Biography | Winston Churchill — He Bought This Kent Hillside House for Five Thousand Pounds

People treat Chartwell as the house Churchill always had.

He bought it in September 1922, after it failed at auction, for five thousand pounds from a Harrow contemporary, Captain Archibald Campbell Colquhoun.

The legal sale completed on 11 November 1922.

The house needed rebuilding. Dry rot was already in the fabric. Philip Tilden reconstructed it through 1924 before the family moved in properly.

The previous year had already taken his mother and his youngest child. By the end of 1922 he had also lost his Dundee seat.

Chartwell became the place where the out-of-office years were spent: books and speeches in the study, walls and lakes built by his own hand in the garden, and a dining table used to gather the people who would argue against German rearmament.

The house was a drain on money. In 1946 a group of friends bought it for the National Trust on the condition that Winston and Clementine could stay for life.

He left it for the last time in October 1964 and died in London the following January.

Clementine handed the house to the Trust after his death. It opened to visitors in 1966.

The rooms are kept close to the arrangement of his lifetime, including the studio that holds the largest public group of his paintings.

The pin is the house, now a National Trust property on Mapleton Road above Westerham. It is a museum, not a private home.

Stand on the north-east slope and the reason for the purchase is still the view. The work done here was the unglamorous kind: pages, brick, and argument, year after year.

Photo: Chartwell, Wikimedia Commons