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00:08We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in
00:14the fields and in the streets.
00:16We shall never surrender.
00:20In the darkest days of World War II, Winston Churchill rallied a nation staring defeat
00:26in the face.
00:29But as he wrestled with the colossal burden of power, he was also confronted with secret,
00:35private pressures.
00:38He is in contact with his former mistress who is asking for special favours to get back
00:45to Britain.
00:47This is the story of an affair that has remained hidden for over 80 years.
00:52She was a very good friend to my mother.
00:55And yes, it was known that they were having an affair.
01:00The story of sensual, intimate, compromising portraits.
01:05In this striking photograph, he's standing peering down at her.
01:09And she is clearly luxuriating in his stare, basking in his glow.
01:14A tale of romance and tragedy, featuring never-before-seen Churchill letters, and previously unheard
01:23testimony.
01:24Just a little fling in the south of France, I see.
01:28It's the story of a marriage on the brink of collapse.
01:32There were, sometimes, talks of divorce.
01:39And of how Churchill's reckless holiday romance came back to haunt him, as he led his nation
01:46in a life-or-death struggle for survival.
01:48It seems to me like Churchill himself felt vulnerable that he might be blackmailed.
02:07In the autumn of 1985, Winston Churchill's former private secretary, Jock Colville, sat
02:13down to give a frank interview to archivists at Churchill College in Cambridge.
02:19For 30 years, the tape of that interview lay buried.
02:23Even now, for legal reasons, Colville's words are voiced by an actor.
02:29Now this is a somewhat scandalous story, and therefore not to be handed out for a great
02:35many hours.
02:37Winston Churchill was not a highly sexed man at all.
02:41And I don't think that in his 60, 55 years of married life, he'd ever slipped up at all.
02:51Except on this one occasion, when Lady Churchill wasn't with him, by moonlight in the south
02:59of France, he certainly had an affair.
03:02A brief affair with Lady Castle Ross, as she was called, Doris Castle Ross.
03:12And Lady Churchill had no idea about this.
03:20Three decades later, the recording has been discovered by American historian Warren Doctor.
03:28He was so startled by what he heard that he played the recording to Professor Richard Toye,
03:33one of Britain's foremost Churchill experts.
03:38I mean, this is obviously a bit of a bombshell, as it relates to all sorts of things.
03:46First off, why do you think that it matters?
03:48I mean, it wouldn't be huge news today that a rich white man has a affair, you know?
03:53Like, why do you think this is important?
03:55Obviously, the established view of Churchill's marriage is that, although there were various
03:59trials and tribulations during this 50-plus years, fundamentally, it was a happy marriage,
04:05and that they'd always been faithful to one another, and that Churchill had never strayed.
04:13Colville wasn't somebody who had it in for Churchill, or was going to, you know, sort of make up stories
04:18about him, and so, obviously, this tape is a bit of a bombshell.
04:23And this is clear evidence that there's still a lot to be found about the great enigma that is Winston
04:29Churchill.
04:33If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say this was their final
04:44tower.
04:47The Colville tape so fundamentally alters our view of the great man's private life that Richard and Warren want to
04:53find out more.
04:59Richard will bury himself in the archives.
05:04Warren will hit the road and try to unpick some of the clues contained in the Colville recording.
05:10They want to find out how the affair impacted on Churchill's career and on the history of the Second World
05:16War.
05:16He certainly had an affair with Lady Castleross, as she was called. Doris Castleross.
05:28So who is Lady Castleross?
05:31Well, these days, if Doris Castleross is ever written about in the press,
05:36it's usually because some journalist has ferreted out the fact that she was the great-aunt of Cara Delevingne,
05:43who is a very famous supermodel and actress who, in a way, seems to have inherited Doris' spark.
05:52Doris was born in a middle-class suburb of South London.
05:55As you can see, she was extraordinarily attractive.
06:00There really is something about her, isn't there?
06:02Yeah, I mean, people called her beautiful, and I don't so much see beauty there as a sort of chiselled
06:08energy.
06:09She had a very, very long, elegant figure.
