DAY 72: Jennie Churchill's War

Painting of Soldiers Embarking for the Front, by Winston Churchill

 "If, after the war, these women should attempt to go back to their old lives they would find themselves confronted with a dreadful sense of uselessness and ineffectiveness. Personally I am convinced that the women of this generation never will be content to relapse into merely pleasure-loving creatures, and that means a metamorphosis....During the days of the suffrage agitations--how long ago those days seem now!--one of the arguments of men was that women were not competent to take part in the serious work which men had always done. The war has answered every argument of that kind with an absolute completeness that I think few will now deny....It is my opinion that after the war women will be given the vote without much opposition, and dozens of men who in the past opposed the idea agree with me upon this subject."

--Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill, to the New York Times, June 4, 1916

Jennie Churchill dined with her son, Winston, and his wife Clementine at Admiralty House on August 4, 1914. The day before, Germany had delared war on France and invaded neutral Belgium, whereupon the government of H.H. Asquith delivered an ultimatum to the Kaiser--withdraw from Belgium immediately, or face the consequences. That night, as the Churchills waited, the deadline of 11 p.m. August 4th came and went without a word from Berlin. Jennie left Winston at the Admiralty ordering the British Fleet to battle stations. The British Empire was at war with Germany.

The story of those years falls outside the scope of That Churchill Woman, but today, one hundred years after the signing of the Armistice that ended the Great War, it's worth noting that Jennie, who was sixty years old in 1914, worked tirelessly throughout the war. She co-chaired an American women's charity that fed soldiers, at thousands of buffets set up at railway stations; nursed them, at hospitals the women sourced and staffed; and entertained them--Jennie toured soldiers' camps, playing the piano while a friend sang. Most importantly, Jennie became Head Matron of London's  Lancaster Gate hospital, where she nursed gas victims, among others. 

A large part of her support went to her son Winston, of course, who was serving in Asquith's War Cabinet. Win had succeeded in funding Dreadnought construction prior to the outbreak of hostilities, and the readiness of the Fleet was critical to British efforts; but the nightmare of the Gallipoli campaign caused him to resign his post as First Lord, and unleashed a profound period of depression in his soul. He was left, he later wrote, gasping like a fish out of water at his uselessness. Jennie suggested he paint.

Winston Churchill, Self-portrait

This seems trivial. It proved otherwise. A few days afterward, Winston experimented with one his children's paint boxes and the next day bought a complete set of oils and an easel. Painting was meditative; painting healed the turbulent mind. Jennie told her sister Leonie that Winston used it as "an opiate." Painting, Violet Asquith noted, was "the only occupation I had ever seen him practice in silence."

Winston left England for Flanders in January 1916, to serve as Commander of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers at Ploegsteert. Active fighting in the trenches at the age of 41 rebuilt his sense of purpose. Jennie's younger son Jack was also at the Front; both her daughters-in-law were raising children at home alone, sharing lodgings and volunteering with the wounded. Jennie's niece, Claire Sheridan, received the dreadful news that her husband was presumed dead. Jennie's nephew Norman Leslie was killed early in the war, at Armentieres. It was a bitter and despairing time. 

Lt. Col. Winston Spencer-Churchill,
Royal Scots Fusiliers

Winston returned to Parliament when David Lloyd George replaced Asquith as Prime Minister, and in January 1917 he was named Minister of Munitions. It was a job he could throw himself into--spearheading the development of his pet project, the tank, and making sure that Britain's soldiers never lacked for supplies. Winston even learned to fly one of the new aeroplanes (crashing in the process), and piloted himself across the Channel to Paris almost weekly during the final months of the war. 

Jennie, meanwhile, edited a slim volume entitled Women's War Work, championing the role of women on the Home Front and predicting they were unlikely to give up their new-found freedom and competence once the men returned from Belgium. In this, she was prophetic. 

On the night of November 11, 1918--one hundred years ago this evening--London erupted in wild celebration. Girls climbed on top of taxis, waving flags, while people in cars blared their horns. Jennie threw a dinner party and half the world--including poet Siegfried Sassoon, whom she'd nursed at Lancaster Gate--showed up to celebrate with her.

I'll be hosting a dinner tonight at my house, in honor of the millions who lost their lives between 1914 and 1918...and remembering Jennie.