- 04/06/2025
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00:00We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in
00:14the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender.
00:18In the darkest days of World War II, Winston Churchill rallied a nation staring defeat
00:26in the face.
00:30But as he wrestled with the colossal burden of power, he was also confronted with secret,
00:35private pressures.
00:38He is in contact with his former mistress who is asking for special favours to get back
00:45to Britain.
00:47This is the story of an affair that has remained hidden for over 80 years.
00:53He was a very good friend to my mother, and yes, it was known that they were having an
00:58affair.
01:01The story of sensual, intimate, compromising portraits.
01:06In this striking photograph, he's standing peering down at her, and she is clearly luxuriating
01:11in his stare, basking in his glow.
01:14A tale of romance and tragedy, featuring never-before-seen Churchill letters, and previously unheard testimony.
01:25Just a little fling in the south of France, I see.
01:29It's the story of a marriage on the brink of collapse.
01:31There were, sometimes, talks of divorce.
01:39And of how Churchill's reckless holiday romance came back to haunt him, as he led his nation
01:46in a life-or-death struggle for survival.
01:48It seems to me like Churchill himself felt vulnerable that he might be blackmailed.
02:07In the autumn of 1985, Winston Churchill's former private secretary, Jock Colville, sat
02:13down to give a frank interview to archivists at Churchill College in Cambridge.
02:20For 30 years, the tape of that interview lay buried.
02:24Even now, for legal reasons, Colville's words are voiced by an actor.
02:29Now this is somewhat scandalous story, and therefore not to be handed out for a great many hours.
02:38Winston Churchill was not a highly sexed man at all.
02:42And I don't think that in his 60, 55 years of married life, he'd ever slipped up at all.
02:52Except on this one occasion when Lady Churchill wasn't with him, by moonlight in the south
02:59of France, he certainly had an affair, a brief affair with Lady Castle Ross, as she was called, Doris Castle Ross, yes, that's right.
03:12And Lady Churchill had no idea about this.
03:20Three decades later, the recording has been discovered by American historian Warren Docter.
03:26He was so startled by what he heard that he played the recording to Professor Richard Toye, one of Britain's foremost Churchill experts.
03:38I mean, it's, this is obviously a bit of a, a bit of a bombshell, as it relates to all sorts of things.
03:44I mean, first, first off, why do you think that it matters?
03:47I mean, it wouldn't be huge news today that a rich white man has a fair, you know, like, why do you think this is important?
03:54Obviously, the established view of Churchill's marriage is that although there were various trials and tribulations during this 50 plus years, fundamentally, it was a happy marriage and that they'd always been faithful to one another and that Churchill had never strayed.
04:13Colville wasn't somebody who had it in for Churchill or was going to, you know, sort of make up stories about him. And so, obviously, this tape is a bit of a bombshell.
04:22And this is clear evidence that there are, there's still a lot to be found about the great enigma that is Winston Churchill.
04:29If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say this was their finest hour.
04:44The Colville tape so fundamentally alters our view of the great man's private life that Richard and Warren want to find out more.
04:53Richard will bury himself in the archives.
04:59Warren will try to unpick some of the clues contained in the Colville recording.
05:06They want to find out how the affair impacted on Churchill's career and on the history of the Second World War.
05:14And on the history of the Second World War.
05:17He certainly had an affair with Lady Castleross, as she was called. Doris Castleross.
05:29So, who is Lady Castleross?
05:31Well, these days, if Doris Castleross is ever written about in the press, it's usually because some journalist has ferreted out the fact that she was the great aunt of Cara Delevingne, who is a very famous supermodel and actress who, in a way, seems to have inherited Doris' spark.
05:52Doris was born in a middle-class suburb of South London. As you can see, she was extraordinarily attractive.
05:59There really is something about her, isn't there?
06:02Yeah, I mean, people called her beautiful and I don't so much see beauty there as a sort of chiselled energy.
