On the evening of May 8, 1945, Winston Churchill could have been forgiven a little merry-making. After all, ‘Mr Hitler’, the man who had been his implacable foe for five long years, had committed suicide eight days earlier.
Generaloberst Alfred Jodl had surrendered unconditionally on behalf of the German army, navy and air force the day before. And Britain’s wartime prime minister had toasted victory over lunch that day with the King himself.
But if anyone understood the peacetime travails that lay ahead, it was Winston. In his radio broadcast to the nation that afternoon, he had said: ‘We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toil and effort that lie ahead…’
For while victory was ours in Europe, we would need to defeat the Japanese in the Far East before beating our swords into ploughshares. Indeed, British troops jokingly redefined the acronym for the British Liberation Army (BLA) — the designation for the force sent into action in North-West Europe — as ‘Burma Looms Ahead’.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill as he addresses the crowd in Whitehall, from the balcony of the Ministry of Health as he broadcasts to the nation that the war with Germany has been won
On the domestic front, meanwhile, there were shattered cities to be rebuilt, an economy to be salvaged and refugees to be repatriated. In the international sphere — as Winston knew better than anyone — the fall of Nazism promised to coincide with the rise of another malevolent threat, Communism.
And yet, just at the time that he should have been savouring an historic triumph in the company of his nearest and dearest, the Prime Minister found himself alone in Downing Street, save for the company of Smokey the cat.
It was deeply poignant that a man so gregarious should find himself bereft of companionship at a time of such national rejoicing. The truth is that Winston, for all his occasional bombast and bluster, was an acutely sensitive man who adored his family.
But Clementine, his wife of 36 years, was on a tour of the USSR in her role as head of the International Red Cross’s Aid To Russia Appeal, a five-week trip that encompassed not just the cultural centres and a meeting with Stalin, but visits to farflung corners of that huge country.
His children were also otherwise engaged. Oldest daughter Diana, 35, was preoccupied by her young family, the three children under nine she had with husband Duncan Sandys, the minister for works in her father’s Cabinet.
Another daughter, Sarah, 30, was an actress — recently divorced from the impresario Vic Oliver — who, apart from being a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), had a busy life of her own.
And Randolph, 33, his only son, was serving in Yugoslavia under the command of the legendary Fitzroy Maclean, Winston’s personal military and diplomatic envoy to Yugoslav leader Josip Tito and his partisans.
(As Churchill personally told Maclean in late 1943, his mission was to ‘simply find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them kill more’.) That left Mary — my mother — but she was in Belgium.
Winston Churchill balancing a top hat on his walking stick watched by his daughter Mary, outside the Mansion House in London
Not that that was going to stop Winston. It was after midnight by the time Captain Mary Churchill got back to her hotel in the centre of Brussels on the night of VE Day. Then 22, she was in the Belgian capital as a junior commander of 481 Battery, one of the first mixed anti-aircraft batteries, set up in 1941 to liberate more men to go to the Front.
Mary had joined up at the age of 18 and, after four years’ service all over England, her unit was ordered to become part of the Allied advance in the wake of D-Day. By May 8, they had got as far as Antwerp.
But come VE Day she was on two days’ leave, and had started the evening at a party in Brussels in an apartment on one of the city’s picturesque side streets. At one point, she leaned over a balcony so she could listen without interruption to the BBC’s broadcast of the King’s Speech on a radio.
She wrote in her diary: ‘I stood quite still and tried to make my stubborn, dulled consciousness accept and realise that the war is over, that the day we have schooled ourselves not to dwell upon — lest in gazing ahead we should falter in our path — that the day of deliverance had come.’
British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill with his wife Clementine leaving a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral, held on the first Sunday after VE Day, London, 13th May 1945
Then it was off to a ‘luscious’ dinner with friends before joining the jubilant hordes who filled the streets and squares, still finding it hard to believe liberation had really arrived. And so Mary was flushed and excited when she arrived back at the hotel. But she was soon brought back down to earth by the sight of her formidable commanding officer, Colonel Galloway.
He had bad news. Her father, the prime minister, had summoned her back to London. Initially she was indignation itself at the suggestion that she should take temporary leave of her command of some 200 ATS troops. And, it should be said, she was having a whale of a time.
As the pace of the fall of Germany quickened, so had the pace of Mary’s social life. Apart from boar shoots in the Ardennes, there were increasingly long leaves to Brussels where champagne flowed at dances attended by both American and British troops.
There were even ping-pong tournaments with Prince Charles of Belgium, though their friendship failed to develop into a romance, despite hopes by parents on both sides. The idea of leaving all this behind, as well as being singled out for special treatment, frustrated her.
‘I was enraged and shocked at the unsuitability of the thing,’ she wrote in her diaries. ‘And then the Colonel said: ‘Don’t be so selfish’ and then my heart’s desire and the thought of Papa having wanted me, left me only with the longing to be at his side and to hell with everything else.’
So she packed, slept a little and in the morning was flown home in a Dakota. She wrote in her diary: ‘I gazed with love and happiness once again — first on the white cliffs gleaming across that unbelievably narrow channel and then on the well-known countryside, then Croydon Aerodrome and at last the annexe [to Number 10 Downing Street] and Papa in his dressing gown with open arms.
‘He had waited lunch for me. He had his on a tray in bed. I, at his feet. I just had time to titivate [smarten herself up] before Papa set out with me in tow to pay diplomatic calls at the Embassies [of European allies].’ When a prime-minister leaves Downing Street these days, he does so in a supercharged, armoured Jaguar saloon that is part of a convoy.
