Violet Bonham-Carter
1887-1969
UK activist, diarist
1. Introduction
Violet was a political activist, diarist and senior executive in organisations such as the BBC and ‘Chatham House’, a think-tank. She was the daughter of H.H. (Herbert Henry) Asquith, Liberal prime minister from 1908 to 1916, campaigning for him and later holding leadership positions in Liberal party associations. She was romantically involved with Churchill before he became engaged to Clementine and remained friends with him for life. She was an excellent orator and is now also known for her journals and letters, published posthumously. She was the mother-in-law of Liberal leader Jo Grimond and the grandmother of actress Helena Bonham Carter.
2. Stories
- Violet first met Winston when sitting next to him at a dinner party in 1906, during which he told her, ‘We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm.’
- After Churchill’s marriage to Clementine, the disappointed Violet was involved in an attention-grabbing incident on a Scottish cliff.
- Violet had a fractious relationship with her mother-in-law Margot, which her father described as one of ‘chronic misunderstanding’.
- Asquith wrote up to three letters a day to Violet’s 26-year-old friend Venetia Stanley, disclosing state secrets.
- Violet was the mother-in-law of Liberal leader Jo Grimond and the grandmother of actress Helena Bonham Carter.
- Violet contributed significantly to women’s causes over the years but described herself as a ‘bad feminist’ and even an ‘anti-feminist’.
- Violet is buried next to Mells Manor, the Asquith family seat and former Catholic retreat.
Violet first met Winston when sitting next to him at a dinner party in 1906, during which he told her, ‘We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm.’1
At first he did not notice her, then he asked how old she was. She said she was 19, after which Churchill said almost despairingly that he was already 32. He launched into a diatribe on the brevity of human life and the huge possibilities of human achievement. She answered one of his questions with a quote from Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, with which Churchill was unfamiliar, but was excited at hearing it. (By the next time they met, he had learned all of Keats’s odes by heart.) Violet quoted some verses by Blake, which Churchill did not know either, but also liked.
Violet was spellbound, thinking ‘This is what people mean when they talk of “seeing stars”’.2 She told her father, Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, that for the first time in her life she had seen genius. Her father, amused, replied, ‘Well, Winston would certainly agree with you there’.3
Later, she tried to define what made him different. Above all, he was unpredictable: ‘There lurked in every thought and word the ambush of the unexpected’.4 His approach to everything was enthusiastic and fresh, unlike her academic father and other scholars that she knew. He was uninhibited and unselfconscious, willing to use both trite and grandiose language that others might ridicule. She also felt that under his bombastic exterior he was quite vulnerable.
Churchill too was impressed, later describing her as ‘a gleaming figure, capable of dealing with the gravest questions and the largest issues with passion, eloquence and mordant wit’.5 Her political speeches gained his highest praise, calling her ‘a champion redoubtable even in the first rank of Party orators’.6 He particularly enjoyed one of her ‘wildfire’ comments about voters being presented with the over-active policies of Lloyd George on the one hand and the inaction of Bonar Law on the other. ‘We have to choose’, she said, ‘between one man suffering from St. Vitus’s Dance [twitching symptoms] and another from Sleeping Sickness.’7
After Churchill’s marriage to Clementine, the disappointed Violet was involved in an attention-grabbing incident on a Scottish cliff.
Winston and Violet talked for hours at parties while others danced. Over time they became ‘practically engaged’,8 in Churchill’s words. Violet was therefore shocked to hear that he was going to marry Clementine, whom she promptly described as an ‘ornamental sideboard’ and ‘as stupid as an owl’.9 Three weeks before Winston’s marriage in September 1908, he made a long trip to see Violet while she was on a family holiday in Scotland, partly from guilt and also to contain possible difficulties with her father who had recently appointed him as president of the Board of Trade, perhaps influenced by Violet’s pleading to him to ‘Make the most of Winston’.10
A week after the wedding, Violet was reported missing, last seen on a cliff top at dusk. A search party combed the rocks below until after midnight, when she was found nearby by some fishermen, uninjured. The newspapers printed sensational stories, including the possibility of a suicide attempt, despite no indication of harm. Violet seemed pleased with the attention which she hoped would give Churchill a twinge of guilt.