06:13She had these amazing racehorse legs.
06:14She was very adept at styling herself so that she looked supremely elegant.
06:22The life to which she was born was too narrow for her, too confining.
06:29She wanted glamour, and she wanted adventure, and she wanted it as quickly as possible.
06:36She was notorious for the skill with which she slept her way up the social ladder of London.
06:43One wouldn't call Doris a prostitute, but she was a professional mistress of extreme class
06:49and extreme skill.
06:52One of her favourite lines was,
06:54There's no such thing as an impotent man, only an incompetent woman.
07:01In 1928, Doris married Lord Valentine Castleross,
07:05much to the amusement of London's cartoonists.
07:09Physically, they were extraordinarily mismatched.
07:13He was sexually absolutely in her thrall.
07:17But it was a very, very turbulent marriage.
07:20He became insanely jealous.
07:22And she had been absolutely honest from the start that she was going to carry on seeing other men.
07:27She had no intention of being a faithful, monogamous wife at home.
07:32And he simply couldn't bear it.
07:36Doris remained a fixture on the London social scene.
07:40She and Lord Castleross separated in 1929, after just one year.
07:46But the marriage had raised her profile.
07:48And the partying PRS was a source of fascination to the press.
07:53She was seen out with celebrities, ranging from Noel Cowart to Charlie Chaplin.
08:01She was photographed by the leading portrait artists of the day,
08:05including the photographer Cecil Beaton, with whom she managed to have an affair,
08:09despite the fact that he was gay.
08:14Her initial connection to the Churchill family was through Winston's son, Randolph.
08:22I think that one of the greatest things in the world is that the young people of great nations should
08:30get to know each other
08:31and understand each other's point of view.
08:37Away from the cameras, Randolph had a reputation as a drinker and a party animal.
08:42In the early 1930s, he and Doris had a brief affair.
08:48It was shortly afterwards that Doris graduated from the son to the father.
08:54Her affair with Winston began at a time of crisis in Churchill's life.
09:06In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany, and Churchill's career entered its most difficult period.
09:16Churchill perceives that Nazi Germany represents a serious threat to Britain.
09:22And therefore, Churchill is arguing for rearmament and a series of alliances with other powers in order to preserve peace.
09:33Few were listening, and Churchill found himself stewing impotently on the back benches.
09:42These were his wilderness years.
09:47Political frustration added to tensions in what was already a tempestuous marriage.
09:53He really, really did love Clementine.
09:57But the marriage was a stormy and turbulent one. There's no doubt about that.
10:03Churchill had married his wife Clementine in 1908.
10:06They'd had five children.
10:08But theirs had always been a complicated partnership.
10:12Clementine was a very clever woman. Not an academic woman, but very sort of bright, very wise in many ways,
10:19quite intuitive.
10:21But I think Churchill was the most demanding husband, emotionally and practically speaking.
10:28Living with him was like being hitched to a hurricane. Nothing ever stopped still.
10:32It was just madness the whole time, frantic activity.
10:35And Clementine was probably the only woman, only person, who wasn't ever scared of Winston.
10:41She'd take him on, and then they'd have epic rows.
10:44And, you know, talking to the staff, they'd talk about hearing them shouting at each other behind closed doors.
10:50And occasionally, I think, things might have been thrown at each other.
10:53I think the 1930s were when the marriage was most under pressure.
10:58When he was out of power, he was very difficult.
11:00And his bodyguard would talk about him kicking waste paper bins in frustration.
11:05And I think there were moments of crisis in their marriage at that point.
11:12Out of office, rowing with his wife, approaching 60.
11:17It was at this point that Winston Churchill encountered Doris Castle Ross.
11:34In 1985, Churchill's private secretary, Jock Colville, revealed that Churchill had had an affair with a woman called Doris Castle
11:42Ross.
11:46The tape contains clues about when and where this happened.
11:50By moonlight in South France, he was staying with this famous American actress, whatever her name was.
11:57He certainly had an affair.
12:01Who was the mystery American actress Churchill was staying with in the South of France when the affair with Doris
12:07took place?
