Chartwell

• 1. Introduction

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  Chartwell is a country house near Westerham in Kent, and Winston Churchill explained his decision to buy it in one short sentence. "I bought Chartwell for that view." The view sweeps across the Weald of Kent from a hillside that rises to roughly 650 feet above sea level. Churchill bought the house in September 1922 and owned it for more than forty years. The people who judge buildings for a living have rarely been kind to it. One chairman of the National Trust, the writer Simon Jenkins, called it undistinguished. So how did a red-brick house with a doubtful reputation become the place where a politician out of office organised a campaign, wrote his books and recovered from a stroke that the public never heard about? Who rebuilt it, who paid for it when its owner could not, and what did its famous resident do with his own hands in the grounds? The answers start centuries before Churchill, at a spring on a Kent hillside.

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• 2. Spring on the Hillside

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  The earliest recorded mention of the land comes from the 14th century, when a man named William At-Well sold it. The name Chartwell traces back to the Chart Well, a spring north of the present house. Chart is an Old English word for rough ground. A building stood on the site by at least the 16th century, when the estate was called Well Street. Henry VIII was reputed to have stayed there while courting Anne Boleyn at nearby Hever Castle. The Historic England listing notes brickwork from the 16th century, or possibly the 17th, in some of the external walls. Through the 17th and 18th centuries the house served as a farmhouse and passed quickly from owner to owner.

  On the 22nd of September 1836 the property was auctioned at Cheapside, advertised as "a suitable abode for a genteel family". In 1848 a former MP named John Campbell Colquhoun bought it. The Campbell Colquhouns were Scottish landowners, lawyers and politicians, and they enlarged and altered the old farmhouse. Their additions included stepped gables, a Scottish baronial gesture toward the homeland of their ancestors. By the time Churchill arrived, the result struck Oliver Garnett, author of a 2008 guidebook, as "Victorian architecture at its least attractive, a ponderous red-brick country mansion of tile-hung gables and poky oriel windows". The man who sold it to Churchill was Captain Archibald John Campbell Colquhoun, who had been at Harrow School in the 1880s alongside his future buyer.

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• 3. Bargain and Builder

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  Churchill first saw Chartwell in July 1921, shortly before it was due to go to auction. He returned the same month with his wife Clementine. She was drawn to the property at first, although her enthusiasm cooled on later visits. In September 1922 the house had failed to sell, and Churchill was offered it for £5,500. His first offer was £4,800, with the warning that "the house will have to be very largely rebuilt, and the presence of dry rot is a very serious adverse factor". That offer was rejected, and he finally paid £5,000. The seller had inherited the property in June 1922, after the death of his brother. As the sale went through, Churchill wrote to him, "I am very glad indeed to have become the possessor of "Chartwell". I have been searching for two years for a home in the country and the site is the most beautiful and charming I have ever seen". The sale was concluded on the 11th of November 1922.

  The fifteen months before the purchase had been calamitous for Churchill. In June 1921 his mother died, and three months later so did his youngest child, Marigold. Late in 1922 he fell ill with appendicitis. At the end of that year he lost his Scottish parliamentary seat at Dundee.

  The architect Philip Tilden began work in 1922, while the Churchills rented a farmhouse near Westerham. Churchill visited often to watch the progress. The building programme lasted two years, and an estimate of £7,000 climbed past £18,000. Damp and other construction troubles made matters worse. By 1924 architect and client were barely on speaking terms, and their lawyers kept arguing until 1927. Clementine worried about the cost of building the house and of living in it afterwards. In September 1923 Churchill wrote to her, "My beloved, I beg you not to worry about money, or to feel insecure. Chartwell is to be our home (and) we must endeavour to live there for many years." He moved in during April 1924. A letter dated the 17th of April begins, "This is the first letter I have ever written from this place, and it is right that it should be to you".

  Tilden was a society architect who had already worked on Port Lympne, the Kent home of Churchill's friend Philip Sassoon. He had also designed Bron-y-de, the house of Lloyd George at Churt. At Chartwell he built in a vernacular style, in red brick, with two storeys, a basement and extensive attics. The 18th-century doorcase at the centre of the entrance front came from a London antiques dealer. The architectural historian John Newman thought it "large and splendid and out of place". On the garden front Tilden added a three-storey extension with stepped gables, which Churchill called "my promontory". It holds the dining room in the basement, with the drawing room above it and Lady Churchill's bedroom above that. Churchill described the bedroom as "a magnificent aerial bower".

