The eventful love life – and intelligence-gathering skills – of one of the most talked-about women of her age makes the first half of this sympathetic study more compelling than the postwar ‘gold-digging’ years
As a youth she wasn’t popular among her peers. “Fat and freckly with red hair and mad about horses,” remembers Clarissa Churchill. “We used to bully her.” Nancy Mitford was no kinder: “She was a red-headed bouncing little thing, regarded as a joke.” Among the debutantes of 1938 she did not shine, being neither rich nor beautiful. And yet despite this unpropitious beginning, Pamela Digby (later Churchill Harriman) would become one of the most influential, moneyed and talked-about women in postwar Anglo-American high society. Sonia Purnell explains how she did it in this sympathetic, well-researched, busily peopled but faintly exhausting biography, which will test even the keenest appetite for stories of ambition and the will to power.
Born into a privileged but cash-strapped family that sold up in Belgravia, London, and moved to Dorset, where her grandfather, the 10th Lord Digby, built a 50-room mansion without bathrooms (he considered them “disgusting”), she was an adventurous and energetic girl who so craved escape from loneliness that she gambled on marrying, aged 19, a man she had only known for two weeks. That her betrothed was Randolph Churchill, a bumptious brute much disliked in society, was both a personal catastrophe and the making of her. He had the pedigree, and provided an entrée to his parents, Winston and Clemmie, who took to Digby immediately. She was their mascot, a confidante and an initiate in “the low cunning of high politics”, often standing in for the fragile Clemmie and becoming a trusted member of Winston’s inner circle at Chequers and in the Whitehall war bunker. Her ascent came at a cost: Randolph, maddened with resentment, took his drinking and philandering to obnoxious new levels. A son, Winston, was the unlucky issue of the union.