06:09She had a very, very long, elegant figure. She had these amazing racehorse legs. She was very adept at styling herself so that she looked supremely elegant.
06:22The life to which she was born was too narrow for her, too confining.
06:29She wanted glamour and she wanted adventure and she wanted it as quickly as possible.
06:36She was notorious for the skill with which she slept her way up the social ladder of London.
06:43One wouldn't call Doris a prostitute, but she was a professional mistress of extreme class and extreme skill.
06:52One of her favourite lines was,
06:54There's no such thing as an impotent man, only an incompetent woman.
07:01In 1928, Doris married Lord Valentine Castleross, much to the amusement of London's cartoonists.
07:09Physically, they were extraordinarily mismatched.
07:12He was sexually absolutely in her thrall, but it was a very, very turbulent marriage.
07:20He became insanely jealous and she had been absolutely honest from the start that she was going to carry on seeing other men.
07:27She had no intention of being a faithful, monogamous wife at home and he simply couldn't bear it.
07:33Doris remained a fixture on the London social scene.
07:40She and Lord Castleross separated in 1929, after just one year.
07:45But the marriage had raised her profile and the partying PRS was a source of fascination to the press.
07:52She was seen out with celebrities, ranging from Noel Cowart to Charlie Chaplin.
08:00She was photographed by the leading portrait artists of the day, including the photographer Cecil Beaton,
08:06with whom she managed to have an affair, despite the fact that he was gay.
08:11Her initial connection to the Churchill family was through Winston's son, Randolph.
08:22I think that one of the greatest things in the world is that the young people of great nations should get to know each other
08:31and understand each other's point of view.
08:33Away from the cameras, Randolph had a reputation as a drinker and a party animal.
08:42In the early 1930s, he and Doris had a brief affair.
08:48It was shortly afterwards that Doris graduated from the son to the father.
08:54Her affair with Winston began at a time of crisis in Churchill's life.
08:58In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany, and Churchill's career entered its most difficult period.
09:16Churchill perceives that Nazi Germany represents a serious threat to Britain,
09:21and therefore Churchill is arguing for rearmament and a series of alliances with other powers in order to preserve peace.
09:34Few were listening, and Churchill found himself stewing impotently on the back benches.
09:42These were his wilderness years.
09:44Political frustration added to tensions in what was already a tempestuous marriage.
09:53He really, really did love Clementine.
09:57But the marriage was a stormy and turbulent one, there's no doubt about that.
10:01Churchill had married his wife Clementine in 1908.
10:06They'd had five children, but theirs had always been a complicated partnership.
10:10Clementine was a very clever woman.
10:15Not an academic woman, but very sort of bright, very wise in many ways, quite intuitive.
10:20But I think Churchill was the most demanding husband, emotionally and practically speaking.
10:27Living with him was like being hitched to a hurricane.
10:30Nothing ever stopped still.
10:32It was just madness the whole time, frantic activity.
10:35And Clementine was probably the only woman, only person, who wasn't ever scared of Winston.
10:41She'd take him on, and then they'd have epic rows.
10:44And, you know, talking to the staff, they'd talk about hearing them shouting at each other behind closed doors,
10:50and occasionally I think things might have been thrown at each other.
10:53I think the 1930s were when the marriage was most under pressure.
10:57When he was out of power, he was very difficult.
11:01His bodyguard would talk about him kicking waste paper bins in frustration.
11:05And I think there were moments of crisis in their marriage at that point.
11:12Out of office, rowing with his wife, approaching 60.
11:16It was at this point that Winston Churchill encountered Doris Castle Ross.
11:22In 1985, Churchill's private secretary, Jock Colville, revealed that Churchill had had an affair with a woman called Doris Castle Ross.
11:42The tape contains clues about when and where this happened.
11:50By moonlight in South France, we were staying with this famous American actress, whatever her name was.
11:57He certainly had an affair.