  Newman judged that only the grouping of the house on its garden terraces really mattered, because that took advantage of the views. He dismissed the road side as a "long, indecisive entrance front close to the road". The house is Grade I listed, yet the listing says this is "for historical reasons" rather than architectural merit. The gardens are Grade II* listed. Tilden's memoirs, True Remembrances, are described as "highly unreliable", and in them he wrote of "creating Chartwell out of the drabness of Victorian umbrageousness". The room that mattered most to Churchill was none of these, but the study on the first floor.

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• 4. Word Factory

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  Bill Deakin, one of Churchill's research assistants, remembered a working day that began at eight o'clock with Churchill reading in bed. Next came the mail. Deakin called the lunchtime conversation "quite magnificent" and said it was a free-for-all. After lunch Churchill walked any guests round the garden. At seven he bathed and changed for dinner. When the guests left at midnight he started work and carried on until three or four in the morning. Deakin put the secret down to "his phenomenal power to concentrate". The historian Peter Clarke, writing about Churchill as an author, gave the house a nickname: "Winston's word factory".

  The study on the first floor was described as Churchill's "workshop for over 40 years" and "the heart of Chartwell". In the 1920s, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he planned his budgets there. In the 1930s, isolated from office, he composed speeches warning against the rise of Hitler. He also dictated the books and articles that paid the bills. His biography of his ancestor Marlborough and his work The World Crisis were written in the room. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples was begun and finished there, with the Second World War interrupting in between. In 1945, defeated at the polls, he retreated to the study to write his histories.

  Tilden had removed a late-Victorian ceiling to expose the early roof beams and then fitted a Tudor doorcase. Three banners hang from the beams. Two are Churchill's standards as Knight of the Garter and as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. The third is the Union Flag raised over Rome on the night of the 5th of June 1944, the first British flag to fly over a liberated capital. Lord Alexander of Tunis gave it to him. The study also holds portraits of Churchill's parents, Lord Randolph Churchill and Lady Randolph Churchill, the latter by John Singer Sargent. Underfoot is a Khorassan carpet, a gift for his 69th birthday from the Shah of Iran at the Teheran Conference in 1943.

  On the 26th of September 1927 Churchill wrote the first of his Chartwell Bulletins. These were lengthy letters to Clementine, who was abroad, describing in great detail the works on the house and gardens and aspects of his life there. The first one opens with news of his deepening interest in painting: "Sickert arrived on Friday night and we worked very hard at various paintings... I am really thrilled... I see my way to paint far better pictures than I ever thought possible before".

  Walter Richard Sickert, Churchill's friend and artistic tutor, appears again in a picture Churchill painted of the dining room, Tea at Chartwell: the 29th of August 1927. It shows Churchill in one of his dining chairs, surrounded by family and guests. With him are Sickert and his wife Thérèse, Edward Marsh, Diana Mitford, Frederick Lindemann, Clementine, Randolph and Diana Churchill. Several of those faces would soon be sitting at the same table for far more serious reasons.

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• 5. Hub of Resistance

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  The Chartwell visitors' book, meticulously kept from 1922, records 780 house guests. Not all of them were friends, but all were useful to Churchill. In the 1930s he was out of political office and campaigning against German re-armament and the government's response of appeasement. Robin Fedden, a diplomat who later became Deputy General Secretary of the National Trust, wrote the Trust's first guidebook to the house. He called Chartwell "the most important country house in Europe" and described Churchill's own "little Foreign Office... the hub of resistance". The historian Graham Stewart went further, calling it "a sort of Jacobite court of St Germain". A stream of friends, colleagues, disgruntled civil servants, concerned military officers and foreign envoys came with information.