12:11If anyone will know, its royal biographer and historian of high society, Hugo Vickers.
12:19Well, this is quite clearly Maxine Elliott.
12:21And here she is, Maxine Elliott, at the villa in the South of France.
12:26She was an actress and she also was quite rich.
12:29What kind of people would come and stay at Maxine Elliott's villa?
12:33She knew absolutely everybody.
12:35So she would, like a good hostess, have a mixture of sort of distinguished people like Churchill.
12:40And then she had a lot of younger people.
12:42Rich ladies with villas in the South of France have no problem in filling them.
12:51Maxine Elliott's villa on the French Riviera was called the Chateau de Loison.
12:57It's kind of a little bit like a Moorish wedding cake sitting on a rock.
13:01And it had a swimming pool.
13:02And then it had a slide going down into the sea, which was a huge feature.
13:06Great fun when you went past in a boat to see this slide.
13:11Remarkably, home movies of Churchill himself at the Chateau survive.
13:20Doris Castle Ross was also a regular visitor, an integral part of the Riviera set.
13:38Churchill first stayed here in the summer of 1933 with his family.
13:45Here we see Churchill's wife, Clementine, and his daughter, Sarah, in the pool.
13:51Doris's distinctive legs towering above them.
13:56Clementine Churchill never returned.
13:59She disliked what she regarded as the risque atmosphere at the Chateau,
14:03where the architecture seemed almost designed to encourage illicit liaisons.
14:10You had a bedroom which joined a bathroom, which joined another bedroom, which joined another bathroom, and so on.
14:16So that if you had unmarried guests but you thought there was a connection between them, you could put them
14:20into two bedrooms and they could share a bathroom.
14:23Which gave them a very easy access through, and nobody needed to know about it.
14:27Do you believe that Churchill did slip up this one time in the south of France?
14:31Well, he painted Doris, painted lovely pictures of her.
14:35She was very attractive and, you know, she was posing for him, and that's quite an interesting relationship anyway.
14:41She's languishing on a, you know, sort of sofa or so, you know, she's lying down anyway.
14:45So, you know, they're halfway there, aren't they?
14:52Churchill was a keen amateur artist.
14:57His paintings at the Chateau show his usual love of colour, but also a fascination with the human form.
15:07He painted three lovingly crafted portraits of Doris, compared to just one of his own wife.
15:16This, the most sensual, he gave as a present to Doris.
15:21A striking intimate photo survives of Churchill arranging his model.
15:28I knew quite a lot of people who knew Doris, and I mean, they all rather loved her.
15:32I thought, you know, she was just one of those sort of girls who was just sort of pulsating with
15:36sort of sexual charm.
15:40Richard has uncovered a revealing record of Doris and Churchill's stay at the Chateau in the summer of 1934.
15:48What we have here is from the Daily Express, and it's headlined, Mr. Churchill is Annoyed.
15:55And it is a picture of Churchill painting with Doris sitting on the wall above him.
16:00The caption says, Mr. Winston Churchill was very angry indeed with the photographer who took this picture.
16:07How dare you? shouted Mr. Churchill as he heard the shutter click.
16:10Waving his brushes, he jumped to his feet and chased the photographer out of the Chateau grounds.
16:16In all, Doris and Churchill holidayed together at the Chateau four times between 1933 and 1936.
16:27Today, the Chateau is owned by the King of Saudi Arabia and is closed to visitors.
16:33Instead, Warren heads to a stormy Monte Carlo.
16:43Churchill was a keen gambler, and the casino here was one of his favourite haunts during his Riviera holidays.
16:52Warren has tracked down Doris Castle Ross's niece, Caroline Delevingne, who lives in southern France.
16:59She's the daughter of Doris's brother Dudley, and the aunt of supermodel Cara Delevingne.
17:07This is the first time the Delevingne family has spoken on camera about the affair.
17:15I just wonder if there is a tradition in your family of this relationship having occurred?
17:21Oh, yes. Both my parents talked about it, they knew about it.
17:26Yes, my mother was very close to Doris, and they talked a lot about everything, really.
