Mary Soames

Mary Soames, born Mary Spencer Churchill in 1922, was the youngest child of Winston and Clementine Churchill. As a teenager at the beginning of the Second World War she volunteered with the Red Cross and Women’s Voluntary Service before joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1941. She served with anti-aircraft batteries in Britain and north-west Europe, eventually becoming a junior commander. Her wartime experience gave her a perspective on her father’s premiership that combined the intimacy of family life with direct participation in Britain’s military mobilisation.

In 1947 Mary married the Conservative politician and diplomat Christopher Soames, with whom she had five children. She later became an author, biographer and important custodian of Churchill family history, writing a major biography of her mother and editing her parents’ correspondence. Her publications used private papers and personal memory to illuminate the family behind Winston Churchill’s public career while also preserving evidence for later historians. Created Baroness Soames through her husband’s peerage and later appointed to the Order of the Garter, she died in London in 2014 aged ninety-one.

Clare Harvey’s The Gunner Girl places Mary Churchill, later Mary Soames, alongside the fictional women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, using her anti-aircraft service as a real counterpart to their wartime duties. Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile shows Mary inside the Churchill family during the first year of her father’s premiership, when the Blitz, Downing Street and Chequers make private family life inseparable from Britain’s struggle to remain in the war.