In 1946, when financial constraints forced Churchill to again consider selling Chartwell, it was acquired by the National Trust with funds raised by a consortium of Churchill's friends led by Lord Camrose , on condition that the Churchills retain a life-tenancy. After Churchill's death, Lady Churchill surrendered her lease on the house and it was opened to the public by the Trust in 1966. A Grade I listed building , for its historical significance rather than its architectural merit, Chartwell has become among the Trust's most popular properties; some 232,000 people visited the house in 2016, the fiftieth anniversary of its opening.

The origins of the estate reach back to the 14th century; in 1382 the property, then called Well-street, was sold by William-at-Well. It passed through various owners and in 1836 was auctioned, as a substantial, brick-built manor. In 1848, it was purchased by John Campbell Colquhoun , whose grandson sold it to Churchill. The Campbell Colquhouns greatly enlarged the house and the advertisement for its sale at the time of Churchill's purchase described it as an "imposing" mansion. Between 1922 and 1924, it was largely rebuilt and extended by the society architect Philip Tilden . From the garden front, the house has extensive views over the Weald of Kent , "the most beautiful and charming" Churchill had ever seen, and the determining factor in his decision to buy the house.

Early history to 1922 Edit

The site had been built upon at least as early as the 16th century, when the estate was called Well Street. The origin of the name is the Chart Well, a spring to the north of the current house, Chart being an Old English word for rough ground. Henry VIII was reputed to have stayed in the house during his courtship of Anne Boleyn at nearby Hever Castle. Elements of the Tudor house are still visible, the Historic England listing for Chartwell notes that 16th (or possibly 17th) century brickwork can be seen in some of the external walls.[5] In the 17th and 18th centuries, the house was used as a farmhouse and its ownership was subject to frequent change. In 1848, it was purchased by John Campbell Colquhoun, a former MP; the Campbell Colquhouns were a family of Scottish landowners, lawyers and politicians. The original farmhouse was enlarged and modified during their ownership, including the addition of the stepped gables, a Scottish baronial genuflection to the land of their fathers.[7] By the time of the sale to Churchill, it was, in the words of Oliver Garnett, author of the 2008 guidebook to the house, an example of "Victorian architecture at its least attractive, a ponderous red-brick country mansion of tile-hung gables and poky oriel windows".

Churchill at Chartwell Edit

1922 to 1939 Edit

Chartwell - Clementine Churchill's "magnificent aerial bower" to the left

Churchill first saw Chartwell in July 1921, shortly before the house and estate were to be auctioned. He returned the same month with his wife Clementine, who was initially attracted to the property, although her enthusiasm cooled during subsequent visits. In September 1922, when the house had failed to sell at auction, he was offered it for £5,500. He paid £5,000, after his first offer of £4,800, made because "the house will have to be very largely rebuilt, and the presence of dry rot is a very serious adverse factor", was rejected. The seller was Captain Archibald John Campbell Colquhoun, who had inherited the house in June 1922 on the death of his brother. Campbell Colquhoun had been a contemporary of Churchill's at Harrow School in the 1880s. On completion of the sale in September 1922, Churchill wrote to him; "I am very glad indeed to have become the possessor of "Chartwell". I have been searching for two years for a home in the country and the site is the most beautiful and charming I have ever seen". The sale was concluded on 11 November 1922.

The previous 15 months had been personally and professionally calamitous. In June 1921, Churchill's mother had died, followed three months later by his youngest child, Marigold. In late 1922, he fell ill with appendicitis and at the end of the year lost his Scottish parliamentary seat at Dundee.