  The hospitality predated the crisis. In February 1926 Sir Samuel Hoare wrote to the press baron Lord Beaverbrook about a visit. He had never before seen Churchill as a landed proprietor, and Churchill seemed more interested in a series of ponds he was making in the valley than in anything else. Roy Jenkins, in his study The Chancellors, contrasted Churchill's holidays with those of his then boss, Stanley Baldwin. Churchill used Chartwell to continue his political work and brought as many colleagues as he could to the house. In January 1928 James Lees-Milne stayed as a guest of Churchill's son Randolph. He recalled an evening at the round dining table when Churchill "spent a blissful two hours demonstrating with decanters and wine glasses how the Battle of Jutland was fought". Churchill got worked up like a schoolboy, "making barking noises in imitation of gunfire" and blowing cigar smoke across the table as gun smoke.

  Sir Maurice Hankey, Clerk of the Privy Council, came to dinner in April 1936. Afterwards he wrote that some points in the conversation indicated the line Churchill was likely to take in forthcoming parliamentary debates on munitions and supply. A week later Reginald Leeper, a senior Foreign Office official and confidant of Robert Vansittart, visited to pass on their views on using the League of Nations against German aggression. Vansittart wrote, "there is no time to lose. There is indeed a great danger that we shall be too late".

  Desmond Morton and Ralph Wigram were two more of Churchill's most important suppliers of confidential government information. He used what they told him to "form and fortify my opinion about the Hitler Movement". Sharing data on German rearmament put their careers at some risk. The military historian Richard Holmes is clear that Morton's actions breached the Official Secrets Act. The planning went beyond talk. In October 1939, when Churchill was reappointed First Lord of the Admiralty, he suggested filling anti-aircraft shells with zinc ethyl, which catches fire spontaneously. A fraction of an ounce, he noted, had been demonstrated at Chartwell the previous summer.

  In September 1938 the Russian Ambassador, Ivan Maisky, made his first visit. His diary describes a two-storey house, a terrace with a breathtaking view, goldfish ponds, and a pavilion-cum-studio hung with dozens of Churchill's paintings. His host's pride and joy was a small brick cottage that he was building with his own hands. Maisky asked what occasion would lead Churchill to open a bottle of wine from 1793 in his cellar. Churchill replied, "We'll drink this together when Great Britain and Russia beat Hitler's Germany". Maisky privately noted that Churchill's hatred of Berlin had "gone beyond all limits".

  The estate nearly did not survive the decade. In 1938 Churchill, beset by financial worries, again considered selling, and the house was advertised with five reception rooms, nineteen bed and dressing rooms, eight bathrooms and eighty acres. It also offered three cottages and a heated, floodlit swimming pool. He withdrew the sale when the industrialist Henry Strakosch agreed to take over his share portfolio for three years and pay off significant debts. That portfolio had been badly hit by losses on Wall Street.

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• 6. Refuge in Crisis

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  In July 1940 Eric Seal, Churchill's Principal Private Secretary, recorded an evening trip to Chartwell, a rare visit. Seal noted a series of ponds stocked with immense goldfish, and wrote that the Prime Minister loved feeding them. Chartwell was mostly unused during the Second World War. Its exposed position in a county so near German-occupied France left it vulnerable to an airstrike or a commando raid. As a precaution the lakes were covered with brushwood to make the house harder to spot from the air. The Churchills spent weekends at Ditchley House in Oxfordshire until security improvements were finished at Chequers, the official country residence in Buckinghamshire. At dinner at Chequers in December 1940, John Colville recorded Churchill's plan to retire to Chartwell and write a book on the war that he had already mapped out chapter by chapter.

  The house remained a haven when pressure was greatest. Churchill spent a night there before the fall of France in 1940. He was then summoned to London by an urgent plea from Lord Gort for permission to retreat to Dunkirk. He returned on the 20th of June 1941, after the failure of Operation Battleaxe to relieve Tobruk, resolved to sack the Middle East commander, General Wavell. Colville's diary describes the afternoon: after a long sleep, the Prime Minister, "in a purple dressing gown and grey felt hat", took him to see his goldfish. Churchill was ruminating deeply about Tobruk. On a short visit on the 24th of June 1944, just after the Normandy landings, his secretary found the house "shut up and rather desolate".