11:59Who was the mystery American actress Churchill was staying with in the south of France when the affair with Doris took place?
12:11If anyone will know, its royal biographer and historian of high society, Hugo Vickers.
12:16Well, this is quite clearly Maxine Elliott. And here she is, Maxine Elliott, at the villa in the south of France. She was an actress and she also was quite rich.
12:29What kind of people would come and stay at Maxine Elliott's villa?
12:32She knew absolutely everybody. So she would, like a good hostess, have a mixture of sort of distinguished people like Churchill. And then she had a lot of younger people. Rich ladies with villas in the south of France have no problem in filling them.
12:50Maxine Elliott's villa on the French Riviera was called the Chateau de Loison.
12:55It's kind of a little bit like a Moorish wedding cake sitting on a rock and it had a swimming pool and then it had a slide going down into the sea, which is a huge feature. Great fun when you went past in a boat to see this slide.
13:10Remarkably, home movies of Churchill himself at the Chateau survive.
13:14Doris Castle Ross was also a regular visitor, an integral part of the Riviera set.
13:26Churchill first stayed here in the summer of 1933 with his family.
13:43Here we see Churchill's wife, Clementine, and his daughter, Sarah, in the pool, Doris's distinctive legs towering above them.
13:53Clementine Churchill never returned. She disliked what she regarded as the risque atmosphere at the Chateau, where the architecture seemed almost designed to encourage illicit liaisons.
14:10You had a bedroom which joined a bathroom, which joined another bedroom, which joined another bathroom, and so on, so that if you had unmarried guests but you thought there was a connection between them, you could put them into two bedrooms and they could share a bathroom.
14:22Which gave them a very easy access through and nobody needed to know about it.
14:27Do you believe that Churchill did slip up this one time in the south of France?
14:31Well, he painted Doris, painted lovely pictures of her. She was very attractive and she was posing for him and that's quite an interesting relationship anyway.
14:40She's languishing on a sofa or so, you know, she's lying down anyway. So, you know, they're halfway there, aren't they?
14:52Churchill was a keen amateur artist.
14:55His paintings at the Chateau show his usual love of colour, but also a fascination with the human form.
15:07He painted three lovingly crafted portraits of Doris, compared to just one of his own wife.
15:13This, the most sensual, he gave as a present to Doris. A striking intimate photo survives of Churchill arranging his model.
15:28I knew quite a lot of people who knew Doris and, I mean, they all rather loved her.
15:32I thought, you know, she was just one of those sort of girls who was just sort of pulsating with sort of sexual charm.
15:37Richard has uncovered a revealing record of Doris and Churchill's stay at the Chateau in the summer of 1934.
15:48What we have here is from the Daily Express and it's headlined, Mr. Churchill is Annoyed.
15:55And it is a picture of Churchill painting with Doris sitting on the wall above him.
16:00The caption says, Mr. Winston Churchill was very angry indeed with the photographer who took this picture.
16:06How dare you? shouted Mr. Churchill as he heard the shutter click.
16:09Waving his brushes, he jumped to his feet and chased the photographer out of the Chateau grounds.
16:15In all, Doris and Churchill holidayed together at the Chateau four times between 1933 and 1936.
16:26Today the Chateau is owned by the King of Saudi Arabia and is closed to visitors.
16:31Instead, Warren heads to a stormy Monte Carlo.
16:38Churchill was a keen gambler and the casino here was one of his favourite haunts during his Riviera holidays.
16:48Warren has tracked down Doris Castle Ross's niece, Caroline Delevingne, who lives in southern France.
16:59She's the daughter of Doris's brother Dudley and the aunt of supermodel Cara Delevingne.
17:05This is the first time the Delevingne family has spoken on camera about the affair.
17:14I just wonder if there is a tradition in your family of this relationship having occurred.
17:20Oh yes, both my parents talked about it, they knew about it, yes.
17:27My mother was very close to Doris and they talked a lot about everything really and she told me.
