In the summer of 1921, Winston Churchill had already buried two people he loved within five months, and the worst loss was still ahead of him. That August, his youngest child died while he was hundreds of miles away, a tragedy he would never speak about again. The year had begun badly. In April 1921, Clementine Churchill’s younger brother, Bill, died by suicide in a Paris hotel room after sinking into a deep depression.
Ten weeks later, Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, died of a hemorrhage after complications from a broken ankle and amputation, at age 67. Winston and Clementine went to Scotland for a spell of golf and politics, leaving their four children at the seaside town of Broadstairs on the Kent coast. The youngest, Marigold Churchill, was 2 years and 9 months old, born four days after the armistice of November 1918. The family called her Duckadilly.
Marigold had a sore throat that did not clear. The infection moved from her throat into her bloodstream, what would today be called sepsis. In 1921, there were no antibiotics—penicillin would not be discovered for another seven years—and the doctor could name what was happening but could do nothing to stop it. The child died on August 23, 1921, in a rented room by the sea, with both parents beside her.
Those present said Clementine made a sound they had never heard from a human being before. Winston Churchill, who had survived cavalry charges, a prison escape, the Western Front, and the Gallipoli disaster, never wrote about the moment afterward in more than half a century of detailed self-narration. Marigold was buried three days later at Kensal Green Cemetery in London, in a private ceremony. Photographers had come; Churchill asked them to leave, and they did.
A few weeks later, Clementine took the other three children to the grave and wrote to her husband about kneeling there, and about a small white butterfly that settled on the flowers. The grave remained at Kensal Green for 99 years. In 2020, quietly and with almost no publicity, the family had Marigold moved 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.
The woman who carried that child through the worst year of her life had her own history, one that explains much about the four children who lived. Clementine Hozier was born April 1, 1885, into what looked from outside like the English aristocracy but was in fact something far more precarious. Her mother, Lady Blanche, was the daughter of an earl with a scandalous private life. Whether Sir Henry Hozier, her legal father, was actually her biological father has been debated by biographers for a century.
Her parents separated, money was short, and when Clementine was 15, her older sister Kitty died of typhoid at 16. Kitty had been the favorite, openly and unmistakably. Clementine grew up beautiful, clever, anxious, and extremely careful. She taught French to make her own money, was engaged twice before she was 23, and broke off both engagements—one reportedly twice.
A young woman of her class in 1907 had one realistic route to security, marriage, and calling off two engagements was close to reckless. She did it anyway because she could tell the men were wrong for her, which reveals that the anxious, careful person everybody described was also, underneath, extremely stubborn about the things that counted. She met Winston Churchill at a dinner party in 1908. He proposed at Blenheim Palace that August, in a small ornamental temple beside the lake, while it rained.
They married September 12, 1908, at St. Margaret’s Westminster, before a crowd so large police had to manage it. She stayed married to him for 56 years. The part that usually gets left out of the legend: Clementine Churchill was, for most of her adult life, unwell with what people at the time called nervous exhaustion.
She suffered from severe anxiety and long stretches of collapse, and was repeatedly sent away by doctors to health resorts and spas for weeks and sometimes months at a time. Her husband’s life was not survivable at close range. He 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 children, while frequently 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, later the pig, she was the cat. Hundreds of these letters survive. A great many were written because she was somewhere else recovering. That is the shape of it: 56 years of devotion conducted for long stretches at a distance because being close to him at full strength was more than her health could take.
In 1922, he bought Chartwell, the house in Kent that became the family emblem, having taken her to see it without telling her he had already decided. She disliked it for years—too big, too expensive, too far from London—and was, in this as in most things, entirely correct and completely overruled. In 1940, weeks into his premiership, she wrote him a letter saying his behavior to his own staff had become contemptuous and overbearing, that people who feared him would stop telling him the truth, and that he was in danger of being disliked by the very men he needed. Then she tore the letter up, rewrote it, and sent it.
When Parliament presented Churchill with a portrait by Graham Sutherland for his 80th birthday in 1954, he loathed it—it showed him old, slumped, and finished. Clementine later had it destroyed without telling him. The country did not find out until years after both of them were dead. The eldest child, Diana Spencer Churchill, was born July 11, 1909, ten months after the wedding.
