Mary Soames. (2012). A Daughter's Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill's Youngest Child. Random House Publishing Group.

Mary Soames. 2012. A Daughter's Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill's Youngest Child. Random House Publishing Group.

Mary Soames, A Daughter's Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill's Youngest Child. Random House Publishing Group, 2012.

Mary Soames. A Daughter's Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill's Youngest Child. Random House Publishing Group, 2012.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Soames, Mary
   • bioText: Mary Soames was the youngest child of Clementine and Winston Churchill. She was born in 1922 and brought up at Chartwell in Kent. In 1941, at age eighteen, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and served in mixed anti-aircraft batteries in England and Europe. She accompanied her father as his aide-de-camp on several of his wartime overseas journeys. In 1945 she was awarded the MBE (military). In 1947 she married Captain Christopher Soames, Coldstream Guards, later Lord Soames, PC, GCMG, CH. She was also the author of her mother's biography, Clementine Churchill, and edited Speaking for Themselves, the personal letters between her parents. Mary Soames died in 2014.
   • name: Mary Soames

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Random House

publishDate

2012-07-24T00:00:00-04:00

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title

A Daughter's Tale

fullDescription

In this charming and intimate memoir, the youngest daughter of Winston Churchill shares stories from her remarkable life—and tells of the unbreakable bond she forged with her father through some of the most tumultuous years in British history. 
Through a combination of personal reminiscences and never-before-published diary entries, Mary Soames, the youngest daughter of Clementine and Winston Churchill, describes what it was like growing up as the scion of one of the lions of twentieth-century statecraft. Warm memories of a childhood spent roaming the grounds of the family’s country estate, tending to a small menagerie of pets, evoke the idyllic mood of England between the wars. As she matures into one of her father’s most trusted companions, we are given rare glimpses inside the glittering social milieu through which the Churchills moved—as well as the rough-and-tumble world of British politics. With fly-on-the-wall immediacy, Mary describes the momentous debate in Parliament where Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was driven from office, paving the way for Winston Churchill’s ascension and the grueling crucible of World War II.
 
During the war Mary served as a gunner in the women’s auxiliary, helping to shoot down the German V-1 rockets then bedeviling London. Styling herself as Private M. Churchill to avoid publicity, she led a unique double life that comes vividly alive again in the retelling. Splitting her time between luncheons at Chequers—where she spent time with the likes of Lord Mountbatten—and the turret of an anti-aircraft battery, she was never far from the center of the action. Hitler even reportedly hatched a plan, never consummated, to hire spies to seduce her in order to gain access to secret British war plans. She attended the Potsdam Conference as her father’s aide-de-camp, arranging a memorable dinner with Harry Truman and Josef Stalin (whom she acidly remembers as “small, dapper, and rather twinkly”). And when British voters overwhelmingly turned on Winston Churchill in the 1945 election, it is left to Mary to recount the pain and devastation her father could never publicly express. 
 
The mutual love and affection between Mary Soames and her parents pours forth from every page of this elegantly written memoir. A Daughter’s Tale is both a moving personal history and a source of untold insight into one of the enduring icons of British national life.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The Spectator
   • content:

     "Perceptive, funny, always totally honest, it provides an unequalled view of the corridors of power."

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 2, 2012
     Churchill’s youngest daughter (born in 1922) reflects on fond memories of the famous British prime minister and on her own role in a heavy antiaircraft battery unit during WWII. Soames (Clementine Churchill) remembers her doting father and socially distracted mother as she grew from much wanted baby into early adulthood, culminating in her wedding after previous short-lived engagements. Thanks to her personal diaries and unpublished letters, Soames recreates with specificity some amusing scenes, casually dropping names like Charlie Chaplin and Lawrence of Arabia, and also commenting on the great man who, while building his power structure in government, was unable to house-train the family’s beloved dog. Although occasionally overladen with daily monotony, Soames’s memoir presents a unique perspective on wartime Britain and her own desire to protect her precious Papa from political and personal attacks while strengthening her own character. 32 pages of photos. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown (U.K.).

