Winston Churchill's wife: The story of Clementine Churchill

ACCORDING to the old adage, behind every great man there is a great woman. That is certainly true of the man voted the Greatest Briton of all time in 2002 - and he himself admitted it. Winston Churchill, whose bulldog spirit and defiant leadership helped inspire the Allies to victory over the Nazis, said that the Second World War would have been "impossible" without his wife Clementine.

His chief of staff General "Pug" Ismay declared that without Clementine the "history of Winston Churchill and of the world would have been a very different story".

Yet despite the key role she played in seeing her husband and country through such perilous times, Clementine Ogilvy Spencer-Churchill has tended to be a neglected historical figure. Until quite recently, that is.

A 2015 biography by Sonia Purnell called First Lady: The Life And Wars Of Clementine Churchill went some way in redressing the balance. And Clementine is given her fair dues in a new film Darkest Hour.

"I really fought to give her more weight in the film," Kristin Scott-Thomas, the actress who plays Clementine, said in an interview.

"She was so busy with supporting the war effort, keeping morale going. She was the most extraordinary woman. And she had this incredible style of her own."

In truth Clemmie was as much of a character as her husband. Born into an aristocratic family of Scottish descent in Mayfair, London, on April 1, 1885, her paternity was a subject of much debate as her mother, Lady Hozier, had a reputation for infidelity. Some believed her father was noted horseman Captain Middleton, but others named Baron Redesdale, grandfather of the Mitford girls.

Clementine's parents separated when she was only six and in the summer of 1899 she moved with her mother and siblings to France. However they returned to England when her sister Kitty died just before her seventeenth birthday.

She first met her future husband in 1904, at a ball when she was 19. Winston Churchill, who was 11 years her senior and already an MP, was so taken by her beauty that he was lost for words and failed to ask her for a dance.

It was to be another four years before they met again, this time at a dinner party. "The romantic in Winston's nature sought in women beauty, distinction and nobility in character: Clementine Hozier possessed all three," her daughter Mary later wrote.

"I hope we shall meet again and come to know each other better and like each other more," he wrote to her afterwards.

After a whirlwind courtship, the pair were married later that year with Winston making his proposal in the Greek temple in the grounds of Blenheim Palace, his ancestral home.

Churchill was now a minister in a Liberal government. Clementine, from the start, set out to serve her husband. The first occasion she came to his defence was in 1909 when an angry suffragette tried to push Churchill over a railway platform on to the path of a departing train. Clementine grabbed her husband's coat tails and "pulled him back with all her might". It probably saved Winston's life.

In 1911, Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, a prestigious post he still held at the outbreak of the First World War. In 1915 he was blamed for the disastrous Gallipoli landings where Allied forces were badly beaten by the Ottoman Turks and Germans, and then did something it is hard to imagine any contemporary politician doing. He resigned to serve on the front line.

"I feel very proud of you, my dear," Clementine told him. Churchill returned to politics a year later and remained a leading figure, switching back to the Conservatives in the 1920s.

By now the couple had four children, a fifth child Marigold, had died aged three. Churchill was tipped by many as a future prime minister but in the 1930s, his career went into decline.

These "wilderness years" put a great strain on the marriage. Churchill could be demanding at the best of times and he also suffered from what he called the Black Dog of depression. It was Clementine who often raised his morale.

Above all else, Churchill hated falling out with his wife. In his book Long Sunset, Tony Montague-Brown, who was Churchill's last private secretary, recalls one scene between the two. "'Winston, I have been married to you for 45 years, for better'... and concluding fortissimo – 'AND FOR WORSE!' – and sweeping out.

"The PM looked at me silently for a moment and then observed solemnly: 'I am the most unhappy of men.' By dinnertime peace had returned."

In May 1940, Churchill, having been vindicated over his warnings about Hitler, became prime minister at a critical moment in his country's history. He rose to the occasion but without the assistance from his wife things could have turned out very differently.

Operation Seduction USA was the attempt to coax the Americans into joining the war and Clementine played a crucial role in the charm offensive.

President Roosevelt's envoy to Britain, Harry Hopkins, was entertained while Clementine even helped facilitate affairs between her daughter Sarah and the American ambassador to Britain, and her daughter-in-law and a leading US newspaper man and another American envoy, to cement the "special relationship".

Together with her husband she toured bomb sites and gave solace to the survivors of air-raids.

Another important task was to conceal from her husband at the height of the Second World War that he had a potentially fatal cardiac condition. In the end Churchill not only survived the war but returned to Downing Street as prime minister in 1951 and lived to the age of 90.

Clementine and her husband were in many ways chalk and cheese. She remained a Liberal even when he had returned to the Conservatives. She counted the pennies, he was extravagant. She loathed some of his best friends. But despite, or perhaps because, of their differences, the partnership proved durable.

Following her husband's state funeral in January 1965 she turned to her daughter and said, "You know, Mary, it wasn't a funeral. It was a triumph."

Clementine lived on for almost another 13 years. She took great delight in her grandchildren and great grand-children. On December, 12, 1977, she died peacefully aged 92. She is buried next to her husband in Bladon, Oxfordshire, not far from the spot where he proposed to her, beginning a union that would change the course of world history.

• Darkest Hour is in cinemas now.