17:33And she told me. We knew about it, yes.
17:37I have these photographs to show you.
17:40Oh my, that's Churchill and Doris on the rocks.
17:44Yes.
17:47I've never seen this photo before.
17:49Ah, right.
17:50And he's got a cigar in his mouth, and it's clearly him.
17:54And where was this taken?
17:55That was in the south of France, staying at Chateau de Lorizon.
17:59And she's wearing her shorts. She liked to show off her good legs.
18:02Oh, yes, definitely.
18:03Yeah.
18:04That's amazing. Do you have any other photos?
18:06Yes.
18:10Oh, is that him there in the hat?
18:12Yes, that's right. That's Doris here, sitting across from him.
18:20Caroline also has an affectionate letter from Churchill to Doris, never before seen by the public.
18:28So this letter was written in 1934. Shall I read it to you?
18:33Please.
18:34What fun we had at Maxime's. It was delightful having you there during our visit.
18:40You were once again a manifest blessing, and a ray of sunshine around the pool.
18:47I wonder whether we shall meet again there next summer.
18:51Wow.
18:53What a remarkable letter.
18:55It is.
18:55That's really amazing.
18:56I know.
18:56What is it that you think drew Churchill to her?
19:01I mean, she was an intelligent woman. She was very attractive.
19:05You know, they were obviously good friends.
19:08Obviously, he was such a great man, such a great hero.
19:12And anything that's going to change that view worries me.
19:19But, I mean, he did have an affair with my aunt, so it's obviously going to come out.
19:26And I'd rather it came out in a way that showed that they had a relationship.
19:39While Churchill was whiling away his time on the Riviera with Doris,
19:43his marriage was deteriorating.
19:49In the winter of 1934, Clementine went off on an extended tour of the Far East,
19:55without Winston.
19:59The Churchills did spend a lot of time apart.
20:02And that was partly Clementine wanting that, or needing it, rather.
20:07She went off on this lovely cruise, South Seas, Champagne,
20:12thousands of miles away from Hitler, her husband,
20:15on board a ship with a very, very attractive man,
20:19seven years younger than her, a bane, witty,
20:23gossipy, arty,
20:25very attentive, handsome.
20:28Clementine's travelling companion was an art dealer called Terence Phillip,
20:32captured here with her in an amateur shipboard snap.
20:40The Colville tape contains an intriguing reference to him.
20:45Did she have an affair with, was it Terence Phillip?
20:50Yes, I think so, but nobody quite knows for sure.
20:56Whether or not this was a full affair, I suspect it probably wasn't.
21:00I think there was a bit of hand-holding.
21:02But she was coming up to her 50th birthday,
21:05and I don't think she was used to getting many compliments anymore.
21:08The sun was shining, the champagne was flowing, and it was all rather fun.
21:13I think Churchill suspected the relationship with Terence Phillip.
21:17If you look at the letters that Clementine sent from the boat,
21:21Terence did this and Terence did that,
21:23I think you'd have to be pretty thick-skinned not to think,
21:26oi, oi, something very strange is going on here.
21:33Churchill's own romance was meanwhile moving dangerously close to home.
21:42At the beginning of 1937,
21:44Doris moved into this house at 43 Barclay Square in Mayfair,
21:49a property bought for her by a wealthy male admirer.
21:54Her brother Dudley and his wife Angela stayed there regularly,
21:59as their daughter Caroline recalls.
22:01My mother had many stories to tell about
22:06when they stayed in my aunt's house in Barclay Square.
22:10When Winston was coming to visit her,
22:13the staff were all given the day off.
22:18That's one of the stories I remember my mother telling me.
22:22And after that, the next day,
22:26Doris confided in my mother about it.
22:29They were, as I said, good friends, as well as being sisters-in-law.
22:34And so, yes, it was known that they were having an affair.
22:40Was it shared with your father as well?
22:43Oh, yes, yes, yes.
22:51Winston's affair with Doris was more than a summer fling.
22:55It extended over several years in two countries.
23:00And by now, the Churchill marriage was in far more trouble
23:04than Churchill's biographers have ever recognised.
