Finest Hour Fall 2017

Churchill and Chartwell “A day away from Chartwell is a day wasted.” Speaking thirty years ago in Dallas at the fourth International Churchill Conference, these were the words that Grace Hamblin, Lady Churchill’s former secretary and Chartwell’s first Administrator, remembered Sir Winston having said many times. He called it his “factory,” but it was so much more than that: it was his dream house, his refuge, his chief pleasure, his pride, and his muse. In this issue, we look at the Chartwell story from its acquisition by Churchill to current plans of the National Trust for future development. David Lough, the leading authority on Churchill’s finances, starts us off with the story of how Churchill came to purchase his “blessed plot” and the constant monetary strains that went with it. Life at Chartwell…

2017 Conference KENT—Congratulations to all on another splendid conference. Getting Lisa Daftari to introduce Lord Dobbs as the Keynote Speaker was a true zinger. It took Dobbs five minutes to rise from the canvass! —Randolph Churchill FOLSOM, CA—Thank you all for the hard work you did on the Churchill Conference in New York. The program was topnotch with the speakers and events. My favorites included touring the Green-Wood cemetery and seeing the Jerome mausoleum, seeing the movie Darkest Hour at the Museum of Modern Art, and listening to the discussion between Celia Sandys and Lady Williams. I enjoyed all the speakers and especially Andrew Roberts. I can hardly wait until the publication of his Churchill biography next year. —Beth Krzywicki LOS ANGELES—I very much enjoyed Lew Lehrman’s talk on “Churchill, Roosevelt & Company.”…

Was it the rolling acres of Blenheim or the chicken and rabbits of Banstead? Something in Winston Churchill’s childhood kept propelling him toward the dream of his own house in the country, surrounded by land and animals. It lay beyond reach until the First World War, when property prices had fallen far enough by 1915 for the two Churchill brothers to lease a small estate where their young families could spend the summer together. It was the land around Hoe Farm rather than its fifteenth-century house that appealed: “It really is a delightful valley and the garden gleams with summer jewellery,” Churchill wrote to Jack. The lease lasted just one summer, but his wife Clementine was equally smitten; that winter while Churchill fought in the trenches she wrote of her own…

Leo Amery (1873–1955) was a lifelong friend of Winston Churchill, although politically they were often at odds with each other. They first met while at school together at Harrow—a humorous account of which Churchill immortalized in his autobiography My Early Life. Both men worked as war correspondents in South Africa and shared a tent together the night before Churchill’s famous armoured train encounter that led to his capture by the Boers, subsequent escape, and enough resulting notoriety to catapult him into Parliament “ten years before you!” as he later chided Amery, who had preferred to slumber in his cot. Unlike Churchill, Amery remained a lifelong Tory and zealously championed protective tariffs, while Churchill, a supporter of free trade, left the Conservative party to join the Liberals in 1904. When Churchill returned…

A couple of years ago, that would be in 2015, I decided to take myself back to Chartwell. I had just finished writing the first full draft of a short memoir capturing the strangeness and the wonder of staying there with Mr. and Mrs. Churchill in the summer of 1949 and again in 1950. [See p. 51.] In 1949 I was eight years old: classrooms at my all-boys school in London were furnished with double-desks, each one shared by two boys sitting side by side. The little boy I was told to sit next to in this our final year at the school could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as my great friend. I had hardly spoken to him during the two or three years we…

Hello and welcome to this special issue of Finest Hour, which looks at my home in Kent. My name is Jock or more formally Jock VI. I proudly work for the National Trust, the charitable organization that owns and maintains many historic properties in the United Kingdom. Shortly after the Second World War, Chartwell was purchased from Winston Churchill by a group of his friends who donated the property to the National Trust with the proviso that Mr. Churchill should be allowed to stay in residence for the remainder of his life. After her husband’s death in January 1965, Lady Churchill vacated the house, which she had long been preparing for its new role as a museum dedicated to the memory of Sir Winston. Chartwell opened to the public in June…