Diplomatic daughters go behind the scenes at Yalta

From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political front doors. With an unerring eye for the revealing detail, Catherine Grace Katz has uncovered a fascinating generational back-story to the Yalta summit of February 1945.

The three varyingly spirited daughters of Churchill, Roosevelt and Averell Harriman who accompanied their world-leading fathers to the freezing bleakness of the Crimea to thrash out terms for ending the second world war all played their crucial role. As Churchill and his second daughter Sarah crossed the Crimean steppe to the sulphurous muddy peninsula in the Black Sea they drove through countryside where ‘nearly all the buildings lay in scorched ruins’. Stalin’s devastating regime was unmissable.

Roosevelt had travelled the 6,000 miles with his only daughter Anna, still disguising from onlookers his dependency, as a long-term polio victim, on a wheelchair. Harriman, America’s glamorous, wealthy ambassador to Russia, arrived from Moscow with his youngest daughter Kathy to join the Russian leader Joseph Stalin, a man whom they had once ‘jocularly referred to as Uncle Joe’.