by Working
WORKING
WITH
WINSTON
The Unsung Women
Behind Britain’s Greatest Statesman
CITA STELZER
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
For Irwin, once again, and always
‘Every biographer of a public figure who depends on
secretarial help, can only benefit by tracking down those
often silent witnesses who sat at the receiving end of their
subject’s voice, and were witness to the aspirations, shortcomings
and strivings of public life.’
Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill.1
‘Throughout my work I was conscious of how Churchill’s
extraordinary productivity depended in such large measure
upon those unsung labourers [the secretary shorthand
typists] in the Churchill vineyard.’
Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill.2
‘It took a nineteenth-century man – traditional in habit,
rational in thought, conservative in temper – to save the
twentieth century from itself… Totalitarianism… came
and went… And who is the hero of that story? Who slew
the dragon?… Above all, victory required one man without
whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning.
It required Winston Churchill.’
Charles Krauthammer 3
‘Like many others in all parts of the globe, I regard you as
the greatest Englishman in your country’s history and the
greatest statesman of our time, as the man whose courage,
wisdom and foresight saved his country and the free
world from Nazi servitude.’
David Ben-Gurion 4
‘His genius often outranged lesser mortals, to his cost.
This was his fatal flaw.’
Barry Gough5
CONTENTS
Foreword by Randolph Churchill
Preface by Cita Stelzer
1 Violet Pearman
2 Grace Hamblin
3 Kathleen Hill
4 Patrick Kinna
5 Jo Sturdee
6 Marian Holmes
7 Elizabeth Gilliatt
8 Lettice Marston
9 Cecily ‘Chips’ Gemmell
10 Jane Portal
11 Doreen Pugh
12 Catherine Snelling
Epilogue
Appendix 1: Operation Desperate
Appendix 2: The black mollies
Sources
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Image credits
Illustrations Insert
Index
FOREWORD
Randolph Churchill
MUCH HAS BEEN written about my great-grandfather and of the important world leaders, politicians and high-ranking military officers with whom he worked. But to maintain the pace at which he worked as an historian, painter, parliamentarian, cabinet minister and war leader, he required a vast staff. When Churchill strode the world stage, the secretarial and typing staff positions were inevitably filled by women, because during the most notable part of his career most men were in the military or in war service. Many of these female secretaries and shorthand typists, although extraordinarily talented and invaluable to Churchill in enabling him to live and work a full life with as little friction and annoyance as possible, remain unheralded.
Helping Churchill to persevere was a small army of hard-working, skilled women whose stories have come to light in a series of oral histories stored in the wonderful archives at Churchill College, Cambridge. Cita Stelzer has mined this source, giving us a view of my great-grandfather only hinted at in scattered journals until now. This is not a report on how Churchill behaved under the glare of publicity, nor when on his best behaviour dealing with his generals and allies. This is Churchill at work, as seen, day-to-day, under severe stress from outside events and self-imposed deadlines to produce the vast volume of histories that he somehow managed to compose during his Wilderness Years, as prime minister during the war, as Leader of the Opposition, and once again as prime minister. Here also is Churchill at play, usually painting – and all beautifully described by Stelzer.
That his work habits were eccentric there is no doubt. Stelzer describes the start of every day: a meeting in his bedroom promptly at 8 a.m. to read the papers and dictate his famous ‘Action This Day’ memoranda on everything from the conduct of the war to the bricks he would need for his next construction project. Secretaries scribbling, military officers talking, a budgie flying about and landing on any available head, including his own, cigar lit, cats being petted, telephone ringing – a veritable circus. All managed with calm precision over the years by a succession of women whose talents Stelzer so well describes.
These women somehow managed to have a complete office set up for Churchill wherever he travelled. Work never stopped and these exceptional women never stopped ‘taking down’, as it was called, keeping him in control of the government. Churchill was demanding; everything had to be ready whenever he arrived, things organized just as they had been at his beloved Chartwell and in Downing Street. And at home, fish had to be fed, dogs walked, financial records kept, appointments made and unmade, travel plans set and re-set.
And he could be impatient at times. But because any flashes of impatience were immediately followed by a smile and a soft word, these women adored him. Years after their employment ended they would come back to help their replacements in moments when the work became unmanageable.
I was really touched to be asked to write this foreword. The Churchill family can never repay the debt that we owe those remarkable ladies that supported my great-grandfather. It has been wonderful to know some of them as friends.
I had the particular privilege to know from a young age the wonderful Grace Hamblin. Grace worked with my great-grandfather and Clementine Churchill from the 1930s to the 1960s, thereafter becoming the first administrator at Chartwell. She often recounted to me how, after taking dictation late at night, she would walk through the darkness back to her home in Crockham Hill on unlit paths and return in the morning with the proofs from the night before. It is fair to say that Grace and many others dedicated their lives to Churchill. I asked Grace why she did the remarkable work she did and the impossible hours. She said: ‘We all knew that what Winston was doing was so important we felt compelled to give him that support.’ Lady Williams – Jane Portal as she was then – and others still provide a great link with Churchill. In 2016 at the Sir Winston Churchill Award Dinner in London the late, great Robert Hardy recited Churchill’s eightieth birthday speech in Westminster Great Hall. Jane, who attended the dinner, was completely taken aback as she had typed that speech and gone through all the proofing with Churchill.
