Winston Churchill’s Personal Life
Often, people feel they know much about Winston Churchill as a servant to his country from easily attained and general information, but they know little about Churchill’s personal life. Churchill was a husband, a father, a painter, and a historian, among many other things. While he also maintains the status of a war hero and prime minister, he was much more in life. His aspirations and desires were a large part of who he was and how he attained his goals.
An important part of every story lies within the family unit. In 1904, Winston attended a ball in Crewe House—the home of the Earl of Crewe and his wife, Margaret Primrose—where he met Clementine Hozier, the granddaughter of the 10th Earl of Airlie.[i] In 1908, they found themselves drawn together at another event, hosted by Lady St. Helier. Imaginably, they were instantly compatible because Churchill proposed to Clementine Hozier at Blenheim Palace, his childhood home, later that year, and they married shortly after.[ii]
Over the course of their marriage, Winston and Clementine Churchill had five children: Diana, Randolph, Sarah, Marigold Frances, and Mary. Unfortunately, Marigold grew fatally ill just short of three years after she was born, and the family buried her in the Kensal Green Cemetery.[iii] Their other children did not suffer the same fate but provided very interesting personalities and habits which the Churchills had to accommodate on very individual levels. Diana was rather flippant and brought her parents great duress. After two failed marriages and three children, Diana committed suicide in 1963. Randolph, after failing to enter parliament several times, finally found acceptance as a Conservative member of parliament for Preston between 1940 and 1945 and continued to become a successful journalist who began Winston S. Churchill’s official biography in the 1960s.[iv] Like his sister, Randolph had two unsuccessful marriages. Additionally, he had two children. Sarah took a career in dramatics, which worked well for a while, but she had the same luck with her love life as her siblings in that she entered two marriages, which ultimately failed, and was then widowed after a third marriage. Mary was the only child who caused her parents little worry or grief. She provided heavy support for them both, especially her mother. Mary’s husband, Christopher Soames, was an Assistant Military Attaché in Paris who later found success in parliament. They had five children, and Nicholas, the eldest, was a prominent member of the Conservative Party in his own time.
Although they spent long periods of time apart from one another, Winston and Clementine Churchill maintained a successful marriage, or, rather, as successful as most long marriages prove, generally. As all couples, they had their faults, fights, and failings. In one instance, Clementine hurled a dish of spinach at Churchill, which reportedly missed and splattered behind him. Additionally, she never quite forgave Churchill for buying Chartwell without expressly involving her in the purchase decision, and she brought up her resentment from time to time with a bitter grudge. As stated by Churchill College at Cambridge, “Clementine was high principled and high strung; Winston was stubborn and ambitious,” a volatile combination of personality traits within a married couple.[v]
Churchill spent a good portion of time away from his family, both on business and on holiday. It was a well-known fact that Winston Churchill put work first, but he was devoted to his children, regardless, although he enjoyed spending time abroad with friends and acquaintances much more than his wife and left his children at home; Clementine Churchill often “found the company tedious” and refused to accompany him.[vi] Occasionally, the family would take holidays together, but more often than not, they began taking vacations apart. Churchill holidayed with regularity, visiting wealthy friends in the Mediterranean and cruising with Aristotle Onassis, Greek millionaire ship-owner.[vii] In all, they took eight cruises together. Once when they passed through the Dardanelles, Onassis instructed his crew to pass quietly and during the night so as to avoid drudging up Churchill’s bad members of the location.
Winston Churchill’s close friends included Professor Lindemann, along with Birkenhead, Beaverbrook, and Bracke—cheerfully dubbed “the three Bs”—of whom Clementine Churchill was never particularly fond. Although Clementine did not often travel with Churchill, the two entertained often as a couple, and their guests included the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, and Lawrence of Arabia.
