, Formosa [Taiwan], and the like, excluding (repeat excluding) Great Britain. I said I would denounce such a plan scathingly. Dulles then gave a long account of the negotiations leading up to the Anzus Treaty, and how the Labour Government had made no objection to it at all.

I explained our point of view. Dewey, who is thoroughly friendly, then said that if I objected so strongly, he would let his baby, i.e. the Pacific Treaty, die. In fact I could consider it dead. On the spur of the moment he said that an alternative plan might be for the United Kingdom and the United States to make a joint declaration (comparable to our guarantee to Poland in 1939) that if Communist China attempted to occupy Indo-China, Burma or any other countries in the Pacific Area, we and the Americans would declare war.¹³

“Great Slab of a Face”

Jock Colville and Christopher Soames, respectively Churchill’s private and parliamentary private secretaries, were present during this chilly interview. Dewey suggested that Churchill “could cast a spell on all American statesmen and that if he were directly associated with the economic talks, the fears of the people and of Congress would be aroused to such an extent that the success of the talks would be endangered.” Colville continued:

Winston took this very reasonable statement ill, but Christopher and I both took pains to assure Dulles afterwards that we thought he was absolutely right. Irritated by this, Winston let fly at Dewey after dinner and worked himself into a fury over certain Pacific Ocean questions. Christopher and I again applied soft soap subsequently. We told Dewey that a sharp debate was the PM’s idea of a pleasant evening…. But…Winston was really worked up and, as he went to bed, said some very harsh things about the Republican Party in general and Dulles in particular…. He said he would have no more to do with Dulles whose “great slab of a face” he disliked and distrusted.¹⁴

So it was that Thomas Dewey reversed himself, but Churchill’s views remained consistent. He went away with grave doubts about Foster Dulles, who would confirm his misgivings by his attitude toward a Soviet summit at the Bermuda Conference with Eisenhower the following December.

“I tell you all this,” Churchill concluded in his cable to Eden and Butler, “to show you the rough weather that may well lie ahead in dealing with the Republican Party who have been twenty years out of office; and I feel very sure we should not expect early favourable results. Much patience will be needed.”¹⁵

And that indeed is another story—one that The Churchill Documents 1951-1965 shall relate.

Endnotes

¹ Larry P. Arnn & Martin Gilbert, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 22, August 1945-October 1951 (Hillsdale College Press, forthcoming).

² See Herbert Hoover, “Our National Policies in This Crisis,” Broadcast on 20 December 1950, in Addresses Upon the American Road 1950-1955 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1955), 3-10. Online at http://bit.ly/2NQXOs2.

³ Larry P. Arnn & Martin Gilbert, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21, The Shadows of Victory, January-July 1945 (Hillsdale College Press, forthcoming, October 2018.)

⁴ WSC to Truman, 12 May 1945; Truman to WSC, 21 May 1945, ibid.

N.B. Material referred to in footnote 5 is omitted in this excerpt.

⁶ Churchill to Attlee and Bevin, 7 March 1946, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁷ Winston S. Churchill, “Foreign Affairs,” House of Commons, 10 December 1948, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁸ Churchill, speech at Leeds, 4 February 1950, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁹ Hoover, “Our National Policies,” 4.

¹⁰ Hoover, ibid., 5.

¹¹ Winston S. Churchill, Zurich, 19 September 1946, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill By Himself (London: Ebury Press, 2012), 315.

¹² Churchill to Thomas Dewey, 30 January 1951, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

¹³ Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 791.

¹⁴ John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1940-1955, 2 vols. Sevenoaks, Kent: Sceptre Publishing, 1986-87, II 320. Note: It is widely reported, but without attribution, that Churchill also said Dulles was “the only bull who carries his china shop with him.”

¹⁵ Gilbert, Never Despair, 791.

Excerpted from a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

PBS and ITV have succeeded where many failed. They offer a Churchill documentary with a minimum of dramatic license, reasonably faithful to history (as much as we know of it). Churchill’s Secret limns the pathos, humor, hope and trauma of a little-known episode: Churchill’s stroke on 23 June 1953, and his miraculous recovery. For weeks afterward, his faithful lieutenants in secret ran the government. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, the film is worth seeing, and worth going to see.

