by Working
Hamblin might have added that the world was entering a long Depression, which put pressure on Churchill’s always fraught finances, characterized by a constant race for his income from his writing to keep up with his rather lavish lifestyle,10 which Hamblin tells us included a household staff of some ten or eleven servants at one time.* The value of his investments was not immune to the effects of the Depression, which put him in what one visitor described as ‘a very grim mood’,11 and caused his brokers at one point to attempt to curb his stock-market activities with the advice that ‘your policy should be… one of masterly inaction.’12
That instruction notwithstanding, Churchill continued his lifelong practice of following the prices of his shares on almost a minute-by-minute basis. Hamblin kept track of his share prices, developing a graph form to show movements in the prices of shares he owned. He took to calling for his ‘Hamblin Graph’, which she took as a compliment. ‘He liked to know where they were every hour… we kept a… graph of the prices as they went up and down.’13 She had to take this graph to him even when he was painting or ‘doing something on the lake, [walking] through the mud to take him the prices wherever he was. It was very amusing.’ That procedure – giving him notes on his share prices – applied as well to other information. Everything had to be written down for him, ‘you never told him a thing. He had his news in notes.’ † And of course he always asked for news, so she would hand him a written note of the news, or a letter or a newspaper, and he was disappointed if there weren’t any.
At least at the beginning of her working life with Churchill Hamblin had two advantages. The first was that with Churchill still recovering from his illness, she had a few weeks in which he was not doing much dictation, perhaps only an hour or so each day, highly unusual for so prolific an author. As a result – and unlike those women who joined Churchill’s secretarial staff in the run-up to and during and even after the Second World War – she could ease into her job. Second, Violet Pearman had been working for Churchill for four or five years, knew the ropes and was willing to train Hamblin.
But some things just can’t be taught to fill the gaps in the knowledge of a twenty-four-year-old moving into the high-pressure world of a senior politician born in Blenheim, and moving easily in the highest reaches of British and international society. Hamblin’s lack of knowledge and experience of the wider world beyond the narrow confines of her childhood and education resulted in some moments of embarrassment, and in some not very understanding responses from Churchill. On one occasion, Churchill asked her to ‘get Emerald on the telephone’. But she had no idea who Emerald was, so Churchill told her: ‘Good God, don’t you know who Emerald Cunard is? She was the greatest hostess of the day.’ It is a testimony to the British class system that this young, ten-shilling-per-day secretary, telling this tale in 1985, still attributed the episode to her own youth and limited education and experience: ‘I ought to have known this. And I was terribly ignorant of politics.’
On another occasion, when Churchill asked her to ring up his dentist, she didn’t know who that was. When she asked, he replied, ‘It’s Mr. Fish who died.’ Kathleen Hill tells a similar story, her version involving a request that she dial the number of a doctor whose name she did not know and which Churchill could not remember. Both tales might be accurate, or the two secretaries might have shared favourite anecdotes. Memories conflate after decades have passed. No matter: these retellings present a true picture of Churchill, who, as Hamblin describes him, could be unreasonable and harsh at times.
Although no amount of training could bridge the gap between Hamblin’s and Churchill’s backgrounds, Mrs Pearman could teach Hamblin lessons that she hadn’t learned in secretarial school. First there was the very important matter of the new girl’s responsibility for the Churchill menagerie. Hamblin had to help him in what came to be called his Butterfly House, constructed from an old larder: laying out the chrysalises so he could watch as the adult butterflies emerged. He instructed her to leave the door of the Butterfly House open, with a cheesecloth curtain, so the adult butterflies could escape into his Chartwell gardens, saying, ‘I am tired of all this captivity.’ Churchill’s knowledge and appreciation of butterflies began as a child and developed further when he was serving in India, and later on tour in Uganda, where he called them ‘flying fairies… with splendid liveries’.14 To Churchill, his butterflies were just as important as his other creatures: he left specific instructions to the National Trust‡ for the care of them after he and his wife died. ‘I hope the National Trust will grow plenty of buddleia for my butterflies,’ he said. Butterflies thrive today at Chartwell on the buddleia-bordered walkway leading to Churchill’s Butterfly House.
