The Churchill Series - Feb. 28, 2006

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill. )

If Churchill ever listed the three most important places in his life I feel sure they were the House of Commons, 10 Downing Street and Chartwell, the large house in Kent and its surrounding farms which he purchased in the 1920s.

In 1990, one of Churchill’s granddaughters, Lady Emma Soames, than age forty, spent a day visiting Chartwell, now maintained by The National Trust. She then recorded some recollections. Here’s a few of them:

When we lived there it was a Noah’s Ark of chickens, pigs, ponies and cattle, agreeably interspersed with barns of hay and towers of straw, a gloomy apple shed and a deliciously filthy pigsty, where my grandfather spent hours leaning over the metal gate scratching the pigs’ backs with his walking sticks. "Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you, but pigs treat you as an equal," he used to say.

Meals were fun. The conversation went largely over our heads, but the food was always delicious and exquisitely spoiling to a child.
…
(Afterwards) Toby the budgerigar would be released on to the table where he would remove all the tiny silver trowels from the salt urns before attacking Grandpapa’s cigar.

At this point the youngest grandchild would be dandled on Grandpapa’s knee while he and my mother smoked large Havanas and indulged in a competition as to who could grow the longest tail of ash. He was not amused if he didn’t win.
…

The house was bequeathed to the National Trust by a group of Churchill’s friends, who showed the imagination and generosity to buy it from my grandfather after the Second World War and give it to the National Trust on condition he could live in it until his death. As he said before the war: "With my happy family around me. I dwelt at peace within my habitation."

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Emma Soames, "Chartwell Childhood," Finest Hour (No.71) Soames article can be viewed here.