How Winston Churchill's daughter-in-law Pamela became his political secret weapon
In the BBC Radio 4 podcast History’s Secret Heroes, Helena Bonham Carter shines a light on the extraordinary stories of some of the most fascinating unsung heroes of the Second World War.
Shortly before the Second World War, Pamela Digby married Winston Churchill’s son Randolph. The marriage was a disaster – but when Winston Churchill became prime minister, she was brought right into the centre of power.
Pamela had incredible powers of seduction, and she used them to help the British cause. She charmed and sometimes had love affairs with senior American political players, diplomats, and generals, creating lines of communication between London and Washington that nobody had expected.
How did Pamela Digby become interested in politics?
In the 1930s, as a teenager, she studied in Munich. Her social circle in England included the Mitford sisters – an upper-class family whose politics ranged from communism to fascism. One sister, Unity Mitford, was close to the Führer, Adolf Hitler. “So, she [Pamela] asked Unity, could she meet the Führer?” says Pamela’s biographer, Sonia Purnell. Pamela took tea with Hitler – but unlike Unity, she wasn’t impressed at all. “She described him as a tin foil character,” says Purnell. But the meeting had a consequence: “It awakened her determination to try and find out how these characters came to power and exerted it so dramatically.”
...they began to see her as almost like a secret weapon in their war campaign.
How did she come to marry Randolph Churchill?
Like other girls of her class, Pamela was a debutante – shopped around on a marriage market. But she was not considered attractive: her peers thought she had too many freckles and was too fond of horses. Sonia Purnell says there were many cruel comments about her: “One lord said, ‘Oh, I see the chestnut mare is in foal again.’ An absolutely appalling slight at her slightly rounded figure.”
In September 1939, war broke out, and Pamela still had no fiancé. With all the men going off to fight, her window to get married was closing. Randolph Churchill had a reputation as a drinker, a womaniser and a gambler. But he proposed to her and she accepted. “He was convinced he was going to be killed in the war,” says Pamela’s nephew Chris James. “And he was determined to leave a son, an heir. And he was going round, asking several girls a night if they would marry him. And they all ran a mile except for Pam.”
How did the marriage go?
Pamela soon had a son, who they named after his grandfather: Winston Churchill. Although she and Randolph did not get on at all – she got on very well with her father-in-law Winston and mother-in-law Clementine Churchill. They too had their doubts about their son and found Pamela to be sparkling company. She often played cards with Winston Churchill. He invited her to dinners with diplomats and military personnel. She became part of a small group called Padlock: “privy to all secrets, basically,” says Sonia Purnell. “And they began to see her as almost like a secret weapon in their war campaign.”
How did Pamela become politically important?
By 1941, Britain’s position looked grim. The only hope as Churchill saw it was to get the United States to join the war on the side of the Allies. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a special envoy to London – the former public administrator Harry Hopkins. “He arrives actually rather determined to dislike Britain and the British,” says Sonia Purnell. The Churchills planned a charm offensive: showing him bomb sites, demonstrating the courage of ordinary people, while also introducing him to Pamela. “He goes back to the States and says, ‘we've got to save those people,’” explains Purnell, “they are really amazing. They deserve everything we can do to help them.”
How did she meet Averell Harriman?
Harriman was a businessman who Roosevelt sent to London to run the Lend-Lease programme. “He was cold and aloof and difficult to really pin down,” says Purnell. Again, the Churchills used Pamela as a secret weapon. At a dinner at The Dorchester hotel, she sat next to Harriman and wore a revealing gold dress. “Quite quickly she goes into what her friends later called the mating dance, and that was effectively stroking his forearm. Then looking into his eyes with her beautiful sapphire eyes, laughing at his attempts at repartee,” says Purnell. An air raid siren went off. Averell Harriman invited Pamela to shelter in his suite. “As he said sometime later, there's nothing like the Blitz to get things going,” says Purnell. “By the morning, he's completely pro Brit.” To avoid a scandal – Harriman, like Pamela, was married – he was posted to Moscow soon afterwards.
Did she have other useful affairs besides Harriman?
“She had a whole roster of important lovers,” says Sonia Purnell. “Often at the same time, she was juggling them.” She had an affair with the American CBS broadcaster Ed Murrow. She used intimate connections with military men such as the American Major General Fred Anderson and the head of the RAF, Peter Portal, to influence them along Churchillian lines, and report their thoughts back to the Prime Minister. “She was playing a role in geopolitics at the very, very highest level,” says Purnell.
She was playing a role in geopolitics at the very, very highest level.
What happened to her after the war?
Pamela and Randolph Churchill were divorced. She was still just 25 years old. She left Britain and had more affairs with influential men. She married a Broadway producer and moved to New York. When he died in 1971, she met one of her wartime flames again – Averell Harriman. Harriman was then 79 and recently widowed; Pamela was 51. “They were married within a very short time,” says Chris James. “And that really was happy for both of them.” Pamela became an American citizen. Later, she campaigned for Bill Clinton to become president. When he won, he made her his ambassador to France. She was by then 73 years old. “Her first formal job, still no formal qualifications,” says Purnell. “She then sat about working on the peace process in Bosnia, using everything she'd learned from the Second World War.”
