Sarah Churchill: Winston’s Right-Hand “Man”

One day in early November of 1943 I was summoned to the commanding officer and told by him that leave of absence was to be granted to me so that I could accompany my father on an important journey. The RAF station at Medmenham was quite near to Chequers.…I hurried there now, and my father told me that a conference between the President of the United States, Stalin and himself had been arranged at Tehran, that the President, despite his health and physical handicap was making the long journey and that Stalin had finally been lured from his lair. My father and the President were to meet in Cairo before the conference in Tehran. I was to accompany my father as one of his aides-de-camp….I walked on air.—Sarah Churchill¹

Though many people remember Mary as the most visible of Winston Churchill’s children from the Potsdam Conference in 1945 through the postwar period, few realize that it was actually her older sister Sarah who accompanied the Prime Minister as his during his tripartite wartime conferences with Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. Early in the war, Winston and Clementine had decided that a member of the family should