  The Churchills first returned to Chartwell after VE Day on the 18th of May 1945. The horticulturalist Stefan Buczacki says they were greeted by the biggest crowd Westerham had ever seen. Military victory was followed within weeks by political defeat in the July 1945 general election. Churchill soon went abroad. Clementine went back to Chartwell to begin opening up the house, remarking, "it will be lovely when the lake camouflage is gone".

  On the 23rd of June 1953, with Churchill again prime minister, a dinner at 10 Downing Street for the Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi ended badly. Churchill collapsed and was barely able to stand or speak. On the 25th he was driven to Chartwell, where he grew worse. His doctor, Lord Moran, said he did not think the Prime Minister could possibly live over the weekend. That evening Colville summoned Churchill's closest friends in the press, Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Camrose and Brendan Bracken. Walking the lawns, they agreed to try for a press blackout. Colville wrote that they "achieved the all but incredible success of gagging Fleet Street". Not a word of the stroke was published until Churchill casually mentioned it in the House of Commons a year later. Secluded at Chartwell, he made a remarkable recovery. He used the recuperation to finish Triumph and Tragedy, the sixth and final volume of his war memoirs, which he had set aside when he returned to Downing Street in 1951.

  On the 5th of April 1955 Churchill chaired his last cabinet, almost fifty years after he first sat in the Cabinet Room as President of the Board of Trade in 1908. The next day he drove to Chartwell. A journalist asked how it felt to be prime minister no more, and Churchill replied, "It's always nice to be home". For ten years he spent much of his time there, though he and Lady Churchill also travelled widely. He wrote, painted, played bezique, and sat by the fish pond feeding the golden orfe. His daughter Mary Soames remembered that in his last two summers he would lie in his "wheelbarrow" chair, contemplating the valley he had loved for so long.

  Catherine Snelling, one of his last secretaries, recalled the shrinking number of visitors. They included Clementine's cousin Sylvia Henley, Violet Bonham Carter, Harold Macmillan and Bernard Montgomery. On the 13th of October 1964 his last dinner guests at Chartwell were his former principal private secretary Sir Leslie Rowan and Rowan's wife. Lady Rowan later said, "It was sad to see such a great man become so frail". The following week, increasingly incapacitated, Churchill left the house for the last time. His official biographer Martin Gilbert records that he was "never to see his beloved Chartwell again". He died at his London home, 28 Hyde Park Gate, on the 24th of January 1965.

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• 7. Saved for the Nation

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  Lord Camrose organised a group of Churchill's friends in 1945, after Churchill again considered selling because of the cost of running the estate. They raised £55,000 and passed it to the National Trust. The Trust bought the house from Churchill for £43,800, and the excess became an endowment. The sale was completed on the 29th of November. The Churchills agreed a 50-year lease at £350 a year plus rates, which let them live there until their deaths. In December 1945 Churchill thanked Camrose in a letter, addressing him as "my dear Bill" and praising a friend who "never wavered in your friendship during all these long and tumultuous years".

  After Churchill's death in 1965, Lady Churchill gave up her rights to the house and presented it to the Trust. It opened to the public in 1966. The Trust has kept it as it looked in the 1920s and 1930s, in line with Churchill's promise to leave it "garnished and furnished so as to be of interest to the public". Rooms hold memorabilia, gifts, original furniture and books, and the honours and medals he received. The drawing room contains a view of Charing Cross Bridge by Claude Monet, painted from a balcony at the Savoy Hotel. That unfinished work became a significant element in negotiations between Churchill's executors and the National Land Fund. The talks concerned giving many of Chartwell's contents to the Trust in lieu of death duties.

  Grace Hamblin, Lady Churchill's long-time secretary, became the first administrator of the house. Earlier in her career she had destroyed the portrait of Churchill by Graham Sutherland. Both Houses of Parliament had given the picture for his 80th birthday in 1954. Both Churchills loathed it, and it was stored in the cellars at Chartwell before being burnt in secret.

  Opening to visitors required new buildings. Philip Jebb designed a restaurant, built north of the house, and a shop and ticket office were added. Some guest bedrooms were merged to make a Museum room and a Uniform room. The Great Storm of 1987 blew down twenty-three trees in the gardens. The woodland around the house suffered far more and lost over seventy per cent of its trees.