Butterflies were not the only ‘pets’ for which Hamblin had responsibility. She recalls that in 1931 Churchill developed a device to protect the black swans given to him by the Australians. It was ‘a light… to protect them at night. It was a very amateur thing on a bicycle [wheel]. It went round and round and round all night. It was supposed to keep the foxes away but the foxes didn’t take much notice and they still burrowed underneath and came up in the water and killed the black swans.’ There were the dogs, as well. As early as his teenage years, Churchill had sold a bike in order to buy a bulldog, which he named Dodo. Hamblin describes ‘a funny little pug and a Blenheim spaniel, and later of course, Rufus’, the black-brown poodle that Churchill loved especially.§ As Hamblin was the one taking care of Rufus, especially during long periods when Churchill was away from Chartwell, Rufus became fond of her. When Churchill returned from a trip, he noticed that Rufus went to Hamblin first. He became ‘quite cross, [saying] you’ve stolen my dog’s affection’. ‘Thereafter,’ reports Howells, ‘he paid little attention to Rufus; with Sir Winston it was a case of all or nothing.’15
When Rufus I died in 1947, Hamblin called Mrs Churchill for advice about how to tell her husband. Mrs Churchill suggested that Hamblin write a note, which she would then hand him. ‘When he read it, the tears ran down his face… because he was very emotional… and he said, “poor Miss, she must have a puppy”.’ This is the compassionate Churchill, saddened at the loss of his favourite pet, but also recognizing that Rufus’s death had deeply affected Hamblin as well. So much so that he gave her a puppy, which took up residence on Churchill’s bed.
When Rufus’s death became known, Mr H. F. Parmiter, the owner of an export/import firm who had no prior connection with Churchill, sent Churchill 300 mixed crocus bulbs with the wish that they be planted on the poodle’s grave. Hamblin received the package at Chartwell and minuted Elizabeth Gilliatt (see Chapter 7) that ‘as Mrs C saw them and thought that in view of this Mr C ought perhaps to sign a letter of thanks’. Mr Parmiter’s 1947 letter adds, ‘Further there will be a quantity of May flowering tulips and from the colours thereof – you can have no possible doubt as to how I voted in the last election.’16
Then there were the goats. Churchill mourned the loss of
the brown nanny goat named ‘Sarah’ [who] died by misadventure… [A gardener] scattered some nitrate of ammonia on the grass. She ate it and expired. [But] the white horned nanny goat named ‘Mary’ survived thanks to a timely dose of castor oil. She is expecting a family… I think it is very important to have animals, flowers and plants in one’s life while it lasts.17
Alongside butterflies, goats and dogs, cats – a particular Churchill favourite – were another of Hamblin’s responsibilities. To this day a yellow marmalade cat named Jock VI¶ (the descendant of an earlier ‘Jock’ who was named after Jock Colville) lives at Chartwell. ‘Ginger was the favoured colour’, Hamblin remembers. The original marmalade cat was called Tango and Colville describes a lunch with the prime minister at which Tango sat on a chair to Churchill’s ‘right-hand side and attracted most of his attentions. He [Churchill] was meditating deeply on the Middle East’.18
Hamblin recalls an unamiable cat that would not respond to Churchill’s ‘Good morning, Cat’, so Churchill threw some
papers at him. The cat ran off, as cats will. Churchill predictably became very upset and fretful, blaming himself and Hamblin for the runaway. One night, after the cat had been gone for some ten days, Sarah Churchill came down from dinner and told Hamblin that her father had finished working, and that she could go home, but only after she ‘put a card in the window to say that if Cat cares to come home, all [will be] forgiven’. Cat did return, a bit wounded, but very much alive, and was rewarded with ‘cream and the best salmon’.19
Pets were not the only animals requiring Churchill’s and his staff’s attention. There was a commercial aspect as well. He farmed lands adjoining Chartwell, raising pigs20 and Belted Galloway cattle, the latter distinguished by the white stripe around their bellies. Churchill built a pigsty with his own hands, and involved Hamblin’s father in the pigs’ care. Mr Hamblin ‘fixed a wire brush to a long stick and presented it to [Churchill] as a back scratcher for his pig’, a gift which delighted Churchill and, no doubt, the pig.21 When Hamblin’s father was ill, Churchill sent him some port.22 An example of Churchill’s ‘loving heart’, to use Elizabeth Layton’s description.23
Zookeeping was only one of Hamblin’s many responsibilities. Churchill was a builder, a bricklayer, never satisfied with the facilities at Chartwell. Hamblin was charged with the responsibility for ordering the bricks for each project – the number and type – and making certain they were ordered sufficiently in advance of their use, so as not to delay construction. She also had to help with the bookkeeping. Unlike animal care and brick supply, this was a chore for which she had been hired. And with the help of Churchill’s accountant Mr Wood# she set up the household accounting system that would remain in use throughout the war years, making Hamblin Churchill’s principal in-house bookkeeper from 1932 until his death in 1965, overseeing and managing all the accounts: household salaries and expenses, books and ‘pot-boiler’ income, and financial and banking records.
