The caption on the back of that vintage photo above mentions (translation from French) :

Will Miss Mary Churchill mary the Prince Regent of Belgium ?

Miss Mary Churchill, one of Winston Churchill's daughter, upon who is whispering that she could engage to Prince Charles, Regent of Belgium.

LEB/DEL/27609 PHOTO KEYSTONE (Paris)

0ctober 2002

Mary Soames has just published a revised edition of Clementine Churchill, her acclaimed biography of her mother. On the eve of her appearance at the Folkestone Literary Festival, Lady Soames, the widow of Lord Soames, who was the last governor of Rhodesia, talks to Valerie Grove.

Being involved in your husband’s career is like running a sweetshop together. That was certainly true at the Embassy in Paris, where I was expected to help a lot; it’s great teamwork and there was plenty for me to do and I felt I could be involved.

I learned mercifully quickly that miniskirts were not for me. Nobody has pretty knees, even a goddess like Princess Diana. Mine are like dolly faces, so I keep them out of sight.

My mother once rounded on me for saying something would be “such a bore”. She said, “Things are only as boring as you choose to make them.” I really hoisted that in. Sometimes a chore turns out to be surprisingly amusing, if you really throw yourself into it.

Like every other young Englishwoman, I shared the feelings that millions of people in the country had for my father, Winston Churchill.

I was 17 when the war broke out, and until then I had simply loved him and admired him as a wonderful father and a marvellous person. Of the people who have played my father in films, the best were Robert Hardy and Albert Finney.

My father taught me not to let the sun go down on my wrath. All my life I have tried to practise what he preached. He didn’t mind public debate and obloquy, but he hated personal spite and family quarrels. He and my mama had words quite often: they were high-mettled people. But my memory of disagreements is balanced by how very quickly they always made it up.

From that, what I have learnt is never to be ashamed of saying you’re sorry. It’s important not to have a false pride about saying sorry, even to young children.

Letters, when written spontaneously, can reflect feelings even more accurately than a diary. When I began writing my mother’s life, when she was still alive, I had already read the letters between my parents, so I felt I was able to discuss with her things I would never have dreamed of asking, because we had not really confided in one another. But sometimes I’d say, “You were in a great fuss about such and such, do tell me more,” and she’d have forgotten about it completely: which taught me that, with the passage of time, mountains turn into molehills.

To make a room look welcoming and sociable, you must make chairs speak to each other. At Downing Street, before people arrived, my mother always went round twitching the chairs so that they turned towards each other in little groups of two or three.

My scrapbooks are among my favourite things. I now have about 43 volumes, containing a jumble of everything in my life. Ten years ago I got so far behind, with mountains of unstuck-in photographs and cuttings, a friend took over making them, though we do go through the material together. Now, I look at the last pages of Christopher’s and my life together, and his death and funeral and memorial service, and she’s done them so beautifully, they are such a comfort.

I found out, just after finishing the original edition of my book, that my grandfather, Clementine’s father, was certainly not Henry Hozier after all. My mother had long suspected this, but I felt then it was inappropriate to insert it in the book, although there had always been rumours that Bertie Mitford, Lord Redesdale, was her father. Now I feel I can write about the promiscuous behaviour of my grandmother, Lady Blanche Hozier: she also had an affair with Bay Middleton in the years when my mother and her sister were born. So I take no dogmatic view about Blanche’s four children’s paternity; I merely use that very useful French expression, “Je n’ai pas tenue la chandelle.”

I think largeish families learn a lot from each other. All the infighting and gangings-up are an education for life. My father used to invite people to lunch and tell them, “You’ll find us all bunged up with brats.” I wanted six children, but knocked off at five.

