Mary Soames obit

Lady Soames obituary

Churchill's daughter who acted as his ADC and went on to become an accomplished writer

 

 She was not on the list.

Mary Soames, who has died aged 91, was the last surviving child of Winston and Clementine Churchill, and the only one of their five children who really came to terms with bearing that distinguished family name. Mary enjoyed a fulfilled life as daughter, wife and mother, before blossoming late into an accomplished writer. Short and stocky, like her father, she inherited his energy and determination, while also displaying her mother's charm and poise. But the empathy, ebullience and sense of fun were all her own.

Mary was born in London, in the same month, September 1922, that Winston bought Chartwell, his beloved country house on the edge of the Kentish Weald. She was by far the most junior of the surviving Churchill children (the infant Marigold having died in 1921), eight years younger than Sarah, the next oldest. She was therefore brought up almost as an only child.

Her older siblings, Diana, Randolph and Sarah, had known a succession of homes but Mary's formative years were spent entirely at Chartwell. There she revelled in country life, particularly horses, and developed a lifelong love of gardening. And, whereas her brother and sisters had suffered a succession of governesses, she was raised largely by Clementine's young cousin, Maryott Whyte, who joined the Churchill household as a nanny at Mary's birth and stayed for over 20 years. "Nana" became the centre of Mary's youth and the nurturer of her lifelong Christian faith.

Relations with her parents were at this stage admiring rather than close. If Clementine made a suggestion, Mary's instinctive reaction was: "I must ask Nana." But in the winter of 1935-36, conscious of the distance between them, her mother took Mary skiing in Austria and this became an annual fixture on the family calendar. "It was chiefly during these lovely skiing holidays," Mary later wrote, "that I started to know my mother more as a person than a deity."

With the outbreak of war in September 1939, Mary followed her parents to London. Then, during the blitz, she was packed off to Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat in Buckinghamshire. Keen for more of the action, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in September 1941 and served in one of the new "mixed" anti-aircraft batteries. Life in tents and draughty barracks was a marked change from her privileged lifestyle to date. At one army dance, she teased an American soldier about his big feet, whereupon he put her over his knee and gave her "about 30 good-natured whacks". His buddy told Time magazine: "She's a regular guy and, like her old man, can take it." Mary's battery served in London and on the coast during the V-bomb raids of 1944, before moving on to Belgium and Germany. Excitement of a different sort came from traveling abroad as her father's ADC. In the summer of 1943 she went to Quebec and Washington; in July 1945 she accompanied Winston to Potsdam for the summit with Truman and Stalin.

On 25 July, during a break in the conference, Winston and Mary flew back to London for the results of the general election. Conservative Central Office remained confident of victory; Mary even left half her luggage behind at Potsdam. But the election proved a Labour landslide: for a while, Winston and Clementine were close to a nervous collapse as they struggled to construct a new life.

Mary, demobbed in April 1946, was particularly helpful to her mother as they reopened Chartwell and set up a new home in Hyde Park Gate, London. Her personal life also blossomed. After a whirlwind romance, she and Christopher Soames (later Baron Soames), a Coldstream Guards officer, were married in February 1947 in St Margaret's, Westminster, the same church as her parents. Clementine took some persuading – she had talked Mary out of a rash engagement in 1941. But on honeymoon Christopher was taken ill with a duodenal ulcer, whereupon Clementine proposed that he retire from the Army, live in the farmhouse down the hill from Chartwell and take over running the estate. So Mary returned to her Kentish roots, this time with a home and family of her own.

Between 1948 and 1959 Mary gave birth to three sons and two daughters. She also supported her husband's political career as a Conservative MP for Bedford (1950-66), campaigning vigorously on his behalf. After he lost his seat, she accompanied him on a series of foreign appointments, particularly relishing her time as hostess in the splendid British embassy in Paris (1968-72). The couple were in Brussels from 1973 to 1976, when Christopher was the first British vice-president of the European commission. Between December 1979 and April 1980, when Christopher was the last governor of Southern Rhodesia, the close personal bond forged by the Soameses with Robert Mugabe and his wife, Sally, was essential for the reasonably smooth transfer of power. Mary felt the subsequent fate of Zimbabwe almost as a personal betrayal.

But another Mary was about to bloom. Winston, who died in 1965, was the subject of a multivolume biography, started by Randolph and completed by the historian Martin Gilbert. Christopher suggested that Mary should write a life of her mother and Clementine took up the idea with enthusiasm. Before her death in 1977, Clementine read all the draft chapters, up to the first world war.

Mary was touched and delighted with the commission, but also a little daunted, having "never before written so much as a pamphlet", as she admitted in the preface. Yet Clementine Churchill (1979) was published to enormous acclaim, winning the Wolfson prize and plaudits from reviewers. AJP Taylor called it "a delightful book … affectionate and also frank". It was indeed this remarkable mixture of feeling and detachment that made the book so appealing. Mary showed how much her mother had done to sustain Winston's career – "my life's work", as she put it. But she also revealed the intense strains this imposed on Clementine's highly strung nature.

Suddenly Mary was recognised as her father's daughter, as well as her mother's, with a good deal of Winston's literary talent. Other books followed, including a memoir, Winston Churchill: His Life as a Painter (1990) and a widely read collection of her parents' letters, Speaking for Themselves (1998). She published a revised edition of Clementine Churchill in 2002, drawing on those letters and other new material, and an autobiography up to 1945, A Daughter's Tale (2011), drawing on her extensive diaries.

In 1989 Mary was appointed chairman of the board of trustees of the National Theatre. This was a political appointment, greeted without enthusiasm in thespian circles. The Soameses had not been theatre-goers and, during an early meeting Mary pushed a note to the NT's director, Richard Eyre: "Who is Ian McKellen?" But she threw herself into the new task in a typically hands-on way, developing a keen interest in the theatre and Eyre found her an invaluable support. At her farewell party in 1995, he said how much he would miss her "gossip, guidance, champagne, 7.45am phone calls, enthusiasm, wisdom and friendship". She replied: "You go too far, but then you often do, dear Richard."

Behind the scenes, she quietly maintained a concern for former members of the family's staff and championed many public Churchill causes, not least the archives centre at Churchill College, Cambridge, where she was elected an honorary fellow. She was also an assiduous patron of the International Churchill Society – attending its gatherings and talking freely and informally with all who attended. On one occasion, asked to present a VIP with a picture of Chartwell that had unfortunately failed to arrive, she carried off the potential embarrassment with great aplomb, imaginatively recreating the beauties of the picture with a verve and humour that delighted the whole audience.

She was made a dame in 1980 and in 2005 was appointed a Lady Companion of the Order of the Garter.

British Prime Minister David Cameron called Mary Soames, the last surviving child of Winston Churchill, “an eyewitness to some of the most important moments in our recent history.

Christopher died in 1987. She is survived by their five children, Nicholas, Emma, Jeremy, Charlotte and Rupert.