17:35We knew about it, yes.
17:38I have these photographs to show you.
17:40Oh my, that's Churchill and Doris on the rocks.
17:44Yes.
17:46I've never seen this photo before.
17:49Ah, right.
17:51And he's got a cigar in his mouth and it's clearly him.
17:54And where was this taken?
17:56That was in the south of France, staying at Chateau de Loraison.
17:59And she's wearing her shorts, she likes to show off her good legs.
18:02Oh yes, definitely.
18:04Yeah.
18:05That's amazing. Do you have any other photos?
18:06Yes.
18:10Oh, is that him there in the hat?
18:12Yes, that's right.
18:14That's Doris here, sitting across from him.
18:20Caroline also has an affectionate letter from Churchill to Doris, never before seen by the public.
18:28So this letter was written in 1934.
18:32Shall I read it to you?
18:33Please.
18:34What fun we had at Maxime's.
18:37It was delightful having you there during our visit.
18:40You were once again a manifest blessing and a ray of sunshine around the pool.
18:47I wonder whether we shall meet again there next summer.
18:51Wow.
18:53What a remarkable letter.
18:55It is.
18:56That's really amazing.
18:57What is it that you think drew Churchill to her?
19:01I mean, she was an intelligent woman.
19:03She was very attractive.
19:05You know, they were obviously good friends.
19:08Obviously, he was such a great man, such a great hero.
19:12And anything that's going to change that view worries me.
19:17But, I mean, he did have an affair with my aunt, so it's obviously going to come out.
19:27And I'd rather it came out in a way that showed that they had a relationship.
19:32While Churchill was wiling away his time on the Riviera with Doris, his marriage was deteriorating.
19:49In the winter of 1934, Clementine went off on an extended tour of the Far East, without Winston.
19:56The Churchills did spend a lot of time apart, and that was partly Clementine wanting that, or needing it rather.
20:07She went off on this lovely cruise, South Seas, Champagne, thousands of miles away from Hitler, her husband,
20:15on board a ship with a very, very attractive man, seven years younger than her, a bane, witty, gossipy, arty.
20:23Very attentive, handsome.
20:27Clementine's travelling companion was an art dealer called Terence Phillip, captured here with her in an amateur shipboard snap.
20:40The Colville tape contains an intriguing reference to him.
20:44Did she have an affair with, was it Terence Phillip?
20:49Yes, I think so, but nobody quite knows for sure.
20:55Whether or not this was a full affair, I suspect it probably wasn't. I think there was a bit of hand-holding.
21:02But she was coming up to her 50th birthday, and I don't think she was used to getting many compliments anymore.
21:08The sun was shining, the champagne was flowing, and it was all rather fun.
21:11I think Churchill suspected the relationship with Terence Phillip.
21:17If you look at the letters that Clementine sent from the boat, Terence did this and Terence did that,
21:22I think you'd have to be pretty thick-skinned not to think,
21:25Oi, oi, something very strange is going on here.
21:27Churchill's own romance was meanwhile moving dangerously close to home.
21:42At the beginning of 1937, Doris moved into this house at 43 Barclays Square in Mayfair,
21:48a property bought for her by a wealthy male admirer.
21:54Her brother Dudley and his wife Angela stayed there regularly, as their daughter Caroline records.
22:01My mother had many stories to tell about when they stayed in my aunt's house in Barclays Square.
22:09When Winston was coming to visit her, the staff were all given the day off.
22:17That's one of the stories I remember my mother telling me.
22:22And after that, the next day, Doris confided in my mother about it.
22:29They were, as I said, good friends, as well as being sisters-in-law.
22:32And so, yes, it was known that they were having an affair.
22:40Was it shared with your father as well?
22:43Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
22:51Winston's affair with Doris was more than a summer fling.
22:55It extended over several years in two countries.
22:58And by now, the Churchill marriage was in far more trouble than Churchill's biographers have ever recognised.
