#836, Sarah Millicent Hermione CHURCHILL

Sarah's first book was 'The Empty Spaces', a book of poems. Her second book, 'A Thread in the Tapestry' is a framed within a solemn and melancholy occasion - her father's funeral procession.  We reproduce here her Preface.  'In these pages you will not discover hitherto undisclosed secrets about matters that have rocked the world since my father was born in 1874.  Others who lived through the varying days have recorded the facts, and made their own evaluations.  Neither is this an autobiography. It is a personal and loving testament to the man who was my father.

My mother throughout the years and many changes of home carefully preserved the letters of her children.  I never knew that she was doing this.  To be handed a bundle of letters late in life is an extremely moving experience.  It is like being hamded back 'yourself' from the beginning.  Yoyr discoveries, your achievements, your failures, your hopes, your survival.  As I will say later, in my childhood the details of what 'the grown-ups' discussed passed over my head, but the theme for each generation and each individual in that generation, to face and probe diligently into the problems of the times, was etched indelibly on my heart and mind from the beginning.  And, furthermore, to do so 'without fear, favour or affection.'

She is evoking the essence of what it was to be his daughter.  Childhood at Chartwell, her father's often enchanting and sometimes formidable ways with his children, the famous people who came to the house, the splended talk: all this is recalled.  Then came the time when Sarah, choosing acting as her career broke away from the conventions of her background and thus imposed something of a test on the family bond.  She tells honestly and simply of her father's wisdom and kindness at this time, and goes on to two occasions when their continuing closeness took her on excursions into history: she accompanied him to both the Teheran and the Yalta Conferences, and give delightful accounts of what they were like 'back-stage'.  But perhaps the most illuminating and moving part of her story is her description of the holiday she spent with Sir Winston on Lake Como after his defeat in the General Election of 1945, for which she calls on hitherto unpublished letters.  Although Sarah Churchill claims to contribute no more than a 'thread' to the great tapestry of her father's life and her family's history, that thread adds colour without which the whole would be incomplete.  Many readers will value her book above more formal records.

Sarah married three times: firstly to Vic Oliver, 1936-1945 (divorced); secondly to Antony Beauchamp, 1949-1957 (widowed) and finally to Thomas Percy henry Touchet-Jesson, 23rd Baron Audley, 1962-1963 (widowed).