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 15, 2012
     Memoir of the youngest child of Winston Churchill, focused largely on the years encompassing World War II. Countless books have been written about Churchill, and even this memoir is only the latest book that Soames (Clementine Churchill, 2002, etc.) has written or edited about her family's history. As the baby of the family, born in 1922, she is Churchill's only surviving child, and she delivers a rare eyewitness account of her father. However, readers looking for an emotionally engaging look at the Churchill family's private lives will be disappointed. Soames clearly worshipped her father, but she appears not to have known him on a deep emotional level. Indeed, other than a few airy letters, the author shares relatively little direct communication between them. She draws heavily on journals and letters she wrote during her young womanhood, in which she apparently had a habit of recounting the menus of lunches and dinners in great detail. Though famous figures make appearances, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, T.E. Lawrence and Charlie Chaplin, Soames rarely judges anyone as less than utterly charming, nor does she provide particularly useful information about historical events. The memoir becomes marginally more interesting in later chapters, as when Soames recounts her stint serving with the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the war, and especially when she briefly tells of her visit to the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. However, Soames rarely delves much below the surface of things, keeping events (and emotions) strictly at arm's length--which often makes for dreary reading. A lackluster memoir, of interest only to the most devoted Churchill aficionados.

     COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 15, 2012
     

     Winston Churchill's reputation as the indomitable prime minister who led Britain through World War II precedes him. Soames (Clementine Churchill: The Biography of a Marriage) is the youngest of Winston and Clementine Churchill's children (and the only one still living), and her recollections, supported by her journals, reveal a loving father whose triumphs and frustrations were regularly shared at the dinner table. She also tells the story of her own coming of age as an adolescent living through the London Blitz, desperate for normalcy in her debutante year. By 1943, two years before war's end, a more mature Mary had become her father's aide-de-camp, accompanying him to North America for the Quebec Conference, which resulted in the Allied invasion of France, the beginning of the end of the war. This memoir is a loving tribute to a famous father and a tale of the daughter who chose to be at his side. VERDICT Soames's use of her own journals in filling out her memories results in a perspective on both herself and her father that few could match. Recommended for both memoir and popular Winston Churchill biography collections.--Lisa Guidarini, Algonquin Area P.L. Dist., IL

     Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 1, 2012
     Soames, Winston Churchill's youngest child, filters some of the greatest events and most remarkable leaders of the twentieth century through her own personal lens in this detailed memoir of her early childhood at Chartwell and her wartime experiences in London and beyond. Buoyed by numerous diary entries and excerpts from letters, her memories, even after such a long period of time, ring clear and true. After a privileged, though not overly pampered, childhood, she, like so many of her generational peers, was abruptly thrust into adulthood by her nation's entry into WWII. Enlisting in the ATS (Auxillary Territorial Service), she served as a gunner girl and accompanied her father as aide-de-camp to both the Quebec Conference (1944) and the Postdam Conference (1945). What really distinguishes her recollections is the fact that she so often straddled two worlds, moving between two distinct social and occupational circles. Soames gratefully and graciously shares her box seat at the crossroads of history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

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In this charming and intimate memoir, the youngest daughter of Winston Churchill shares stories from her remarkable life—and tells of the unbreakable bond she forged with her father through some of the most tumultuous years in British history. 
Through a combination of personal reminiscences and never-before-published diary entries, Mary Soames, the youngest daughter of Clementine and Winston Churchill, describes what it was like growing up as the scion of one of the lions of twentieth-century statecraft. Warm memories of a childhood spent roaming the grounds of the family’s country estate, tending to a small menagerie of pets, evoke the idyllic mood of England between the wars. As she matures into one of her father’s most trusted companions, we are given rare glimpses inside the glittering social milieu through which the Churchills moved—as well as the rough-and-tumble world of British politics. With...

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