Mary Spencer-Churchill was born at Chartwell, in the county of Kent in southeast England, on September 15, 1922. She was the youngest child of former United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill. During World War II, she enlisted as a private and served as a personal aide to her father for several summit meetings, including the Potsdam conference in 1945, where her father, President Harry S. Truman and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin planned the postwar world.
She married Christopher Soames and nurtured his career as a prominent Tory politician, ambassador to France, and the last governor of one of Britain's last major colonies, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). After her husband's death in 1987, she wrote a series of books about her family including Clementine Churchill: The Biography of a Marriage, which won the Wolfson History Prize, and A Daughter's Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill's Youngest Child. She was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Dame of the British Empire. In 2005, Queen Elizabeth appointed her a Ladies Companion of the Garter, Britain's highest chivalric order. She died on May 31, 2014 at the age of 91.
030