The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (53 page)

Mary, the country mouse, became an anti-aircraft gunner assigned to the heavy-gun battery in Hyde Park. This caused her mother no small degree of anxiety, especially after an eighteen-year-old member of a Southampton battery was killed during an air raid, on April 17, 1942, the first such death of the war. “
My first agonizing thought was—it might have been Mary,” Clementine told her in a letter. But she also confessed to feeling “private pride that you my beloved one have chosen this difficult, monotonous, dangerous & most necessary work—I think of you so often my Darling Mouse.” John Colville recalled how one evening, when air-raid sirens began to sound, “
the P.M. dashed off in his car to Hyde Park to see Mary’s battery at work.”

Mary was promoted and by 1944, the penultimate year of the war, found herself in command of 230 female volunteers. “
Not so bad at 21!” her father wrote proudly in a letter to Randolph.

Winston Junior was even more impressed. He understood that his grandfather was an important man, but it was his aunt Mary he idolized. “
To a three-year-old, having a grandfather who was Prime Minister and running the entire war was a concept difficult to grasp,” he wrote in a memoir. “…But to have an aunt who had four huge guns of her very own—that was
something
!”

E
RIC
D
UNCANNON GRIEVED THE
failure of his courtship, as became apparent on Saturday, September 6, 1941, when he and John Colville went shooting at Stansted Park with a group of friends.

Wrote Colville, “
Eric, who was at his simplest and most charming, told me he can still think of nothing but Mary Churchill.”

Churchill did at last relent. On Tuesday, July 8, 1941, in the midst of a heat wave with temperatures in the nineties, John Colville stopped by Churchill’s office just before his nap.

“
I hear you are plotting to abandon me,” Churchill said. “You know I can stop you. I can’t make you stay with me against your will but I can put you somewhere else.”

Colville told him he understood but added that he hoped Churchill would not do so. He showed him one of his as yet unfinished contact lenses.

Churchill told Colville he could go.

At last able to wear his lenses, Colville presented himself for another RAF medical interview and this time—“oh rapture!”—passed. Soon afterward he was sworn in as a new member of the RAF Volunteer Reserve, the initial stop on his final journey to becoming a pilot. The RAF did insist, however, that first he have two teeth filled, something his dentist had previously told him not to worry about. This took an hour.

At length, it came time for Colville’s departure from 10 Downing Street, so that he could begin his training to become a fighter pilot. He could wear his contact lenses for only about two hours, and this, happily, disqualified him from serving on a bomber crew. Churchill “agreed that the short, sharp battle of the fighter pilot was far better than the long wait of a bomber crew before they reached their objective.” He was, however, appalled to learn that Colville would be doing his training not as an officer but as the RAF’s equivalent of an enlisted man, an aircraftman second class. “You mustn’t,” Churchill told him. “You won’t be able to take your man.”

Wrote Colville, “
It had not crossed his mind that one of his junior Private Secretaries, earning
£
350 per annum, might not have his own valet.”

On September 30, after packing his things, Colville said a private goodbye to the prime minister, in his office. Churchill was genial and gracious. “He said it must only be ‘
au revoir
’ as he hoped I should often come back and see him.” Churchill told Colville that he really should not be letting him leave, and that Anthony Eden had been annoyed at having to do so. But he conceded that Colville was doing “a very gallant thing.”

As their meeting came to an end Churchill told him, “I have the greatest affection for you; we all have, Clemmy and I especially. Goodbye and God bless you.”

Colville left, feeling a great sadness. “
I went out of the room with a lump in my throat such as I have not had for many years.”

C
OLVILLE DID
NOT
DIE
in a fiery wreck after being shot to bits by an Me 109. He underwent his flight training and was assigned to a reconnaissance squadron flying American-made Mustangs, based in Funtington, adjacent to Stansted Park, where he contracted a case of impetigo. Lady Bessborough, Eric Duncannon’s mother, invited him to stay in Stansted House, to recuperate. A few weeks later, he received a summons from Churchill.