A year later, Violet visited a friend, Archie Gordon, youngest son of Lord Aberdeen, on his deathbed in Winchester Hospital after a car accident. Archie proposed and Violet accepted, but he died a few days later. Eventually Violet married Maurice (‘Bongie’) Bonham-Carter, her father’s private secretary. Winston was serving on the Western Front but Clementine attended the wedding and their son Randolph was a page boy. Clementine commented that the married couple looked dreary on return from honeymoon;11 other reports suggest that they went on to have a happy marriage.
Nevertheless, Violet later became emotionally involved with economist O.T. ‘Foxy’ Falk, her husband’s business partner. In the end, Foxy eloped with ‘Cuffy’ (Mademoiselle Hubler), the Bonham-Carters’ governess. Cuffy set up a finishing school in Oxford, where Foxy assisted with maths tuition. Her pupils included Katharine, Duchess of Kent.
Despite initial tensions, Violet and Clementine developed a good relationship. Violet and Winston remained permanent friends, one of the closest women in his life outside his family. Her maiden speech in the House of Lords, two days after his death, was a eulogy in which she praised his courage, greatness of heart, vitality and ‘his warm and wide humanity’.12
Violet had a fractious relationship with her mother-in-law Margot, which her father described as one of ‘chronic misunderstanding’.13
H.H. Asquith’s first wife Helen Melland died in 1891 from typhoid fever. Violet was four years old and developed a strong attachment to her father. Asquith married Margaret (‘Margot’) Tennant three years later, a completely different character from the reserved Helen. Margot was a dynamic socialite and a member of the Souls, an apolitical group of well-connected intellectuals. She had a biting wit and became a writer, partly to pay for the Asquiths’ lavish lifestyle.
She gained a reputation for being difficult and tactless, as noted by Clementine, writing to Winston from France: ‘Margot is causing a commotion on the Riviera by proposing herself to unwilling & nervous hostesses & not taking ‘No’ for an answer or standing any nonsense! Consuelo [Clementine’s hostess] is flying to Paris to avoid a too prolonged visitation.’14 Winston had written earlier: ‘How she talks – anything & everything that comes into her head slips off her indiscreet tongue.’15
In marrying Asquith, Margot had taken on five stepchildren (four boys and a girl), leaving her little time alone with her new husband. Asquith soon became prime minister with all the demands required of the role and together they had five more children (three died in infancy). Later she said to a friend, ‘I have only been alone with Henry and my children three weeks in nineteen years’.16
Part of the friction with her stepdaughter was caused by Violet’s closeness to her father, resulting in competition. Violet too was headstrong and had a sharp tongue. Margot was instrumental in arranging a good informal education for her and in introducing her to high society, but some of the confidence this instilled contributed to their clashes.
Violet later acknowledged Margot’s loyalty to her father but this did not fully make up for his years of despair over the stress in his household. Some of it, however, he caused himself through his obsessive relationship with Venetia Stanley, Violet’s best friend.
Asquith wrote up to three letters a day to Violet’s 26-year-old friend Venetia Stanley, disclosing state secrets.
Venetia Stanley was Clementine’s first cousin, once removed,* and the daughter of Lord Stanley, former Liberal MP for Oldham, near Manchester, which was subsequently Churchill’s constituency. She had been friends with Violet since 1907 and spent much time at the Asquiths’ house. Asquith acknowledged a description of himself that he had ‘(perhaps) a slight weakness for the companionship of clever and attractive women’17 (somewhat of an understatement) and had a habit of writing to some of those he knew, including Venetia.
In 1912, Venetia joined H.H. and Violet on a vacation to Sicily, during which he fell in love with her, as did another companion, Edwin Montagu, a Liberal MP. Montagu proposed the following year but Venetia rejected him. Asquith stepped up his communications, writing her around 560 letters over three years, sometimes during parliamentary debates and occasionally during cabinet meetings.
Venetia enjoyed the attention and reciprocated the letter writing. The topics included politics which sometimes involved Asquith disclosing state secrets. Since there are no minutes of many of the political meetings at the time, the letters Asquith sent to Venetia have been useful to historians, but he destroyed those he received.
He would sometimes clear his schedule on a Friday to take her for a drive. On one occasion, Clementine wrote to Winston, ‘The naughty old Sage [Asquith] took Venetia for a long motor drive in the country yesterday […] I must say, if I were still a young damsel at large, I would take my walks abroad with a younger swain!’18 Margot was the only one aware of the situation at the time and chose to accept it, although it added to the household strain.
Eventually Venetia found the relationship stifling and belatedly accepted Montagu’s proposal, converting to Judaism to avoid his being disinherited. Asquith was devastated and Violet was also displeased, as she did not like Montagu. The marriage appears to have been one of convenience with an agreement to allow Venetia to have other relationships, which she put to good use, including a liaison with Lord Beaverbrook. Montagu died in 1924, aged 45, probably from sepsis or encephalitis, with Venetia outliving him by 24 years, remaining unmarried.
* Venetia’s grandfather was Edward Stanley, 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley, who was Clementine’s great-grandfather.
Violet was the mother-in-law of Liberal leader Jo Grimond and the grandmother of actress Helena Bonham Carter.
Violet had four children. Her eldest, Cressida, was an archaeologist, working primarily in Greece. Her second, Laura, married Jo Grimond who led the Liberals from 1956 to 1967 and then again briefly in 1976 after the resignation of Jeremy Thorpe after a scandal. She stood as a Liberal MP candidate in West Aberdeenshire but was defeated. Violet’s third child, Mark, was a publisher and Liberal politician. He was made a life peer in 1986 and became literary agent for the politician and writer Roy Jenkins, whose biographies include Asquith (1964) and Churchill (2001).*
Her fourth child Raymond was a banker who married Elena Propper de Callejón, the daughter of a Spanish diplomat. Their actress daughter Helena Bonham Carter has been nominated for two Oscars for her roles in The Wings of the Dove and The King’s Speech. Actor/producer/director Kenneth Branagh was her partner from 1994 to 1999, then Tim Burton from 2001 to 2014. While they were partners, Bonham Carter and Burton lived in neighbouring London properties with a direct connection. The separate arrangements apparently worked well due to their contrasting tastes in décor, different routines and Burton’s snoring.
Helena Bonham Carter starred with Meryl Streep in the film Suffragette (2015), set in 1912, when Asquith was prime minister. Asquith was against votes for women, as was his daughter Violet at the time (see Suffragettes). During casting, director Sarah Gavron was concerned: ‘Once we read about her family history, we were a little bit trepidatious. What would she [Helena] think about this? Her playing a militant suffragette when she’s a descendant of the arch-enemy?’19 Helena Bonham Carter later said, ‘I think they [H.H. Asquith and Violet] were against the violence in the Suffragettes’ protests’, and ‘My mum’s explanation is that Violet was treated like a man, so she never experienced any personal discrimination’20 (overlooking the key fact that Violet could not vote). In a separate interview, she said there was a scene where she threw dung at her cinematic great-grandfather, but that it was cut.21
Helena Bonham Carter bought Mill House, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, part of Asquith’s former estate, for £2.9 million in 2006. Asquith had entertained guests there such as Lloyd George, Churchill and Aga Khan III. Asquith was buried nearby at the Church of All Saints, as was the author George Orwell (real name Eric Blair).
* Roy Jenkins’s other biographies include Baldwin (1984), Truman (1986) and Roosevelt (2005).
Violet contributed significantly to women’s causes over the years but described herself as a ‘bad feminist’ and even an ‘anti-feminist’.22
Violet’s four brothers all went to Winchester and Oxford, whereas she was given private tuition. Although in some ways this may have been preferable, avoiding the harsh rigours of many private schools at the time, it reflected the educational discrimination of the era, but Violet was not resentful.
She campaigned for equal pay for women and for family allowances to be paid directly by the government to mothers to help their economic standing. She rejected the idea (widespread at the time) of restricting women’s involvement in politics to domestic issues. Despite her opposition to the militant suffragette movement, which she believed caused a barrier to female suffrage, she had sympathy for the suffragists who used constitutional methods for change. However, she felt that poverty was a more burning injustice than suffrage in the early 1900s.
She prioritised her family life over her political career when her four children were young but remained highly active in public life. She made many speeches, wrote articles and held senior positions in numerous organisations, including being the first female president of the Liberal Party.
In 1941, Churchill asked her if she would like to be a governor of the BBC. She accepted immediately with the response, ‘Will a bloody duck swim?’23 (akin to ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’), knowing that it was one of his favourite phrases. He then sometimes referred to her as his Bloody Duck and she sometimes signed letters to him as ‘Your BD’.
She stood as a Liberal candidate in the 1945 and 1951 general elections but was unsuccessful, despite Churchill having her Conservative competitor withdrawn in 1951. Churchill would have made her minister of education had she won. She was a regular broadcaster after the war and was active in foreign relations, meeting Israel’s Ben-Gurion, Taiwan’s Kai-shek and America’s John F. Kennedy.
She achieved many female firsts, including giving the Romanes lecture at Oxford in 1963, the Royal Academy dinner speech in 1967, and a speech to the male-only Reform Club in 1968.* After the latter, she reflected in her diary how many times she, an ‘anti-feminist’, had been ‘the first to break virgin soil’ in the advance of women’s interests.24
* The Romanes Lecture is the university’s annual public lecture with the first being given by William Gladstone in 1892. The Reform Club is a private members’ club which admitted its first female members in 1981.
Violet is buried next to her family’s Somerset estate, which has associations with 1910s decadence, devout Catholic writers, codebreaking, secret South African negotiations and Soviet Union espionage.
Mells Manor and its estate came into the Asquith family through the marriage of Violet’s brother Raymond Asquith to Katharine Horner, daughter of barrister Sir John Horner. Both Raymond and Katharine were members of the ‘Corrupt Coterie’, a decadent aristocratic group consisting mainly of children of the Souls. Their son, Julian, was born in April 1916 and Raymond was killed five months later in the Battle of the Somme, shortly after seeing his newborn son while on home leave.
Katharine converted to Catholicism in 1923 and later made the manor available as a Catholic retreat for people such as the writer Evelyn Waugh and war poet Siegfried Sassoon. Monsignor Ronald Knox, a former crime fiction writer, lived there for ten years as an unofficial chaplain. He was buried in the graveyard of St Andrew’s church next door in 1957, as was Sassoon, ten years later, who wanted to be near Knox.
Maurice Bonham Carter was buried in the same churchyard in 1960 and was joined by Violet in 1969 after a heart attack, aged 81. The wording on her gravestone includes her title Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury, from her family ties in Wiltshire. She was already a ‘Lady’ as the daughter of an earl and the wife of a knight but held the baroness title in her own right on being made a peer in 1964.
Also in the churchyard is the family tomb of Reginald McKenna, a banker, Liberal politician and chancellor of the exchequer under H.H. Asquith. He commissioned Edwin Lutyens, who had restored Mells Manor, to design a reconstruction of Mells Park House on the same estate. The latter building was later owned by Consolidated Gold Fields and used for secret negotiations between the South African Government and the African National Congress in the late 1980s.
Inside the church are two other Lutyens designs: a memorial wreath for Violet’s brother Raymond, and the base of an equestrian statue of Violet’s nephew Edward Horner, also killed in World War I.
H.H. Asquith was made 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith and died in 1928, with his grandson Julian, a diplomat, becoming 2nd Earl. Julian married Anne Palairet, a former Bletchley Park codebreaker, in 1947. The third and current earl is Julian’s son Raymond Asquith, a former MI6 head of station in Moscow. In 1985, he exfiltrated the KGB officer and British agent Oleg Gordievsky from the Soviet Union, taking him over the Finnish border in the boot of a car. He is married to Clare Pollen, an academic who has proposed that Shakespeare was a covert Catholic who incorporated coded religious language in his plays.
3. Biographical summary
| Occupation | Politician, diarist |
| Country | UK |
| Career | President, Women’s Liberal Federation (1923-25, 1939-45). Promoter, Focus in Defence of Freedom and Peace*. A governor of the BBC (1941-46) and the Old Vic theatre (1945-69). President (1945-47) then Vice-President (1947-65), Liberal Party Organisation. Vice-Chair, United Europe Movement (1947)**; member, Royal Commission on the Press (1947-49); Patron, United Nations Association – UK***; President, Royal Institute of International Affairs (‘Chatham House’ think tank) (1964-69). Three volumes of diaries and letters, written 1904-69, published 1997-2000. |
| Born | 15 April 1887, Eton House, John Street, Hampstead, London (13 years younger than Churchill) |
| Father | H.H. Asquith (1852-1928), Liberal prime minister 1908-16 |
| Mother | Helen Melland (1854-1891); died of typhoid fever when Violet was four. Stepmother Emma ‘Margot’ Tennant (1864-1945); socialite, author |
| Siblings | Fourth of five children: 1. Raymond (1878-1916), barrister; killed in World War I, aged 37 2. Herbert ‘Beb’ or ‘Bob’ (1881-1947), poet, novelist, barrister 3. Arthur ‘Oc’ (1883-1939), army officer, government administrator and businessman 4. Helen Violet (1887-1969) 5. Cyril (1890-1954), barrister and judge Step-sister and step-brother by father and stepmother (three others died in early childhood): 6. Elizabeth (1897-1945), author 7. Anthony ‘Puffin’ (1902-68), film director |
| Education | Home schooled; finishing schools in Dresden and Paris |
| Spouse | Maurice ‘Bongie’ Bonham Carter (1990-1960), private secretary to H.H. Asquith 1910-16; m. 1915 until Maurice’s death |
| Relationships | O.T. ‘Foxie’ Falk, economist |
| Children | 1. Cressida (1917-1998), archaeologist 2. Laura (1918-1994), politician; married Jo Grimond, Liberal Party leader 1956-67 and 1976 3. Mark (1922-1994), publisher and politician 4. Raymond (1929-2004), banker; father of actress Helena Bonham Carter (1966-) |
| Died | 19 February 1969, aged 81 (four years after Churchill) |
| Buried | St Andrew’s Church, Mells, Somerset |
| Chartwell | Visitors’ book: 12 recorded visits (1950-63) |
| Other Club | No |
| Nickname | Bloody Duck (Churchill) |
* A Churchill-led anti-fascist alliance.
** The United Europe Movement opposed supranational entities and favoured intergovernmental cooperation: European Union, ‘The History of the European Union – 1947’, Europa.Eu, 2018.
*** A membership organisation promoting UK participation in the United Nations.
4. See also
Churchill’s early love interests
- Plowden, Pamela
Churchill’s family
- Stanley, Venetia (Clementine’s first cousin, once removed)
Suffragettes
- Suffragettes
Liberal party policies
- Budget Protest League
- Lloyd George, David
- Sinclair, Archibald
Churchill controversies
- Radical Liberalism
5. Further reading
Violet Bonham Carter
- Bonham Carter, Violet, Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1914-1945, ed. by Mark Pottle (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998)
- Bonham Carter, Violet, Daring to Hope: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1946-1969, ed. by Mark Pottle (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000)
- Bonham Carter, Violet, Lantern Slides: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1904-1914, ed. by Mark Pottle (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996)
Bonham Carter and Churchill
- Bonham Carter, Violet, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (Eyre & Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965)
- Churchill, Winston, Great Contemporaries (Collins, 1959)
Suffragettes
- BBC, ‘Late Night Line-Up – The Suffragettes’, BBC iPlayer, 1968 (TV interview with Joan Bakewell)
Asquith family
- Asquith, H.H., Letters to Venetia Stanley, ed. by Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock (Oxford University Press, 2014)
- Clifford, Colin, The Asquiths (John Murray, 2003)
- De Courcy, Anne, Margot at War: Love and Betrayal in Downing Street, 1912-1916 (Orion, 2014)
- Lester, V. Markham, H. H. Asquith: Last of the Romans (Lexington Books, 2019)
6. References
1. Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (Eyre & Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965), p. 16.
2. Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him, p. 16.
3. Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him, p. 18.
4. Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him, p. 17.
5. Winston S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries (Putnam, 1937), p. 115.
6. Churchill, Great Contemporaries, p. 115.
7. Churchill, Great Contemporaries, p. 115.
8. Frederick W. F. Smith, Churchill, 1874-1922 (Harrap, 1989), p. 112.
9. Violet Bonham Carter, Lantern Slides: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1904-1914, ed. by Mark Pottle (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), p. 162.
10. Violet Bonham-Carter, Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 123.
11. Winston S. Churchill and Clementine Churchill, Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, ed. by Mary Soames (Black Swan, 1999), p. 127.
12. Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury, ‘Motion for an Humble Address, and Tributes’, Hansard, 1965.
13. Mark Pottle, ‘Carter, (Helen) Violet Bonham [Née (Helen) Violet Asquith], Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2007).
14. Churchill and Churchill, p. 307.
15. Churchill and Churchill, p. 67.
16. H.H. Asquith, H.H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, ed. by Michael Brock (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 9.
17. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 473.
18. Churchill and Churchill, p. 66.
19. Alice Wasley, ‘The Incredible Link Between Helena Bonham Carter & Suffragette Villain’, Motion Picture Association, 2015.
20. Wasley.
21. Red Team, ‘Helena Bonham Carter Is Red’s November Cover Star’, Red, 2015.
22. Pottle.
23. Asa Briggs, Governing the BBC (BBC, 1979), p. 72.
24. Pottle.