Winston and Clementine: 56 years of letters signed with a pig and a cat

By The Yourtale team · Published 31 October 2026 · 5 min read

Pig and Kat were Winston and Clementine Churchill. He was Pig (at first Pug), she was Kat, and through 56 years of marriage they signed their letters with those names and a small sketch of a pig or a cat beside the signature. Their daughter Mary later gathered some 1,700 of their letters, notes and telegrams into one book.

We told this story in 87 seconds on our channels. This page is the longer version, with the sources, and with the question it left us wanting to ask our own parents.

Key takeaways

• He was Pig, she was Kat. The names ran from 1908 to the 1960s, often with a drawn pig or cat beside the signature.
• The proposal nearly did not happen. He overslept, she almost left, and a rainstorm at Blenheim did the rest.
• Some 1,700 letters survive, kept and edited by their daughter Mary.

How did Winston and Clementine meet?

Clementine Hozier first met Winston Churchill at a ball at Crewe Hall in 1904. In March 1908 they were seated side by side at a dinner given by Lady St Helier, a distant relative of hers, and this time it took (Wikipedia). Five months of social meetings and frequent letters followed.

They had to write. In the summer of 1908, as their daughter Mary Soames tells it in her biography of her mother, unmarried girls did not lunch or dine alone with men, so the two of them met mostly at parties. Clementine was deeply in love and kept it from even her close friends (Mary Soames, reprinted by the International Churchill Society).

What happened on the morning of the proposal?

In early August 1908 a fire burned a whole wing of Burley Hall, near Oakham, where Winston was staying. Clementine heard a garbled rumour before The Times confirmed that nobody had been hurt. On 8 August she wrote to him: "My dear heart stood still with terror."

He had already asked her to Blenheim Palace, where he was born, promising that "in its garden we shall find lots of places to talk in, & lot of things to talk about." She hesitated ("only a sudden access of shyness," she wrote back). She was also down to her last laundered and starched dress, with no maid to help her make it last.

On the morning of 11 August he arranged to meet her in the rose garden after breakfast. Then he overslept. Clementine came down on time, ate alone, and seriously considered going straight back to London. His cousin the Duke of Marlborough noticed, sent a sharp note upstairs, and took her for a half-hour drive round the estate in his buggy. When they got back, Winston was waiting, anxiously scanning the horizon.

That afternoon a torrential rainstorm caught them on a walk, and they sheltered in the Temple of Diana, a little Greek temple above the great lake. There he asked her to marry him. When the shower was over, they came out engaged. She had asked him to keep it secret until she had told her mother. On the way back they met the other guests on the lawn, and he ran across it waving his arms and told everyone (Soames).

They married at St Margaret's, Westminster, on 12 September 1908. Twenty-two years later Churchill ended his memoir My Early Life on that date: "September 1908, when I married and lived happily ever afterwards." It is the last line of the book (My Early Life, 1930).

Why did the Churchills sign their letters Pig and Kat?

The sources we read do not say how the names began, and we are not going to guess. What the letters show is that they never dropped them. He was "pig" (originally "pug"), she was "kat", and the names run from the shy notes they passed under the same roof at Blenheim in 1908 to the shaky handwritten ones of 1963, often with a small squiggly sketch of a pig (or a dog) or a cat next to the signature (London Review of Books). The International Churchill Society shows one of her 1909 letters ending in a drawn cat, and his pug drawing from a letter the same year (ICS).

They wrote even when they were in the same house. Clementine argued better in writing than in person, where a disagreement was apt to end badly, so the page is where the hard things got said (HistoryNet).

Mary Soames, their youngest child, edited the archive into Speaking for Themselves (in the US, Winston and Clementine): some 1,700 letters, notes, telegrams and memoranda, some of them undated, across a marriage that lasted until his death in January 1965 (HistoryNet; Wikipedia).

What did your parents call each other?

Most long marriages have a Pig and Kat. Very few of those names are written down, and the story of how they started usually goes with the two people who used them. The Churchills had a daughter who kept 1,700 pieces of paper. Most families have a phone.

Next time you are with your parents, put your phone on the table, hit record, and ask what they called each other, and why. Then ask how the proposal really went. Once they get going, our free questions to ask your grandparents and interview guide will keep it going.

That conversation is the one we built Yourtale to hold. An AI interviewer asks the questions, AI drafts the chapters from what was said, and someone in the family reads and approves every page before it prints. We are not open yet. Join the waitlist and we will write once, on the day we open.

Frequently asked questions

Why did Winston Churchill sign his letters with a pig?

His pet name in the marriage was "pig" (at first "pug"), and Clementine's was "kat". They kept the names for the whole marriage and often drew a small pig or cat beside the signature. The sources do not record how the names began.

How many letters did Winston and Clementine write each other?

Some 1,700 letters, notes, telegrams and memoranda were edited by their daughter Mary Soames into one volume. They wrote across 56 years of marriage, sometimes while living in the same house.

Where did Winston Churchill propose to Clementine?

In the Temple of Diana, a small Greek temple above the lake at Blenheim Palace, on 11 August 1908. They had taken shelter there from a rainstorm. That morning he had overslept and she had nearly gone back to London.

How we made this

We researched this story for our short from Mary Soames's biography of her mother (as reprinted by the International Churchill Society), the London Review of Books review of the letters, HistoryNet's review of the US edition, and Churchill's My Early Life. Every quote above was checked against those texts. The short is narrated by a synthetic voice, and the pig and cat in it are our own drawings, not reproductions of theirs.