23:08There were, sometimes, talks of divorce.
23:12The D word was mentioned.
23:14Clementine went to see Churchill's sister-in-law.
23:18They got on extremely well.
23:20And I think Clementine went to her and said,
23:21I'm finding it difficult to cope with.
23:24I wonder whether I should, you know, even consider finishing it.
23:27During his wilderness years in the mid-1930s, Churchill plunged recklessly into a relationship with high society socialite, Doris Castleross.
23:48Churchill's wife, Clementine, also enjoyed a romantic friendship with art dealer Terence Philip.
23:59Their closeness captured in this holiday snap.
24:03The Churchill marriage was being pushed to its limits.
24:07But in the summer of 1937, Doris wrote to Churchill.
24:18This is a letter from Doris to Churchill, July 9th, 1937.
24:23My dear Winston, I hear you are not going to Maxine's, but to America in September.
24:30I am going to Maxine's as usual.
24:32I should so like to see you.
24:34I am not at all dangerous anymore.
24:36Do ring me sometime.
24:38Mayfair 3731.
24:40My love, Doris.
24:42And clearly, that very striking phrase, I am not dangerous anymore.
24:46I think it indicates that the affair is over, that she'd like to see him, but that she's going to sort of be friendly and affectionate and she's not going to sort of press him for any sort of physical relationship.
25:01There is no record of Churchill and Doris ever spending time together again before the war.
25:06It's likely the decision to end the relationship was Churchill's.
25:12And reflected the fact his warnings about the Nazis were finally starting to find an audience.
25:19I do think people start waking up to his message about Nazi Germany.
25:24And he starts recognizing that maybe his best place isn't in the south of France and sort of, you know, luxuriating and in the sun.
25:32His place is actually back at home because he feels a call to do something about what's going on in Europe.
25:40Anyone can see that public opinion is growing in favor of compulsory national service.
25:48As Churchill ended his dangerous dalliance and hurled himself back into frontline politics, Clementine also put a stop to her own romantic friendship.
25:57When Clementine came back from the cruise, the fling with Terence Phillip doesn't finish completely.
26:07She goes and sees him a couple of times, then suddenly it stops.
26:11And this is when we see the marriage kind of get going again.
26:16She wants to be by her husband at his side when he is waging this battle to wake up the world to the threat that Hitler and Berlin and Nazi Germany were posing to Britain.
26:28And in a way Hitler brought them back together again.
26:31But Doris' impact on Churchill's life was not over.
26:40As Winston and Clementine returned to the center stage of world affairs, she was about to take a radical new departure.
26:48As far as I know, this was Doris' one and only big lesbian love affair.
26:54Doris began a relationship with an American woman called Margot Hoffman.
27:01Margot was extremely rich, incredibly rich.
27:05And Doris wanted by the late 30s to make a change in her life.
27:11She was approaching 40.
27:14She was still having lots of affairs with men.
27:17It was beginning to look a little bit tawdry.
27:19Margot bought Doris a small palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice.
27:30Doris' plan was to graduate from courtesan to society hostess.
27:36And Doris certainly knew how to throw a party.
27:38In the summer of 1938, the rich and famous flocked to her palazzo.
27:55Here we see the future Prince Philip with Doris' sister-in-law, Angela.
28:01But Doris had picked the wrong country.
28:04Doris has this one great season, but of course, by 1939, no-one's going to Venice anymore.
28:13And Mussolini's joined Hitler and her palazzo's in enemy territory.
28:20For Churchill, the German invasion of Poland and Britain's declaration of war at the start of September 1939 marked the end of his wilderness years.
28:36He re-entered the government for the first time in a decade and was put in charge of the Royal Navy.
28:46As the Nazis look out tonight, they cannot find one single friendly eye in the whole circumference of the globe. Not one!
29:01Not one!
29:06Already he was rallying a nation braced for war.