In addition to entertaining both his friends and family members, Winston Churchill engaged quite a few personal hobbies. As an amateur artist, Churchill enjoyed painting and employed a special gusto after resigning in 1915 as First Lord of the Admiralty.[viii] Paul Maze, a friend of Churchill’s whom he met in World War I, taught him to paint early during Churchill’s career while providing both companionship and influence. Throughout his painting career, Churchill’s skills grew stronger. Churchill is particularly known for his impressionist landscape paintings, and he composed many of these works of art while on holiday in Egypt, Morocco, or the South of France. Not wanting to paint under his own title, Churchill utilized the name “Charles Morin” as a pseudonym and reached the point where he rarely left his home without his painting supplies. Any time he traveled, he tried to slip away for a few moments so that he could spend time with his paints and canvas. Even when Churchill was touring France’s Maginot Line in 1939, he still managed to paint with his friends near Dreux.[ix]
Painting was only one of many hobbies Winston employed to pass his free time. Maybe unexpectedly, one of Churchill’s greatest vices was a slight gambling addiction, and he lost a small fortune when the American stock market crashed in 1929. Although he maintained a famous name and arose from an upper-class family, Churchill did not believe his income supported his established lifestyle, and the 1929 crash didn’t help cushion his ever-slimming pockets. Churchill’s income while out of office arrived primarily from book sales and opinion pieces; therefore, he wrote often and well. Winston Churchill has a small library under his name, which includes a novel, two biographies, three volumes of memoirs, and several historical works. In 1953, he gained the Nobel Prize for Literature, and two of his most famous works brought international fame: The Second World War, his six-volume memoir, and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a four-volume history covering the period from Caesar’s invasions of Britain to the beginning of World War I. Additionally, many of Churchill’s speeches are in print, such as Into Battle, published in the United States under Blood, Sweat, and Tears, which Life Magazine included as one of the 100 most astounding books published between 1924 and 1944.[x]
In his spare time at home, Churchill also constructed buildings and garden walls at his house in Chartwell. A few major works he undertook at the country home were building a dam, a swimming pool, and a red brick wall to surround the vegetable garden, as well as retiling a cottage at the end of his garden. In addition to these home improvements, Churchill bought an adjoining farm in 1946 and took up farming.[xi] On the side, he also bred butterflies, an interest left over from his time in India.[xii] Moreover, Churchill found great interest in science and technology, delving into a stint of writing popular-science essays on evolution and fusion power. In Are We Alone in the Universe?, a mostly forgotten piece of writing, Churchill investigated in an unpublished manuscript the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
To top it all off, Churchill began dabbling in horse-racing in 1949 and took advice from his son-in-law, Christopher Soames, on his first purchase, a three-year-old gray colt named Colonist II, the first of many thoroughbreds. In 1950, Churchill was initiated into the Jockey Club, which much pleased him.[xiii]
All in all, Winston S. Churchill had a personal life full of odds-and-ends hobbies, similar to that of any common person. Historians pay close attention to his feats and follies, hoping to gain more insight into the mind of Winston Churchill, the fascinating man who left his mark on history in a way unlike any other. Churchill was a normal man, too, though. He cared for his family, enjoyed the small things in life, and felt that his efforts could be used in many ways.
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References
[i] “Sir Winston Churchill: A Chronology.” Churchill College, Cambridge. https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/churchill-papers/churchill-biography/. Accessed 22 May 2017.
[ii] Soames, Mary. Speaking for Themselves: The Private Letters of Sir Winston and Lady Churchill. 1999.
[iii] Soames, Mary. Speaking for Themselves: The Private Letters of Sir Winston and Lady Churchill. 1999.
[iv] “Sir Winston Churchill: A Chronology.” Churchill College, Cambridge. https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/churchill-papers/churchill-biography/. Accessed 22 May 2017.
[v] “Sir Winston Churchill: A Chronology.” Churchill College, Cambridge. https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/churchill-papers/churchill-biography/. Accessed 22 May 2017.
[vi] Soames, Mary. Speaking for Themselves: The Private Letters of Sir Winston and Lady Churchill. 1999.
[vii] “Sir Winston Churchill: A Chronology.” Churchill College, Cambridge. https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/churchill-papers/churchill-biography/. Accessed 22 May 2017.
[viii] Jenkins, Roy. Churchill: A Biography. 2011.
[ix] “Sir Winston Churchill: A Chronology.” Churchill College, Cambridge. https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/churchill-papers/churchill-biography/. Accessed 22 May 2017.
[x] Canby, Henry Seidel, and editors. “The 100 Outstanding Books of 1924-1944.” Life. August 1944.
[xi] “Sir Winston Churchill: A Chronology.” Churchill College, Cambridge. https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/churchill-papers/churchill-biography/. Accessed 22 May 2017.
[xii] Wainright, Martin. “Winston Churchill’s Butterfly House Brought Back to Life.” The Guardian. August 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/19/winston-churchill-butterfly. Accessed 22 May 2017.
[xiii] “Sir Winston Churchill: A Chronology.” Churchill College, Cambridge. https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/churchill-papers/churchill-biography/. Accessed 22 May 2017.
