CHARTWELL KENT

In 1922, when Winston Churchill bought Chartwell for the bargain price of £5,000, it was a damp, dilapidated Victorian mansion with dry rot, but he had fallen in love with its panoramic views over the Weald of Kent. His wife Clementine wasn’t so keen, worried about Winston’s extravagant spending and all the expenses of upkeep that came with country house life.

They moved in with their four children – Randolph, 13, Diana, 15, Sarah, ten, and toddler Mary – in 1924.

Churchill (right) threw himself into transforming Chartwell into a comfortable family home. A dab hand at bricklaying, he built a heated swimming pool and a play cottage in the kitchen garden for his daughters.

Chartwell would be his home for 40 years, a hive of activity as he dictated thousands of words to his secretaries, working from his bed or his bathtub late into the night, fortified by cigars and whisky and water. It became the hub of Churchill’s own intelligence service in the 1930s as he gathered confidential information and struggled desperately to alert the nation to the dangers of Hitler’s rise to power. During the war he visited only rarely – for Chartwell’s exposed position made it vulnerable from the air.

After the war, beset by expenses, he considered selling the house until a group of friends and admirers bought it for the National Trust with the proviso the Churchills could live there until they died. The Churchill family requested that Chartwell should always have a resident marmalade cat with white socks called Jock – and the presentday incumbent is Jock VII.

Churchill finally retired from politics aged 89, and one of his most frequent visitors was Field-marshal Montgomery, but the Chartwell visitors’ book lists hundreds of the great and famous: the Queen Mother, Charlie Chaplin and Laurence Olivier, suffragette Christabel Pankhurst.

The house is full of fascinating mementos. There’s the torch dented by shrapnel Churchill carried in his breast pocket that possibly saved his life during the First World War, and the bronze portrait bust that shows the scar on his forehead acquired when he was hit by a taxi in New York in 1931. If he hadn’t been wearing a heavy overcoat he might have been killed. A few weeks later the Daily Mail paid him £600 – more than a year’s Parliamentary salary – for the story of a misadventure that ranks as one of the greatest ‘what ifs’ of history.