“
It is time that you came back here,” Churchill told him.

“But I have only done one operational flight.”

“Well, you may do six. Then back to work.”

After his six sorties, he returned to Downing Street to resume his work as private secretary. As D-Day neared, he was called back to his squadron, over protests raised by the Prof that if he were captured and identified, he would prove a valuable asset to German intelligence. Churchill let him go with reluctance. “
You seem to think that this war is being fought for your personal amusement,” he told him. “However, if I were your age I should feel the same, and so you may have two months’ fighting leave. But no more holidays this year.”

It was hardly a holiday. Colville flew forty sorties over the French coast, conducting photographic reconnaissance. “
It was thrilling as we crossed the Channel to look down on a sea boiling with ships of all kinds heading for the landing beaches,” he wrote in his diary. “It was thrilling, too, to be part of a vast aerial armada, bombers and fighters thick as starlings at roosting-time, all flying southwards.” Three times he was nearly shot down. In a lengthy letter to Churchill, he described one incident in which an anti-aircraft shell tore a large hole through one wing. Churchill loved it.

Once again Colville came back to 10 Downing. Prior to his RAF tenure, he had been reasonably well liked at No. 10 although never heartily loved, according to Pamela Churchill, but now that he had returned from active service, his cachet had risen. “
None of us except Clemmie really liked Jock,” Pamela said years later. “…But he then went off and joined the air force and I think that was a very smart thing to do because when he came back again, everybody, you know, was so pleased to see him.” He was no longer “wet,” as Mary had first judged him in the summer of 1940. “Nothing could have been less true,” she conceded later.

In 1947, Colville became private secretary to Princess Elizabeth, soon to be queen. The offer came as a surprise. “It is your duty to accept,” Churchill told him. During his two-year tenure in the post, Colville met and fell in love with one of the princess’s ladies-in-waiting, Margaret Egerton; they married on October 20, 1948, at St. Margaret’s Church, adjacent to Westminster Abbey.

Colville achieved a fame greater than any of his fellow private secretaries did when, in 1985, he published his diary, in edited form, under the title
The Fringes of Power;
the work became a touchstone for every scholar interested in the inner workings of 10 Downing Street under Churchill. He removed much personal material—“trivial entries which are of no general interest,” as he put it in his preface—though anyone reading the actual handwritten diary held in the Churchill Archives Center in Cambridge, England, will see that those trivial entries were of the utmost importance to Colville himself.

He dedicated the book to Mary Churchill, “with affection and with penitence for some of the less complimentary references to her in the early part of this diary.”

In all, Beaverbrook offered his resignation fourteen times, the last in February 1942, when he was minister of supply. He resigned rather than take on a new post as minister of war production. This time Churchill did not object, doubtless to Clementine’s delight.

Beaverbrook left two weeks later. “
I owe my reputation to you,” he told Churchill in a letter on February 26, his last day. “The confidence of the public really comes from you. And my courage was sustained by you.” He told Churchill he was “the savior of our people and the symbol of resistance in the free world.”

Churchill replied in kind: “
We have lived & fought side by side through terrible days, & I am sure our comradeship & public work will undergo no break. All I want you to do now is to recover your strength & poise, so as to be able to come to my aid when I shall vy greatly need you.” He credited Beaverbrook’s triumph in the fall of 1940 with playing “a decisive part in our salvation.” He closed: “You are one of our vy few Fighting men of genius.”

And so, Beaverbrook at last departed. “I felt his loss acutely,” Churchill wrote. But in the end, Beaverbrook had succeeded where he’d needed to succeed, doubling fighter output within his first three months as minister of aircraft production and, perhaps just as important, standing near at hand to provide the kind of counsel and humor that helped Churchill through his days. What Churchill most valued was Beaverbrook’s companionship and the diversion he provided. “
I was glad to be able sometimes to lean on him,” Churchill wrote.