29:10But for Doris Castle Ross, a London of sandbags and rationing held little appeal.
29:15At the start of 1940, she fled to America.
29:27A photograph of her survives immediately after her arrival on the dock in New York.
29:33Tucked away in her luggage was the portrait Churchill had given to her.
29:36By now she'd broken with Margot, but she had met the very, very rich heir to a banking family who had promised to divorce his wife and marry her.
29:49So, essentially Doris arrives in New York expecting to be greeted with open arms by this new lover.
29:59After a very short time, evidently that all falls through.
30:03And she's now stuck in New York.
30:06As her biographer at this point, I longed for her to get a job.
30:09Of course.
30:10Just to actually stop depending on other men, stop depending on your looks, on your luck, and actually forge some real independence for yourself.
30:22But I think by that point Doris had just got so stuck in this existence of spending far more money than she had, of always relying on someone else to pick up the tab.
30:34Just a couple of months after Doris arrived in New York, Churchill was appointed Prime Minister.
30:49Almost immediately, he was confronted with the collapse of Allied forces in Western Europe, and the very real threat of invasion.
30:56I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
31:06Just two days after this famous speech, Churchill found time to send Doris a telegram.
31:16So, here's a telegram that I want to show you.
31:18This is written on the 15th of May, 1940, and Churchill has written,
31:28Thank you so much, dear Doris Winston Churchill.
31:33So, she has clearly written him to congratulate him, I would suspect, on becoming Prime Minister.
31:39Yes.
31:41Even in the darkest hour, as it were.
31:43Yes.
31:44Well, I think it shows their friendship.
31:49But in New York, over the next two years, Doris would struggle.
31:56This is a really poignant letter that she wrote to her brother Dudley in May 1942.
32:04It's precious because we have very, very few letters from Doris.
32:07And she writes, she writes from Hotel Del Monaco, having had to move out of her rather more luxurious rented apartment.
32:16My dear Dudley, no news from you for ages. How are you? And Angela and the babies.
32:22I've been trying to get home, but it seems impossible. I'm so homesick and miserable being away from England.
32:29It's a strange, bleak little letter.
32:31It feels very hopeless to me.
32:33I think what was cruelest to Doris is that not only was she piling up debts, she felt she had not enough friends in New York,
32:43but she was also conscious she was losing her looks.
32:46I think time had not been kind to her.
32:50You can see from photos around this period that that sort of lustrousness of youth, that confidence of youth, seems to have been knocked out of her.
32:58Doris was desperate to get home, but by now America had joined the war.
33:11Tickets across the Atlantic were almost impossible to obtain.
33:16In March 1942, Doris wrote to an old friend, Lord Beaverbrook, who also happened to be one of Churchill's closest political allies and confidants.
33:30My dear Max, I must go back to London. Please, please, Max, do help me. Forgive me for worrying you, but I am very desperate.
33:43Amidst the pressures of war, Beaverbrook appears not to have replied.
33:52Doris now felt she had no alternative but to reach out to her most powerful connection.
33:57In one of the darkest moments of the war, Churchill's Riviera romance was about to come back to haunt him.
34:02It seems to me like she uses the implication of blackmail, perhaps, to get what she wants.
34:08In the months following America's entry into the Second World War, Churchill travelled twice to Washington for some of the most important summit meetings in history with President Roosevelt.
34:26It was during a meeting with Roosevelt on June the 21st 1942 that Churchill received news that the British base at Tobruk in North Africa had fallen.
34:49The defeat at Tobruk came after a long series of setbacks and was a real serious humiliation for the British.
35:03Incredibly, just two days later, Churchill found time to telephone Doris Castleross in New York.
35:12Doris wrote a letter to Churchill later that same day.
35:14My dear Winston, so very many thanks for telephoning me this morning.
35:21To hear your voice gave me such a lift.
35:24I cannot sleep in New York.
35:26I have been homesick for so long and would only like to know that I could return home.