23:08There were, sometimes, talks of divorce.
23:12The D word was mentioned.
23:14Clementine went to see Churchill's sister-in-law.
23:18They got on extremely well.
23:20And I think Clementine went to her and said,
23:22I'm finding it difficult to cope with.
23:24I wonder whether I should, you know, even consider finishing it.
23:41During his wilderness years in the mid-1930s,
23:45Churchill plunged recklessly into a relationship
23:47with high society socialite, Doris Castleross.
23:55Churchill's wife, Clementine, also enjoyed a romantic friendship
23:58with art dealer Terence Phillip.
24:00Their closeness captured in this holiday snap.
24:04The Churchill marriage was being pushed to its limits.
24:09But in the summer of 1937, Doris wrote to Churchill.
24:16This is a letter from Doris to Churchill, July 9th, 1937.
24:23My dear Winston, I hear you are not going to Maxine's,
24:27but to America in September.
24:29I am going to Maxine's as usual.
24:32I should so like to see you.
24:33I am not at all dangerous anymore.
24:36Do ring me sometime.
24:37Mayfair 3731.
24:39My love, Doris.
24:42And, clearly, that very striking phrase,
24:45I am not dangerous anymore,
24:46I think it indicates that the affair is over,
24:50that she'd like to see him,
24:52but that she's going to sort of be friendly and affectionate
24:55and she's not going to sort of press him
24:58for any sort of physical relationship.
25:01There is no record of Churchill and Doris
25:04ever spending time together again before the war.
25:08It's likely the decision to end the relationship was Churchill's.
25:13And reflected the fact his warnings about the Nazis
25:15were finally starting to find an audience.
25:20I do think people start waking up to his message about Nazi Germany.
25:25And he starts recognizing that maybe his best place isn't in the south of France
25:30and sort of, you know, luxuriating and in the sun.
25:33His place is actually back at home.
25:35Because he feels a call to do something about what's going on in Europe.
25:40Anyone can see that public opinion is growing in favour of compulsory national service.
25:47As Churchill ended his dangerous dalliance
25:50and hurled himself back into frontline politics,
25:53Clementine also put a stop to her own romantic friendship.
25:59When Clementine came back from the cruise,
26:03the fling with Terence Philip doesn't finish completely.
26:07She goes and sees him a couple of times.
26:10Then, suddenly it stops.
26:12And this is when we see the marriage kind of get going again.
26:16She wants to be by her husband at his side when he is waging this battle
26:22to wake up the world to the threat that Hitler and Berlin and Nazi Germany were posing to Britain.
26:28And, in a way, Hitler brought them back together again.
26:34But Doris' impact on Churchill's life was not over.
26:40As Winston and Clementine returned to the centre stage of world affairs,
26:45she was about to take a radical new departure.
26:48Now, as far as I know, this was Doris' one and only big lesbian love affair.
26:55Doris began a relationship with an American woman called Margot Hoffman.
27:02Margot was extremely rich, incredibly rich.
27:05And, you know, Doris wanted, by the late 30s, to make a change in her life.
27:11She was approaching 40.
27:14She was still having lots of affairs with men.
27:17You know, it was beginning to look a little bit tawdry.
27:26Margot bought Doris a small palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice.
27:31Doris' plan was to graduate from courtesan to society hostess.
27:36And Doris certainly knew how to throw a party.
27:49In the summer of 1938, the rich and famous flocked to her palazzo.
27:56Here we see the future Prince Philip with Doris' sister-in-law, Angela.
28:02But Doris had picked the wrong country.
28:07Doris has this one great season, but, of course, by 1939, no-one's going to Venice anymore.
28:15And Mussolini's joined Hitler and her palazzo's in enemy territory.
28:28For Churchill, the German invasion of Poland and Britain's declaration of war at the start of September 1939
28:35marked the end of his wilderness years.
28:41He re-entered the government for the first time in a decade
28:43and was put in charge of the Royal Navy.
28:47As the Nazis look out tonight, they cannot find one single friendly eye
28:57in the whole circumference of the globe.