  In 2016, the fiftieth anniversary of its opening, 232,000 people visited Chartwell, making it one of the Trust's most popular properties. That year the Trust launched the Churchill's Chartwell Appeal to raise £7.1M. The money was to buy hundreds of personal items held at the house on loan from the Churchill family. Among them is Churchill's Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". The medal is displayed in the Museum room, at the opposite end of the house from the study. John F. Kennedy, granting Churchill honorary United States citizenship, said that in that study Churchill "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle". One last room remained closed. Shortly before her death in 2014, Mary Soames gave permission to open her father's bedroom, and the Trust planned to open it by 2020.

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• 8. Lakes, Walls and Animals

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  On the 1st of January 1935, while Lady Churchill was on a cruise off Sumatra, Churchill reported in a Chartwell Bulletin that he had arranged for "one of those great mechanical diggers". He wrote that in a week it could do more than 40 men, and that it could walk over the sloppiest fields because it was "a caterpillar". Two weeks later he wrote again that the digger had arrived but moved with the greatest difficulty on the wet ground. The lower lake already existed under the Colquhouns. The island within it and the upper lake were Churchill's own creations, and the most ambitious of his landscaping schemes.

  The gardens cover 8 ha, with a further 23 ha of parkland. The Churchills created almost every landscape, architectural and water feature seen today, with later input from Lanning Roper, Gardens Adviser to the National Trust. They removed much of the Victorian planting of conifers and rhododendrons while keeping the woodlands beyond. The rose garden to the north was laid out by Lady Churchill and her cousin Venetia Stanley. Nearby stands the Marlborough Pavilion, built by Tilden and decorated in 1949 with frescos by Churchill's nephew John Spencer Churchill. Beyond the roses lies the water garden, with the golden orfe pond and the swimming pool built in the 1930s. For the pool, Churchill sought advice from his friend and scientific guru Professor Lindemann on heating and cleaning.

  Churchill developed an interest in bricklaying when he bought the house. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he built walls, a summerhouse and some houses on the estate. In 1928 he joined the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers, a move that caused controversy. Near the Victorian kitchen garden is the golden rose walk, with thirty-two varieties of golden roses. His children gave it to the Churchills in 1958 as a golden wedding anniversary present. Close by is the painting studio built in the 1930s, which now houses a large collection of his work. South of the terrace lawn, the croquet lawn was once a tennis court. Lady Churchill was an accomplished and competitive player of both games, although her husband was not.

  The lakes were home to Churchill's large collection of wildfowl. Black swans, a gift from the Australian Government, restocked them in 1975. In May 1942 Churchill wrote to Randolph that the goose and the black swan had both fallen victim to the fox. His friend Violet Bonham Carter recalled the early 1950s, when he lamented a bad summer for butterflies. Then two Red Admirals landed on a clump of buddleia that he had planted to attract them. She never forgot his pleasure. The painter William Nicholson, who gave Churchill lessons and visited often, drew a study for a picture called Breakfast at Chartwell. He meant it as a gift for the Churchills' silver wedding anniversary in 1933, but he disliked the finished version and destroyed it. It showed the couple at breakfast, which they rarely shared, and Churchill's marmalade cat, Tango. Churchill began a tradition of keeping a marmalade cat at Chartwell, and the National Trust continues it as he wished.

  In 1946-47 Churchill bought Chartwell Farm and Parkside Farm, then Bardogs Farm and a market garden. By 1948 he was farming about 500 acres. Mary Soames's husband, Christopher, managed the land, where Churchill kept cattle and pigs and grew crops and market vegetables. By 1952 his operating losses exceeded £10,000 a year, and by the end of the decade the farms and livestock were sold. Racehorses proved more lucrative. In 1949 he bought Colonist II, who won his first race, the Upavon Stakes at Salisbury, that year. Colonist II went on to earn Churchill £13,000 in winnings. In 1955 he bought the Newchapel Stud, and by 1961 his total prize money exceeded £70,000. Looking back, he mused that "Perhaps Providence had given him Colonist as a comfort in his old age and to console him for disappointments".

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