page_title: Clementine Churchill
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Clementine Churchill / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: A photograph of Kitty Ogilvy Hozier by Berkhamsted photography studio T. Banning dated 1899 written in ink on the reverse of the card mount
context_page_description: Clementine Ogilvy Spencer-Churchill, Baroness Spencer-Churchill, GBE was the wife of Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and a life peer in her own right. While legally the daughter of Sir Henry Hozier, her mother’s known infidelity and his suspected infertility make her paternal parentage uncertain. She met Winston Churchill in 1904 and they began their marriage of 56 years in 1908. They had five children together, one of whom named Marigold died at the age of two from sepsis. During World War I, Clementine organised canteens for munitions workers and during World War II, she acted as Chairperson of the Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund, President of the Young Women’s Christian Association War Time Appeal and Chairman of Maternity Hospital for the Wives of Officers, Fulmer Chase. Throughout her life she was granted many titles, the final being a life peerage following the death of her husband in 1965. In her later years, she sold several of her husband’s portraits to help support herself financially. She died in her London home at the age of 92.
context_section_description: Although legally the daughter of Sir Henry Hozier and Lady Blanche Hozier (a daughter of David Ogilvy, 10th Earl of Airlie), her paternity is a subject of much debate, as Lady Blanche was well known for infidelity. After Sir Henry found Lady Blanche with a lover in 1891, she managed to avert her husband's suit for divorce because of his own infidelities, and thereafter the couple separated. Lady Blanche maintained that Clementine's biological father was Capt. William George "Bay" Middleton, a noted horseman; Mary Soames, Clementine's youngest child, believed this. However, Clementine's biographer, Joan Hardwick, has surmised (due in part to Sir Henry Hozier's reputed sterility) that all Lady Blanche's "Hozier" children were actually fathered by her sister's husband, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale (1837–1916), better known as a grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters of the 1920s. Whatever her true paternity, Clementine is recorded as being the daughter of Lady Blanche and Sir Henry.
  In the summer of 1899, when Clementine was 14, her mother moved the family to Dieppe, a coastal community in the north of France. There the family spent an idyllic summer, bathing, canoeing, picnicking, and blackberrying. While in Dieppe, the family became well acquainted with ‘La Colonie’, or the other English inhabitants living by the sea. This group consisted of military men, writers and painters, such as Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert. The latter came to be a great friend of the family. According to Clementine's daughter, Mary Soames, Clementine was deeply struck by Sickert and thought he was the most handsome and compelling man she had ever seen. The Hoziers' happy life in France ended when Kitty, the eldest daughter, was struck with typhoid fever. Blanche Hozier sent Clementine and her sister Nellie to Scotland so she could devote her time completely to Kitty. Kitty died on 5 March 1900.
  Clementine was educated first at home, then briefly at the Edinburgh school run by Karl Fröbel, the nephew of the German educationist, Friedrich Fröbel, and his wife Johanna and later at Berkhamsted School for Girls (now Berkhamsted School) and at the Sorbonne in Paris.  She was twice secretly engaged to Sir Sidney Peel, who had fallen in love with her when she was 18.
caption: Kitty Ogilvy Hozier in 1899, the year before she died
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