35:35Doris was seeking help to obtain a passage back to England.
35:39Churchill even found time to slip away for a private dinner with her in Washington.
35:46If you think about the extraordinary pressures on Churchill at this time, the idea that he is in contact with his former mistress, who is asking for special favours to get back to Britain, and that he responds, is extraordinary.
36:03So extraordinary, Professor Toye believes she had a secret means of getting her former lover's attention.
36:14The vivid, sensual portrait Churchill had painted of her in the south of France, which was still in her possession.
36:21According to a well-informed biography of Doris's husband, Valentine, when they met in Washington, it was his portraits of her that Doris and Churchill discussed.
36:36Churchill was frightened. They might fall into the hands of an American magazine publisher who could use them to damage the reputation of Britain's war leader.
36:44Clearly, the one in Doris's possession would only fall into the hands of a publisher if Doris handed it over.
36:56Is there an implicit motion of blackmail or something in this?
36:59I mean, I think that's kind of intriguing because, clearly, if the portrait was to fall into the hands of an American publisher with accompanying information, then, of course, at the height of the war, this might well have been a sensational story.
37:12There was a hint here that she might say something about the relationship between her and Churchill.
37:17Doris's family firmly reject any suggestion she threatened to kiss and tell.
37:25But her possession of the painting and her presence in New York clearly left Churchill vulnerable.
37:34If even a whisper of his affair reached the press, it could severely dent his reputation in America,
37:40at a time when the outcome of the war depended on Britain's alliance with the United States.
37:48It seems to me that it's almost irrelevant whether or not Doris was actually blackmailing Churchill or not.
37:55What is important to me is that, given the enormous pressure that Churchill was under with the fall of Tobruk,
38:00and the huge importance of the special relationship between the US and the UK,
38:05that he was suddenly vulnerable to being blackmailed.
38:07He must have thought, I just have to deal with this, I've got to get her back to Britain as quickly as possible.
38:16There is no doubt Churchill used his influence in Washington to get Doris out of the country.
38:23The evidence for this is a letter that survives from the summer of 1942 to one of President Roosevelt's top aides,
38:31written by Doris.
38:32You kindly phoned me some time ago telling me that Winston Churchill had written you
38:38to ask if you could arrange for my clipper passage back to England.
38:41I could be ready in a few weeks.
38:43A ticket aboard a clipper or seaplane miraculously appeared.
38:53At the end of September 1942 Doris crossed the Atlantic.
38:58Churchill's portrait of her again tucked away in her luggage.
39:01She returned to a grim grey London, entering its fourth year of war.
39:15She and Churchill never saw each other again.
39:19The evening she arrived, she was met at Waterloo Station by her former husband, Valentine.
39:35He took her to the Dorchester Hotel.
39:37Short of money, it appears Doris was hoping for a reconciliation.
39:42She has high hopes that she might persuade him to come up to her room.
39:49But when they move into the Dorchester and Valentine first sees Doris under electric light,
39:57he realises that the woman he fell in love with is not the woman he's seeing now.
40:03That time and the war have been very, very hard on her
40:06and all the stress of the last few years is absolutely etched on her face.
40:12And although he stays to eat with her, he leaves her.
40:16Right.
40:17And Doris spends her first night in London alone.
40:20There's an air raid, she has to go racing down to the cellar.
40:25You can feel the ground shaking from the bombs, the thud of the ACAC guns from Hyde Park just over there.
40:33And Doris is deeply traumatised.
40:41Doris lived at the Dorchester through the autumn of 1942,
40:44wrestling with deaths, depression and insomnia.
40:52On December the 9th, she took an overdose of sleeping pills and died two days later.
40:58She was just 42.
41:09My instinct is that it was an accident.
41:12These drugs were extremely dangerous.
41:15It was quite possible for somebody who was in a state of distress, who was desperate for sleep, to overdo it.
41:23You know, just desperately wanting some rest.