29:00Not one!
29:06Already he was rallying a nation braced for war.
29:09But for Doris Castle Ross, a London of sandbags and rationing held little appeal.
29:23At the start of 1940, she fled to America.
29:28A photograph of her survives immediately after her arrival on the dock in New York.
29:33Tucked away in her luggage was the portrait Churchill had given to her.
29:39By now she'd broken with Margot, but she had met the very, very rich heir to a banking family,
29:47who had promised to divorce his wife and marry her.
29:50So, essentially, Doris arrives in New York expecting to be greeted with open arms by this new lover.
29:59After a very short time, evidently, that all falls through.
30:03And she's now stuck in New York.
30:06As her biographer at this point, I longed for her to get a job.
30:10Of course.
30:10Just to actually stop depending on other men, stop depending on your looks, on your luck,
30:17and actually forge some real independence for yourself.
30:22But I think by that point, Doris had just got so stuck in this existence of spending far more money
30:31than she had,
30:32of always relying on someone else to pick up the tab.
30:39Just a couple of months after Doris arrived in New York, Churchill was appointed Prime Minister.
30:49Almost immediately, he was confronted with the collapse of Allied forces in Western Europe,
30:54and the very real threat of invasion.
30:57I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
31:06Just two days after this famous speech, Churchill found time to send Doris a telegram.
31:16So, here's a telegram that I want to show you.
31:22This is written on the 15th of May, 1940, and Churchill has written,
31:28Thank you so much, dear Doris Winston Churchill.
31:33So, she has clearly written him to congratulate him, I would suspect, on becoming Prime Minister.
31:39Yes.
31:40Even in the darkest hour, as it were.
31:43Yes.
31:44Well, I think it shows their friendship.
31:49But in New York, over the next two years, Doris would struggle.
31:56This is a really poignant letter that she wrote to her brother Dudley in May 1942.
32:04It's precious because we have very, very few letters from Doris.
32:08And she writes, she writes from Hotel Del Monaco, having had to move out of her rather more luxurious rented
32:15apartment.
32:16My dear Dudley, no news from you for ages.
32:19How are you and Angela and the babies?
32:22I've been trying to get home, but it seems impossible.
32:25I'm so homesick and miserable being away from England.
32:28It's a strange, bleak little letter.
32:31It feels very hopeless to me.
32:34I think what was cruelest to Doris is that not only was she piling up debts, she felt she had
32:40not enough friends in New York, but she was also conscious she was losing her looks.
32:47I think time had not been kind to her.
32:50You can see from photos around this period that that sort of lustrousness of youth, that confidence of youth, seems
32:57to have been knocked out of her.
33:05Doris was desperate to get home.
33:08But by now, America had joined the war.
33:14Tickets across the Atlantic were almost impossible to obtain.
33:20In March 1942, Doris wrote to an old friend, Lord Beaverbrook, who also happened to be one of Churchill's closest
33:28political allies and confidants.
33:31My dear Max, I must go back to London.
33:35Please, please, Max, do help me.
33:38Forgive me for worrying you, but I am very desperate.
33:44Amidst the pressures of war, Beaverbrook appears not to have replied.
33:52Doris now felt she had no alternative but to reach out to her most powerful connection.
33:57In one of the darkest moments of the war, Churchill's Riviera romance was about to come back to haunt him.
34:04It seems to me like she uses the implication of blackmail, perhaps, to get what she wants.
34:26In the months following America's entry into the Second World War, Churchill travelled twice to Washington for some of the
34:33most important summit meetings in history with President Roosevelt.
34:41It was during a meeting with Roosevelt on June the 21st, 1942, that Churchill received news that the British base
34:48at Tobruk in North Africa had fallen.
34:52The defeat at Tobruk came after a long series of setbacks and was a real serious humiliation for the British.
35:03Incredibly, just two days later, Churchill found time to telephone Doris Castleross in New York.
35:12Doris wrote a letter to Churchill later that same day.
35:16My dear Winston, so very many thanks for telephoning me this morning.
35:21To hear your voice gave me such a lift.
