You might say that Churchill’s Citadel, by Katherine Carter, is a book about Chartwell, a house in the lovely Kentish Weald, just 24 miles southeast of the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. You might also say that it is a book about Winston Churchill himself, who fell in love with the ramshackle Henry VIII-period pile and its hilltop setting in 1921; bought it the next year for £5,000; and then spent four times that sum in the next two years to make it habitable for Clementine, his wife, who had loved the house at first sight, too, but fallen right out of love with it when she (more practical than her heartstrong husband) became aware of its numerous dilapidations.
Churchill loved Chartwell so much, and was so clearly aware of the extent to which Clementine had soured on it, that he bought it without telling her. She was at the time heavily pregnant with their fifth child, Mary. (It’s a good thing he possessed powers of persuasion unmatched by most men in history.) The Churchills moved in to Chartwell in 1924—after radical renovations that flooded the previously gloomy interiors with light, and a conjugal accommodation that gave Clementine the best room in the house—and lived there happily until Churchill’s death in 1965. “When the sun shines,” he once wrote, “I would rather be here than anywhere in the world.”
The widowed Clementine turned the house over to the National Trust, which had acquired the title to it in 1946, when the Churchills were in deeply straitened circumstances. From that year on, Winston and Clementine had lived in Chartwell under a life-tenancy—a gracious condition of the team of well-wishers who’d purchased the house from the Churchills on behalf of the Trust. And so it came to pass that Chartwell entered the public domain.
Ms. Carter, the book’s author, is a historian who specializes in early 20th-century political history. She was Chartwell’s first ever dedicated curator, and she writes in Churchill’s Citadel that she was “tasked with managing the house and the truly astonishing collections within its walls, from [Churchill’s] monogrammed slippers to his Nobel Prize.” The job came with delightful perks: She lived in Chartwell, the sanctum sanctorum, for a decade; and the modesty with which she points out that she occupied only the attic rooms—previously the servants’ quarters—will not dispel the envy that many readers will feel. (This reviewer certainly felt a twinge.)
The envy gives way, quickly enough, to gratitude. Carter isn’t just a terrific historian with an instinctive feel for the preciousness of the objects under her care. Living in and overseeing Chartwell, “immersed in its history both day and night,” gave her “a unique first-hand understanding” not just of how the house would have worked, but also of the ideas and policies that were generated there by Churchill and the many men of consequence and distinction who came to visit him in his years of political exile from 1929-39. The period was bookended by his chancellorship of the Exchequer (1924-29) and his return to the ministerial stage as First Lord of the Admiralty in September 1939 and ascent to the prime ministership in May 1940 (both thanks to Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland).
What Carter does—and what makes her book different from the many hundreds of books written on or about Churchill—is to make Chartwell a protagonist in the Churchill story, turning it from an inanimate dwelling-house to a lively proscenium on which the great man lived and worked and plotted a course for his soon-to-be-embattled country. “As well as looking at the broader story of Chartwell during the crucial years leading up to the Second World War,” writes Carter, “I intend to reposition it in the historical narrative, from scenic backdrop to center-stage.” She sets out to debunk the myth that Chartwell was where Churchill went to switch off from politics, to merely fish and paint and eat restorative meals: “You only need to look at Chartwell’s visitors’ book, which was typically only signed by overnight guests, to see how untrue such a portrayal is.” More than 700 different people signed the book, and when you factor in the very many visitors who popped in to see Churchill for just an hour or two, those who made their way to Chartwell in the prewar years of the 1930s numbered (says Carter) “in the thousands.” His heroic (and overworked) secretary, Grace Hamblin, called it his “citadel” (giving Carter the perfect prompt for her book’s title).
Carter offers a detailed account of the most significant visitors to Chartwell, focusing on those who helped concentrate Churchill’s mind on the growing threat of a revanchist Hitler and his war machine. In our nerdier moments, we might be tempted to describe her book as a prosopography: a study or work that relates a group of persons to a historical context. Who were these persons who came a-courting? The names are an enchanting list of the familiar and the forgotten. The book begins with Churchill’s return from a visit to Germany in August 1932—made in the company of Clementine and their son Randolph—when he missed meeting Hitler by a hair’s breadth, the German chancellor chickening out of a private dinner with the British statesman ostensibly because he (Hitler) was unshaven and unwashed after a long day of travel. The truer reason, suggests Carter, is likely to have been that he didn’t fancy the prospect of a tête-à-tête with—and a host of awkward questions from—a man of Churchill’s intellect.
Churchill came back to Britain convinced that his country—and an isolationist America—had to prepare for war. He was bolstered in this view by visitors such as Albert Einstein, a refugee from Hitler; Pierre-Étienne Flandin, a former prime minister of France; Heinrich Brüning, chancellor of Germany from 1930-32; Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, a Czech aristocrat, in flight from the Gestapo, whom Hitler had disparaged as a “cosmopolitan bastard” (his father was Austro-Hungarian, his mother Japanese, and his wife Jewish); Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, a high-born German lawyer and anti-Nazi activist; Sheila Grant Duff, a pioneering English journalist, distantly related to Clementine, who brought bad tidings from Prague, where she’d worked as a foreign correspondent; Quo Tai-Chi, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s ambassador in London, who informed Churchill in harrowing detail of the Japanese war crimes in Manchuria; and Stefan Lorant, the editor of the increasingly influential Picture Post, a man later known as “the Godfather of Photojournalism,” who featured Churchill prominently on his pages (to the latter’s immense political advantage).
Other memorable visitors were T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), the only man for whom the garrulous and (let’s face it) egotistical Churchill ever kept silent; Harold Macmillan, a future Tory prime minister; and Neville Chamberlain, the appeaser. The most frequent visitor of all, a man whose name appeared in the visitors’ book more often than anyone else’s, was Frederick Lindemann, an Oxford professor who was, Carter tells us, Churchill’s chief adviser. Lindemann was unusual among guests at Chartwell for being near-vegetarian (he did eat the whites of eggs) and teetotal.
Carter’s descriptions of meals at Chartwell offer a mouthwatering complement to her accounts of the heavier discussions of diplomacy (which featured a frustratingly unproductive visit, from Churchill’s perspective, by Joseph Kennedy, who’d go on to be American ambassador in London); national security and the minutiae of air and naval warfare; coalition politics in Britain; and German rearmament. The Churchills ate sumptuously when they had company. When the French politician Flandin stayed at Chartwell, he lunched on gigot d’agneau, dining a few hours later on sole, pheasant, and ice cream (not at all as commonplace then as it is now). Lunch the next day was chicken chasseur, followed by partridge italienne for dinner. These culinary efforts, writes Carter, “had the desired effect of impressing their guest and making him feel at ease in the Churchills’ company.”
History, clearly, isn’t made on an empty stomach, nor, especially, with an empty glass. The Churchills drank—and served—copious amounts of expensive Pol Roger, the house champagne. A vast and underpaid staff made the house run like clockwork in these prewar years that Clementine called “the golden age of Chartwell.” In those times, writes Carter, Churchill “worked day and night,” gathering around him his “informants, allies and advisors.” These meetings, she tells us, “armed Churchill with the weapons needed to fight the battle to alert Britain to its impending danger.” Chartwell, she asserts, “changed the course of history.” It was in Chartwell, you might say, that the plans that made it possible for the free world to repel Hitler were first hatched—hatched, in fact, before Hitler had fired a shot. For that reason alone, may God bless this house.
Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm
by Katherine Carter
Yale University Press, 432 pp., $30
Tunku Varadarajan, a writer for the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
