‘It’s not a bad life for the leaders of the British bourgeoisie! There’s plenty for them to protect in their capitalist system!’ So wrote Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, after his first visit to Winston Churchill’s country house at Chartwell in Kent. He described the house thus: ‘A wonderful place! Eighty-four acres of land … all clothed in a truly English dark-blue haze.’

Churchill had bought Chartwell in 1922 with the fruits of an inheritance. Much of the frenetic energy that he devoted over the next eighteen years to writing and journalism sprang from his need to pay for the house’s upkeep and for the generous entertaining that he undertook there.

It was during the 1930s that Chartwell mattered most. Churchill was out of office. He had a flat in London but no official residence and, for much of the time, no particular reason to be in the capital. Chartwell was not, though, a retreat from the world. It was a kind of factory, filled with secretaries and research assistants who hammered Churchill’s literary and political productions into shape. It was also a meeting place – close enough to London for people to come down for lunch, dinner or an evening of conspiracy. It was, to a large extent, at Chartwell that Churchill plotted his political campaigns of the decade. Two of these were misguided. He sought to resist the limited reforms that the Baldwin government proposed to British rule in India and to defend Edward VIII during the crisis that sprang from the king’s insistence on marrying an American divorcée. Another campaign he led from there – against the appeasement of Nazi Germany and in favour of British rearmament – would, in retrospect, be seen as the most important in interwar British politics.

Churchill still had the best address book in Europe. Officials and ministers talked to him and sometimes provided him with confidential information. His country house was itself a huge advantage. Most upper-class weekends in the country meant a draughty bedroom, the certainty that breakfast (consisting of kedgeree) would be the least inedible meal of the day and the promise that conversation would be confined to hunting. Anyone who took refuge in the library would find nothing but bound copies of Punch. Those who came to see Churchill enjoyed a heated swimming pool and a generous supply of cold champagne. There was a superb library and a collection of maps that could be produced to explain any geopolitical crisis. Most of all, there was Churchill – exasperating and vain, but never dull. 

Katherine Carter, a curator at Chartwell, puts the house and the people who gathered there at the centre of her book. The result is a stimulating and enjoyable work that shows us interwar politics from an unfamiliar angle. She traces an extraordinary series of guests. T E Lawrence, the kind of adventurer whom Churchill admired, turned up on his motorbike to talk about air power. Joseph Kennedy, the US ambassador in London and father of JFK, came down, though his pro-German views do not seem to have been much influenced by Churchill’s eloquence. The most unexpected guest was Ghanshyam Das Birla, a close associate of Gandhi who came to lunch in 1935 and who seems to have got on surprisingly well with Churchill. Carter does not give us the menu, though one assumes that even Churchill did not, on this occasion, indulge his taste for beef and beer. 

As time went by, Churchill invited people who could tell him something about the state of Europe. They included Heinrich Brüning, chancellor of Germany between 1930 and 1932, and Richard von Coudenhove-­Kalergi, a Czech of Austro-Hungarian and Japanese descent who talked to Churchill about how Europe might be unified. Although on the Right, Churchill increasingly recognised that allies against Hitler might be found on the Left. He understood that Stalin – unlike Trotsky, whom he despised – was a Russian nationalist, more interested in defending his own frontiers than spreading revolution abroad. This accounts for the hospitality extended to Ivan Maisky. The ally that mattered most to Churchill was France. He received Léon Blum, the socialist prime minister of the Popular Front government, and Pierre Cot, the minister of aviation, who was close to the Communist Party.

Chartwell went with a particular style of political action. Cut out of day-to-day policymaking, Churchill had the time to think big. His house functioned almost as an academic institution in which public figures came to spend brief sabbaticals. Churchill himself was simultaneously occupied with writing journalistic pieces about the state of the world and historical works (principally a biography of his ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough). 

When war was declared, things changed. Churchill went back into government – as First Lord of the Admiralty and then as prime minister. Except when abroad to negotiate with his allies and harass his generals, Churchill fought the war from Downing Street – though he often spent weekends at Chequers, the prime minister’s official country house. Chartwell briefly came back to life from 1945 to 1951, when Churchill was leader of the opposition, and it was there that the bulk of his The Second World War was written. From 1951 to 1955, Churchill was prime minister once more, again having the use of Chequers. After his resignation in 1955, things were never quite the same. He was ill and depressed. He spent much time abroad in what Violet Bonham Carter called ‘Onassisland’ – on the yachts and in the villas of rich admirers. During the rare periods when he was at Chartwell, people still came to see him, but now they did so in the hope of cheering him up rather than because they needed to discuss matters of state. Long-suffering friends endured endless games of bezique or tried to kindle a spark of enthusiasm in Churchill by talking about Napoleon, one of his favourite hobby-horses.By the early 1960s, Churchill was, as Private Eye put it, ‘The Greatest Dying Englishman’ and plans for an elaborate state funeral had been drawn up. He was, after a service at St Paul’s, buried near Blenheim Palace, the ducal seat of his grandfather in which he had been born. Occasionally, even in his melancholy old age, Churchill looked back to the excitement and fun of Chartwell in the 1930s. He once said that he wanted to be buried under the croquet lawn there. It is a pity that he did not get his way.