{"id":83180,"date":"2013-03-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/the-bulldogas-daughter\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:17:12","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:17:12","slug":"the-bulldogas-daughter","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/the-bulldogas-daughter\/","title":{"rendered":"The bulldog\u2019s daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tW<\/font>inston Churchill\u2019s life defies attempts to fit it between hardcovers. His son Randolph tried it first, completed two volumes, but only got his father to the outbreak of the First World War. That was completed brilliantly by Martin Gilbert, but it took another six volumes to get him all the way to 1965. Roy Jenkins\u2019s one-volume life is excellent in its way, but it treated cursorily or left out a great deal, and the book still ran to an unwieldy thousand pages. William Manchester published the first two of his planned three-volume life, The Last Lion<\/i>, but the third volume was only published in 2012 by another author, Paul Reid, Manchester having given up and died.<\/p>\n

\n\tBetter, perhaps, to approach the great man\u2019s life through partial perspectives. There is <\/span>The Fringes of Power<\/span> (1985), John Colville\u2019s marvelous diary written during his time as an aid at 10 Downing Street from 1939 to 1955, or Violet Bonham Carter\u2019s <\/span>Winston Churchill As I Knew Him<\/span> (1965), a substantial work of history as well as the source of many of the best Churchill anecdotes. Now there is <\/span>A Daughter\u2019s Tale<\/span>, the reminiscence of Churchill\u2019s youngest daughter and only surviving child, Mary Soames. The book is just as engrossing, though shorter and not so penetrating, as these others. Soames turned ninety in September, but her writing shows no signs of murkiness; it is clear, sharp, occasionally opinionated, and understatedly witty.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\tLady Soames (as she has been since 1972) takes us from her childhood at Chartwell, populated mainly by farm animals and, on weekends, the country\u2019s most famous politicians, through the war years during which she worked in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, or <\/span>ATS<\/span>, in an anti-aircraft unit, and finally to her marriage to Christopher Soames in 1947. The book is far more than a collection of entertaining tidbits about aristocrats and politicians, though it has its share of those (Jack, Winston\u2019s brother, playing tunes by tapping his teeth with his fingernails; Mary and her sister calling Lord Mountbatten \u201cGlamour pants\u201d). <\/span>A Daughter\u2019s Tale<\/span> is a serious memoir, even apart from its portrayal of the author\u2019s father, and Soames shows a keen awareness of the darker parts of human nature. She recalls, for example, her teenaged cousin Esmond Romilly, an atheist (he would later become a communist and the husband of Jessica Mitford), wagering that he could make her deny Jesus Christ \u201cin sixty seconds flat.\u201d Mary, then around twelve, said he couldn\u2019t, so \u201cEsmond got up and drew a washbasin full of cold water, frogmarched me to it, and held my head down. After two dousings I of course denied my Saviour.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\tThe American edition of the book has dropped Clementine\u2019s name from the subtitle, but she features in it nearly as prominently as her husband. Soames is her mother\u2019s biographer, and here, too, Clementine appears as a complex personality, prone to \u201cemotional, electric storms\u201d but loving toward her children, unshakably loyal to her husband but intolerant of his more fanciful ideas. We learn of her \u201cflaying\u201d the Conservative Chief Whip David Margesson over luncheon at No. 10 after Margesson uttered some statement Clementine thought suggestive of appeasement. Soames remembers her mother shouting \u201cOh you old son of a bitch!\u201d at Winston during one of their flare-ups; and she tells the story (also in Colville\u2019s diary) of Clementine storming out of a service at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in 1940 when the officiating clergyman urged a pacific attitude toward the country\u2019s enemies.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\tMany of the events Soames records have been recorded before, but in <\/span>A Daughter\u2019s Tale<\/span> we have a new eyewitness account of them: she quotes heavily from her diaries and from her letters to her parents and others, and her memory seems remarkably unaffected by the seven intervening decades. She was with her father when, for example, he arrived at Bristol University in April of 1941 to award honorary degrees. The surrounding neighborhoods had been bombed the night before; men kept arriving late to the ceremony, \u201cgrime on their faces half washed off, their ceremonial robes on over their firefighting clothes\u201d; and yet people whose houses lay in ruins cheered for the Prime Minister and slapped him on the back as he passed.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\tMary was her father\u2019s aide-de-camp when he visited New York in the early fall of 1943. She records a luncheon with President Roosevelt at which Helen Rogers Reid, the publisher of the <\/span>New York Herald Tribune<\/span>, expressed disapproval of Britain\u2019s India policy, a subject on which Churchill had notoriously hidebound opinions. Instead of defending British policy, the Prime Minister asked whether she meant \u201cthe brown Indians of India, who have multiplied alarmingly under the benevolent British rule? Or are we speaking of the red Indians in America, who I understand are almost extinct?\u201d She was with him, too, during the 1945 general election, when the United Kingdom ousted its leader as soon as he\u2019d finished saving it. Soames records her father\u2019s dejected resignation. \u201cI\u2019ve thrown the reins on the horse\u2019s neck,\u201d he remarked to an adviser, Michael Parish. \u201cBut you won the race,\u201d Parish replied. \u201cAnd in consequence I\u2019ve been warned off the turf.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\tThe book reminds us how difficult it was, physically, for Churchill to win the race. Other biographies have recorded his bouts of pneumonia (one in 1943, another in 1944) but not with the eye of a daughter; again and again she quotes her worries over his (to her) obvious physical exhaustion. On the brighter side, I don\u2019t remember any other book on Churchill revealing so touchingly his penchant for ridiculous attire: \u201c[C]lothed in a padded silk Chinese dressing-gown decorated with blue and gold dragons\u201d; \u201cPapa was wearing his mauve and black quilted dressing gown over his siren suit and a soft black hat\u201d; \u201cWe had a tent pitched half way down the beach from which Papa emerged in shapeless drawers\u2014smoking & with his ten gallon hat on.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\tA Daughter\u2019s Tale<\/i> is a terrific memoir and there are thirty-two pages of photographs, many of them published for the first time. The absence of an index is the one fault I can find in this otherwise superb book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1661,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[745],"department_id":[561],"issue":[2980],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":63,"value_formatted":63,"value":"63","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page 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