This dedication to the Churchill family continues to this day. In 1964 Nonie Chapman came to help Lady Churchill. She continued working for Clementine until her death in 1977, whereupon Nonie worked for Lord and Lady Soames until Mary died in 2014. Not being one to retire, Nonie is now found volunteering at Chartwell on a regular basis. She had helped Clementine set up Chartwell for the public opening and now joins the 400 volunteers who lovingly care for Churchill’s legacy and make every visit to Chartwell so special.
I am thrilled that the spotlight is being put on these remarkable women who played their full part in preserving our freedom by ensuring the lion’s roar was heard.
PREFACE
EVERY HISTORIAN IS obliged to expla
in why still another book about Winston Churchill, adding to the thousands already published, can contribute to our knowledge and understanding of this great man. My answer is that this book captures the man as seen by a group from whom we have heard very little – the women who worked for him and made his life and work so productive and important. From other studies we know, as historian Geoffrey Elton has said, that Churchill was quite simply a great man; or as Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer put it, the indispensable man; or as Churchill himself put it, a glow-worm among the more ordinary worms. We know, too, what the famous thought of him: a man with whom it was fun to share the same decade, according to Franklin D. Roosevelt; a man who could be good to work with if he avoided hooey, according to Harry S. Truman; the greatest Englishman of our time, according to Clement Attlee, the leader of the party committed to defeating him at the polls; the true victor of the Second World War, according to Charles de Gaulle.
These are examples of the three broad sources on which we rely for our opinion of Winston Churchill. The first of these was, of course, Churchill himself, a prodigious recorder of his deeds during a long life that led him from cavalry charges to reckoning with the atom bomb, and of political battles that included just about everything – abdication, India’s status, Irish home rule and all of the events in which he participated in his long life. The second source of information is provided by professional historians, most notably Sir Martin Gilbert in his eight-volume biography and associated documents, and now, Andrew Roberts’s monumental biography. Third, we have the diaries and recollections of men – and some exceptional women – whom Churchill regarded either as equals or, more often, as people important to him to impress, or at least before whom displays of unpremeditated bad behaviour would not be in his interest.
That has left largely unaccounted for the experiences and views of the many women who worked for him, who were far from his equals. That gap is what this book intends to fill.
During the course of his career Churchill was served by changing teams of secretaries and shorthand typists who devoted their lives and careers to managing the ‘torrent of dictated notes… comments, questions and requests’ 1 and the vast volume of his private correspondence, the production of and contractual arrangements for his multi-volume histories that sold more copies than any other twentieth-century historian, according to biographer Andrew Roberts, and his houses, horses, pets, record-keeping and finances, and arrangements for hundreds of thousands of miles of travel.
I call these women (and one man) ‘secretaries’ only to use the job titles of their time. Today, women of equal talent and willingness to work would have grander titles in recognition of the work they were doing. Kathleen Hill’s granddaughter, Georgina Hill, who vividly recalls conversations with her grandmother, tells me that ‘Even though her job title was “secretary”, it is clear that the job involved much more than just typing. Some of her functions included what we would understand in the modern political world as “chief of staff”, “press secretary”, “advisor” and “researcher”.’ 2
But ‘secretaries’ or shorthand typists is what they were called in Churchill’s day, and so I use that term, even though among other things they had major administrative roles, not least among them organizing major international summits that brought together in often-inaccessible places not only the principal players, but hundreds of military advisors in need of thousands of documents, secure communications facilities, food and, inevitably in those days, alcoholic refreshment.
A very few, most notably Joan Bright Astley and Elizabeth Nel (née Layton), left records of their own experiences in informative and important books. But until the prescient Churchill Archives intervened and arranged for many of these women to provide oral histories of their days with Churchill, we had no record of the daily experiences of many of these women in the service of a great, impatient, multi-tasking (to use a word not in currency during Churchill’s years) man. Churchill wanted what he wanted when and where he wanted it and was unembarrassed to make unusual requests. A stewardess on a BOAC flight reports that ‘Sir Winston handed me a pair of velvet-monogrammed slippers and asked me to warm them up… The head steward… put them in the oven… Twenty minutes later he returned the slippers cracked and curling up at the toes, on a silver tray… Churchill looked up with a wry smile and said that was rather a silly idea.’ 3
The women whose oral histories are on deposit in the Archives4 served him through his Wilderness Years, long before the Second World War, during the triumphs and tragedies of his years in government, during his country’s darkest and finest hours, and during his long search for lasting peace in the years of the Cold War. They saw him when he woke in the morning and went to bed the following morning. And all hours in between, since he was determined never to be without a secretary in case he wanted to commit his thoughts and commands to paper – immediately. They were with him, pad, pencil and at times typewriters at hand when he was building a wall at his beloved Chartwell, at the races cheering his horses to victory, facing off against an angry Stalin, negotiating a truce in the Greek civil war with shells flying around them, and with him travelling to Fulton, Missouri, to work on his speech warning of the descent of an Iron Curtain across Europe. In short, they are supremely qualified to provide insight into how Churchill was able to accomplish as much as he did, and what Churchill revealed of himself to his subordinates when in full work flow, a subject to which I return in the Epilogue.