Philip Tilden, Churchill's architect, began work on the house in 1922 and the Churchills rented a farmhouse near Westerham, Churchill frequently visiting the site to observe progress. The two-year building programme, the ever-rising costs, which escalated from the initial estimate of £7,000 to over £18,000, and a series of construction difficulties, particularly relating to damp, soured relations between architect and client, and by 1924 Churchill and Tilden were barely on speaking terms.[a] Legal arguments, conducted through their respective lawyers, rumbled on until 1927. Clementine's anxieties about the costs, both of building and subsequently living at Chartwell also continued. In September 1923 Churchill wrote to her, "My beloved, I beg you not to worry about money, or to feel insecure. Chartwell is to be our home (and) we must endeavour to live there for many years." Churchill finally moved into the house in April 1924, a letter dated 17 April of that year to Clementine begins, "This is the first letter I have ever written from this place, and it is right that it should be to you".

In February 1926, Churchill's political colleague Sir Samuel Hoare described a visit in a letter to the press baron Lord Beaverbrook; "I have never seen Winston before in the role of landed proprietor, ... the engineering works on which he is engaged consist of making a series of ponds in a valley and Winston appeared to be a great deal more interested in them than in anything else in the world". In January 1928, James Lees-Milne stayed as a guest of Churchill's son Randolph. He described an evening after dinner; "We remained at that round table till after midnight. Mr Churchill spent a blissful two hours demonstrating with decanters and wine glasses how the Battle of Jutland was fought. He got worked up like a schoolboy, making barking noises in imitation of gunfire, and blowing cigar smoke across the battle scene in imitation of gun smoke". On 26 September 1927 Churchill composed the first of his Chartwell Bulletins, which were lengthy letters to Clementine, written to her while she was abroad. In the bulletins, Churchill described in great detail the ongoing works on the house and the gardens, and aspects of his life there. The 26 September letter opens with a report of Churchill's deepening interest in painting; "Sickert arrived on Friday night and we worked very hard at various paintings ... I am really thrilled ... I see my way to paint far better pictures than I ever thought possible before".

Churchill described his life at Chartwell in the later 1930s in the first volume of his history of the Second World War, The Gathering Storm. "I had much to amuse me. I built ... two cottages, ... and walls and made ... a large swimming pool which ... could be heated to supplement our fickle sunshine. Thus I ... dwelt at peace within my habitation". Bill Deakin, one of Churchill's research assistants, recalled his working routine. "He would start the day at eight o'clock in bed, reading. Then he started with his mail. His lunchtime conversation was quite magnificent, ...absolutely free for all. After lunch, if he had guests he would take them round the garden. At seven he would bathe and change for dinner. At midnight, when the guests left, then he would start work ... to three or four in the morning. The secret was his phenomenal power to concentrate."

Chartwell was the base from which Churchill waged his campaign against Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement

In the opinion of Robin Fedden, a diplomat, and later Deputy General Secretary of the National Trust and author of the Trust's first guidebook for Chartwell, the house became "the most important country house in Europe". A stream of friends, colleagues, disgruntled civil servants and concerned military officers came to the house to provide information to support Churchill's struggle against appeasement. At Chartwell, he developed what Fedden calls, his own "little Foreign Office ... the hub of resistance". The Chartwell visitors' book, meticulously maintained from 1922, records some 780 house guests, not all of them friends, but all grist to Churchill's mill. An example of the latter was Sir Maurice Hankey, Clerk of the Privy Council, who was Churchill's guest for dinner in April 1936. Hankey subsequently wrote, "I do not usually make a note of private conversations but some points arose which gave an indication of the line which Mr Churchill is likely to take in forthcoming debates (on munitions and supply) in Parliament". A week later, Reginald Leeper, a senior Foreign Office official and confident of Robert Vansittart, visited Churchill to convey their views on the need to use the League of Nations to counter German aggression. Vansittart wrote, "there is no time to lose. There is indeed a great danger that we shall be too late".

Churchill also recorded visits to Chartwell by two more of his most important suppliers of confidential governmental information, Desmond Morton and Ralph Wigram, information which he used to "form and fortify my opinion about the Hitler Movement". Chartwell was also the scene of more direct attempts to prepare Britain for the coming conflict; in October 1939, when reappointed First Lord of the Admiralty on the outbreak of war, Churchill suggested an improvement for anti-aircraft shells; "Such shells could be filled with zinc ethyl which catches fire spontaneously ... A fraction of an ounce was demonstrated at Chartwell last summer".

