An extract from Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm by Katherine Carter.
The magic of Christmas at Chartwell was its constancy. The same group returned to the Churchills’ corner of Kent most years, reuniting on Christmas Eve. Clementine, who had been one of four siblings but had sadly lost two by the time she was in her mid-thirties, welcomed her sister Nellie and her family, the Romillys. Winston’s brother Jack was another constant, with his wife Gwendoline, known as ‘Goonie’, and their three children. The noise of a cacophony of cousins filled the house at Christmas. The dining room provided the stage for amateur performances, with make-up kindly provided by Mr Gurnell, the chemist in the nearby village of Westerham.
For Churchill, however, even Christmas Day was a working day. His secretaries had to be on hand too, and later recalled ‘he was never terribly good tempered because he couldn’t get anyone on the telephone and it made him so cross’. There was no good time to be doing nothing in Churchill’s mind. ‘He liked the world to be busy and something happening all the time.’1
On the upside, the secretaries, and a number of the household staff were invited to take part in the festivities, from decorating the house with natural festive foliage to playing Father Christmas on Christmas Eve night, a role usually assigned to Moppet, but which Randolph did too on occasion. The gifts were retrieved from the ‘Genie’s cupboard’,2 a strictly out-of-bounds closet, before they were laid beneath the Christmas tree, which took pride of place in the library. Its positioning meant that, when the doors were open to the drawing room, an 80-foot-long vista was afforded of the glittering spectacle. It was lit with flickering candles which, on one occasion, set the tree alight, but fortunately Randolph heroically saved the day and put out the fire. The gifts underneath the tree, always wrapped in brown paper and tied with a red ribbon, were of a plentiful supply.
Christmas was looked forward to by the staff at Chartwell as much as the Churchills. Every year, they held a big party in the servants’ hall on the lower ground floor, next to the kitchen. Each member of staff, and the family members of those who lived in cottages on the estate, were given presents. ‘At one time my sister and I were the only children on the estate so we fared better than most’, the daughter of head gardener Mr Hill later recalled. Unfortunately her gift that year of ‘a large baby doll with a china head’ proved too fragile, and after it was dropped, sadly the doll was no more.3
About the Book
Churchill’s Citadel
Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm
Katherine Carter
“No one could be better qualified than Katherine Carter to write this fascinating account of the way that Winston Churchill used Chartwell Manor as the indispensable centre of his political, social, literary, familial and also espionage operations during his Wilderness Years. Carter’s passion for her subject and evident scholarship and writing ability positions her perfectly as a prime custodian of the Churchillian story for future generations.”—Andrew Roberts
“A brilliant idea, brilliantly done: not just the most original account of the build up to the Second World War you will read, but immensely entertaining as well.”—Tom Holland
Notes
- Grace Hamblin interview conducted by Pat Ackerman. CAC, Churchill Oral History Collection, CHOH 1 HMBL – Tape 1, Side 2. ↩︎
- Soames, Clementine Churchill, p. 263. ↩︎
- Hibbert, ‘My War Years’, via https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/ stories/55/a2759655.shtml. Permission for use kindly given by Mrs Gwen Hibbert.
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Featured Images
“Chartwell House, rear” by Gaius Cornelius is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Winston Churchill with children, Randolph and Diana, circa on January 1, 1923. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