Sadness attends our mortality, death comes to us all. Sir Winston teetered in 1953; only his inner circle knew how close he had come. The “secret” has been public now for fifty years, since publication of his doctor’s diaries in 1966. But at the time it was a secret. Not a word leaked, thanks to family, staff, and three press barons—Beaverbrook, Bracken and Camrose. Private secretary John Colville wrote: “They achieved the all but incredible, and in peace-time possibly unique, success of gagging Fleet Street, something they would have done for nobody but Churchill.”

Secret Pathos

Exactly how ill the Prime Minister really was I leave to experts. At the time, many close to him thought he would die. Colville wrote: “he went downhill badly, losing the use of his left arm and left leg.” In the film Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran (Bill Paterson), summoned to Downing Street, finds the PM singing incoherently: “I’m forever blowing bubbles.” Great heavens, I thought, they are going to link this to Marigold….

“Bubbles” was the favorite song of a 2 1/2-year-old daughter who died in 1921. Rarely mentioned, Marigold was buried in a corner of their hearts. With poignant flashbacks, the film unfolds their memories of the loss they still deeply felt. In a moving scene, Clementine tearfully recounts Marigold’s story to her husband’s nurse. As a device for portraying her and Winston’s humanity, this is a touch of genius.

The nurse, Millie Appleyard (Romola Garai) is the film’s only fictional character. She is meant to represent “the help”—too numerous to catalogue in the space of a short film. Millie has a Yorkshire accent but her father, she tells Churchill, was Welsh: “and no fan of yours.” (WSC once allowed deployment of troops during the Welsh miners strike in 1910.) Devoted to his recovery, but always her own woman, Millie sees the job through. Confronting all challengers, she’s a perfect foil for Churchill, his wife, and their sometimes obstreperous family.

Expert Casting

Critics who say PBS dotes on British drama forget that UK theatre offers unequalled depths of talent. There are so many exceptional actors that casting lookalikes for a historical film is a relative breeze. In Churchill’s Secret, the casting is superb.

Michael Gambon is an excellent Churchill: more drawn, less cherubic, but perfect in his mannerisms and bearing. Lindsay Duncan as Clementine is almost up to the standard set by Vanessa Redgrave, brilliant alongside Albert Finney’s Churchill in “The Gathering Storm” (2002)—and far superior to Sian Phillips, the great Robert Hardy’s opposite number in “The Wilderness Years” (1981).

Supporting actors are outstanding. Colville (Patrick Kennedy) and Christopher Soames (Christian McKay)—who bore the burden of state in those anxious days—could not be more lifelike. R.A. “Rab” Butler (Chris Larkin)—a Chamberlainite who had never liked and hoped to replace Churchill, whom he had hoped would retire since 1945—is the same weak reed he was in life. “I hope you don’t think of me as an enemy,” says Rab to a rapidly recovering Churchill in August. The Prime Minister replies: “I don’t think of you at all, Rab.” 

The portrayal of the Churchill children, boozing and bickering (correctly excepting Mary), is over-emphasized. These scenes are admittedly fiction. No one alive knows what really happened at Chartwell in those secret weeks. The family and staff I talked to never mentioned rows during those weeks. The film strives however to represent how the three elder children must have felt, and certainly acted, at one time or another. They had grown up under a great shadow in trying times. As Moran (perhaps wise before the fact) is made to remark: “There’s a price to pay for greatness, but the great seldom pay it themselves.” 

What Good’s a Constitution?

More time could have been spent on how Colville and Soames held the fort while the boss recovered.  Churchill once wrote a famous article, “What Good’s a Constitution?” In 1953, they must have asked themselves that question.

Today it would be impossible to keep a lid on such a secret. What they did might indeed be thought unconstitutional. Yet the nation owed a debt to those responsible lieutenants, who acted only when they knew the PM would approve. As Colville remembered:

…the administration continued to function as if he were in full control. We realised that however well we knew his policy and the way his thoughts were likely to move. We had to be careful not to allow our own judgment to be given Prime Ministerial effect. To have done so, as we could without too great difficulty, would have been a constitutional outrage. It was an extraordinary, indeed perhaps an unprecedented, situation….Before the end of July the Prime Minister was sufficiently restored to take an intelligent interest in affairs of state and express his own decisive views. Christopher and I then returned to the fringes of power, having for a time been drawn perilously close to the centre.

