Winston Churchill’s granddaughter has collected new information on his Boer War adventures. She spoke to Maureen Barnes
Sir Winston Churchill’s granddaughter, author and historian Celia Sandys would, I imagined before I met her, be the sort of doughty Englishwoman who in my youth did good works and belonged to the Women’s Agricultural Institute. Stern, firm and authoritative.
I couldn’t have been more wrong but, having read Churchill: Wanted Dead or Alive (HarperCollins), which is anything but mundane, I should have known better. Her account of the 24-year-old Churchill’s extraordinary experiences in the Boer War is both thrilling and fascinating.
Sandys, daughter of Churchill’s eldest daughter Diana and former British cabinet minister, Lord Duncan Sandys, is tall, rangy and casually elegant. In her mid-50s, she has the fine-boned features and colouring of a younger Maggie Smith or Vanessa Redgrave. I met her in Cape Town where she was staying at a B&B, albeit rather a smart one.
She had just finished a trip leading 46, mostly American members of the International Churchill Society, which she chairs, tracing the footsteps of her grandfather and his Boer War experience.
It’s hard to imagine what it must be like to be related to the legendary man who, in his lifetime, was called “the greatest living Englishman”. And it’s not only the influence he had on the conduct and outcome of World War II that made him a colossus of the 20th century. Even had he never gone into politics, his intellect combined with his superb writing talent would have brought him enduring fame.
Although he died when she was 21, Sandys has fond memories of her grandfather (I still have difficulty in even imagining The Great One as a grandpa). “He very much wanted a close family,” she said, “something he didn’t have when he was growing up.”
As a teenager, Sandys frequently went on holiday with her grandfather in the final years of his life – usually to warm spots, such as the south of France, where Churchill, a keen artist, spent much time painting.
In 1959 she was with her mother and grandparents, guests of Aristotle Onassis on his luxury yacht, Christina, for a Mediterranean cruise. It was to be a fateful voyage, as fellow guests included opera diva Maria Callas, whose sensational affair with Onassis was about to become public. Also on board was Callas’s doting husband and Onassis’s wife, Tina – on the last cruise she would take on the yacht.
In another strange twist of fate, Tina Onassis later married one of Sandys’s cousins, the Duke of Marlborough, and
eventually died tragically.
Sandys remembers Callas as an “awful woman” with an enormous ego who was never satisfied with anything. She recalled how at one port of call the local people had brought masses of flowers in honour of her grandfather and arranged them into a V for Victory. When Callas saw them she said, “How kind of the people to bring me flowers, but I wonder why they’ve made them into a V?”
In the course of her research for Churchill: Wanted Dead or Alive, which began in 1995, Sandys visited South Africa several times doing what she calls “living research”- speaking to descendants of Boers and Brits whose family members were involved in the war.
On a previous visit she had appealed in the press for anyone with knowledge of Churchill’s South African adventures and, to her surprise, was inundated with replies. Then began a sort of antiques roadshow where she visited the most promising respondents to assess the value of their stories. Everyone truly believed they had a tale to tell, but some were based on fact while others were family myths which had grown over time – out of 200 responses some 60 proved valuable. The gems gave her a wonderful sense “of completing a jigsaw” and also provided much of the original material which makes this book so interesting and fresh.
The story of young Winston’s capture and escape from prison reads like an exciting adventure novel, and you marvel anew at the bravery of this war correspondent.
In war as in politics, Churchill was only happy when he was in the thick of the action. Two weeks after his arrival in Cape Town in October 1899, Churchill boarded an armoured train headed for Boer occupied territory. The train was ambushed and he was captured, but only after taking charge and helping others escape. Later he daringly escaped from his Pretoria prison and, with occasional help along the way, crossed the border into Loureno Marques hidden in a goods wagon.
Sandys’s account of this adventure and what followed when he returned to South African to participate in the relief of Mafeking is the stuff of legend. The book, while historically accurate, is so exciting that it might be called Indiana Jones and the Battle of Spion Kop.
Actually, Sandys is hoping that a film will be made of the tale, but it may cost just a bit more than the one proposed -as Sandys relates – by her grandfather in 1899. He was thinking of making a documentary war film while he was in South Africa and wrote to a distant relative, suggesting they each pay half the expenses: “About the Cinematograph scheme: I do not expect it would require more than 700 altogether.”