March 12, 2015

Aboard the same yacht which took Clementine on a journey to the Dutch East Indies was Terence Philip, a bachelor who was much sought-after by London hostesses. In the heady and romantic atmosphere of the tropic islands, Clementine fell in love. On their return to England, he visited her several times at Chartwell but their relationship, writes her daughter Mary Soames, “was like a fragile tropical flower which cannot survive in greyer, colder climes.”

While his wife was away, Churchill sent her numbered Chartwell Bulletins as domestic reports on family doings: redecorating the house, replanting of orchard, the building of a new wall. Often, after late debates in the House, a tired Winston declined to drive to Chartwell and stayed in a flat they owned in Morpeth Mansions, near Westminster Cathedral.

Despite the acrimony of the India Bill debate, WSC attempted to make peace with Tory leaders in the hope that Stanley Baldwin would invite him to join the Government upon the retirement of Ramsey Macdonald. Against a German situation which Churchill found “increasingly sombre,” he advocated collective European security as the best guarantee of peace. Others began to heed his warnings. The Daily Express apologized for ignoring his comments and Desmond Morton told him that “you alone seem to have galvanized the House.”

He did not work on Marlborough but he wrote a weekly column for the Daily Mail and a daily series in the Evening Standard, on The King’s 25 Years (Woods C266) to celebrate the Silver Jubilee. Following the fatal accident to T. E. Lawrence, he remembered his friend with “Lawrence of Arabia’s Name Will Live,” published in the Daily Mail (C269) and reprinted in Great Contemporaries.

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