Mary Churchill: the secret life of Winston Churchill's daughter

Finally reading the memoirs that have occupied so much of my mother’s time over the past years has been both a joy and a revelation to me. Like many who lived and fought in the Second World War, neither of my parents was a “war bore”, and I had only the sketchiest idea of what my mother, Mary Churchill, got up to during those years.

I saw pictures of her looking young and glamorous in uniform, and she would make us laugh when she said that she used to put her fingers in her ears as she gave the command, “Fire!” And although I spent the first eight years of my life at Chartwell Farm, right next to my grandparents’ famous home, I knew little about my mother’s childhood there some 30 years previously.

It is a fact that the Churchills never throw anything on paper away. So, thanks to the diaries that my mother started when she was 12 and the letters she exchanged with her parents and siblings, she has been able to write a detailed account of growing up at Chartwell in the Thirties and the years spent serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

The word matriarch could have been coined to describe my mother: now 89, she is the last living child of her parents, mother of five adult children, grandmother of 12 and has recently acquired three great-granddaughters. She lives surrounded by artefacts of a riveting life. Her armchair sits beneath her favourite photograph of her father, and she still smokes cigars after meals – a habit she picked up from him during the Fifties.

I realise now my mother’s life was shaped by the tragic death of an older sister, Marigold, who would have been four when Mary was born in September 1922. “The older ones were a gang and I was so much younger, I was almost like an only child,” she tells me. Sarah, her nearest sister, was eight, Randolph was 11 and Diana 13 when Mary was born. Marigold had died of tonsillitis.

This disaster shook my grandmother Clementine to the core. So when Mary was born, conceived in the desolate months after Marigold’s death, Clementine recruited a highly responsible cousin, Marryot Whyte – known to all as Nana – to take charge of the precious new baby.

Unlike her older siblings, who saw off many ineffectual governesses and nannies, my mother had a stable childhood, imbued with Nana’s high moral standards and a deep religious faith that sustains her still. “I was the Chartwell child and I saw a lot of my parents. I loved being with my father.”

From an early age, my mother ate with the grown-ups. “When Papa was in reciting vein, it was quite wonderful, rolling forth yards of Macaulay, Byron and Shakespeare, most of which he’d learnt at Harrow. His memory was formidable. I loved Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, when we’d all join in the choruses.”

She grew up to be a passionately loyal daughter, who remained close to her parents until the end of their lives. But she was evidently a strange child – greatly preferring the company of adults, educated patchily and – by her own confession – rather a prig.

The company at Chartwell was a heady mix of her father’s close advisers, the military and politicians of all stripes, leavened with visits from glamorous figures, such as Lawrence of Arabia, known to my mother as Aircraftman Shaw, who dressed up one evening in his princely Arab robes, an event burned into her memory.

The talk at the dining room table was of the issues of the day. “As I grew up, I started to become interested in the conversation,” my mother says. “I became inflamed by great causes like Munich. That made me very unpopular at school, because all the children’s parents were great supporters of Mr Chamberlain.”

Mary turned 17 the month war was declared, September 1939. Her own service in the ATS was, like so much else in her early life, the result of a unique set of circumstances. “I heard General Pile, commander in chief of anti-aircraft forces, complaining to my father at No 10 about the lack of men for the anti-aircraft batteries.

My father said, 'No, I can’t spare any men, you’ll have to use women.’ Judy [Montagu, her cousin] and I were frightfully excited and rushed off to the ATS recruiting office, specifically asking to go into mixed batteries.”

After training at Aldermaston, she served until 1946. She worked her way through the ranks, ending as a junior commander. Her father was very proud of her career and mentioned it in the letters he wrote to his son Randolph, then serving in Eastern Europe. “Not bad for 21!” he exclaimed when he wrote of the 230 women Mary commanded as her battery set off for the front in 1944.

A degree of celebrity was thrust upon my mother and it’s only now I appreciate that she was rather eligible. “Well, you could say that I suppose,” she told me with her usual modesty. “But it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time”, referring to the unrequited loves, an ill-advised brief engagement and other romantic incidents that fill her diary when she was in her twenties. “We all worked hard, but our lives were guided by the pleasure principle,” she explains. “Whatever terrible things were happening, there were parties every night.

Looking back, I am rather shocked that one night we went to a nightclub to find it had just received a direct hit and we just went on and found another.”

Although being Churchill’s daughter brought with it great opportunities, it was pretty difficult being Mary Churchill during her Army career. “I was received pretty frostily as everyone expected you to be above yourself. But once they discovered you scrubbed as many, if not more, floors as they did, they accepted one. But I hated going to a new unit because there was a wall of suspicion and antipathy both from officers and your own ranks.”

Until her battery was posted to Belgium after D-Day, her longest postings were at Enfield [north London] and Hyde Park, which allowed her to see her parents whenever she had leave. She was embarrassed by these geographically favourable postings, but it was thought to be a pleasure for the prime minister to have her nearby. He used to visit her battery frequently, as did a series of visiting VIPs, including President Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins, Irving Berlin and the Regent of Iraq, who thought the mixed battery a new style of military harem.

Outside the family, of course, the utmost discretion was necessary for she inevitably heard of defeats, victories and strategies before they became more widely known. She had been at home when the date for D-Day was fixed as June 5, 1944 – it was later moved to June 6.

“When June 5 arrived, I was fraught with anxiety. That night, I went to a regimental party, got home late and I’d just got to sleep when suddenly I heard a distant roar. I rushed out into the garden and there, in the grey light, I saw the troop-carriers coming over. The dawn was just beginning and there were the massed aircraft with their gliders. I fell on my knees and prayed. One was very wrought up but one had the sense of victory – that it was going the right way.”

My mother often accompanied her father to public events. Everywhere they went, he was greeted by large and ecstatic crowds. Such light security is almost unthinkable now, but on VE Day, my mother drove with her father through London in an open car when he formally visited the Allies’ embassies. Accompanied by only four mounted police and some outriders, they passed through streets lined with noisy, celebrating crowds.

“He was always very, very moved by people’s reaction to him. Sometimes he had tears pouring down his cheeks,” my mother says. But when the extraordinary result of the 1945 election was finally declared on July 26, it was my mother whose emotions were brimming over. Coming so soon after victory was declared and as Churchill’s personal popularity was soaring, the electoral rout was almost incomprehensible.

In her diary, my mother goes to bed at the end of the day the votes were counted “stunned, numbed, incapable of thought or action”. She was greatly upset and much less philosophical about it than her father, who endlessly repeated, “It is the will of the people.” She now explains: “We were all shattered. I found it a great effort to keep a good demeanour in public.”

This is understandable since her love and admiration for her father was intense. “When I saw how people turned to him in confident hope, my own daughterly affection became entwined with all the emotions I felt as a patriotic Englishwoman,” she recorded.

I have always been grateful to my mother that she didn’t burden us with tales of our grandfather’s achievements, but allowed us to bond with our grandparents purely on mutual affection. “I didn’t think it would be good to fill your heads with tales of Grandpapa’s greatness when you were all small,” she has since told me.

And thanks to her powerful modesty, she was never going to share so much of what is in this memoir with us. Her closeness to her parents, the drama of her war years and the origin of many family expressions and rituals are now explained and clarified. So no one could be more grateful than her family that she has written it.

This article appeared in full in the October issue of 'Saga’ magazine www.saga.co.uk/magazine. 'A Daughter’s Tale’ by Mary Soames (Doubleday, £25) is available from Telegraph Books at £23 + £1.25 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk