Winston Churchill cheated on his wife, according to a newly unearthed admission by a former aide, a revelation that could have left the former British prime minister vulnerable to blackmail and changed the history of World War II.
John "Jock" Colville, an aide to Churchill, reportedly reveals the secret in a never-before-seen interview with archivists at Churchill College in Cambridge. It was recorded in 1985, just a few years before Colville's death, The Guardian reported, and footage appears in a new "Secret History" documentary.
"Now this is a somewhat scandalous story and therefore not to be handed out for a great many years . . . Winston Churchill was . . . not a highly sexed man at all, and I don't think that in his 60 or 55 years' married life he ever slipped up, except on this one occasion when Lady Churchill was not with him and by moonlight in the south of France," Colville says in the clip.
"He certainly had an affair, a brief affair with . . . Castlerosse as I think she was called … Doris Castlerosse, yes, that's right," Colville continued.
Churchill married his wife, Clementine, in 1908. Castleross is the great aunt of the supermodel Cara Delevingne.
Churchill spent four vacations with Castlerosse in the south of France during the 1930s when he was out of office, The Guardian noted. He painted at least two portraits of her and they continued to meet at her London home.
"My mother had many stories to tell about [the affair] when they stayed in my aunt's house in Berkeley Square," Doris's niece, Caroline Delevingne, said in a televised interview.
"When Winston was coming to visit her, the staff were all given the day off. That's one of the stories my mother told me . . . and after that, the next day . . . Doris confided in my mother about it, they were, as I said, good friends as well as being sisters-in-law, and so, yes, it was known that they were having an affair," Delevingne added.
The affair remained a secret from Churchill's wife Clementine until the late 1950s when some of Castlerosse's love letters to Churchill were shared with her, The Sunday Times of London reported.
"She was worried about it for months afterwards," researcher Richard Toye, professor of history at Exeter University, told The Guardian. "Clementine would say to Colville, 'I always thought Winston had been faithful,' and Colville tried to reassure her by saying many husbands on a moonlit night in the south of France have strayed; it's not such a big deal."
Research on the affair, uncovered by Toye and Warren Dockter, an international historian at Aberystwyth University, is featured in the new documentary "Secret History."
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