Her family called her the gold cream kitten. She was pretty, red-haired, warm, and nervous, and by every account never quite sure of herself. Her relationship with her mother was strained almost from the beginning and stayed strained for most of her life. Diana married John Bailey in December 1932, a society wedding, but the marriage barely lasted two years in practice and ended in divorce in 1935.
That same year she met Duncan Sandys, a serious and ambitious Conservative politician who stood by Churchill during the late 1930s, and married him in September 1935. They had three children. During the war, Diana served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service in London and worked through the air raids. On paper, the 1940s were her good decade.
Then it started to come apart slowly over about 15 years. In 1953, she had a severe breakdown and was ill for a long time afterward. Her father, careless with almost everyone, was unusually gentle with her during those years. The marriage to Sandys failed over the 1950s and ended in divorce in 1960.
She moved into a flat with her daughters, and at 51 began running a household on her own for the first time in her life. In 1962 she legally changed her name back to Diana Churchill. And then she began volunteering for the Samaritans, the organization that answers calls from people in despair. She was good at it—colleagues said she had an unusual capacity for listening to strangers in pain.
In October 1963, at her home in Chester Row, Diana died from an overdose of sleeping pills. She was 54. Her father was told at his London home, and the people with him said he took it almost silently and then did not speak for a long while. Diana was the first of his children he outlived.
The second blow of that year had fallen on her younger sister, but the only son was the child the whole machine had been built around. Randolph Frederick Edward Spencer Churchill was born May 28, 1911, and from the moment he could walk, he was told what he was for: heir, and the next Churchill in Parliament. His father, who had spent his own childhood writing letters to a distant parent that went unanswered, decided to do the opposite and raised his son to believe he was exceptional. He invited Randolph into adult conversation from an early age and encouraged him to argue with statesmen, but never once made him earn any of it.
The result was a boy who was brilliant, fearless, extremely funny when he chose to be, and almost impossible to be in a room with. A child told from infancy he is the heir to a great man has been handed a standard he cannot meet. Winston had built his son the opposite childhood—endless approval, endless attention—without noticing the effect was much the same. Both ended up measuring themselves against the same man.
Randolph was drinking double brandies at 18, went to Eton then Oxford, and left without a degree. He became a well-paid journalist and popular lecturer in America before he was 25, largely on his surname, and spent the money as fast as it came in. He gambled, picked fights at dinner tables, and would begin an evening charming and end it having insulted his host. Politically, he was a disaster that actively damaged his father.
In 1935 he ran in a by-election as an independent conservative against his own party, splitting the vote and handing the seat to Labour. He stood again and lost. Finally, in September 1940, he became MP for Preston—the only election he would ever win. He was not lacking in courage.
During the war he served as a staff intelligence officer in the Middle East, went on raiding operations behind the lines in the Western Desert, and in 1944 parachuted into occupied Yugoslavia. His aircraft crashed on the way to a landing strip; he was lucky to get out. His private life was chaos. In October 1939, a fortnight after meeting her, he married Pamela Digby, 19.
Their son, another Winston, was born in October 1940 during the Blitz. Randolph went abroad for long stretches; Pamela, young and living in London under his parents’ roof, formed a relationship with Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s envoy in London. The marriage ended in divorce in 1946, leaving a permanent wound between Randolph and his parents. Pamela later married Harriman, became a formidable figure in American politics, and served as U.
S. ambassador to France until her death in 1997. Randolph lost Preston in the 1945 Labour landslide and never returned to Parliament, though he tried twice more. Journalism was what was left, and he was good at it—a ferocious, well-sourced reporter who wrote books attacking powerful people.
The last act was better than what came before. In 1960, his father authorized him to write the official biography of Winston Churchill based on the family’s own archive. Randolph moved to a house at Stour in East Bergholt, Suffolk, hired a team of young researchers, and worked. He published the first volume in 1966 and the second in 1967—careful, generous, heavily documented books still used today.
At the very end, he had been given the one job in the world he was uniquely qualified to do, and he did it properly. Ran olph Churchill died at Stour on June 6, 1968, of a heart attack at 57. He had planned five volumes and finished two. Martin Gilbert, a young historian he had hired, took over and spent the next 20 years completing the other six.
The sister who came next lived a life that read like a film. Sarah Millicent Hermione Churchill was born October 7, 1914, two months into the First World War. The family nickname was the mule because she was stubborn. She wanted to dance, and in a family where the expected path for a daughter was a good marriage, she went into musical theater in the West End instead.
