It cost 250,000 lives on both sides with the Anzacs - troops from Australia and New Zealand - bearing the brunt. However, Turkish troops - allied to Germany - trapped Allied forces on the beaches of the Gallipoli peninsula. He boldly proposed to thread his naval fleet through the needle of the Dardanelles, the narrow 38-mile strait in north west Turkey. In 1915, as First Lord Of The Admiralty, Churchill wanted to open a second front away from the massacre of the trenches in France and Belgium. Winston was most definitely a rising political star - until the disaster of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I. In the first two years of their marriage there were two babies, and she fought the first of 14 election campaigns at his side. Their early married life was idyllic and their love for one another shines through their letters.Ĭlementine proved to be an eager student of politics and was thrilled by her husband’s work, first as president of the Board Of Trade and then as home secretary. She wrote to his mother Jennie: ‘I feel no one can know him without being dominated by his charm and brilliancy.’ Soon after, during a weekend at Blenheim Palace, Winston’s birthplace and home of his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough, he proposed to her. She was more guarded but increasingly captivated as he lay siege to her by daily letters. He was enamoured from the start - here was a girl, not just of great beauty but also intelligence, one whom he could talk to rather than just worship from afar.
Their next meeting, in 1908, was more auspicious when Winston arrived late to a dinner party to find Clementine Hozier seated next to him. She was not impressed by his small stature or his silence and soon escaped to dance with someone else. She first met my grandfather in 1904 at a society ball where he was, uncharacteristically, dumbstruck by her beauty. Kristin Scott Thomas and Gary Oldman star as Clementine and Winston Churchill in director Joe Wright's Darkest Hour She also mixed with girls from a variety of social backgrounds, another rarity in those far-off days, which stood her in great stead as the wife of an MP. As a result, Clementine was far better educated than many of her peers. The heartbroken Blanche moved back to England where the family lived in a state of impoverished gentility in Hertfordshire.Ĭlementine attended Berkhamsted High School for Girls at a time when girls of her class were usually taught by governesses. (She once boasted that she was juggling ten men at once.)Ĭlementine’s father is thought to have been Bertie Mitford, Lord Redesdale, grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters.įollowing her divorce, Blanche Hozier took her children to live in Dieppe where, as a foreign, titled beauty, she embraced the bohemian lifestyle of a group of expat writers and artists which included Oscar Wilde.īut this idyll came to a sad end in 1900 when her eldest daughter and Clementine’s confidante, Kitty, died of tuberculosis. Privately he was a bully and an authoritarian - his children were terrified of him.Įven before their separation, the Hoziers had what would now be called an open marriage, and their four children (Kitty, Clementine and twins Nelly and Dick) are assumed to have been fathered by Blanche Hozier’s several lovers. Her father was a thorough scoundrel, whose business activities at Lloyd’s were regarded with horror even in those unregulated days. So who was this woman, whom history has rather consigned to the wings, unfairly diminished by the long shadow cast by her husband, and whose impact, until now, never been fully portrayed on film?Ĭlementine Hozier was born in 1885, the daughter of Blanche and Colonel Henry Hozier. In the course of their 57-year marriage, Clementine saw Winston through desperate days of political humiliation and disfavour, episodes of the ‘black dog’ - the crippling depression and self-doubt that haunted him periodically - and the tragic loss of the fourth of their five children, Marigold, who died aged three.Īnd of course, she was at his side through the war years when his need for support was never greater.
His personal sense of destiny was only fully vindicated when he became Britain’s wartime leader. In 1908, aged just 23, she had committed herself to a complex and brilliant man with a love of action, whose ambitions were high but whose early career was uncertain. The Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine, sit on board a naval auxiliary patrol vessel as it travels down the Thames towards docks in east London on 25 September 1940
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