BIOGRAPHY

call oral sex,’ she said.

Husband number two, Ernest Simpson, was an AngloAmerican businessman. The couple lived in a flat in Bryanston Court, and she socialised with the American colony in London. Simpson’s sister was a friend of the American Thelma Furness, then mistress of the Prince of Wales, which was how the meeting that changed Wallis’s life was arranged. Few could explain the attraction Wallis exerted on the Prince. She had a raucous voice and an overlarge chin, and she was uneducated, with no interest in music or art.

It is well attested that Wallis tried to stop Edward from abdicating. She wasn’t in love with him, didn’t want to be queen and was horrified when she realised how much he was giving up. Although she allowed herself to be persuaded to divorce Simpson, she apparently failed to see what was coming. Vickers argues that Edward alone brought about the abdication, and there was no

ANNE SEBBA

BLOOD, TOIL, TEARS THE CHURCHILLS: A FAMILY AT THE HEART

OF HISTORY – FROM THE DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH TO WINSTON CHURCHILL

★

By Mary S Lovell (Little, Brown 624pp £25)

IN HER PREFACE to this vivid and enjoyable rollercoaster of a book, Mary S Lovell pre-empts critics who may want to take her to task for adopting a gossipy tone by pleading guilty. She is right to make a virtue of reality, as there is much in this family saga, told with élan to the last of its almost 600 pages, to gossip about. From syphilis to gambling debts, alcoholism to papal annulments, it’s all here. Several of her protagonists indulge in innumerable adulterous affairs and marry three or even four times. There is also, along with the tr iumphs and romances, much tragedy and sadness, including suicides and nervous breakdowns, and the same stories could have been told with an air of gloom or moral censoriousness. Lovell does not go in for any of that. For example, Pamela Churchill, who was married to Randolph and became Winston’s much loved daughter-in-law, comes a close second to the long-suffering Clementine as the heroine of the book. She was often out of the country in the immediate aftermath of the war because of her busy social life and frequent visits to the USA. This, according to Lovell, had its benefits, since her son often went to stay at Chartwell or Minterne so that both sets of grandparents saw a good deal of him – while she saw a good deal of Averell Harriman. ‘Pam, having enjoyed an amusing flirtation

Establishment plot to get rid of him. Marriage condemned Wallis to a lifetime dedicated to entertaining the spoiled and childlike Duke. By all accounts he remained devoted to her. She dominated him, and she was fortunate that an empty life of socialising, fashion and jet-setting suited her far more than it did him. It was the Duke, not Wallis, who cared that she wasn’t styled HRH – this meant that women were not expected to curtsey to her – and who nursed her in-laws’ petty slights.

The Queen allegedly once remarked: ‘The two people who have caused me most trouble in my life are Wallis Simpson and Hitler.’ Hugo Vickers’s compelling account makes one feel that Wallis did the Queen a favour. She made a success of a marriage she had never really wanted, and kept the re s t l e s s Duke of Windsor s a f e l y anchored for thir ty-five years. She cer tainly didn’t deserve the ghastly death so hauntingly described here. To order this book for £20, see LR Bookshop on page 29

with David Niven … was now involved in a casual affair with the devastatingly handsome Prince Aly Khan,’ Lovell writes briskly a few pages later. Of course Winston himself towers over the book, as he towers over the whole clan. Yet although there are thousands of books about Winston, Lovell’s ambitious and original undertaking succeeds in placing him at the centre of a domestic setting, pitting g rave political demands against those of his family, which were equally relentless and in some ways more challenging. Many of the stories she tells are not new; but seeing how they affect Winston on the world stage adds immeasurably to their dramatic edge. Winston in 1935 faced what Lovell describes as ‘Clementine’s only extra marital romance’ – albeit non-sexual – with Terence Philip, with whom she had gone cruising on Lord Moyne’s yacht; the divorce of his daughter Diana and her subsequent marriage to Duncan Sandys; the public espousal of communism by his seventeen-year-old nephew Esmond Romilly; and finally his favourite daughter Sarah’s announcement that she was going to marry the Viennese Jewish actor Vic Oliver, whom Churchill viewed as an ‘itinerant vagabond’.

But the climax of the book is the moment in May 1940 when Winston, aged sixty-five, is finally summoned to be Prime Minister and writes in his diary of his profound sense that he is walking with destiny, a belief instilled in him by his American mother, Jennie. In December 1941 Winston travelled to Washington and delivered one of the most crucial speeches in his career, in which he reflected on the accident of birth whereby his father was British and his mother American; what if it had been the other way around? He emphasised his ties to American soil in order to persuade the USA to join in the war. Yet, however well known that speech to Congress is, what is less known is that, hours beforehand, while still composing it, he found time to see his nephew’s young wife, Decca

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LITERARY REVIEW April 2011