But on that day 75 years ago, when the streets of London were mobbed with people celebrating the end of their nightmare, Winston and Mary climbed into an opentopped car and, with the support of just four mounted policemen and a handful of dispatch riders, made their way at a snail’s pace through the crowded streets.
She wrote in her diary: ‘How can I ever describe the crowds? It has all been told and I shall never forget it — nor can I express my pride and joy at the sight of Papa being so received. How wonderful he has been!
And how wonderful he is now, for it is he who is striking the note of just restraint. ‘Retribution and justice must be done but in the words of Edmund Burke: ‘I cannot frame an indictment against a whole people.’
‘He talked to me about this at lunch and then at the American Embassy he used it in his short speech to staff.’ But first stop was the Russian Embassy at 13 Kensington Palace Gardens.
‘There were toasts and caviar but I felt uncomfortable,’ Mary wrote in her diary. After all, her father was already convinced that the Nazi menace had been replaced by a Communist one. Indeed, it was just three days later that Churchill coined the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’ in a letter he wrote to President Truman.
A reference to the oppressive nature of the regimes in the Soviet bloc, it would come to define the East/ West split of Europe. From the Russian Embassy, they made the short hop to the French Embassy on Knightsbridge, where Ambassador Rene Massigli entertained them in a ‘lovely’ drawing room.
‘Mme Massigli appeared in a stunning hat looking handsome with glittering tears in her hard eyes,’ Mary wrote in her diary. They returned to Downing Street and father and daughter went their separate ways until dinner.
In a letter later that month to her closest friend Judy Montague, Mary wrote of that first evening with her father: ‘When I arrived I found Papa and Smokey the cat celebrating Victory a little sadly. ‘Poor Papa — so tired and so terribly depressed about the future.
‘But chiefly moved beyond anything by the demonstrations in London. I thought back across these long years — I thought of 1940 — I thought of the darknesses and hours he had worked through with such unrelenting courage and perception.’
Later that evening, Winston’s eldest daughter Diana and her husband Duncan Sandys joined Winston and Mary for dinner. After listening to a radio programme about Winston, the Prime Minister’s bodyguard Tommy Thompson appeared to tell them that large crowds were forming outside on Whitehall.
‘So Duncan, Diana and I bolted ahead to get a good place in the crowd and we and everyone else bellowed happily when dear Papa appeared ‘He was charming — tender and gay. Then he finally recited a verse from Rule Britannia and we all responded with gusto that Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.’
Diana and Duncan then rushed off to Buckingham Palace while Mary waited for her sister Sarah to arrive. ‘When I’d nearly given up hope at 12.15am, she appeared with John Winant [the U.S. Ambassador].
We dashed to the Palace and were not too late. The King and the Queen — she resplendent in white and a diamond tiara — appeared and we all yelled with happiness and pride.
‘The flood lighting is too lovely — the city is transfigured. The crowds are vast, happy and unbelievably controlled. (After shouting for the K and Q we went to the American Embassy and were fed on eggs and bacon cooked by John G Winant Jr.)
‘Papa in the midst of national victories and personal triumphs suddenly looks old and deflated with emotion, fatigue and a heartbreaking realisation of the struggles yet to come.’ For the next two days, Mary stayed at Number 10 with her father while awaiting the delayed return of a triumphant Clementine from Moscow.
On the following night — Thursday 10 — Max Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate who had galvanised the war effort as minister of aircraft production, came in after dinner. ‘Much talk and wrangle about the General Election,’ Mary recalled.
‘Max says: ‘Now’ — Papa broods. This is the 5th anniversary of Papa as Prime Minister.’ On the night of Friday, May 11, Winston and Mary had dinner alone again, this time in the garden of Number 10.
‘The dusk deepened around us. We listened to the news — and then to some romantic waltzes. The floodlighting came on at about 10.30pm. Papa was wearing his mauve and black quilted dressing gown over his siren suit and a soft black hat. We walked a little on the Parade to look at the lights.
Nelson gazed down upon Papa. Smokey the cat slid silently across the lawn to be remotely and coldly polite to Papa. ‘At about 11pm, Papa went upstairs to lay his golden egg [believed to be a reference to writing a speech on Japan].
I went to bed — knowing I had spent an evening which with so many other memories of Papa will live vividly in my mind and heart until I die.’ The next day, Clementine finally returned from Moscow. On her last day in the Russian capital, she had read a speech prepared for her by Winston before going to the ballet to see Swan Lake.
She later wrote: ‘At the fall of the curtain the prima ballerina, with exquisite grace, turned the applause from herself to our box. She wheeled towards us, clapping and smiling, the whole company followed her and then the great audience took up the applause.’
The next morning she boarded her husband’s personal aircraft, a Douglas C-54 Skymaster, laden with gifts, including an Order of the Red Banner of Labour, and a large diamond ring (a present from Madame Molotov, wife of the Soviet foreign minister).
Winston was determined to be at RAF Northolt to meet her, but in typical fashion he was late leaving Storeys Gate (the Number 10 annexe) and the Skymaster had to circle the airport repeatedly in order to allow her unpunctual, but loving, husband time to reach the Tarmac to meet her.
Clementine certainly cut a dash that day. Mary wrote: ‘She is decorated and looks a wow in uniform.’ After a large family reunion at Chequers, on the following day Mary accompanied her parents to the service of National Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral attended by the King and Queen.
She wrote in her memoir some 50 years later: ‘Such was the mood, we were allowed to sing the second verse of the National Anthem, (usually a real no-no) bidding God arise to scatter the King’s enemies: ‘Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks … ‘
‘Winston, with a little help from the Almighty, had certainly done that.
Mary Churchill’s wartime diaries, edited by Emma Soames with the Churchill Archive, are to be published next year by Two Roads as Mary Churchill’s War.