by Working
And they were drawn from a work pool of women with similar values and expectations. Yes, some of these women were brought up overseas, some came from homes on the upper end of the middle class, some were less fortunate. But all seemed to feel comfortable working with each other – no back-biting, no begging off assignments deemed unpleasant. In such cases trades could easily be worked out with colleagues with different preferences, in order that Churchill’s work could be accomplished seamlessly. Indeed, cooperation was so smooth that to Churchill these women were almost interchangeable parts. He cared very little which secretary responded to the call ‘Miss’, so long as it was a familiar face. Over the years he maintained his work habits and schedule unchanged – it was his staff, not Churchill, that did the adapting.
Of course, we cannot ignore the fact that Churchill’s secretaries lived at a time and in a country in which opportunities available to men were not available to them. Few had the financial or social resources to obtain a university education, although all clearly had the intellectual equipment to complete successfully degree-granting programmes. For a good many of the years before the Second World War jobs were scarce, good jobs scarcer still, as at least a few of Churchill’s secretaries discovered when they occasionally became overwhelmed by his demands and sought other positions. Many women under the pressure of wartime labour shortages came to realize that they were quite capable of ‘manning’ factories, flying aeroplanes and surviving the rigours of dangerous cross-Atlantic journeys.
As early as 1941 the deeds of some of these shorthand typists/secretaries were recognized when they received MBEs. Others later received various honours for sacrificing the normal lives of other women to the cause of supporting Churchill in his multiple endeavours, especially during the war. And in many cases, as we will see, an impish grin or a ‘beatific’ smile was thanks enough.
There is another reason to study the experiences of these extraordinary women. In telling us what it was like to work for Churchill, they also tell us much about the man that we could not learn from his self-descriptions or from reports of those colleagues to whom he had reason to defer, to charm or to heed. We see here, through the eyes of these women – who worked with him in peace and war, in and out of office – what Churchill, a consummate actor, revealed of himself when not on stage, when not performing, when not under the glare of a public spotlight. Or not in a setting in which his behaviour could shape what historians might say about his exploits, his histories. These witnesses tell us how he treated subordinates, women he had no reason to please. It is to their tales to which we now turn.
It is not surprising that many of these attractive and talented women married, during or after their work with Churchill. I have chosen to use the names by which he knew them.
1
Violet Pearman
‘I have watched this famous island descending
incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway
which leads to a dark gulf.’
Winston Churchill, 24 March 1938
‘Thank God, our navy has you with your heart of gold
to lead “our hearts of oak and jolly tars.”’*
Violet Pearman, 28 February 1940
VIOLET PEARMAN SERVED as Winston Churchill’s personal secretary from 1929 until 1938, when she was forced by illness to retire.† She continued to work for Churchill on a part-time basis at her home near Chartwell until her death in 1941, from the effects of a stroke. Grace Hamblin, one of those who worked under Pearman, later reflected in a letter to Sir Martin Gilbert:
In appearance she was tall and striking. She seemed to me to work like a Trojan – fast and furious, without stopping. I have never come across anyone who typed so fast! She was always surrounded by papers – a pile of ‘work to do’ on one side and a pile of ‘work done’ on the other. She ran up and down stairs. Sir Winston referred to her as Mrs P. She was devoted to him, and very loyal. She seemed to be in charge of every single thing – not anything special – just everything!1
Pearman’s service came at a difficult time in Churchill’s life, his so-called ‘Wilderness Years’, during which he pined for but did not receive a cabinet post. This was also a time in which, like other investors caught up in the Great Depression, he lost a great part of the wealth he had acquired not by inheritance, but by hard work. To make matters worse, during the Pearman years Churchill suffered several serious illnesses, and was hit by a taxi in New York, a serious accident requiring hospitalization.
