They honeymooned in Baveno, Venice and Veveří Castle in Moravia before settling into a London home at 33 Eccleston Square. Winston and Clementine were married on 12 September 1908 in St. After five months of meeting each other at social events, as well as frequent correspondence, Winston proposed to Clementine during a house party at Blenheim Palace on 11 August 1908, in a small summer house known as the Temple of Diana. On their first brief encounter, Winston had recognised Clementine's beauty and distinction now, after an evening spent in her company, he realised she was a girl of lively intelligence and great character. In March 1908, they met again when seated side by side at a dinner party hosted by Lady St Helier, a distant relative of Clementine. Marriage and children Ī young Winston Churchill and fiancée Clementine Hozier shortly before their marriage in 1908Ĭlementine first met Winston Churchill in 1904 at a ball in Crewe Hall, the home of the Earl and Countess of Crewe. She was twice secretly engaged to Sir Sidney Peel, who had fallen in love with her when she was 18. Kitty died on 5 March 1900.Ĭlementine was educated first at home, then briefly at the Edinburgh school run by Karl Fröbel, the nephew of the German educationist, Friedrich Fröbel, and his wife Johanna and later at Berkhamsted School for Girls (now Berkhamsted School) and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Blanche Hozier sent Clementine and her sister Nellie to Scotland so she could devote her time completely to Kitty. The Hoziers' happy life in France ended when Kitty, the eldest daughter, was struck with typhoid fever. The latter came to be a great friend of the family.Īccording to Clementine's daughter, Mary Soames, Clementine was deeply struck by Sickert and thought he was the most handsome and compelling man she had ever seen. This group consisted of military men, writers and painters, such as Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert. While in Dieppe, the family became well acquainted with 'La Colonie', or the other English inhabitants living by the sea. There the family spent an idyllic summer, bathing, canoeing, picnicking, and blackberrying. In the summer of 1899, when Clementine was 14, her mother moved the family to Dieppe, a coastal community in the north of France. Kitty Ogilvy Hozier in 1899, the year before she died Whatever her true paternity, Clementine is recorded as being the daughter of Lady Blanche and Sir Henry. However, Clementine's biographer, Joan Hardwick, has surmised (due in part to Sir Henry Hozier's reputed sterility) that all Lady Blanche's "Hozier" children were actually fathered by her sister's husband, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale (1837–1916), better known as a grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters of the 1920s. William George "Bay" Middleton, a noted horseman Mary Soames, Clementine's youngest child, believed this. Lady Blanche maintained that Clementine's biological father was Capt. After Sir Henry found Lady Blanche with a lover in 1891, she managed to avert her husband's suit for divorce because of his own infidelities, and thereafter the couple separated. She died in her London home aged 92.Īlthough legally the daughter of Sir Henry Hozier and Lady Blanche Hozier (a daughter of David Ogilvy, 10th Earl of Airlie), her paternity is a subject of much debate, as Lady Blanche was well known for infidelity. In her later years, she sold several of her husband's portraits to help support herself financially. Throughout her life she was granted many titles, the final being a life peerage following the death of her husband in 1965. During the First World War, Clementine organised canteens for munitions workers and during the Second World War, she acted as Chairman of the Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund, President of the Young Women's Christian Association War Time Appeal and Chairman of Maternity Hospital for the Wives of Officers, Fulmer Chase, South Bucks. They had five children together, one of whom (named Marigold) died aged two from sepsis. While legally the daughter of Sir Henry Hozier, her mother Lady Blanche's known infidelity and his suspected infertility make her paternal parentage uncertain.Ĭlementine (pronounced Clemen-teen) met Churchill in 1904 and they began their marriage of 56 years in 1908. Clementine Ogilvy Spencer Churchill, Baroness Spencer-Churchill GBE ( née Hozier 1 April 1885 – 12 December 1977) was the wife of Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and a life peer in her own right.
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