In 1936, aged 21, she appeared in a review alongside Vic Oliver, an Austrian-born comedian, Jewish, popular, divorced, 18 years older. Her parents were appalled. Sarah left for New York and married Oliver in December 1936. It was the first serious break in the family, reported in every newspaper in Britain.
The marriage lasted in name until 1945. The war made her briefly into something else. She joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and was posted to photographic interpretation—examining aerial reconnaissance images. She was good at it, and nobody could say she had been handed it.
She also became her father’s traveling companion at the moments that mattered most: to Tehran in 1943, where he met Roosevelt and Stalin, and to Yalta in February 1945, where postwar Europe was shaped. She was in the room or just outside it for some of the most consequential weeks of the 20th century. Then the war ended, and the trouble began. Toward the end of her first marriage, she had a relationship with John Winant, the American ambassador to Britain, who was already deeply depressed and died in 1947.
Sarah went to Hollywood. In 1951, she starred opposite Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding, a substantial role in a major MGM musical. For a few years, she had a real career. In 1949 she married for the second time, to photographer Anthony Beauchamp.
That marriage failed too, and after the couple separated, Beauchamp died from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1957. By the end of the 1950s, alcohol had taken over. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in 1959 and again in 1960. She went to Switzerland for treatment.
It did not hold. Then briefly something went right. In 1962, at 48, she married Thomas Touchet-Jesson, Lord Audley. By every account, he was the love of her life, and she was visibly happy for the first time in 20 years.
He died in July 1963, 15 months after the wedding. Three months after that, her sister Diana died. Sarah never really recovered from either. She lived another 19 years, wrote poetry and two memoirs, painted, and had no children.
She died in London on September 24, 1982, aged 67, her health long since broken by the drinking. That leaves the fifth child, the one you have heard less about, because hers is the only life in this story that worked. Mary Churchill was born September 15, 1922, 13 months after Marigold died. She grew up mostly at Chartwell, raised largely by her nanny and later governess, Marriott White, Clementine’s cousin, in a settled, affectionate routine while her parents were in London or abroad.
By the time Mary was old enough to notice the chaos, the older three were already adults inside it. In the war, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and served in mixed anti-aircraft batteries, rising to junior commander. She served in Belgium and Germany and acted as her father’s aide-de-camp on overseas trips, including the Potsdam conference in 1945, where he learned mid-conference that the country had voted him out. In February 1947, she married Christopher Soames, a guards officer.
Her parents approved, which had never happened with any of their children’s marriages. It lasted 40 years until his death in 1987. They had five children. Soames became a Conservative MP, then Britain’s ambassador to France, then a European commissioner, and in 1979, the last governor of Southern Rhodesia, overseeing the transition to Zimbabwean independence.
Why hers turned out so differently, nobody knows for certain. She was the youngest by seven years, never in competition with anyone. She was raised largely by one steady, affectionate woman in one place. She arrived after the worst year her parents ever had, into a household that had learned how quickly a child can be lost.
And she was by temperament simply more sturdy. Mary spent the second half of her life as the keeper of the family record. She wrote her mother’s biography, published in 1979, still the standard work. She edited the letters between her parents, chaired the National Theatre Board, was made a dame and later a baroness in her own right.
Mary Soames died on May 31, 2014, at 91, the last of them. Winston Churchill died on January 24, 1965, at his London home aged 90—70 years to the day since the death of his own father, which he had predicted out loud years earlier. He was given a state funeral, the first for a commoner in generations. Clementine was 79.
She had been his wife for 56 years and had already buried two of her five children. She lived another 12 years, mostly quietly, in a flat in Belgravia. She was made a life peer in 1965, taking the title Baroness Spencer Churchill in her own right. In 1968, she lost her son.
Clementine Churchill died on December 12, 1977, at 92. She had 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.
The public version of this family is a photograph on a wall: the cigar, the hat, the two fingers raised. The private version is a marriage conducted partly by letter because one of them kept collapsing, a toddler lost to a sore throat, an heir who drank, a daughter who answered the phone to strangers in the dark, and another who went to Hollywood and could not stop. They are nearly all at Bladon now, in the churchyard beside the wall of Blenheim Palace. Winston, Clementine, Randolph, Diana, Sarah, and Mary are there.
For 99 years, the missing name was the smallest one, a 2-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 a century, but all seven of them are together.