Mary Churchill’s War: The Wartime Diaries of Churchill’s Youngest Daughter

‘I am not a great or important personage, but it will be the diary of an ordinary person’s life in war time – though I may never live to read it again, yet perhaps it may not prove altogether uninteresting as a record of my life – or rather the life of a girl in her youth, upon whom life has shone very brightly, who has had every opportunity of education, interest, travel and pleasure and excitement, and who at the beginning of this war found herself on the threshold of womanhood.’

With Churchillian prescience for great events, and blessed with the family gene for recording them, Mary Churchill began keeping a diary in earnest in January 1939, recording the thoughts of a rather prim sixteen-year-old obsessed with her pony, the state of her fingernails and with her shortcomings in the sight of the Lord. Eight months later, just before her seventeenth birthday, war was declared and a few days later, on 18 September, she muses on her future – one that turns out to more than fulfil her own, or anyone else’s, expectations.

By 1939, the three elder Churchill siblings had all left home, but Mary was living with her parents, moving first from Chartwell to Admiralty House and thence in short order to No. 10 Downing Street. Thanks to her assiduous journalling it is not long before the reader of these diaries is eavesdropping on history and her descriptions of great events as viewed from her father’s elbow.

Watching from the Strangers’ Gallery, Mary describes the impact of many of her father’s speeches in the House of Commons and – most revealingly perhaps – she records conversations where he was going through the birth pangs of writing them. She tells of travels with her father too, of visiting Bristol and Cardiff as the Blitz raged, and her description of the crowds’ reactions to seeing Winston as they crawled out from bomb shelters is better than Pathé footage. Later, in 1943, she went with her parents on a transatlantic journey as her father’s aide-de-camp, first to the Quebec Conference and then on to stay with President Roosevelt at the White House. The Americans took her to their hearts.

Mary is also by her father’s side the day after VE Day and, in 1944, on another magical, historical journey she goes with her parents to Paris for the celebration of the Liberation of Paris. Mary and Clementine watched from the stands as Winston processed at the side of General de Gaulle down a Champs Élysées packed with cheering Parisians. After many a vin d’honneur – one with the cream of the French Resistance – Mary, Winston and de Gaulle board a train for eastern France to inspect – in freezing snow – the reconfigured French forces. There de Gaulle presents Mary with a Croix de Lorraine, the symbol of the Free French (which she wore with pride on Remembrance Days for the rest of her life). More soberly she records being with her parents when the results of the 1945 election came in – results that seemed to upset her more than her father, who was a philosophical democrat.

But woven into this narrative of great events, the enormously powerful presiding genius of her father and the long shadow of war, is the story of a teenager who is becoming a woman. The thoughts and feelings of a high-spirited but dutiful daughter, devoted to her parents, but eager to leave home; a young girl turning from an innocent ingénue to an eligible young woman with three years of army experience under her belt, a Captain’s stripes on her khaki sleeve and a military MBE. Mary suffers the universal concerns of young women as ever were and will be: she alternately obsesses about food and then the need to lose weight; she compares herself unforgivingly against the society beauties she dines with; she describes dressing up in enthusiastic detail; and her excitement at events like being piped aboard one British Navy vessel and launching another is joyful and infectious. She is beady in her observations and portrayal of the players around her father during these years, canny in her analysis of Pamela ‘Spam’ Churchill and her descriptions of sitting next to FDR at dinner are charming but not bedazzled. She also falls very out of love with her brother Randolph, who causes so much family unhappiness that she chronicles in detail; it is the first of very few moments where she doesn’t support her father who she feels spoils Randolph and forgives him too readily for his boorish behaviours. Sometimes she is very funny.

The most powerful thread that runs right through in the diaries is Mary’s admiration of her father. Her feelings for him intensified when she saw up close his conduct of the war, when she came to appreciate the stresses he was under, carrying an often secret and always great burden of the destiny of this country, while the brilliance of his speeches left my mother in awe of his intellect and his personality. After his adept speech to the Commons winding up the censure debate in 1941 she writes, ‘I think my love and admiration of Papa is almost a religion to me – I sometimes feel I cannot hold the emotions I have for him.’