The women (and one man) whose stories are told here quite literally made Churchill’s achievements if not possible, at least far easier to achieve than they would have been in their absence. Listening to these first-hand accounts of working with Winston makes one realize how much can be missed when restricted to mere pieces of paper. These women had perfect, rather posh English accents, as that phrase was understood years ago. One secretary thought she had been hired because of her ‘convent-learned accent’. All were highly intelligent and superbly organized, and, somehow, in an age when educational opportunities were not widely available to women, well educated, several at high-level secretarial colleges. All knew how to spell all the words in Churchill’s enormous vocabulary, or at least most of the time. All were capable of coping with dictation from a man who often insisted they do so under trying conditions. And they all had excellent memories, helpful in coping with his myriad and varied requests. All jumped at the opportunity to trot off to the library to fetch books he requested or to find special paints. Listening to their tales of working with Churchill, one could hear their command of the language, both its range and its ‘music’, as one of them, Kathleen Hill, called it when describing Churchill’s speeches. What they did not have was Churchill’s command of history, and they knew nothing of the speeches he had delivered before many of them were born or became adults – something their boss at times found truly incredible, and rather annoying when this gap in their knowledge interfered with their ability to take down his dictation.
You can hear in their voices the self-confidence that allowed them to serve without being servile, to approach Mrs Churchill when her husband was being most unreasonable, to prepare a jokey request for nylons and cosmetics during rationing, to remain poised and able to work when confronted with a boss in his bed or his bath, military officers in the room or on the phone, dogs and cats roaming around, a budgie perching on their heads, cigar smoke billowing, telephones ringing. It was that self-confidence that permitted them to endure a rather unnerving initiation into what Churchill called his ‘Secret Circle’.
When they were first introduced to their new boss, he looked them over and immediately began dictating. If the result was not to his liking, a mini-explosion resulted, perhaps a result of genuine frustration, perhaps contrived as a trial by fire. It took more than a little self-confidence and a great deal of resilience to pass that test.
I was also impressed by the shrewdness of their observations of their taskmaster and enchanted by the good nature wi
th which they told their tales, chuckling at the recollection of amusing events; their sweetness of tone when calling him, as they almost all did – but not to his face, of course – ‘The Old Man’. Notable, too, is the lack of animosity when describing how Churchill’s driving ambition and work habits often made their personal lives difficult. Or of the times when his behaviour reflected his work-first, worker-second priorities. The usual response to rebukes was to blame themselves and avoid the great man’s presence until the storm blew over, as it inevitably and quickly would, the glower or criticism replaced with a smile or a bit of praise of some later work well done. All left Churchill’s service still loyal, available to their successors for advice, and willing to show up to lend a hand on occasions such as birthdays, when the volume of correspondence was overwhelming. All take satisfaction from looking back on a career that enabled Winston Churchill to live and work so successfully with as little friction and annoyance as possible.
These women lived in a time very different from our own. They understood and accepted the social and class distinctions characteristic of the employer–employee relationship – late-night work did not often result in an invitation to dine with the family or Churchill’s guests, even though they had to wait until dinner and the inevitable round of brandy, cigars and films concluded so that they could resume work with him. Unanticipated demands were to be met without discussion, no matter the resulting personal inconvenience. No line was drawn between taking dictation and walking the dogs or feeding the fish or helping Churchill to prepare for bed. It is a marked contrast with today’s sharp demarcation between secretarial chores and fetching coffee.
They were acculturated. They knew most of the names of the rich and famous with whom Churchill corresponded; they knew that seating at a dinner was guided by rules not to be treated lightly; that rank had its privileges; they knew whom to call if they needed information not readily to hand. When they did not know the answer to one of Churchill’s questions, they knew the correct response was ‘I don’t know, but will find out.’ They understood when to allow the Churchill family its privacy and when to fade into the background if photographers were present. They understood the need for discretion, and not only in wartime when the importance of absolute secrecy was made clear to them; they, who were privy to all the great secrets of the war, including all the details of the planning and date for D-Day. They knew the sort of dress appropriate to an office: no need to make a dress code explicit, except for a warning that white gloves were in order when meeting royalty. And, of course, they were top-notch stenographers and typists, crucial when working for a man who ‘could talk a book better than write one and he often got through three or four thousand words a day’.5