I’ve learnt, observing other families, that people remain forever in the position they started out – first, second or third – even when middle-aged. As the baby of my family [she was the fifth, born shortly after the fourth child, a daughter, had died in infancy] I don’t think I was more cherished, but I seemed almost like an only child, for whom special arrangements had to be made. The eldest three were already quite high up the slopes. My mother invited her cousin, Maryott Whyte, a trained Norland nurse, to come and be “Nana” to me. She was upright, Scottish and religious, and dominated my young life. She read to me for hours and gave me my faith, and I’m grateful to Nana for that. When my mother much later remarked on what fun I seemed to have with my own children it went to my heart. But none of us felt neglected by her: we thought it natural that my father came first with her.

However close your family life is, you must cherish and nurture the life between the two of you, the private time à deux which can be squeezed out by busyness and children. You have to make it happen.

If you love someone very much and he is no longer there, it’s a hole in your life that nothing fills. I think disability is a good analogy: if you lose an arm, everyone says how wonderful it is that you manage, and you do manage, but the arm’s gone. One is so blessed and lucky to have children and grandchildren whose lists you are on: hardly a day passes when one of them doesn’t ring up, or visit. In her last years my mother always had good friends who wanted to see her. In her last year she sent out 100 handwritten Christmas cards. Not bad for a lady of 90.

A real challenge is an enormous blessing in widowhood. Less than a year after my husband died, a very arid moment, I was offered the chairmanship of the National Theatre, a great challenge, I had time to give to it and it was a proper job. I had no expertise: I had to ask them what a proscenium arch was. But fools rush in, and I learnt an enormous amount on the hoof. I learnt that everybody in an organisation, however lowly, has to be understood, recognised and appreciated for what they do. In that vast, unrelenting building there are something like 600 people behind the scenes, and I wanted them all to feel an essential part of what happens there night after night. I also became rather fond of a very saucy mouse in my office.

I’ve never not had a dog in my life. I was always rather scornful of old widowed ladies who were soppy about their dogs, but I am increasingly conscious that I am old, I am widowed, and I am soppy about my dog, an adorable Lancashire Heeler known as The Prune. I am très non-sportive, and she makes me walk. She is a great companion, and since she is genetically blind, and I’m deaf, we’re a mutual self-help society. She often hears my front doorbell when I don’t.

I have learnt how wrong one can be about somebody as the terrible and wicked situation unfolds in Zimbabwe. [In 1980 Christopher and Mary Soames were sent to Rhodesia to oversee the handover as it became independent].

I don’t think we were wrong to trust Robert Mugabe at the time: my husband esteemed him as a clever, able man, and Zimbabwe had 20 years of peace and relative prosperity, and harmony between the races. Appalling injustices have been done to the white farmers, but the worst horror has been borne by the black people, with thousands of jobs and school places lost. A gruesome tragedy and quite heart-breaking.

It’s never too late to start a new garden. When I left our old house in the country and moved to this London house I started again from scratch. Just outside the French door I made an “outdoor sitting room”: an area enclosed on all sides by greenery. Even the shadiest areas can be green with hostas, which do so well in pots. My lilies are my proudest achievement. But the vital feature of a garden is to have things you can touch and smell: rosemary, lavender and lemon-scented geraniums.

I still enjoy the post-prandial pleasure which I learnt from my father: a really good Havana cigar.

Churchill: A Biography
by Roy Jenkins

Winston Churchill was querulous, childish, self-indulgent, and difficult, writes English historian Roy Jenkins. But he was also brilliant, tenacious, and capable--in short, "the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street." Jenkins's book stands as the best single-volume biography of Churchill in recent years.

Marked by the author's wide experience writing on British leaders such as Balfour and Gladstone and his tenure as a member of Parliament, his book adds much to the vast library of works on Churchill. While acknowledging his subject's prickly nature, Jenkins credits Churchill for, among other things, recognizing far earlier than his peers the dangers of Hitler's regime. He praises Churchill for his leadership during the war years, especially at the outset, when England stood alone and in imminent danger of defeat. He also examines Churchill's struggle to forge political consensus to meet that desperate crisis, and he sheds new light on Churchill's postwar decline. --Gregory McNamee - Amazon.com

