The summer of 1921 had already been cruel to Winston Churchill. In April, his wife Clementine’s younger brother, Bill, a man in his thirties who had struggled with depression and gambling, took his own life in a Paris hotel room. Ten weeks later, Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, died suddenly of a hemorrhage after a fall and a failed leg amputation. She was 67.
By mid-August, the Churchills had attended two funerals in five months. They needed rest, so Winston went to Scotland for golf and politics, and Clementine went with him. Their four children were sent to the seaside, to rented lodgings at Broadstairs on the Kent coast, the sort of place Edwardian families sent children for the sea air. The oldest, Diana, was twelve.
Randolph was ten. Sarah was six. The youngest, Marigold, whom the family called Duckadilly, was two years and nine months old. She had been born on November 15, 1918, four days after the armistice, and to parents exhausted by four years of war, she felt like proof that ordinary life was beginning again.
In surviving photographs she is a round-faced toddler with fair hair, the kind of child everyone picks up. At Broadstairs, Marigold developed a sore throat. She had been unwell on and off for months, the ordinary run of childhood coughs and colds. The French governess kept her warm and waited for it to pass.
It did not. The infection moved from her throat into her blood. Today it would be called sepsis and treated with antibiotics that did not exist for another two decades. In 1921, there was nothing to give her.
No injection, no drip, no drug. A doctor could name what was happening, but he could not stop it. Clementine was sent for and came at once. Winston followed.
Marigold died on August 23, 1921, in a rented room by the sea, with both parents beside her. She was two years and nine months old. Clementine, a controlled and intensely private woman raised to show nothing in public, made a sound that those present said they had never heard from a human being before. Winston, who had survived a cavalry charge in the Sudan, a prison escape in South Africa, and the trenches of the Western Front, could not describe the moment afterward at all.
In more than half a century of writing about his own life in enormous detail, he never wrote about it. What is hardest to sit with is how ordinary the cause was. A sore throat. Nothing rare.
Nothing any parent in that era would have panicked over on the first or second day. Penicillin would not be discovered for another seven years and would not treat patients for another twenty-one. Marigold Churchill died of something a course of cheap tablets would clear up in a week today. Her parents had been hundreds of miles away when it turned serious, and that fact sat in the middle of the family for the rest of their lives, never said out loud.
Marigold was buried three days later in a private ceremony at Kensal Green Cemetery in London. Photographers had come; Churchill asked them to leave, and they did. A few weeks later, Clementine took the other three children to the grave. She wrote to her husband afterward about kneeling there with them and about a small white butterfly that settled on the flowers.
She wrote that the children were very quiet on the way home. The grave stayed at Kensal Green for ninety-nine years. In 2020, quietly and with almost no publicity, the family moved her to the churchyard at Bladon in Oxfordshire, where she could lie with her parents, her brother, and her sisters. Thirteen months after Marigold died, Clementine gave birth to her fifth and final child, a daughter named Mary.
That Clementine survived the worst year of her life at all says something about the woman who had married Winston Churchill in 1908. She had grown up in the English aristocracy on paper but in a precarious version of it: a scandalous mother, a cold legal father, periods of living cheaply abroad, and an older sister, Kitty, who died of typhoid at sixteen and had been the favorite, openly. Clementine grew up beautiful, clever, anxious, and extremely careful. Engaged twice before she was twenty-three, she broke off both engagements, a near-reckless act for a woman of her class whose only realistic route to security was marriage.
She did it anyway because she could tell the men were wrong for her. She met Churchill at a dinner party in 1908. He proposed at Blenheim Palace that August in a small ornamental temple beside the lake, and they married that September in front of a crowd so large the police had to manage it. She stayed married to him for fifty-six years, and it cost her nearly everything she had.
For most of her adult life she suffered from what people then called nervous exhaustion: severe anxiety and long stretches of collapse. Doctors repeatedly sent her away to health resorts, to the south of France, to spas in Germany for weeks and sometimes months at a time. Her husband worked through the night, spent money the family did not have, took political risks that could end them, and filled the house with colleagues and cigar smoke. She managed the staff, the money, the constituencies, and the wounded feelings of the people he insulted, often while close to breaking down herself.
They wrote to each other constantly, even when in the same country, signing letters with animal drawings: he was the pug, she the cat. Hundreds of those letters survive, affectionate and full of practical instruction, and a great many were written because she was somewhere else recovering. Into this household were born five children, and the one who came first, Diana, spent fifty-four years trying to find a place where the center of gravity never moved. Born in July 1909, she was pretty, warm, and nervous, and her relationship with her mother was strained almost from the beginning.
She married young in 1932, and that marriage ended in divorce by 1935. That same year she married Duncan Sandys, a serious Conservative politician who stood by Churchill during the wilderness years and rose through government. They had three children, and during the war Diana served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service in London, working through the air raids. On paper the 1940s were her good decade.
Then it came apart over roughly fifteen years. In 1953 she had a severe breakdown, and it came back. Her father, careless with almost everyone, was unusually gentle with her during those years. Her marriage to Sandys ended in divorce in 1960, and she moved with her daughters into a flat, running a household on her own for the first time at fifty-one.
In 1962 she legally changed her name back to Diana Churchill. Then she began volunteering for the Samaritans, the organization that answers calls from people in despair and talks them through the night. She was good at it. Colleagues said she had an unusual capacity for listening to strangers in pain.
