Mrs. Winston Churchill

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 61, 23 August 1940, Page 6

Mrs. Winston Churchill

I WAS asked the other day whether Winston Churchill was a bachelor, and although I gave my inquirer an emphatic "no" I feel that that was doing poor justice to a woman of whom Mr. Churchill wrote in his autobiography: "My marriage was much the most fortunate and joyous event which happened to me in the whole of my life." So let me give a brief portrait of Mrs. Winston Churchill. Her name is Clementine, and through her mother, Lady Blanche Hozier, she is a member of a great Scottish family, the Airlies. Her marriage in 1908 to young Winston Churchill, at that time regarded as one of the most promising of the new recruits in the House of Commons, was quite a surprise to

London society, for the bride was little known, and Winston was considered one of the eligible catches of the season, Clementine Hozier was, however, a girl of outstanding beauty and personality. , To-day she is still a woman of whom one instinctively thinks: "she must have been beautiful in her younger days." She is a first-rate tennis player, and once won the London covered-courts championship, As to her taste in‘clothes, I am afraid I’m getting out of depth here-but I am told she favours supremely smart simplicity. She is very slim and can carry clothes that make her look young, so much so that people have frequently suggested that she is Mr. Churchill’s second wife-even after 32 years of marriage. Mrs. Churchill’s greatest qualification is that she is a first-class platform speaker, though she rarely exercises this gift nowadays, and leaves the eloquence to her famous husband. In his early political career, however, she spoke a great deal in public on his behalf. Nowadays she performs with competence and skill that very wifely duty of hearing her husband’s speeches in the raw, and making useful and critical comment on them.-(George Bagley, "Personalities and Places'in the News,’ 3YA August 6).