In March 1942, Beaverbrook felt compelled to explain to Churchill why he had made all those previous threats to resign. He acknowledged using them as a tool to overcome delays and opposition—in short, to get his way—and he believed that Churchill had understood that. “
I was always under the impression,” he wrote, “that, in your support for my methods, you wished me to stay on in office, to storm, to threaten resignation and to withdraw again.”

The two men remained friends, though the intensity of their friendship ebbed and flowed. In September 1943, Churchill brought him back into his government as lord privy seal, a move that seemed designed mainly to keep his friend and adviser close at hand. Beaverbrook resigned from this as well, but by then Churchill, too, was leaving office. In one volume of his personal history of World War II, Churchill gave high praise to Beaverbrook. “He did not fail,” he wrote. “This was his hour.”

The Prof was vindicated.

At length Mr. Justice Singleton felt confident enough about the various statistics of German and British air strength to offer a judgment. “
The conclusion at which I arrive,” he wrote, in his final report in August 1941, “is that the strength of the German Air Force in relation to the Royal Air Force may be taken as roughly 4 to 3 as at the 30th November, 1940.”

Meaning that all along, as the RAF fought what it believed to be an overwhelming foe, the two air forces did not differ much in terms of strength, the main variance, as Singleton now concluded, being in the numbers of long-range bombers. This comforting news came a bit late, of course, but in the end it may well be that the RAF, thinking itself the underdog by a ratio of four to one, fought better and with more urgency than might have been the case if it had shared the relative complacency of the Luftwaffe, which believed itself to be vastly superior. The report proved that the Prof’s instincts had been accurate after all.

His embrace of aerial mines did not have as salutary an outcome. Throughout 1940 and 1941, he and Churchill lobbied and cajoled Air Ministry officials and Beaverbrook to produce and deploy the mines, and to make them a staple in Britain’s arsenal of defensive weapons. He had few successes, many failures, and in the end, faced with increasing resistance, the mines were abandoned.

Lindemann and Churchill remained friends throughout the war, and Lindemann was a regular guest for meals—vegetarian meals—at 10 Downing Street, Chequers, and Ditchley.

For a time, the affair between Pamela Churchill and Averell Harriman flourished. Harriman’s daughter Kathy caught on to their relationship soon after her arrival in London and did not mind. The fact that she herself was several years older than her father’s lover seemed not to trouble her. Kathy was not particularly close to her own stepmother, Marie, and felt no sense of betrayal.

That Kathy should grasp the reality so quickly surprised no one. The couple made little effort to disguise the affair. Indeed, at one point, for about six months, Harriman, Pamela, and Kathy shared a three-bedroom flat at 3 Grosvenor Square, near the American embassy. Churchill knew of the affair, Pamela believed, but he expressed no outward concern. If anything, so strong a bond between a member of the Churchill family and Roosevelt’s personal emissary could only be an asset. Clementine did not approve but also did nothing to intercede.
Randolph later complained to John Colville that his parents “had condoned adultery beneath their own roof.” Beaverbrook knew of it, and loved knowing of it, and made sure that Harriman and Pamela spent long weekends at his country home, Cherkley, where Winston Junior continued to reside in the care of a nanny. Harry Hopkins knew about the affair, and so even did Roosevelt. The president was tickled.

In June 1941, Churchill sent Harriman to Cairo to assess how American aid could best buttress Britain’s forces in Egypt, and asked his son, Randolph, to look out for him. By now Randolph had been promoted to major, assigned to manage press relations at British headquarters in Cairo. He was himself conducting a love affair, this with a celebrated hostess named Momo Marriott, wife of a British general.
One night, while talking with Harriman during a dinner on a chartered dhow on the Nile River, which Randolph had arranged just for the visiting American, Randolph boasted about his own affair. He had no inkling that Harriman was sleeping with his wife, even though it was a source of gossip within his circle and at White’s club back in London.

