Welcome to Dan Snow's history. We've had a lot of episodes on this podcast

talking about Winston Churchill who talked about his great successes, his failures,

his attitude towards empire and race, his domestic policy, his leadership style.

On this podcast we are going to talk about his daughters. Rachel Tretouille has

just written the first biography of Winston Churchill's daughters, Diana, Sarah,

Marigold and Mary. They lived really extraordinary lives and they

present at many of the seismic moments of Churchill's career. Winston Churchill

had had a very difficult relationship with his parents. They were remote, they were

inaccessible, they're too busy to worry about what their son was up to, and

Winston was desperate to do things differently. He spent a huge amount of time

with his kids, he built them a tree house. He was probably more involved than many

of his generation and breeding would have been, even so there were enormous

challenges growing up as the children of Winston Churchill. That was Diana,

there was Randolph his boy of course, but Sarah, Marigold and Mary, Marigold died

of just two and a half years, deeply traumatic event in the early 1920s for

Churchill family. The others were going remarkable life journeys, which weren't

easy. Churchill suffered bouts of depression during his life. Diana would

develop mental health problems and eventually committed suicide. Sarah

wrestled with alcoholism. This is a story about a family at the very heart of

British, political and social life, and a story about what it's like to go up as

a child of greatness. Rachel Trethui has found all sorts of new archival material

and it's an absolutely fascinating discussion of this over scrutinized family,

...