Churchill’s Citadel, by Katherine Carter

You may have read all 911 pages, excluding notes or index, of Roy Jenkin’s magisterial biography of Winston Churchill, which after 20 years remains incredibly sound. There is also a good chance that you’ve read Andrew Robert’s acclaimed and more recent exhumation of the great man’s life and works – Churchill: Walking with destiny from 2019. It’s hard to disagree with the joyous quote on the cover from the Sunday Telegraph, which describes it as ‘colossal, energetic, critical and deliciously funny.’

So there’s an open question as to whether or not the world needs a book seemingly focusing on Churchill and his country home, Chartwell – an architecturally none-too-remarkable manor house in Westerham in Kent which he bought in 1922.

The good news is that it does. And in part this is because in Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gathering Before the Storm, the author, Katherine Carter, curator of Chartwell which is owned by the National Trust, does not really focus on the house at all.

Instead she takes us on a compelling journey through Churchill’s wilderness years in the 1930s with the house a supporting cast member, alongside the long-suffering Clementine or WSC’s team of correspondence or literary secretaries – Mrs Pearson or Mrs Hamblin, each tirelessly porting their typewriters hither and thither as the great man strides on ahead, trailing cigar smoke.

Following an intriguing introduction about a near meeting between Churchill and Hitler in Munich in 1932 – Carter builds her book around 12 meetings that took place between Churchill and an assortment of significant or extraordinary individuals at Chartwell.

It starts with his meeting with Albert Einstein in July 1933 and ends with the Chinese ambassador Dr Quo Tai-chi in August 1939 – and in between we are treated to WSC’s encounters with T. E. Lawrence, as well as Joseph Kennedy, the pro-Appeasement US ambassador, Pierre-Etienne Flandin, the former French PM who would become a minister in the Vichy government, and the former German Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, ‘Hitler’s predecessor’.  We also have a chapter about the Abdication Crisis and Archibald Sinclair, the Liberal leader who was Churchill’s second in command on the Western Front, plus a chapter about WSC’s meeting in February 1938 with pan-Europeanist Austrian Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. He sat down with WSC on a freezing cold day to a tea of sandwiches and ‘Churchill’s favourite Dundee cake’ and stayed in the grandly titled Henry VIII room. Over dinner he explained how a ‘united Europe should be centred around a Paris-London axis, in the hope that those states threatened by Hitler would join this alliance and thereby avert war, or, failing that, win it.’ Of his host, meanwhile, Kalergi recalled: ‘All his thoughts and activities were concentrated on preparing his country for the decisive battles against Hitler, for he now considered this quite inevitable.’

It’s astonishing to discover that Churchill’s guests even included Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, who would be one of the plotters in the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. He visited in August 1938 and would be undone in part by the discovery of a letter from Churchill in his possession.

With each visit the remorseless rise in international tensions is ratchetted up, giving us what feels like a contemporary eye view and surely Churchill’s outlook as he amassed information passed to him by these guests and his extensive European network.

As we move through the decade the guests included the indomitable Prague-based journalist Shiela Grant Duff who visited him October 1938 and would become a cog in his international intelligence machine. She didn’t expect to like him but was wowed by what she found at Chartwell, declaring Churchill to be ‘a strong and curiously noble man, totally without spite or rancour or pettiness of any sort’.

With war approaching we come to a chapter about Churchill’s encounter in February 1939 with Stefan Lorant, the Hungerian émigré editor of the Picture Post which championed him and his critique of Appeasement, and then there’s a chapter focusing on Churchill’s relationship with Harold Macmillan – an anti-Appeaser who came into Winston’s fold – and a meeting in April 1939, as voices grow for the master of Chartwell to be given a position in government.

Each chapter is built around the individual or visitor concerned – with the actual meeting, usually a lunch followed by a stroll around the estate including Churchill’s studio where he would made self-deprecatory remarks about his efforts, little more than a vignette. What each chapter, however, does is cleverly build the case of how these interactions informed and influenced Churchill’s world-view and how that in turn informed his politics and actions.

Against this background we learn about the workings of the house and its staff – the difficulty of finding maids, Churchill’s unusual and demanding hours of work, the way the Churchills get through kitchen maids or their eventual decision to economise by letting their butler go (after which Churchill answers his own front door, at least sometimes). But Carter doesn’t over do the Downton stuff: instead it forms part of a richer mosaic of the man, along with Churchill’s relentless bricklaying in the grounds or the building of ponds, all of which sheds new light on this very important life.

So this is a book about much more than a house. It’s a book about the headquarters of a resistance movement, of a man who was consumed with the need to galvanise a sleeping world against a rising peril. It’s a book about the people who fed him that vital information too – it’s a pleasure to be reminded that Churchill knew of Germany’s invasion of Poland before the War Office, for instance – but it’s also about the domestic environment that nourished him through some of his darkest years. And for all these reasons it undoubtedly deserves a place on the shelf alongside Jenkins and Roberts. Indeed, the secretary who termed Chartwell, ‘Churchill’s Citadel’, had it absolutely right. It was just that.

Cut and Run by Alec Marsh is published by Sharpe Books in paperback (£8.99) or Kindle (£3.99) or available on KindleUnlimited.