Randolph’s lack of awareness was evident in a letter he wrote to Pamela in July 1941, which he entrusted to Harriman to deliver to her upon his return from Cairo. The letter praised Harriman. “
I found him absolutely charming,” Randolph wrote, “& it was lovely to be able to hear so much news of you & all my friends. He spoke delightfully about you & I fear that I have a serious rival!”

Randolph finally learned of the affair early in 1942, while on leave. He had, by then, grown dissipated in appearance. Their marriage, already wounded by his spending and drinking and Pamela’s indifference, now veered into a miasma of argument and insult. Furious battles broke out at the Annexe, during which Randolph would pick fights with Churchill. Clementine, concerned that her husband might suffer an apoplectic seizure, again banished Randolph from the house, this time for the duration of the war. By the summer, when Randolph returned to London to convalesce from injuries sustained in a car crash in Cairo, it was clear to all that the marriage could not be repaired. Evelyn Waugh, one of Randolph’s clubmates at White’s, wrote of Pamela, “
She hates him so much she can’t be in a room with him.” In November 1942, Randolph left her.

Harriman moved her into an apartment of her own and paid her an annual allowance of
£
3,000 ($168,000 in today’s dollars). To disguise his role, he used an intermediary: Max Beaverbrook, who, true always to his love of human drama, was glad to do it, and worked out a scheme to camouflage the fact that Harriman was providing the money.

But this, too, was not exactly a secret. “
Unlike Paris, where there was a great black market, everybody took pride in sticking pretty closely to rationing,” said John Colville. “But if you dined with Pamela, you would have a five- or six-course dinner, eight or ten guests, and foods you didn’t ordinarily see. My guess is that all of us around the table were sort of smirking and saying that Averell was taking good care of his girlfriend.”

In October 1943, Roosevelt picked Harriman to be his ambassador to Moscow, and the affair, inevitably, began to cool. Distance freed them both. Harriman slept with other women, Pamela with other men, including, at one point, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. “
I mean, when you are very young, you do think of things very differently,” Pamela told a later interviewer.

As the war neared its end, Pamela felt a growing anxiety about what would come next. On April 1, 1945, she wrote to Harriman in Moscow: “
Supposing the war ends in the next four or five weeks. The thought of it sort of scares me. It is something one has looked forward to for so long that when it happens, I know I am going to be frightened. Do you know at all what I mean? My adult life has been all war, and I know how to grapple with that. But I am afraid of not knowing what to do with life in peacetime. It scares me horribly. It’s silly, isn’t it?”

Years passed. Harriman went on to become U.S. secretary of commerce under President Harry Truman and later was elected governor of New York; he held various senior advisory posts in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He nursed grander aspirations, however—to become secretary of state, maybe even president—but these proved beyond his reach. Despite his many affairs, he remained married to his wife, Marie, and by all counts their marriage grew stronger over the years. Marie’s death in September 1970 left Harriman shattered, according to Marie’s daughter, Nancy. “
He used to sit in her room and cry.”

In 1960, Pamela married Leland Hayward, the producer and talent agent who co-produced the original Broadway version of
The Sound of Music;
their marriage lasted until Hayward’s death in March 1971.

Pamela and Harriman kept in distant touch. In August 1971, they both found themselves invited to a Washington, D.C., dinner party thrown by a mutual friend, Katharine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post
. Harriman was seventy-nine years old; Pamela, fifty-one. They spent the evening in close conversation. “
It was very strange,” she said, “because the moment we started talking, there were so many things to reminisce about that one really hadn’t thought about for years.”

Eight weeks later they married, in a private ceremony at a church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, attended by only three guests. They wanted the ceremony kept secret—but only for the moment.

Later that day, about 150 friends gathered at Harriman’s nearby townhouse for what they had been told was just a cocktail party.

As Pamela walked in, she cried out to a friend, “
We did it! We did it!” It had taken only three decades. “
Oh Pam,” another friend wrote, soon afterward, “isn’t life strange!!” Their marriage endured for another fifteen years, until Harriman’s death in July 1986.