Travel Winston’s girl takes Manhattan
Artist Edwina Sandys, Churchill’s granddaughter, is inspired by her New York home and her great ancestor. By Anthony Haden-Guest
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rt wasn’t Edwina Sandys’s first choice when it came to deciding on an occupation. That was in the early ’70s, when she was married to Piers Dixon (1928-2017), son of the British Ambassador to France, with two sons. ‘I thought, what next? I should be doing something,’ says Edwina, 83. But what? ‘Then I thought, well, we’ve got a family business.’ Yes, indeed. Winston Churchill was her grandfather; she is the daughter of Diana Churchill (1909-63). Duncan Sandys (1908-87), her father, was a Cabinet Minister under Macmillan and Churchill, his father-in-law. Going for a seat in parliament was clearly the answer for Edwina, too. She was chosen to contest a difficult seat in London’s East End. ‘I made a speech. I said striped suit and spotted tie will not win this constituency,’ she says. ‘As I was a different sort of person from the average Conservative toff, they’d be more likely to be interested in me.’ She was selected. Except it wasn’t the answer. Piers Dixon had already been offered a chance 88 The Oldie March 2022
Edwina with Child, UN, New York, 1979 Inset: Winston and Edwina, far left, 1943
at a seat, but was informed by the constituency that the offer had been made on the assumption that the Dixons’ presence would be as a married couple and would be withdrawn if Sandys pursued her bid. He went on to be MP for Truro from 1970 to 1974. She withdrew, teary-eyed. But she held on to the magic
markers, then rather a novelty, that she had been using on her electoral map to colour in the areas she had been to. ‘When I had to give up the seat, I did quite a few abstract drawings, on nice heavy paper,’ she says. These were her first drawings since childhood but they looked strong. So she framed and hung them. Thus the accidental birth of Edwina Sandys, amateur artist. It is interesting that her grandfather had been Britain’s best-known amateur artist. ‘We used to watch him,’ she says. ‘It was a very lovely thing – because we saw him when he was at home and relaxed. He was a different person from when he was in the House of Commons. When he went on holiday, he took the canvases with him. He did them fairly quickly. He didn’t stay with one for a month or anything like that.’ Sandys’s birth as a professional artist was also sudden. A friend who came round for a drink one evening owned a restaurant on the King’s Road, Chelsea, and told her of an ugly incident that very day. ‘All the paintings we had hanging in the restaurant were stolen,’ he said. He was looking around her walls as she commiserated. ‘Why
