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Articles
Mary Churchill at War: A Historical Treasure
Emma Soames, ed., Mary Churchill’s War: The Wartime Diaries of Churchill’s Youngest Daughter. London: Two Roads-Hachette, 2021. 416 pages, Amazon $19.99. This review from the Times Literary Supplement is republished by kind permission of the editors.
Mary Churchill was 17 years old when the Second World War broke out. She moved with her parents Winston and Clementine first to the Admiralty and then to No. 10 Downing Street. She watched her father as he wrote his wartime speeches; joined him on his tours of Blitzed cities such as Bristol and Cardiff. She was his aide-de-camp at the 1943 Quebec and Potsdam Conferences, and stayed in President Roosevelt’s White House. Fortunately for historians, she also kept a diary.
As well as her abiding love for her father—indeed a worship of him that Mary admits “is almost a religion to me”—what gives this book its powerful resonance is the personal courage she showed once she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) aged eighteen. She served in anti-aircraft batteries from Whitby to Newport, but especially in Hyde Park protecting London from the Luftwaffe night after night, as the bombs fell and shrapnel flew. She never mentions her own bravery, of course, but it shines through between the lines. “Quite heavy barrage,” she writes in January 1941, for example. “Awfully exciting.”
A historical treasure
Although there is a good deal of charming and interesting content about Mary’s personal life—her doomed engagement to Lord Duncannon, her partying while on leave, her dieting and dress-sense and so on—future historians will be excited by these diaries for the light they shed on her father and his colleagues.
“The House was in a most uncertain, unpleasant & sensitive and restless mood,” Mary (who later became Lady Soames) records of the Norway Debate that paved the way for her father to become prime minister in May 1940. “A storm of interruptions arose making Papa sit down & the speech ended amid catcalls from both sides of the House. There was a spirit of criticism & ferocity to be felt most strongly.” That is not how it reads in Hansard, and it is invaluable to have another eyewitness account of that momentous period, to place alongside the standard ones by Hugh Dalton, Chips Channon, Jock Colville, Harold Macmillan and Harold Nicolson.
Unlike them—except Colville—Mary had intense, personal, daily contact with Winston Churchill. Of the sinking of the French Fleet at Oran on 3 July 1940, she writes: “Papa is shocked & deeply grieved that such action has been necessary.” When Charles de Gaulle came for lunch later that month, she noted: “The general is a stern, direct giant. We all thought him very fine.” He told her, “France now only exists in the souls of her faithful sons and in the hearts of those in a foreign land who still fight against tyranny.”
Literary quality
For one so young, Mary had a surprisingly fine turn of phrase. The Battle of Britain has her noting: “The knights of King Arthur’s round table assume a prosaic air in comparison with our pilots.” Having danced with the legless Squadron Leader Douglas Bader, she wrote: “He is exemplary of the triumph of life & mind & personality over matter.” She could also be tersely outspoken. When an “acidulated old woman” cast aspersions on the French and reminded her that the Germans were also the children of God, Mary’s only comment was “the old bitch!” When Neville Chamberlain resigned from the Cabinet she recorded, “He is very ill—I am sorry for that but I am glad he is gone at last. I am an inveterate—unforgiving—unforgetting contra-Munichoise.”
She notes various ideas of Churchill’s that never came to fruition, such as “the formation of training colleges for those embarked on a political career” in order to counter the deterioration of quality of MPs. (It’s not too late.) Even though Churchill was not a Christian, he asked her to “Pray for the victory of British arms” during the Libyan offensive of December 1940. Alongside major events such as the North African campaign, she also mentions that Churchill “rushed out and complained to the cook about the soup, which he (truthfully) said was tasteless.” Only a few pages later, her father is opining on socialism versus the profit motive, telling Hugh Dalton, “I’m afraid you will not get much work without profit.”
Witness to history
Mary was with her father when Germany invaded Russia, watched when he faced two votes of no confidence. And she saw him march down the Champs Elysées at the Liberation of Paris. On 30 June 1944 her parents visited her anti-aircraft battery, when only twelve days earlier she had noted: “Diver attacks continue…At night the firing has been unbelievable—the whole sky a mass of light & tracer tracks & the noise is like hell let loose.”
These diaries are essentially a daily love letter from a brave young woman to her adored father. They are immensely evocative of wartime Britain and occasionally powerfully moving, but also historically important.
The author
Andrew Roberts is a biographer and historian whose books include Salisbury: Victorian Titan (winner of the Wolfson Prize for History), The Storm of War (winner of the British Army Book Prize) and Napoleon the Great (winner of the Grand Prix Fondation Napoléon). His Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018) was acclaimed as “undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written” (Sunday Times). He is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London; the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; and a regular contributor to the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. His latest work is George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch.