ep-06 Issue - The Heraldry Society

2
MARY, LADY SOAMES LG DBE
by David White
The Guest of Honour at the Society’s Dinner at
Apothecaries Hall in November is to be Lady Soames,
LG, DBE.
Mary Soames, now 85, has had a remarkable life,
much of it spent at the centre of the British political
world. The daughter of Sir Winston Churchill, and the
wife of Christopher Soames, cabinet minister,
Ambassador to Paris, and final British Governor of
Rhodesia, she has also carved out a career for herself
as a writer and arts administrator. When, in 2005, the
Queen appointed her as only the third non-Royal Lady
of the Garter it was widely welcomed as an inspired
choice.
Her parents, Winston Churchill and Clementine
Hozier, married in 1908 and she was the youngest of
their five children. Mary Soames is the final survivor.
Her father bought Chartwell, his house in Kent,
shortly after Mary was born in 1922 and it was there
that her childhood was spent; visitors to the now
National Trust property can see the Wendy house built
in the garden for her. The age gap between her and
her nearest sibling, Sarah, was such that she has
reflected that her upbringing was more like that of an
only child, ‘I lived chiefly among grown-ups, with
whom I was on the whole more at ease than with
children of my own age’. Attending two Kentish day
schools she was at home at Chartwell to meet some of
the many visitors who called upon Winston Churchill,
not just politicians but others, including Walter Sickert
and Lawrence of Arabia. In early childhood she was
unaware of the fame and importance of her father,
who would allow her to ‘help’ him with his bricklaying.
But as a teenager she was treated by him as fully adult
and asked her opinion of current affairs.
After her father had become Prime Minister in
1940, she was, to her considerable annoyance, sent by
her parents to live at Chequers to avoid the Blitz. Not
yet of military age, she worked as a billeting officer for
the WVS in Aylesbury. At 18 she joined up, spending
the next five years in the Auxiliary Territorial Service,
first as a private, then as a sergeant, and ultimately as
a junior officer. She could not escape being the Prime
Minister’s daughter. ‘It was much easier’ she has said
‘when I was in the ranks. Once you were an officer it
was much more of a struggle to be accepted. I
remember my terror whenever I was sent to a new
Mary, Lady Soames wearing her robes as a Lady
Companion of the Order of the Garter, in procession to
St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle for the annual
service of the Order of the Garter on 19 June 2006.
Photograph by Philip Allfrey in Wikipedia Commons
unit’. Her work was in anti-aircraft batteries. For a
period she was posted to a battery in Hyde Park, where
her father would sometimes ‘drop in’ when she was on
duty. She witnessed the flying bomb fall on the
Guards Chapel.
Later she was on the coast at Hastings, shooting at
flying bombs as they came across the Channel, before
she moved on to make up part of the defences of
liberated Brussels. But her war service also entailed
serving as an ADC to her father during his visits to
Quebec and Potsdam. Stalin she remembers as ‘small,
dapper and rather twinkly’.
In 1947 she married Christopher Soames, who had
spent the war in the Coldstream Guards, but who soon
now left the army and began running the farm at
Chartwell. In 1950 he was elected MP for Bedford
and Mary Soames threw herself into the work of an
MP’s wife in the constituency. But she felt her mother
had been too much the political wife, and for her own
children she would always make the school holidays
sacrosanct.
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