![]() This was presented by the Churchill children, who flew out to surprise their parents with it while they were holidaying at Villa "La Capponcina", Cap d’Ail on the French Riviera. The Golden Rose Garden at Chartwell was planned by Sir Winston & Lady Churchill's surviving children as a gift to mark their parents' Golden Wedding Anniversary in September 1958. As the planting of the new garden was not completed ahead of the Churchill's actual anniversary date marking fifty years of marriage (and because the roses would not have bloomed until the following year) a vellum-bound, illuminated, large-format elephant-folio book entitled " The Golden Rose Book" was prepared for them as a gift to receive on the day. In spite of their ups and downs, the view has been that he never wavered and this clearly changes the picture … Future Churchill biographers will have to engage with it." Plan of the Golden Rose Garden at Chartwell" “I wouldn’t claim it radically changes our view of Churchill, but it does change our view of the Churchills’ marriage. Toye said confirmation of the affair was historically important. “Clementine would say to Colville, ‘I always thought Winston had been faithful’, and Colville tried to reassure her by saying many husbands on a moonlit night in the south of France have strayed it’s not such a big deal.” ![]() “She was worried about it for months afterwards,” Toye said. The affair remained buried until the late 1950s, when some of Castlerosse’s love letters to Churchill were shared with Clementine. When her death became known, Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill’s fixer, was believed to have retrieved the compromising painting from her brother Dudley. ![]() Castlerosse died at the Dorchester hotel from an overdose of sleeping tablets shortly after her return to London. The UK needed America’s support to defeat Hitler.Ĭastlerosse, armed with one of Churchill’s paintings of her, which would help corroborate her claims of an affair, something that had the potential to scandalise society and undermine the prime minister’s standing, successfully pressed her former lover into securing her a rare seat on a flight home. In 1942 Churchill was visiting President Roosevelt for a vital meeting. Her ex-lover provided her with an opportunity. As her looks and fortune declined, and war came, she was desperate to return home. Castlerosse moved to Venice, had a relationship with a female American millionaire, and then moved to the US. ![]() ![]() That’s one of the stories my mother told me … and after that, the next day … Doris confided in my mother about it, they were, as I said, good friends as well as being sisters-in-law, and so, yes, it was known that they were having an affair.”īut when war threatened and Churchill’s career revived, he ended the relationship. “When Winston was coming to visit her, the staff were all given the day off. “My mother had many stories to tell about when they stayed in my aunt’s house in Berkeley Square,” Doris’s niece, Caroline Delevingne, recalls in the Delevingne family’s first televised interview about the affair. During this time Churchill painted at least two portraits of his lover – he only ever painted one of his wife, Clementine – and they continued to meet at her home back in London. In the interview Colville disclosed: “Now this is a somewhat scandalous story and therefore not to be handed out for a great many years … Winston Churchill was … not a highly sexed man at all, and I don’t think that in his 60 or 55 years’ married life he ever slipped up, except on this one occasion when Lady Churchill was not with him and by moonlight in the south of France … he certainly had an affair, a brief affair with … Castlerosse as I think she was called … Doris Castlerosse, yes, that’s right.”Ĭhurchill spent four holidays with Castlerosse, the great-aunt of model Cara Delevingne, in the south of France during the 1930s when he was out of office. It confirms what has long been rumoured – that Churchill engaged in an affair with a glamorous aristocrat, Lady Doris Castlerosse – something that would later leave him vulnerable to her manipulation. The two academics discovered that in autumn 1985 Churchill’s former private secretary, Sir John “Jock” Colville, gave a frank interview to archivists at Churchill College in Cambridge which has never been aired – until now. ![]()
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