In 1938, Churchill, beset by financial concerns, again considered selling Chartwell, at which time the house was advertised as containing five reception rooms, nineteen bed and dressing rooms, eight bathrooms, set in eighty acres with three cottages on the estate and a heated and floodlit swimming pool. He withdrew the sale after the industrialist Henry Strakosch agreed to take over his share portfolio, which had been hit heavily from losses on Wall Street, for three years and pay off significant associated debts.

1939 to 1965 Edit

Chartwell was mostly unused during the Second World War. Its exposed position in a county so near to German occupied France, meant that it was vulnerable to a German airstrike or commando raid. As a precaution the lakes were covered with brushwood to make the house less identifiable from the air. A rare visit to Chartwell occurred in July 1940, when Churchill inspected aircraft batteries in Kent. His pre-war writing assistant Eric Seal recorded the visit; "In the evening the PM, Mrs C and I went off to Chartwell. One of the features of the place is a whole series of ponds, which are stocked with immense goldfish. The PM loves feeding them". The Churchills instead spent their weekends at Ditchley House, in Oxfordshire, until security improvements were completed at the Prime Minister's official country residence, Chequers, in Buckinghamshire. At dinner at Chequers, in December 1940, John Colville, Churchill's assistant private secretary recorded his master's post-war plans, "He would retire to Chartwell and write a book on the war, which he had already mapped out in his mind chapter by chapter".

German Panzers at Tobruk, June 1941. Closed up during the war, Chartwell remained Churchill's bolthole at times of crisis

Chartwell remained a haven in times of acute stress – Churchill had spent the night there just before the fall of France in 1940. Summoned back to London by an urgent plea from Lord Gort for permission to retreat to Dunkirk, Churchill broadcast the first of his wartime speeches to the nation; "Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour...for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation..." He returned again on 20 June 1941, after the failure of Operation Battleaxe to relieve Tobruk, and determined to sack the Middle East commander, General Wavell. John Colville recorded Churchill's deliberations in his diary; "spent the afternoon at Chartwell. After a long sleep the P.M. in a purple dressing gown and grey felt hat took me to see his goldfish. He was ruminating deeply about the fate of Tobruk and contemplating means of resuming the offensive". Churchill continued to pay occasional, short, visits to the house; on one such, on 24 June 1944, just after the Normandy landings, his secretary recorded that the house was "shut up and rather desolate".

After VE Day, the Churchills first returned to Chartwell on 18 May 1945, to be greeted by what the horticulturalist and garden historian Stefan Buczacki describes as, "the biggest crowd Westerham had ever seen". But military victory was rapidly followed by political defeat as Churchill lost the June 1945 general election. He almost immediately went abroad, while Clementine went back to Chartwell to begin the long process of opening up the house for his return – "it will be lovely when the lake camouflage is gone". Later that year, Churchill again gave thought to selling Chartwell, concerned by the expense of running the estate. A group of friends, organised by Lord Camrose, raised the sum of £55,000 which was passed to the National Trust allowing it to buy the house from Churchill for the sum of £43,800. The excess provided an endowment. The sale was completed on 29 November. For payment of a rent of £350 per annum, plus rates, the Churchills committed to a 50-year lease, allowing them to live at Chartwell until their deaths, at which point the property would revert to the National Trust. Churchill recorded his gratitude in a letter to Camrose in December 1945, "I feel how inadequate my thanks have been, my dear Bill, who (...) never wavered in your friendship during all these long and tumultuous years".