In October 1963, Diana died at her London home from an overdose of sleeping pills. She was fifty-four. Her father was eighty-eight, and it was the first time he outlived a child. The only son, Randolph, was born in May 1911, and from the moment he could walk he was told what he was for: the heir, the next Churchill in Parliament.
His father, who had spent his own childhood writing letters to a distant parent that were mostly never answered, did the opposite. He raised his son to believe he was exceptional, invited him into adult conversation from an early age, encouraged him to argue with statesmen, and never once made him earn any of it. The result was a boy who was brilliant, fearless, and almost impossible to be in a room with. He was drinking double brandies at eighteen, left Oxford without a degree, became a well-paid journalist and lecturer on the strength of his surname, gambled, and picked fights at dinner tables.
Politically he was a disaster, splitting the Conservative vote in a 1935 by-election and handing the seat to Labour. He lost again and again. He finally won a seat during the war in 1940, and it was the only election he ever won. He served with real courage, parachuting into occupied Yugoslavia in 1944 as part of the British mission to Tito’s partisans.
His private life was chaos. In October 1939, a fortnight after meeting her, he married Pamela Digby, nineteen years old. Their son was born in October 1940 during the Blitz, and Randolph went abroad for long stretches. Pamela, young and living under his parents’ roof, formed a relationship with Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s envoy, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1946, leaving a permanent wound.
Randolph married again in 1948; that ended too. He lost his seat in the 1945 Labour landslide and never returned to Parliament. What was left was journalism, at which he was ferocious and good. In 1960 his father authorized him to write the official biography, the definitive life of Winston Churchill.
Randolph moved to a house in Suffolk, hired a team of young researchers, and worked. He published the first volume in 1966 and the second in 1967, careful and generous books still used today. His father lived long enough to read the first volume; there is no record of what he said about it. Randolph died of a heart attack on June 6, 1968, at fifty-seven.
He had planned five volumes and finished two. The sister who went to Hollywood, Sarah, was born in October 1914. She wanted to dance, and against the family’s expectations she went into musical theater. In 1936, aged twenty-one, she married Vic Oliver, an Austrian-born comedian eighteen years older than her, divorced, and Jewish.
Her parents were appalled, and it was reported in every newspaper in Britain. During the war she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and was posted to photographic interpretation, the painstaking work of examining aerial reconnaissance images. She was good at it. She also became her father’s traveling companion at the moments that mattered most, going with him to Tehran in 1943 and to Yalta in February 1945, in the room or just outside it for some of the most consequential weeks of the century.
Their letters from that period are the warmest in the family archive. Then the war ended and the trouble began. She went to Hollywood and got a genuine break, starring opposite Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding in 1951. She had a real career for a few years.
A second marriage failed; her first husband’s successor died from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1957. By the end of the decade alcohol had taken over. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in 1959 and again in 1960. She went to Switzerland for treatment and came back, but it did not hold.
In 1962, at forty-eight, she married Lord Audley, the love of her life by every account. She was happy for the first time in twenty years. He died in July 1963, fifteen months after the wedding. Three months after that, her sister Diana died.
Sarah lived another nineteen years, wrote two memoirs dealing openly with her drinking, and painted. She died in London on September 24, 1982, aged sixty-seven. The fifth child, Mary, was the one who worked. Born in September 1922, thirteen months after Marigold died, she grew up mostly at Chartwell under the care of a steady, affectionate nanny, her mother’s cousin, while the older three were already adults inside the family’s chaos.
She watched Diana’s marriages, Randolph’s rows, and Sarah’s elopement from a distance, like weather through a window, and drew her own conclusions. During the war she served in mixed anti-aircraft batteries and rose to junior commander. She married Christopher Soames in 1947, a guards officer whom her parents approved of, which had not happened before with any of their children’s marriages. It lasted forty years until his death.
They had five children. Soames became a Conservative MP, Britain’s ambassador to France, and in 1979 the last governor of Southern Rhodesia, overseeing the transition to Zimbabwean independence. Mary spent the second half of her life as the keeper of the family record, writing the biography of her mother, editing her parents’ letters, chairing the National Theatre Board, and being made a baroness in her own right. She was the last of the children, dying on May 31, 2014, at ninety-one.
Winston Churchill died on January 24, 1965, aged ninety, seventy years to the day after the death of his own father, a prediction he had made aloud years earlier. He was given a state funeral. Clementine was seventy-nine, had been his wife for fifty-six years, and had already buried two of her five children. She lived another twelve years, mostly quietly, and was made a life peer in her own right, not as an appendage to his name.
In 1968 she lost her son. She died on December 12, 1977, at ninety-two, having outlived her husband, her son, her eldest daughter, and the toddler buried in 1921. Of the five children she carried, only two were still alive when she died. Sarah followed five years later, and Mary survived them all, spending the next three decades speaking for the whole family.
They are nearly all at Bladon now, in a small churchyard beside the wall of Blenheim Palace where Winston was born. For ninety-nine years, the one missing name was the smallest, a two-year-old buried in a London cemetery in 1921. In 2020, the family brought her home and had her name cut into a stone beside her sisters.
It took them a century, but all seven of them are together.