35:24I cannot sleep in New York.
35:26I have been homesick for so long and would only like to know that I could return home.
35:36Doris was seeking help to obtain a passage back to England.
35:41Churchill even found time to slip away for a private dinner with her in Washington.
35:46If you think about the extraordinary pressures on Churchill at this time,
35:51the idea that he is in contact with his former mistress who is asking for special favours to get back
35:59to Britain,
36:01and that he responds is extraordinary.
36:08So extraordinary, Professor Toy believed she had a secret means of getting her former lover's attention.
36:15The vivid, sensual portrait Churchill had painted of her in the south of France.
36:21which was still in her possession.
36:25According to a well-informed biography of Doris's husband, Valentine,
36:29when they met in Washington,
36:31it was his portraits of her that Doris and Churchill discussed.
36:36Churchill was frightened.
36:38They might fall into the hands of an American magazine publisher
36:41who could use them to damage the reputation of Britain's war leader.
36:47Clearly, the one in Doris's possession would only fall into the hands of a publisher if Doris handed it over.
36:56Is there an implicit motion of blackmail or something in this?
36:59I mean, I think that's kind of intriguing because, clearly, if the portrait was to fall into the hands of
37:05an American publisher
37:06with accompanying information, then, of course, at the height of the war, this might well have been a sensational story.
37:12There was a hint here that she might say something about the relationship between her and Churchill.
37:20Doris's family firmly reject any suggestion she threatened to kiss and tell.
37:25But her possession of the painting, and her presence in New York, clearly left Churchill vulnerable.
37:34If even a whisper of his affair reached the press, it could severely dent his reputation in America.
37:41At a time when the outcome of the war depended on Britain's alliance with the United States.
37:48It seems to me that it's almost irrelevant whether or not Doris was actually blackmailing Churchill or not.
37:55What is important to me is that given the enormous pressure that Churchill was under with the fall of Tobruk,
37:59and the huge importance of the special relationship between the US and the UK,
38:04that he was suddenly vulnerable to being blackmailed.
38:08He must have thought, I just have to deal with this, I've got to get her back to Britain as
38:11quickly as possible.
38:16There is no doubt Churchill used his influence in Washington to get Doris out of the country.
38:23The evidence for this is a letter that survives from the summer of 1942 to one of President Roosevelt's top
38:29aides,
38:31written by Doris.
38:34You kindly phoned me some time ago telling me that Winston Churchill had written you
38:38to ask if you could arrange for my clipper passage back to England.
38:41I could be ready in a few weeks.
38:49A ticket aboard a clipper, or seaplane, miraculously appeared.
38:54At the end of September 1942, Doris crossed the Atlantic.
38:58Churchill's portrait of her again tucked away in her luggage.
39:10She returned to a grim, grey London, entering its fourth year of war.
39:18She and Churchill never saw each other again.
39:27The evening she arrived, she was met at Waterloo Station by her former husband, Valentine.
39:35He took her to the Dorchester Hotel.
39:38Short of money, it appears Doris was hoping for a reconciliation.
39:43She has high hopes that she might persuade him to come up to her room.
39:49But when they move into the Dorchester and Valentine first sees Doris under electric light,
39:58he realises that the woman he fell in love with is not the woman he's seeing now.
40:03That time and the war have been very, very hard on her,
40:07and all the stress of the last few years is absolutely etched on her face.
40:12And although he stays to eat with her, he leaves her.
40:16And Doris spends her first night in London alone.
40:20There's an air raid, she has to go racing down to the cellar.
40:25You can feel the ground shaking from the bombs, the thud of the ACAC guns from Hyde Park just over
40:32there.
40:33And Doris is deeply traumatised.
40:41Doris lived at the Dorchester through the autumn of 1942, wrestling with debts, depression and insomnia.
40:52On December the 9th, she took an overdose of sleeping pills and died two days later.
40:58She was just 42.
41:08My instinct is that it was an accident.
41:13These drugs were extremely dangerous.
41:15It was quite possible for somebody who was in a state of distress,
41:19who was desperate for sleep, to overdo it.