Thus the guiding force of her personality became Mary’s determination never to let her father down. From her first public speech when she launched Westerham War Weapons Week in February 1941 aged eighteen, ‘I could not help feeling mighty proud of Papa – because it was all for him. And it made me determined to do him credit – and so to behave that he would not have to make excuses for his daughter.’ This determination coloured her behaviour throughout the war and stayed with her for the rest of her life: she never forgot the responsibilities that went with being her father’s daughter. When I sometimes accompanied her on public engagements fifty years later, as the moment came for her to perform, I could see her pulling herself up to her full height to channel her love for her father and her powerful sense of duty to burnish and protect his memory.

In supporting her father, she was doing the same for her sometimes fragile mother, the clever, elegant Clementine who found the hectic life of a wartime PM’s consort occasionally frazzling. Mary, who loved her mother deeply, became a frequent understudy for her at dinners and events when Clementine took to her bed. Thus, her parents both came to rely increasingly on their youngest daughter. Mary understood this and, for instance, her decision to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service was made agonising for her as she worried about leaving her parents.

But it wasn’t all duty and dinners with Generals. Mary and her best friend, the clever and well-connected Judy Montagu, were longing to do more in the war effort and, in 1941, they signed up for the ATS with the express intention of joining the very first mixed anti-aircraft batteries. They went through the fairly gruelling training together – made particularly excruciating at moments for Mary as the War Office started to use her as a poster girl for the Service while she was hoping to remain private Private Churchill (instructing her mother not to write using envelopes bearing the No. 10 seal). Nonetheless Mary dried her tears and, as ever, did her duty.

Both girls became NCOs and then did Officer training together before going their separate ways – Judy to become eventually a senior instructor in the ATS and Mary to serve in anti-aircraft batteries from Whitby to Newport. But those ‘powers that be’ close enough to observe the Prime Minister evidently appreciated how beneficial it was to him to have Mary close to hand, and consequently, much of Mary’s war service was spent in units close enough to London to allow her to see her family; indeed, her battery in Hyde Park received almost as many official visitors as it did VE bombs. Winston liked to show off his daughter’s prowess at dealing with the enemy.

Like that of so many serving soldiers, Mary’s leaves were a riot of fun: trips to the theatre, dinners at the Savoy, more champagne and nightclubs than you can imagine and then walks back to Whitehall at dawn. All with a dizzy procession of men, serving soldiers or airmen, some of them childhood friends and others more recent and of the American variety. In camp, barely a night passed that there wasn’t a dance. Some remained friends, and a few were killed in action, most notably Tony Coates who Mary had met at Chequers.

Mary’s romances were, by current standards, very innocent (she records a kiss only in 1942), but their intensity was dazzling. When she was eighteen she ill-advisedly became engaged to a boy she had met only a couple of months previously. After she had taken Eric Duncannon to Chequers to meet her parents, her mother unleashed an A-Team of the PM’s advisors to talk her out of marriage. The team consisted of US Ambassador Averell Harriman, the President’s Special Envoy Harry Hopkins and the leading British political figure Max Beaverbrook. After several walks around the lawn at Chequers with the cream of global diplomacy Mary wept, caved in and the wedding was called off.

The Chequers effect became rather a characteristic of her romances which tended to grind to a halt when exposed to the intense oxygen of the place. Men who were fun and flattering in the Mess, and perhaps demons on the dance floor, didn’t match up to the high standards of home where the fascinating could suddenly seem dull. Indeed, to this day there is no greater ordeal than taking a boy home.

Mary’s narrative opens in January 1939 when she is sixteen and absorbed by school and country life. We have chosen to end her story in 1945 when she decides to leave the Army and return to London from Germany to support her parents after the debacle of the 1945 election. The diaries do not end there, but as marriage and motherhood enter her life Mary spends less and less time on her diary. Other entries are not included for reasons of length, but the entire diaries are available to read digitally at the Churchill Archives Centre, where my co-editors Allen Packwood and Katharine Thomson have provided huge support, invaluable historical background and encyclopaedic expertise.

My mother wrote in the introduction of her life of her mother, Clementine Churchill, ‘This is a work of love, but I hope not of blind love’. I echo her words here.