41:32There was no record of how Churchill reacted to news of Doris' death.
41:35But there is evidence he remained anxious about his portrait of her, which Doris had brought back from New York.
41:46To ensure it didn't fall into the wrong hands, it appears Churchill turned to his trusted political fixer, Lord Beaverbrooke.
41:53And so what we have here is the original of Lord Beaverbrooke's engagement diary.
42:01We see that just a few days after Doris' death, her brother, Captain Dudley Delevingne, comes to see Beaverbrooke.
42:08We see that he sees Beaverbrooke again the next day, and on December the 20th, Captain Delevingne and wife have lunch at Beaverbrooke's country house.
42:20Just what was discussed at these meetings with Doris' brother, Dudley, is not known.
42:31But at the end of them, Beaverbrooke was in possession of Churchill's portrait of Doris.
42:36It was only returned to Dudley Delevingne once the war was safely over.
42:51Do you think that there is an element of tragedy in Doris' life?
42:55I think there is.
42:58She was always looking to be looked after, to feel secure.
43:01And obviously, towards the end of her life, during the war, it was very difficult for her.
43:11Nowadays, we would imagine she would want to be more independent.
43:16But I think in those days, there were a lot of women who didn't think like that,
43:22and that was their only way of having the freedom they wanted to travel, to live in different countries,
43:29to have an exciting lifestyle.
43:35She was a woman of her time, I think, really.
43:46As for Churchill, he would go down in history as the saviour of his nation.
43:50The British people never knew of his affair, or the threat to his reputation it posed in the dark days of 1942.
44:03Throughout the war, his wife Clementine was a rock by his side.
44:08Clementine Churchill comes out, I think, as almost kind of a hero.
44:12She chose to stay with Churchill, not just through a low point in his life and a low point in their marriage, but through the war.
44:18They were stronger for it, both of them.
44:23And Britain is stronger for them having been together, because he would not have been the same war leader in 1940 if she left.
44:30Yesterday morning, the designated head of the German state signed the act of unconditional surrender.
44:46Today is victory in Europe's day.
44:48Advanced Britannia.
44:53Long live the cause of freedom.
44:56God save the King.
45:04According to his former private secretary, Jack Colville,
45:07it was only at the very end of Churchill's life that Clementine discovered about the affair with Doris,
45:12after being shown letters from Churchill's private archive.
45:18It worried her terribly. For months afterwards, she used to say to me,
45:22I never thought Winston had ever been unfaithful to me.
45:26So I said, well, I bet he wasn't.
45:28I mean, just a little fling in the south of France.
45:31You really shouldn't worry about it.
45:33But she did. She was awfully worried about it.
45:35Today, Churchill and his wife lie together in a country churchyard in Oxfordshire.
45:54In terms of his character, how do you think that this makes us sort of re-evaluate Winston Churchill?
45:59So I don't think it's necessarily the case that his sort of love for Clemmie diminished or wavered,
46:06rather that I guess it shows that he was human.
46:09Yeah. I think it's important, particularly for historians, not to deify Winston Churchill.
46:14For us to remember that he was a human being. He was a person.
46:17And that human beings go out there and they live their lives and things happen.
46:21And that's what life is.
46:23Churchill's unflinching resolve during the darkest days of World War II is legendary.
46:27Until now the private pressures, resulting from his indiscretions, have been entirely hidden.
46:36In future, no historian will be able to ignore the tale of Winston and Doris.
46:42And tales from around the dinner table are on the agenda on Monday night as we bust a few festive foodie myths in Food Unwrapped Does Christmas at 8.
46:55Movie time next tonight on Channel 4.
46:57Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig are the only thing saving us from the otherworldly threat.
47:01The network premiere of Ghostbusters is coming up.
47:03Weekend пожill next tememora is coming up.
47:04Weekend
47:20Next of February 20th week.
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47:24map may be reviewed as usual.
47:27Jesus Christ is coming up.
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