The odd Churchill family

Another link from Arts & Letters - this time to quite a long review of a biography of the woman who became the Churchills' war time cook.  The bits I liked:

Among Landemare’s regular clients in the mid-1930s were Winston and Clementine Churchill. Churchill was not at the time a minister, but he understood the political power of food. ‘He treated the dining room as a stage, and dinner as a performance.’ Happier as host than as a guest, he and Clementine gave dinners twice a week and frequent lunches. As lunch remained a less formal occasion the balance of the sexes didn’t matter. Winston and Clementine each held their own parties and she particularly enjoyed her ‘hen luncheons’.

 Although the Churchills always lived beyond their means, by the end of the 1930s Landemare’s prices had exceeded the Churchills’ reach. The outbreak of war, however, altered domestic economics once again. The demand for grand dinners declined and Landemare decided a permanent post would be desirable. The Churchills took on ‘Mrs Mar’ in February 1940, less than a month after rationing started. Clementine was ‘enchanted ... I knew she would make the best out of rations, and that everyone in the household would be happy.’ In May, Churchill became prime minister and Landemare moved into 10 Downing Street the following month. Here, at last, she becomes visible in history as a person described by others: ‘a round body’, according to one of the Churchill secretaries, ‘who could tell one in detail the intricacies of marriage and divorce among the aristocracy’. A woman who was ‘open and generous-spirited’ and ‘very calm indeed, whenever there was a mini-crisis’. She was quite often to be found sitting in the kitchen ‘half an hour or so before a big dinner ... with everything under control, reading the Sporting Life’. In October 1940 this sangfroid nearly cost her her life. Churchill ran into the kitchen during an air raid and told her to get into the shelter, but Landemare, who was making a delicate pudding, refused: ‘If I’d’ve turned it out it’d’ve been no more – it was so light you see.’ Churchill insisted, and moments later the 25-foot plate-glass window at the back of the kitchen exploded into shards. ‘Ooh the rubble, terrible,’ she recalled.‘He saved my life, I’m sure.’

Throughout the war she cooked at Downing Street, Chequers and occasionally in the tiny kitchen under the Cabinet War Rooms. Churchill was an enthusiast for chain eating, which was his interpretation of the medical advice he had been given before the war. He liked soup last thing at night and insisted, even at Yalta, on operating on ‘tummy time’. He was not a glutton but, as Gray puts it, ‘he was used to good food and plenty of it.’....

The Churchills were famously terrible employers. Many a cook and kitchen maid had left in tears and one had reputedly gone mad. Mrs Mar, however, did more than stay the course. She became a trusted ally and a friend to Mary, the Churchills’ daughter. She took a practical view of Winston’s peculiarities. If, as sometimes occurred, he ‘absent-mindedly wandered around stark naked’, she told him off and he would apologise. His roast beef ‘always had to be underdone’, but since he was often late for meals this could be difficult to achieve. Landemare’s method was to ‘watch till I knew he was in, then he’d have to have his bath and then I knew to put the meat in’.