The relationship between Pearman and her boss was at times a rocky one. At one point she wrote to a Miss Neal, who worked at a firm of secretarial agents (an employment agency) in Bedford Street, London, in search of alternative employment: ‘We are all fed up with the hours of work here. In spite of the fact that we arrange matters as we think satisfactorily, and they are approved by Mr Churchill, he always breaks them.’2 This was no overstatement. Churchill’s main Private Secretary Jock Colville describes the chaos that surrounded Churchill’s movements, ‘Trains and aeroplanes would be ordered, but not used. Cabinets and Chiefs of Staff meetings would be summoned at short notice and at inconvenient times… There was a lot of rhyme, especially at meals, but very little reason. Yet the machine worked.’3 So Pearman had it right, at least in part. It does not seem to have been true that ‘We are all fed up.’ She clearly was. But others caught up in the Churchill whirlwind ‘loved
Churchill as much as they respected his energy and his abilities’.4
This would not be the last time that Pearman decided to seek other work with another boss. Several years later, recovering from a serious injury (of which more in a moment), Pearman decided to contact Sir James Hawkey, an important figure in Churchill’s constituency. Eight years as Churchill’s ‘loyal, devoted secretary’ was enough, Pearman wrote, and she implored Sir James to find her a post among his ‘large circle of friends and acquaintances’. For our purpose, to understand how Churchill was viewed by those who worked for him, Pearman’s characterizations are important: thoughtless and self-centred are the most damning, unwilling to allow ‘me to live a more human life… I must have a change or something will snap’.5
There are several reasons for these occasional outbursts. The first was the workload, created by Churchill’s unrelenting drive to publish more, correspond more, speak more, and in effect take time off only when he had so loaded his secretary with work that he was forced to wait for his dictation to be transcribed. Churchill would dictate all morning, then go to lunch, while the secretary transcribed the morning’s work. He would then edit it. Then off to dinner, expecting the secretary to be available after dinner and into the early hours of the morning. That might reasonably be considered unreasonable, especially at a time when Churchill did not have the large staff made available to him later in his career. In 1936 Pearman told an interviewer from the Sunday Express, ‘No hours, no time for hobbies. Believes a secretary’s chief value lies in taking burdens from her employer’s shoulders.’ Pearman was surely correct in believing that her life was not her own. In some part, of course, the problem might have been due to the fact that it is not uncommon for workaholics like Pearman to hoard work, and then become overwhelmed by what lies ahead.
The second cause of Pearman’s occasional inability to cope with the stress of her job was outside pressure that at times became difficult for her to bear. She was trapped in an unhappy marriage with a man who had lost both legs in the First World War and was severely shell-shocked, but refused to grant her a divorce. At the same time as she worked for Churchill, she was raising two young children in an age in which personal considerations were no excuse for a refusal to work overtime.
Finally, Pearman’s options were limited. The unemployment rate hit 20 per cent in those years, and women who refused to accept domestic work were not eligible for the benefits that employers often conferred on household staff. Not a happy circumstance. As Pearman pointed out in her letter to Sir James, ‘posts are difficult to get, especially when one
is 42’.6 As another talented secretary put it, ‘there were more secretaries than jobs in those days’.7
Fortunately, these eruptions always proved temporary, in the latter case perhaps because shortly after she wrote to Sir James her workload must have been eased by the hiring of Kathleen Hill, who began work in mid-1937 as the first secretary to take up residence at Chartwell.8 Pearman’s decision to let the storms pass was to the benefit of both parties. She found an exciting employer, who provided steady work during a time when stable jobs were scarce, and Churchill found an indispensable employee, described by Roy Jenkins as ‘for a decade, beginning in 1929… Churchill’s principal and dedicated dictating and literary secretary… ever accompanying’.9 Churchill was well aware of Pearman’s competence and did not hesitate to recognize it publicly. ‘I ought not forget to add,’ he wrote in a newspaper column, ‘that since I have looked into my dispatch box and I have found that my far-seeing private secretary in England, Mrs Pearman, had furnished me with a travelling address book of people I might want to communicate with in the United States, and in this I read “Baruch, 1055 Fifth Avenue”, with the private telephone number duly set out.’10
Pearman performed two very distinct functions for Churchill. The first were what he, but few others, viewed as ordinary secretarial chores, the tasks that kept his life in order and his output at an astonishingly high level, both in quality and quantity. Pearman worked mostly at Morpeth Mansions, the Churchills’ London penthouse,11 and at Chartwell. Churchill, no longer a member of the cabinet, was eager to make up for the ministerial salary he would no longer be getting and embarked on what for anyone else would be called a writing frenzy, making up for the lost salary many times over.
The time shuttling between Morpeth Mansions and Chartwell was put to good use. Pearman took dictation from him and often typed in the car between the two houses, a Churchillian habit of a lifetime that proved a considerable problem for Mrs Pearman and her successors, especially since Churchill often urged his driver to make good time between destinations. As his driver from 1928 to 1936 reports, ‘We had close calls on the road. The kind of driving he demanded made this inevitable.’12
Pearman not only had to attend to Churchill’s secretarial needs when he was in Britain, she also had to arrange for those needs to be met when he was travelling alone without her. She knew that on his tour of the United States and Canada it would be important to arrange for secretarial assistance. It is not clear that she initiated the arrangements, but that is likely the case. In any event, the private railway cars made available by the Canadian Pacific Railway for the Canadian leg, and by Charles Schwab for the US portion of the trip, came equipped with the loan of secretaries in both countries.13 As Churchill wrote to Mrs Churchill: ‘This is a gt [sic] boon as I don’t know how I shd [sic] dictate correspondence, telegrams etc. without this help.’14
There seems to be no systematic list of the variety of chores Pearman performed for Churchill. We do know that she was among the earliest to attempt to curb his expenses. In the mid-1930s she ‘suggested losing three of the servants to save wages of £240 a year; reducing the swimming pool temperature to halve heating costs; pruning the £240 annual laundry bill, and, boldest of all, recommended that the expenditures on wine and cigars should be “investigated”’.15 Perhaps the best summary is provided by Martin Gilbert: ‘His personal, political, literary and financial correspondence was all within her compass. Her discretion was absolute.’16
Pearman performed another and more delicate role for Churchill. If Churchill had allowed the various difficulties Pearman encountered to result in her resignation, he undoubtedly could have found a skilled secretary to replace her, although finding one with her range of talents would not have been easy. But he would be unlikely to have found one who could help him in his efforts to awaken Britain to the threat posed by Nazi Germany.
