Miranda Brooke, Wayward Daughter: Sarah Churchill and Her World.
Stroud, Glos.: Amberley Publishing, 384 pages, Amazon $39.95.

There is a need for an authoritative biography of Sarah, Winston’s and Clementine’s star-crossed daughter. For one thing, Sarah inhabited worlds other Churchills did not—theater and television. Any story of her adventures and misadventures in those worlds would tell us not only about her, but about those worlds in Britain and America. For another, the story of this beautiful, talented woman, whom marital happiness and contentment eluded, is worth recalling in detail. It divulges the role of her famous parents, about whom it seems we can never learn enough. Miranda Brooke has provided such a biography—almost.

Brooke starts with a report on her research, in archives, in newspaper cuttings, through interviews across continents. Her effort that can be described as a model of diligence and tenacity.  Then there are the amazing photos she has uncovered, many previously unseen by the general public. Finally, Brooke lays out many obscure details of Sarah’s life.

Hopeful beginnings

A vivacious red-haired beauty, Sarah was liked by all who came into contact with her. She proved a talented actress and dancer, with starring roles on stage and screen in America and Britain. She was also a poet and artist. And she played her part in Britain’s war effort, serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). After what Rachel Trethewey (in The Churchill Girls) describes as “tough training” at Morecombe, Lancashire, she held a top-secret, high-pressure job of interpreting photo reconnaissance

Sarah’s parents adored her—Winston so much so that took her along to Teheran, Yalta, and other wartime conferences. “Being with him was a wonder itself,” says Brooke, “a privilege she hadn’t enjoyed since she was a child.”

Their contacts, summits aside, were rather infrequent. They were part of what Brooke calls an “inconsistent relationship,” At Yalta, Brooke writes, Sarah “seemed to dwell on one particular sight: queues of Romanian prisoners waiting to take their pitiful share of food from a bucket.” It is unlikely that their Russian captors were similarly moved. This shows, at least to this reviewer, that the sensitivity so many people found attractive in Sarah was also a burden that would damage her in later life.

On her own

Winston and Clementine encouraged her professional career,  but not the first two of her three marriages. The first, to the Austrian comedian Vic Oliver, ended in divorce. The second ended when Anthony Beauchamp took his own life, leaving her a widow. Her third marriage ended when her husband had a stroke, leaving her single again.

Her much younger sister Mary enjoyed a magical childhood: gardens to romp in, pets galore, the best of everything material, paternal and maternal. But Mary in her Daughter’s Tale writes that Sarah grew up in a more “inconsistent” time.  As I quote Jane Portal (now Lady Williams) in my book, Working with Winston, the older siblings had “difficult upbringings…. They had a need when they came to visit their father to have his whole attention and they didn’t always get it.… [Still, Churchill] had an enormous capacity for love…. I always thought Sarah was his favorite.”

Winston was often away on political business, campaigning or in government, as an MP and cabinet minister. Clementine was sometimes felled by pressures physical and mental—being married to Winston was no picnic. She famously fled on trips abroad to recover her well-being. Despite long separations, this marriage produced, in order: Diana, a sister who took her own life; Randolph, an often nasty, drunk brother; Sarah, who became an alcoholic; and Mary, an extraordinarily contented sister. (Another sister, Marigold, died at age of two, to the enduring pain of her parents.) I leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions about the role Sarah’s early years played in her ultimate misfortunes. Yet we must also consider her triumphs, for her life was not unremitting pain.

No book is perfect…

…as the reader soon realizes here. Brooke tells us so much we did not know, yet the text is replete with unnecessary flaws. This often-rambling work is the victim of a somewhat undisciplined author and a sloppy editor. A more discerning editor would have left some of Brooke’s prodigious details on the cutting room floor, to borrow a phrase from Sarah’s world.

For example, Brooke has Sarah in New York City at the St. Moritz Hotel after the war, followed by a paragraph on Harold Macmillan’s effort to persuade her father to retire; then a paragraph about the USA’s McMahon Act limiting Britain’s access to American nuclear technology; followed by stories about Alec Wilder’s drinking. The reader’s head spins.

The meandering text is compounded by Brooke’s habit of referring even to minor participants in Sarah’s life by first names, long after introducing them to the reader. For instance, Gil Winant, America’s wartime ambassador to Britain and one of Sarah’s lovers, had a brother named Fred. He and other “Freds” receive several mentions without the reader being told which Fred is referred to. Brooke also takes over-familiar liberties. For instance, she often refers to Churchill as “Pa,” or overdoes the phrase, “The Mule put her hoof down” (“mule” being Sarah’s childhood nickname).

Order and disorder

Brooke demands a great deal of her readers when she toggles back and forth between Sarah’s stage appearances and personal life, with little to guide the reader through the transitions. I doubt it was wise to include not only the titles of plays in which Sarah appeared—an appendix would have nicely accomplished that—but a detailed recitation of plots, cast members and other miscellany. Although interesting in their own right, they get in the way of the narrative. Sarah’s life was so fascinating that little would be lost in the telling if we did not know the myriad unnecessary details of every play, playwright and actor.

As alcohol claimed more of her, Sarah’s behavior became so erratic that she had difficulty obtaining parts. Her behavior led to a very public 1958 arrest in Los Angeles and, later, a ten-day prison stay in Britain. In 1982 she died at age 67, of what has been described by some as an “undisclosed illness” but by Brooke as cirrhosis and uremia.

Miranda Brooke has paved the way for the next author who attempts a biography of Sarah by uncovering a great deal of material, including some wonderful photographs, that might have been overlooked. For that we owe her thanks.

The author

Cita Stelzer graduated from Barnard College with a degree in History. She is also a Churchill Fellow of the International Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri; and a member of the board and secretary of the executive committee of the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy. Her first two books are Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (2013); and Working with Winston: The Unsung Women Behind Britain’s Greatest Statesman (2019). She is now working on a third, to be published in America by Pegasus late next year.