The Second World War --- $77.00 By Winston S. Churchill John Keegan

The Wit and Wisdom of Winston Churchill: A Treasury of More Than 1,000 Quotations and Anecdotes --- $10.36 By James C. Humes Richard M. Nixon

Winston Churchill (Penguin Lives) --- $13.97 By John Keegan

Marlborough - Volume I --- $17.50 By Winston Churchill

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Alone 1932-1940 --- $35.00 By William Raymond Manchester

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 --- $35.00 By William Manchester

Churchill's Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy --- $40.00 By Klaus Larres

Memoirs of the Second World War --- $20.97 By Winston S. Churchill

History of the English-Speaking People: Age of Revolution --- $3.98 By Winston S. Churchill

Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples --- By Winston Churchill

Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian. --- $13.17 By John Lukacs

Churchill and Roosevelt, the Complete Correspondence: I. Alliance Emerging, Ii. Alliance Forged, Iii. Alliance Declining --- $400.00 By Winston Churchill Warren Kimball Franklin D. Dfrankl Roosevelt

Churchill: A Study in Greatness --- $20.97 By Geoffrey Best

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples --- $29.95 By Winston, Sir Churchill

A Connoisseur's Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill --- $39.95 By Richard M. Langworth The Churchill Center

Blood, Sweat and Tears --- $29.95 By Winston S. Churchill Randolph S. Churchill

The River War --- $29.95 By Winston S. Churchill

Churchill: A Life --- $16.80 By Martin Gilbert

The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 --- $16.95 By

Churchill, Whitehall and the Soviet Union, 1940-45 (Cold War History) --- $65.00 By Martin H. Folly

Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills --- $11.20 By Mary Soames

Winston s Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939-1941 --- $40.00 By Martin Gilbert

The Great Republic: A History of America (Random House Large Print) --- $25.95 By Winston S. Churchill winst Churchill

Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (Unabridged) --- $22.95 By

The Wit & Wisdom of Winston Churchill: A Treasury of More Than 1,000 Quotations and Anecdotes --- $20.00 By James C. Humes Richard Milhous Nixon Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill: His Life As a Painter --- $40.00 By Mary Soames

Churchill in His Own Voice and the Voices of His Contemporaries --- $10.95

Churchill Speaks: Winston S. Churchill in Peace and War: Collected Speeches, 1897-1963 --- $25.00 By Winston Churchill Robert Rhodes James

The Gathering Storm --- $12.60 By Winston S. Churchill

In Search of Churchill: A Historian's Journey --- $13.97 By Martin Gilbert

The Birth of Britain --- $20.97 By Winston Churchill

Churchill: The Unruly Giant --- $24.50 By Norman Rose

The Churchill War Papers: The Ever Widening War, Volume 3: 1941 --- $59.50

Their Finest Hour --- $13.30 By Winston S. Churchill

Churchill on Leadership: Executive Success in the Face of Adversity --- $14.00 By Steven F. Hayward

History of the English Speaking People: Birth of Britain, 55 B.C. to 1485 --- $10.00 By Winston S. Churchill

Churchill's Deception: The Dark Secret That Destroyed Nazi Germany --- $23.00 By Louis C. Kilzer

The British Liberal Tradition: From Gladstone to Young Churchill, Asquith, and Lloyd George--Is Blair Their Heir? (Senator Keith Davey Lecture Series --- $9.95 By Roy Jenkins Lord Roy Jenkins

Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World (Unabridged) --- $13.95

History of English Speaking People: Great Democracies, 1815-1901 --- $3.98 By Winston S. Churchill

Churchill at War: The Memoirs of Churchill's Doctor --- $11.20 By Lord Moran Moran Lord

Allies at War: The Bitter Rivalry Among Churchill, Roosevelt, and De Gaulle --- $18.20 By Simon Berthon

My Early Life: 1874-1904 --- $10.50 By Winston Churchill William Manchester

The Wicked Wit Of Winston Churchill --- $10.36 By Dominique Enright

Winston Churchill Warns of German Threat --- $1.95 By

Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets --- $24.50 By David Stafford