K.B.O.

While the testimony of insiders certainly suggests a close call, many were confident that Churchill would recover. The morning after the stroke, wrote Mary Soames, he “amazingly presided at a Cabinet meeting, where none of his colleagues thought anything was amiss.” She quoted Harold Macmillan: “I certainly noticed nothing beyond the fact that he was very white. He spoke little, but quite distinctly.” By the time he arrived at Chartwell on the 25th, he was at rock bottom. Yet a month later he was well enough to be driven the three-hour journey to Chequers, the PM’s official country house, and was resuming his literary and political work.

Churchill’s Secret is replete with Sir Winston’s famous admonition in the face of misfortune, K.B.O. (Keep Buggering On.) Amid growing calls for his retirement, he was determined to stay—long enough at least for one more try at his final goal: a permanent peace. The film is not clear about how much time elapsed between the stroke and the “test” Churchill set for himself. That was the Conservative Party Conference at Margate. There on October 10th he would have to make a major, fifty-minute speech. It was do or die: We are rushed through the weeks to Margate, actually almost four months after he was stricken.

Of course he brought the house down. Jock Colville noted: “He had been nervous of the ordeal: his first public appearance since his stroke and a fifty-minute speech at that; but personally I had no fears as he always rises to occasions. In the event one could see but little difference, as far as his oratory went, since before his illness.”

“See them off, Winston”

Some observers have faulted the portrayal of Clementine in Churchill’s Secret—not for Lindsay Duncan’s skillful acting, but for the words the script has her say. To some she seems a whiny, self-centered neurotic, the very picture given in recent biography.

I honestly didn’t have that impression. At Margate Clementine tells him firmly: “See them off, Winston.” Their daughter told me Clementine had thought in June that his life was ending. The film suggests that Lady Churchill had many regrets; and she did. She genuinely believed—and had for a long time—that he had stayed too long. “Clementine bore the brunt of all this,” Mary wrote, “and her anxiety concerning his political intentions was great.”

The film establishes a reasonably accurate picture of Lady Churchill. “None of us would be here without him,” one of his children says, “And he wouldn’t be here without you.” Winston himself tells her: “I shall face anything with you, the Tories, the Russians—even death itself.”

Unlike certain frothy popular accounts, Churchill’s Secret makes it clear that come what may, Clementine was the rock on which he depended. As he said of her on many occasions: “Here firm, though all be drifting.”

Much younger than her siblings, Mary had an idyllic youth, growing up at Chartwell, her father’s beloved Kentish home, but always in the background was his preoccupation with the growing threat of Hitler, and in 1939 the war arrived, and with it Mary’s life was dramatically altered. She served with the ATS, manning London mixed anti-aircraft batteries, and shared her father’s grief when in July 1945, with the war almost over worldwide, he was summarily relieved as Prime Minister as a result of the General Election. The publisher states:

…we follow Mary’s life through her fascinating personal diary, published here for the first time. Through the immediacy of her private observations we are drawn into a world where the ordinary minutiae of a packed family, social and romantic life proceed against a background of cataclysmic events….Mary takes on her own set of professional demands while sharing the many anxieties and stresses brought to bear upon her family through her father’s position. The mutual love and affection between Mary and her parents is evident on every page, from her earliest years at Chartwell to Winston’s defeat at the 1945 general election, when Mary recounts her own pain and devastation on her father’s behalf. At this point she meets her future husband, Christopher Soames. We are left in no doubt at the end of this charming and revealing memoir that, at twenty-four, Mary has lived a full life and is well prepared for her future as young wife and mother.

For several years we have heard from Lady Soames as she progressed through the writing, a prodigious task for anyone her age, yet she has always been young at heart, and possessed with her father’s determination to “finish the job.” We take great delight in knowing that her work is now done, and that she may “rest her paw” and take pride in another outstanding Churchill literary work to add to her many earlier ones.