Churchill’s Citadel by Katherine Carter: How Chartwell went from Churchill’s retirement
Churchill’s Citadel by Katherine Carter (Yale University Press £20, 432pp)
Churchill’s Citadel is available now
In 1922 Winston Churchill bought a country home in Kent, an hour outside London. Chartwell was a bit of an architectural hotchpotch, but to Churchill it represented a place to retreat to and lick his wounds.
Seven years earlier he had been forced to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty after the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, which saw thousands of British and ANZAC troops lose their lives.
More recently, he had been forced out of Parliament. While he would manage to scramble back into power two years later, he was out of government again in 1929. When, in 1932, Hitler was given the chance to meet Churchill in Munich, the Nazi leader couldn’t see the point. Mr Churchill was yesterday’s man.
Yet, as Katherine Carter shows in this fascinating book, Churchill used his years of exile at Chartwell to rebuild his life and his political career. There was far more than self-interest in play. Churchill believed passionately that Great Britain was putting itself in grave danger by ignoring the looming international crisis.
While prime ministers Baldwin and Chamberlain were busy promoting peace at all costs, Churchill wrote thousands of letters and newspaper articles warning that Herr Hitler was a tyrant with a ‘war mentality’ who would not stop until he had conquered the world.
Time and again, Churchill thundered from Chartwell that Britain desperately needed to expand its military capacity to be ready for the invasion that was just around the corner. Grace Hamblin, one of Churchill’s several secretaries, recalled ‘peers and potentates as well as ordinary men’ arriving at Chartwell at all hours of the day and night ‘to discuss the threat of war’.
The atmosphere at Chartwell wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. With access to the household accounts, National Trust curator Katherine Carter paints a delightful portrait of a family home in its many off-duty moments.
Although Churchill always seemed old, he had an extraordinary physical stamina and loved the bracing routines of the countryside as much as the next aristocrat (he had, after all, been born at Blenheim Palace).
Visitors to Chartwell were surprised to be led by the butler into the grounds to discover their host, cigar clamped between his lips, carefully building the wall of a new cottage. He boasted that he could manage 500 bricks a day. Favoured guests were given cement and a trowel and told to lend a hand.
Churchill the builder: Churchill boasted that he could lay 500 bricks a day
Political Powerhouse: Chartwell was bought by Churchill in 1922
Churchill’s appetite was equally prodigious. His adored wife Clemmie did not cook herself – she was an aristocrat, after all, cousin to the Mitford girls – but she had imaginative ideas about how to feed overnight guests. Carter has delved into the domestic accounts and reports that a typical meal consisted of a starter of gnocchi, followed by chateaubriand, finished with a lemon souffle.
That’s not forgetting the alcohol, especially champagne, which flowed so freely that it is amazing anyone was able to stay upright.
Eating lavishly three times a day became so ingrained at Chartwell that Diana, the eldest Churchill daughter, confided later that the reason she married early and unwisely was simply to escape the endless feeding.
Someone else who couldn’t stomach the constant scoffing was T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia. Churchill regularly summoned the airman to Chartwell to pick his brains about building up the RAF in readiness for the coming conflict, which Churchill was convinced would be won or lost in the skies. Lawrence was down-to-earth, declaring his favourite meal to be fish and chips eaten from a newspaper ‘and no sitting down’.
Guaranteed to arrive without a dinner jacket, the diminutive Lawrence was obliged to raid the wardrobe of his portly host, with the unfortunate result that he resembled a child in fancy dress with ‘his cuffs dangling in his soup’.
After dinner, when distinguished guests including Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein were staggering away from the table, their host was just getting going. It was in the small hours that Churchill dictated his articles and books to secretaries who were employed on a shift pattern.
Joyce Cutting, who worked at Chartwell in 1931, reported that Mr Churchill sometimes dictated while wearing only ‘pink Celanese underwear’. Alarming though this sounds, Joyce was probably referring to the 1930s equivalent of ‘lounge wear’.
As the international situation deteriorated during the 1930s, Churchill’s message gained traction. Give Hitler an inch, or a country, and he’d immediately take another one.
Far from funny: The Churchill family with Tom Mitford (far left), Freddie Birkenhead (second left) and Charlie Chaplain (far right)
Younger British politicians who were sceptical about appeasement started to appear at Chartwell, as did disaffected German statesmen and military men who hoped to persuade an increasingly influential Churchill that Britain needed to act decisively in publicly condemning Nazi aggression if there was to be any hope in turning back from the disaster of full-blown war.
How ironic, then, that, just as Churchill was emerging from obscurity, it appeared that he might have to sell his beloved refuge. He and Clemmie had never managed to live within their surprisingly modest means, following the loss of their fortune in the 1929 stock market crash. Their idea of economy was to pay their staff as little as possible.
In 1937 the dreaded moment came when the house was put on the market. Even so, Churchill insisted the estate agents didn’t advertise the magnificent property, but merely wait to see if anyone happened to make an enquiry.
In the end the moment of danger passed. Quite how Churchill wriggled out of his financial hole is unclear, although Carter is not alone in suggesting that he was rescued by the generosity of a financier friend.
Once hostilities were declared in 1939, though, Churchill was scarcely in residence at Chartwell. Its position near the Channel made it far too dangerous. German bombers would have no problem flying over to assassinate the newly-appointed British prime minister and still be home in time for lunch. It was not until the war was over that the Churchills returned permanently to Chartwell.
Winston Churchill was now a national treasure, a man who needed saving for the nation. A deal was done with the National Trust, allowing him to remain in residence until his death 20 years later.