To Kent (again), close to the village of Westerham – birthplace of James Wolfe of Quebec – to visit Chartwell, the country of home of Winston Churchill.
“A day away from Chartwell is a day wasted” he once said, and it was probably Churchill’s favourite place in the whole world, so much so, in fact, that he even considered being buried there (under what is now the croquet lawn).
He bought the house (which came with 80 acres of land) for £5,000 in 1922, then spent the next two years and a further £17,000 refurbishing, modernising and extending it, using an architect called Philip Tildman who ‘re oriented’ the house so that its principal view became the valley at the back of the property rather than the road at the front. Tildman also added the extension that has the dining room on the ground floor, with a drawing room and Clementine Churchill’s bedroom on the subsequent levels. The exposed beams in Churchill’s study are also Tildman’s work, the architect wanting to reveal some of the fabric of the original 16th century building.
Chartwell represented a number of things to Winston. It was to be a family home, giving some stability. The Churchills had lived in a number of houses without ever settling in one, and while their London residence continued to change, Chartwell provided continuity.
It was also a project, something to absorb Churchill’s restless energies. The 1922 General Election saw him lose his seat and therefore his government position, so he threw himself into the restoration work. He was not a good client, and Tildman and he fell out over the works, ultimately communicating only through Clementine or through lawyers.
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After the work on the house was done he moved onto improving the grounds, having a series of ponds dug that were fed from the spring that rose behind the house (the original Chart Well), which he stocked with fish – Golden Orfe – bought from Harrods.
The ponds then fed an open air swimming pool that could be heated by a furnace beneath it, and then into a stream that ran along the valley. In the 1930s Churchill went a stage further, hiring a huge digger to construct a lake behind the house. He also learnt bricklaying, building some of the wall around the kitchen garden and a brick wendy house (the ‘Marycot’) for his youngest daughter Mary.
Chartwell was also a place to entertain, where friends, family, celebrities and other visitors could motor down from London for lunch or dinner. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh visited, as did Charlie Chaplin. Einstein came to Chartwell in 1933, to ask for Churchill’s help in publicising the truth about the oppression of Jews in Hitler’s Germany.
Other visitors in the ‘30s included politicians, civil servants and military officers, coming to brief Churchill on Government foreign and rearmament policy that would inform Churchill’s speeches and newspaper articles about the looming Nazi menace.
The house and its land also functioned as a refuge from politics, a place to paint (the studio there still has over 100 of his paintings), to try his hand at farming (pretty unsuccessfully), and even today the place is quiet and still, with no road noise and with views from which other houses are almost completely absent.
Churchill’s persistent money troubles (he was hugely profligate,, his income rarely matching his expenditure) almost saw the house sold just before the war until some friends bailed him out with a ‘loan’. After the war a group of donors bought Chartwell anonymously, gifting it to the National Trust on the condition that they would not take it over until both Winston and Clementine died. As it happened, Clementine relinquished the house shortly after Churchill’s death and it was first opened to the public in 1966.
Today it has been restored to how it was in its 1930s prime, with fabrics, furniture and decor that is either original or modelled from contemporary photos. One self tours the house (numbers are restricted and timed tickets are issued) to see and feel what life at Chartwell might have been like. There are also displays of some of the gifts and honours given to Churchill (including his Nobel Prize for Literature), uniforms and other clothing, and a small exhibition at the end of the house tour, “A History of Winston Churchill in 50 Objects“.
The house is open to the public from April to October, but the grounds can be visited throughout the year. April/May is a particularly wonderful time to visit the woods on the estate as they are entirely carpeted with the purple of bluebells.
It’s not the easiest of places to get to if you don’t have a car, but it is well worth the trip. Details of public transport options can be found on the National Trust website here.
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