Plaque at Chartwell recording the names of those who raised the funds for the purchase of the house by the National Trust in 1945

In the summer of 1953, Chartwell became Churchill's refuge once more when, again in office as Prime Minister, he suffered a massive stroke. At the end of a dinner held on 23 June at 10 Downing Street, for the Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, Churchill collapsed and was barely able either to stand or to speak. On the 25th, he was driven to Chartwell, where his condition deteriorated further. Churchill's doctor Lord Moran stated that, "he did not think the Prime Minister could possibly live over the weekend". That evening Colville summoned Churchill's closest friends in the press, Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Camrose and Brendan Bracken who, walking the lawns at Chartwell, agreed to try to ensure a press blackout to prevent any reporting of Churchill's condition. Colville described the outcome, "They achieved the all but incredible success of gagging Fleet Street, something they would have done for nobody but Churchill. Not a word of the Prime Minister's stroke was published until he casually mentioned it in the House of Commons a year later". Secluded and protected at Chartwell, Churchill made a remarkable recovery and thoughts of his retirement quickly receded. During his recuperation, Churchill took the opportunity to complete work on Triumph and Tragedy, the sixth and final volume of his war memoirs, which he had been forced to set aside when he returned to Downing Street in 1951.

Churchill's final departure from political office came some sixteen months later when, on 5 April 1955, he chaired his last cabinet, almost fifty years since he had first sat in the Cabinet Room as President of the Board of Trade in 1908. The following day he held a tea party for staff at Downing Street before driving to Chartwell. On being asked by a journalist on arrival how it felt no longer to be Prime Minister, Churchill replied, "It's always nice to be home". For the next ten years, Churchill spent much time at Chartwell, although both he and Lady Churchill also travelled extensively. His days there were spent writing, painting, playing bezique or sitting "by the fish pond, feeding the golden orfe and meditating". Of his last years at the house, Churchill's daughter, Mary Soames, recalled, "in the two summers that were left to him he would lie in his 'wheelbarrow' chair contemplating the view of the valley he had loved for so long". On 13 October 1964, Churchill's last dinner guests at Chartwell were his former principal private secretary Sir Leslie Rowan and his wife. Lady Rowan later recalled, "It was sad to see such a great man become so frail". The following week, increasingly incapacitated, Churchill left the house for the last time. His official biographer Martin Gilbert records Churchill was, "never to see his beloved Chartwell again". After his death in January 1965, Lady Churchill immediately relinquished her lease and presented Chartwell to the National Trust. It was opened to the public in 1966, one year after Churchill's death.

National Trust: 1966 to 2017 Edit

The house has been restored and preserved as it looked in the 1920-30s; at the time of the Trust's purchase, Churchill committed to leave it, "garnished and furnished so as to be of interest to the public". Rooms are decorated with memorabilia and gifts, the original furniture and books, as well as honours and medals that Churchill received.[5] Lady Churchill's long-time secretary, Grace Hamblin, was appointed the first administrator of the house. Earlier in her career, Miss Hamblin had undertaken the destruction of the portrait of Churchill painted by Graham Sutherland. The picture, a gift from both Houses of Parliament on Churchill's 80th birthday in 1954, was loathed by both Churchill and Lady Churchill and had been stored in the cellars at Chartwell before being burnt in secret.[65]

The opening of the house required the construction of facilities for visitors and a restaurant was designed by Philip Jebb, and built to the north of the house, along with a shop and ticket office. Alterations have also been made to the gardens, for ease of access and of maintenance. In 1987, the Great Storm caused considerable damage, with some twenty-three trees being blown down in the gardens. Greater loss occurred in the woodlands surrounding the house, which lost over 70% of its trees.

Chartwell has become among the National Trust's most popular properties; in 2016 some 232,000 visitors came to the house.[69] In that year, the fiftieth anniversary of the house's opening, the Trust launched the Churchill's Chartwell Appeal, to raise £7.1M for the purchase of hundreds of personal items held at Chartwell on loan from the Churchill family.[70] The items available to the Trust include Churchill's Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to him in 1953.[71] The citation for the award reads, "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values".[72] The medal is displayed in the museum room on the first floor of Chartwell, at the opposite end of the house to the study, the room where, in the words used by John F. Kennedy when awarding him honorary citizenship of the United States, Churchill "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle".[73]