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On this day 90 years ago

Ninety years ago today Jennie Churchill, American mother of Winston, died. She had fallen down the stairs after slipping on some high heeled shoes which had not had their soles adequately scored. At first it was thought she had just sprained an ankle but then gangrene set in. She had the lower leg amputated and for a while it seemed as if she would recover. But on June 9th 1921 she suddenly haemorrhaged. Winston famously ran through the streets in his pyjamas to be with his adored mother before she died. She was just 67 and still radiating the energy and vigour which made her so attractive to younger men.

Although married to Montague Porch, a Nigerian civil servant, she was still known as Lady Randolph Churchill and buried, as she had requested, at Bladon churchyard just outside Blenheim Palace because she wanted in death to lie next to her errant first husband, Lord Randolph Churchill.

Not so ancient history on Crete

Seventy years ago next month, one of the bloodiest battles of World War Two began. German paratroopers landed on Crete on the morning of May 20th 1941. They encountered fierce opposition from Greek and Allied forces, including many Anzacs, and at first it looked as if the invasion would be a Nazi disaster. But, in spite of suffering appalling casualties, after ten days the Germans conquered the island. For the next four years the Nazi invaders encountered some of the fiercest resistance from a civilian population anywhere in Europe. The retaliation was brutal and has left lasting scars.

It is impossible not to think of those years as I wander around the small square at the south end of Kondylaki Street in Chania, the beautiful port town of Eastern Crete where I am staying. As soon as the Germans seized the island they demanded a complete list of all members of the Jewish community on Crete which then totalled around 300. Three years later, by then swollen with refugees from other parts of Greece, they were all rounded up. At dawn on May 29th 1944 the entire area of the old town was blocked off by trucks as loudspeakers ordered the Jews out onto the street. Allowed to take nothing with them, they were herded into the square today full of cafes pulsing with life and shops selling vibrant clothes and gaudy souvenirs. They were driven to a nearby prison where they remained for two weeks with little food and no changes of clothes while their homes were looted. Finally, on June 9th they were all loaded onto a converted tanker en route for Auschwitz via Athens but were torpedoed by a British submarine targeting German ships and all drowned.

The Jewish presence on Crete, dating back to the 4th century BC not long after the conquest by Alexander the Great, was wiped out in one day. The ancient synagogue of Etz Hayyim, although much looted and attacked over the years, is all that remains. For the last decade there has been a determined effort to revive Jewish life in Chania and on the eve of Passover a local restaurant hosts a community Seder, or Passover meal, which attracts a motley crew of Greeks and tourists, both Jewish and not. I sat next to a Russian who was next to a half Greek half Turkish man , not Jewish, but who said he came because he liked to celebrate the revival of Jewish life. Another guest felt guilty that the local community had not been able to do more in 1944.

Later this month there will be commemorations of the Battle of Crete in various parts of the island perhaps the last time that anyone who was alive at the time will attend.

Cat’s Paws at Work again

I finally caught up with the justly praised centenary exhibition devoted to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes at the Victoria and Albert Museum and drooled over the fabulous costumes remarkably preserved with all their brilliance and sparkle intact. I loved the fascinating commentaries on the music of the ballets by Howard Goodall and restored footage of Karsavina showing what dancing was like before the Ballets Russes when dancers had some flesh on them. And I consumed a host of mini biographies of such key artistic figures of the early twentieth century as Stravinsky, Bakst, Nijinsky, Fokine, Lydia Lopkova and my namesake – the wild and beautiful ballerina, Ida Rubinstein. For 25 years I was a Rubinstein, too, but in those days only knew about Anton and Arthur not Ida.

But I was reminded of one story which was not told here: on June 21 1911 Nijinsky made his debut on the London stage largely thanks to the support patronage and organisation of the beautiful society hostess, Gladys de Grey by then Gladys Ripon. Each performance of the Ballets Russes was a personal triumph for Gladys none more so than the one given four days after the coronation, in front of the new King and Queen, at which she swept up and down the aisle of the Opera House personally greeting as many members of the audience as she could.

This public and dramatic success worked like a knife in and old wound for Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie (by then Mrs Cornwallis West). Jennie could never forget how her late husband, Lord Randolph had admired, wooed and perhaps even bedded Gladys. Jennie decided to pursue an even more ambitious goal of promoting a Shakespeare Memorial and a National Theatre largely out of rivalry with Gladys. Actually Jennie’s was a brilliantly imaginative idea to raise funds for a National Memorial Shakespearean Theatre. She recreated a Shakespearean world at Earl’s Court with buildings designed by Lutyens, Elizabethan taverns and jousting competitions. But her event flopped and yet again Jennie lost money. Soon after she lost her husband too, George Cornwallis West. Jennie died in 1921 after a fall down stairs Diaghilev eight years later in 1929.

Wimmin’s Work

I have just been to see Made in Dagenham. It’s a film about 187 women machinists who went on strike at the Ford Motor Company in 1968 initially when their work was down graded from skilled. Slowly the issues broadened out into an all out strike for equal pay for women and one of the best moments in the film is seeing the idea dawning on these brave, if rather too well dressed and coiffed women, that equal pay is not only a right it’s an achievable right. It’s a beautiful film and when the men turn against them, very moving. At least, it made me cry.

It reminded me of how, ten years later in 1978, I too faced the power of my own union, the NUJ, or at least a small part of it. I wanted to take maternity leave and come back to my job at Reuters in Fleet Street. But, as the Father of the Chapel reminded me, I was just one woman with one problem and they were in the middle of fighting a pay claim for all five hundred or so journalists. To support me in my battle to keep my job open until after the baby’s birth would divert energy and risk weakening the fight for more money for us all…surely I understood that?

I understood enough to resign from the NUJ and realise I lacked the courage of the Dagenham women. I resigned from Reuters, paid back my maternity leave and became a freelance journalist and member of the ever-supportive Society of Authors. Later that year the law changed but I had produced my baby too early. It’s hard to believe these antiquated ideas are so recent, until you see the bouffant hairstyles, black rimmed eyes and fabulous Biba dresses. I remember wearing them! Discrimination against women in the workplace still exists but not quite like it did in the sixties and seventies before the law changed. The film started from a Whistledown Radio programme in 2003, The Reunion, in which the Dagenham strikers were brought back together to share their experiences and at the end you get to meet the real women…