41:24You know, just desperately wanting some rest.
41:32There was no record of how Churchill reacted to news of Doris' death.
41:36But there is evidence he remained anxious about his portrait of her,
41:40which Doris had brought back from New York.
41:45To ensure it didn't fall into the wrong hands,
41:48it appears Churchill turned to his trusted political fixer, Lord Beaverbrooke.
41:53And so what we have here is the original of Lord Beaverbrooke's engagement diary.
42:01We see that just a few days after Doris' death, her brother, Captain Dudley Delevinge, comes to see Beaverbrooke.
42:09We see that he sees Beaverbrooke again the next day.
42:14And on December 20th, Captain Delevinge and wife have lunch at Beaverbrooke's country house.
42:24Just what was discussed at these meetings with Doris' brother, Dudley, is not known.
42:31But at the end of them, Beaverbrooke was in possession of Churchill's portrait of Doris.
42:42It was only returned to Dudley Delevinge once the war was safely over.
42:51Do you think that there is an element of tragedy in Doris' life?
42:55I think there is.
42:58She was always looking to be looked after, to feel secure.
43:02And obviously, towards the end of her life, during the war, it was very difficult for her.
43:12Nowadays, we would imagine she would want to be more independent.
43:16But I think in those days, there were a lot of women who didn't think like that,
43:22and that was their only way of having the freedom they wanted to travel,
43:28to live in different countries, to have an exciting lifestyle.
43:35She was a woman of her time, I think, really.
43:46As for Churchill, he would go down in history as the saviour of his nation.
43:53The British people never knew of his affair,
43:55or the threat to his reputation it posed in the dark days of 1942.
44:04Throughout the war, his wife Clementine was a rock by his side.
44:09Clementine Churchill comes out, I think, as almost kind of a hero.
44:13She chose to stay with Churchill, not just through a low point in his life
44:16and a low point in their marriage, but through the war.
44:21They were stronger for it, both of them.
44:23And Britain is stronger for them having been together,
44:26because he would not have been the same war leader in 1940 if she left.
44:36Yesterday morning, the designated head of the German state
44:40signed the act of unconditional surrender.
44:45Today is victory in Europe's day.
44:51Advance Britannia.
44:53Long live the cause of freedom.
44:56God save the King.
45:03According to his former private secretary, Jack Colville,
45:07it was only at the very end of Churchill's life that Clementine discovered about the affair with Doris,
45:13after being shown letters from Churchill's private archive.
45:19It worried her terribly.
45:20For months afterwards, she used to say to me,
45:22I never thought Winston had ever been unfaithful to me.
45:26So I said, well, I bet he wasn't.
45:28I mean, just a little fling in the south of France.
45:31You really shouldn't worry about it.
45:33But she did.
45:34She got awfully worried about it.
45:47Today, Churchill and his wife lie together in a country churchyard in Oxfordshire.
45:53In terms of his character, how do you think that this makes us sort of re-evaluate Winston Churchill?
46:00So I don't think it's necessarily the case that his sort of love for Clemmie diminished or wavered.
46:06Rather, I guess it shows that he was human.
46:09Yeah. I think it's important, particularly for historians, not to deify Winston Churchill.
46:14For us to remember that he was a human being. He was a person.
46:16And that human beings go out there and they live their lives and things happen.
46:20And that's what life is.
46:23Churchill's unflinching resolve during the darkest days of World War II is legendary.
46:30Until now, the private pressures, resulting from his indiscretions, have been entirely hidden.
46:36In future, no historian will be able to ignore the tale of Winston and Doris.
46:48And tales from around the dinner table are on the agenda on Monday night as we bust a few festive
46:52foodie myths in Food Unwrapped Does Christmas at 8.
46:55Movie time next tonight on Channel 4.
46:57Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig are the only thing saving us from the otherworldly threat.
47:01The network premiere of Ghostbusters is coming up.
47:04He wins up in two species and always Wilson and Nick PicksGirls.
47:13The download is on the mobile way team.
47:14The net sale is on theボствiken tous,
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