The Day the King Came to Chartwell (2024)

April 20, 2024

Finest Hour 199, Special Issue 2022

Page 31

By Katherine Carter

Katherine Carter is Property Curator at Chartwell.

When King Charles III (then Prince Charles) visited Chartwell in June 2017, he became the third generation of the Royal Family to walk through the grand oak doors of Winston Churchill’s country house. Following in the footsteps of his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and his aunt, Princess Margaret, the king-to-be came to see the house of the great statesman who served six monarchs over the course of his long career.

It was an unusually grey and windy day when the car of the Prince of Wales, as he was, pulled through the large wooden gates and onto the driveway at Chartwell. In that moment, I found myself thinking about the members of the Churchills’ own staff and how they might have felt upon the arrival of royalty during those visits in the early 1950s. I was once shown an entirely unofficial photograph of Princess Margaret’s visit, taken from the top floor of the house, where the kitchen was in the years after the war. I loved the idea of that sense of excitement among those working for the Churchill family and the compulsion to capture the moment with their own cameras for posterity. That feeling of both awe and anticipation was exactly what my colleagues and I felt awaiting the future king on the doorstep of Churchill’s house.

Officially His Royal Highness visited in his capacity as President of the National Trust. We were celebrating the success of our fundraising campaign, which had been undertaken to acquire almost a thousand objects that had been on long-term loan to the trust. One of the items was Chartwell’s Visitors Book, an unrivalled historic record of life at Chartwell with more than 750 signatories. We had on display the page of the book recording his grandmother’s visit and which simply reads “Elizabeth R.” The royal signature is also beautifully underlined. I had the enormous pleasure and privilege of leading our new King’s tour that day, and, though the whole day was memorable, there were a handful of moments that felt extraordinarily special.

As we walked into Sir Winston’s bedroom, I remember there being a moment’s pause when the Prince saw the size of the room and its modest décor. My response was to point out that, because the room had never been open to the public before, the placement of the objects and pictures remained exactly as they had been when Churchill left his beloved house for the final time in the autumn of 1964.

It was at that point that our Royal visitor saw the famous photograph of his grandfather King George VI, the Queen (later Queen Mother), Princess Elizabeth (later Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II), and Princess Margaret as they stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during the VE-Day celebrations of 8 May 1945. In the centre of the Royal Family, during the very hour of victory, stood Churchill himself.

“The bedroom was Churchill’s inner sanctum, his most private space,” I remarked, “and the pictures he chose to hang on the walls represent those most special to him, and the ones he wanted to see each morning when he awoke, and each night before he went to bed.” “That’s wonderful,” the Prince replied, “It’s a brilliant photograph.”

We left Churchill’s bedroom and returned to the study—the beating heart of Chartwell. I had a particular surprise up my sleeve for our special guest and asked the group to pause for a moment while we stood on the carefully placed drugget that protects the precious rug given to Churchill by the Shah of Persia. I pulled out the conservator’s gloves from my pocket, put them on, and picked up a photograph from the shelf by Churchill’s desk. “I thought you might enjoy seeing this, Sir,” I said as I brought the photograph to him.

The picture is one from Balmoral, with Churchill standing proudly on the left wearing a spectacular double-breasted coat while holding his hat and cane in one hand. Standing resplendently in the centre is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, with the same heartwarming smile seen in the last official photographs taken of her before she passed away, also taken at Balmoral. The Queen is even, similar to those final photos, in a tartan skirt, which had been a garment of choice for her Balmoral stays throughout her life. Beside her in the photograph is our new king as a small boy holding the hand of his younger sister, Princess Anne.

I remember noticing that the Prince’s face changed at that point in his visit. He was clearly remembering the time he had spent as a child with Sir Winston. He even pointed out the car featured in the photograph, of which he had fond memories. He thanked me for showing him this wonderful (and signed!) image of his mother as a young queen with her family during the earliest years of her reign. The Prince seemed especially delighted that such a lovely family moment of his now forms a permanent part of our display at Churchill’s house.

There are, of course, countless treasures in Chartwell’s collection, but I think that moment, of showing the Prince a photograph that Churchill himself cherished featuring the future monarch as a young boy, might very well be among the most special interactions I have ever had with an object on display in the house. As Curator of the Churchills’ most favoured residence, it is my job to help people connect with the Churchill family’s beloved possessions, and I feel very proud to have been able to do that on the day the King came to Chartwell.