Pearman’s belief in Churchill’s lonely drive to inform the nation of Britain’s lack of preparedness for the inevitable conflict with Germany took her far beyond the role one would normally ascribe to a secretary. She became the trusted intermediary between Churchill and insider sources of information – ‘leakers’ in today’s jargon – providing Churchill with information and data about the diminished state of the nation’s armed forces.
That role began in the spring of 1936, when Pearman had a bad fall at Chartwell, while, as was her habit, she was rushing to do a chore for Churchill. She slipped on a polished floor, caught her heel on a rug and fell against a stone fireplace, hitting her head on the metal fender. She broke a bone at the base of her spine and was ordered to rest.17 Churchill’s letters of 23 and 30 March reveal two sides of the man. He compassionately ordered her to stay in bed, generously told Hamblin, her assistant, to send Pearman salary cheques ‘as required’, and offered to pay for any ‘extra treatment you may require’.18 But in one he writes, ‘Let me know when you are able to do any typing’, and in the other he tells her ‘Do not worry about typing for the present’, which might remind her to do just that, worry – Churchill’s ‘for the present’ perhaps meaning that at some point she should indeed start worrying.19
Pearman was not idle while recuperating. In May she set in train a series of events of great importance to Churchill. Before returning to work after her fall and travelling to the south of France with him in September of 1936, Pearman met Torr Anderson, who at the age of forty had had a long and distinguished military career and was then a squadron leader (and later group captain) in the air arm of the military. Sir Martin Gilbert describes Anderson as an ‘able, anguished soul’.20 Pearman, who Gilbert notes was ‘attracted by’ Anderson, knew that his concerns were identical to Churchill’s, and that Churchill did not have good information on the condition of the air arm. So she wrote a note to her boss:
A serving Air Force officer would like a talk with you very soon… as a serving officer you would appreciate his position. He did not wish to write but thought a talk was better. Would you speak to him tomorrow, if possible? He would come to the Flat or the House.‡ He would confidently say you would be much interested in what he has to say. When can he come and see you?
Pearman then added the officer’s name and contact details.21 The meeting was held and Anderson, like others in the military and government, provided Churchill with valuable data, memos and other information about the state of Britain’s air arm and of the German build-up. It is probable that Pearman ‘encouraged Anderson to do what he had done’.22 We do know that many of Anderson’s memos, in which he referred to Churchill as ‘Papa’, were dictated to Pearman.23 She understood the work Churchill was involved in, shared his goals, and was confident and able enough to step in when she thought it useful or necessary to help Churchill pursue them.
And she had the complete confidence of Anderson and others who were passing on to Churchill the data and information he needed for his campaign to awaken the nation to an impending threat. These officers provided that information via back channels – meaning Pearman – who was a hugely important conduit between Churchill and those willing to jeopardize their jobs and careers by leaking data to support his then-unpopular position that Britain was unready for a war and that it would eventually have to face German military might. ‘By the autumn of 1937 Churchill’s sources of information on defence had become widespread, regular and of high quality.’24
That confidence in Pearman’s discretion and loyalty was essential to this clandestine operation, in which the sources of information always feared discovery. Pearman warned Churchill that Anderson and several others providing data were worried that the leaks might be traced back to them. She wrote to Churchill: ‘Commander [sic] Anderson told me very seriously that he had never been frightened in his life before… He does not know whether they are suspicious of him and may try to trace him. The figures are accurate and so accurate and staggering, that he thinks this is the reason those who know are frightened of facts coming out.’25 The ‘revelation of British weakness in the
air was known only to a handful of senior Air Force officers, and now, thanks to Anderson, it was known to Churchill’.26 And their source was known to Pearman.
Pearman was more of a participant in the operation than a mere conduit of information. Fearful of being discovered, Anderson telephoned Pearman, and she related the call to Churchill, writing
please do not use what he gave you on Sunday. Bear the facts in mind and say if you like that it had come to your ears but do not show the copies to anyone… He said himself that you were not to think he was not ‘balanced’, because he was so pessimistic.
I explained that I had said this was because he brooded too much owing to his lonely life, therefore being thrown back into his thoughts and worries, and he agreed this was so.27
This is more than a robotic stenographer or keeper of the diary at work: it is a trusted co-conspirator providing her own interpretation of events, and soothing words for a very nervous source.
