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Churchill’s Little Redhead: A Thoughtful Memoir by Celia Sandys
Celia Sandys, Churchill’s Little Redhead (Stroud, Glocs.: Fonthill Media, 2021), 306 pages, $38, Amazon $29.79, Kindle $9.99.
A delightful autobiography
What a charming and revealing memoir this is from Winston Churchill’s granddaughter, Celia Sandys.
Churchill could never count among his blessings a quiet, serene family life into which to retreat from the hurly burly of politics and war. His loving wife, Clementine, was often exhausted. His political life bounced from wilderness years to periods in high office, his health from robust to threatening bouts of pneumonia and strokes. The family finances fluctuated between worries about penury and the millions produced by his pen. His only son, Randolph, was an unpleasant man, often drunk, roiling family gatherings and ruining friendships. His eldest daughter Diana sadly committed suicide His enchanting daughter, Sarah, allowed alcoholism and failed marriages to wreck a promising theatrical career. Only his daughter Mary floated above the chaos and, in her telling, had an idyllic childhood. Later she led productive personal and public life.
We know all this because the lives of the Churchill children have been chronicled in many books, some better than others. Now we have a new source of information, a delightful autobiography by granddaughter Celia Sandys. Celia’s mother Diana married Duncan Sandys, Financial Secretary to the War Office and Minister of Works in the wartime coalition government. Celia has an older sister Edwina, today a famous artist and sculptor.
Early memories
Celia was born in 1943, in the midst of war and rationing. She notes however that rationing didn’t apply to new-born babies, who received extra rations for the first nine months of their lives. Her first memory is of her third birthday party and a cake—”a thing of wonder made by Madame Floris…Grandpapa’s favourite… Sugar pink, emblazoned with a cat.… Pink is my favourite colour to this day.” Throughout the book, Celia interweaves stories and memories of her grandfather with her own life.
Like her grandfather who had special affinity and love for his nanny, Elizabeth Everest, Celia also had a special love for her nanny, Annie Gray. Once, Celia recalls, during some heavy bombing in London, Nanny rang Downing Street. She was so insistent that an armored car was sent to their flat to evacuate the two sisters to Chequers. I am sure the Prime Minister, her grandfather, would have endorsed this. At Chequers he warmly greeted them with the words, “poor little shelter brats.” Celia is sure that her Annie Gray reminded her grandfather of Mrs. Everest.
During Celia’s childhood she spent time with Churchill at Chartwell and Chequers. At Chartwell, Celia and her sister slept in a room above Churchill’s. The girls would go in to say good morning to Winston and Clementine in their separate bedrooms. She says “we saw a great deal of our grandparents.” Celia is honest and forgiving when talking about her mother’s troubled life. When Celia was ten, she accompanied Diana to a clinic in Italy so she could recuperate from a nervous breakdown.
Growing up a Sandys
At school, Celia excelled in sports, particularly swimming, and she confesses to several “scrapes.” But she was unprepared for earning her own living: “I left with the sort or education I might have received from a governess before the war…. [M]y parents did not encourage me to stay on….” But they did send her to Paris, where she spent two terms at a finishing school. She recalls her “coming out ball in 1961,” because “from the moment my grandfather arrived, it was guaranteed success.” Sir Winston stayed until two in the morning, tapping his feet to the music.
But Celia discovered that “partying for months on end…was fairly boring,” and looked for ways to support herself. She tried a cookery school—which seemed pointless as they had a cook at home—then secretarial and dressmaking courses. But she was untrained for any job; everything had been provided for her at home. She was only 17 when her parents divorced and her mother, Celia and her sister moved to a new flat. Suddenly they had to fend for themselves, without a dishwasher but with her nanny and a maid. She describes her mother’s “relaxed approach to housekeeping” and herself as “badly trained in the techniques of domesticity.”
Sadly, in October 1963, “tragedy struck and my mother died of an overdose. She had suffered a number of breakdowns and was still depressed following her divorce from my father who had remarried.” Ironically, Diana had been working for the Samaritans when she took her life. Celia’s mother led a troubled and unhappy life but Celia is kind and understanding while frank about her mother’s ups and downs and eventual suicide.
Travel and travail
In 1963, after the divorce, her father became secretary of state for the Colonies under Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home. He invited Celia to accompany him on a tour or Kenya and Zanzibar. to celebrate their independence. She was delighted to go and writes, “I had an amazing time.” Staying in British official residences, she threw herself into the social whirl and writes honestly about the social gaffes she seemed unable to avoid. She fell in love with South Africa. There in 1965 she met her first husband, Michael Kennedy, and moved with him to Kenya. But that marriage was to last only five years.
Also in 1965 Sir Winston Churchill died, and the world mourned. Celia describes the family’s grief, the public mourning at St. Paul’s, and the private burial at Bladon. At the same time, she began to notice her Aunt Sarah’s drinking was becoming a family—and a public—problem. She quotes Sarah as saying that “she nursed her scandals at both ends.” She writes as sympathetically of her own troubled life as she does about her mother’s. Two Churchill sisters led tragic lives but her other aunt, Mary Soames, led a long and happy one. As does Celia.
All that life can give
Celia married twice more, the third time to Major General Ken Perkins, a likable man who proved the enduring partner she had often wished for. Sandys has three sons and daughter. And she has worked hard, writing several books about Churchill, including Chasing Churchill, basis for a PBS film on her grandfather’s travels. She also appeared on the TV show “MasterChef,” where chefs prepared a dinner based on what Churchill liked to eat. I was fortunate to have been at that dinner, along with Randolph Churchill, Allen Packwood and David Reynolds. We had a wonderful evening at the Churchill College dining hall.
Celia Sandys has written a beautiful memoir of a life well-lived. Hers is a tale of a loving and forgiving, mature woman who has experienced all that life can give, both pleasures and pains.
The author
Cita Stelzer graduated from Barnard College and was a special aide to New York Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Hugh Carey, before joining an economic consulting firm specializing in regulatory policy. She is the author of two works on Sir Winston: Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (2013) and Working with Winston: The Unsung Women Behind Britain’s Greatest Statesman (2019). This review also appeared in The Churchillian, Churchill Society of Tennessee, Spring 2022.
Further reading
Cita Stelzer, “Sarah Churchill: A New Biography of ‘The Mule’ by Miranda Brooke,” 2021.
Cita Stelzer, “Getting to Know You”: First Dinners with Winston Churchill,” upcoming, 2022.
Raymond A. Callahan, “Rachel Trethewey Ponders the Lives of Diana, Sarah and Mary Churchill,” 2021.