The problem was that ‘he could not bear to pay bills’.24 She recounts his unusual but ‘lovely delay in action’ routine: she would present the household bills for approval and payment. He would then go down the list saying:
‘yes, we’ll pay that one… we’ll pay twenty pounds off that one… and we’ll pay so much off that one’. Then he came to the electricity and said ‘that’s impossible. It can’t be eighty pounds… Look up the same one eight years ago.’ Before the war, you see he was not a rich man at all.
In 1956, decades after Hamblin left Churchill’s employ, he was still scrambling to pay his bills. According to Sir Martin Gilbert, ‘There are three that he [Churchill] had queried, one for wines and spirits (£115, about £8,000 today), one for the wiring of special lighting for paintings in the first-floor corridor (£96, about £6,000 today), and one for clothes and repair of clothes from Turnbull & Asser of Jermyn Street (£105, about £7,000 today).’25
Hamblin, always a good manager, did her best to contain Churchill’s profligacy, an attempt that was not always rewarded with his approval. She realized that it was impractical to ship his champagne from London to the South of France when he visited there. So she arranged for his champagne to be sent directly to him in France from local suppliers. But when he saw the bill from a French wine supplier he was upset and asked her why he was being billed by a new supplier. She recalled: ‘I ought to have said because it is cheaper, but I said… it was the easiest way. He then said: Since when have I asked you do things the easiest way?’26
Zookeeping and financial management, important as they were, were not Grace Hamblin’s main job. That was to take dictation – ‘taking down’, as it was called – often until two or three in the morning, from which she was expected to produce flawlessly typed copies of letters and memoranda; and what he called his ‘pot boilers’, such as a series he wrote for the Strand Magazine,27 which she says he wrote for the money as well as ‘for the pleasure of [writing] something down about whatever was going on’. ‘He worked like a tiger’, she later recalled.28 More troublesome from her point of view was his biography of his great ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, which she found ‘dreary and dim’, with long unfamiliar names, complicated by Churchill’s tendency to skip back and forth in the historical narrative, making it more difficult to follow. The research assistants working on Marlborough were often in the room while he dictated, and later added to or corrected the draft. She would then consolidate all these and type them up for Churchill ‘to mull over’.
Hamblin’s problems were not confined to the times when Churchill was working on his biography of the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill’s special dictating style, which remained unchanged throughout his long career, reflected the intensity with which he worked to get his speeches and memoranda to mean precisely what he intended them to mean, and left little room for concern for any difficulties he imposed upon his secretaries. Recalling his dictating habits, Hamblin says he paced up and down while dictating to her shorthand:
when he got to the end of the room and out of your little circle, his voice would drop very often so that part was not easy… Suddenly he would quote something from a book… and I could never take that down in shorthand… [I’d] try to get a hold of the book [but] you’d find he had taken the book to lunch or something like that. It didn’t go smoothly… It was all being turned over in his mind. He went over and over and over sentences and it was for you to decide which was the final one.
Things were even worse when Churchill was on the move. Churchill’s secretaries would be driven down from London to Chartwell in the car, with the dog, cigar smoke, typewriters, shorthand pads and pencils, detectives such as Walter Thompson,** rugs and papers and work boxes.†† In the late 1940s, this collection in the already crowded car was augmented by a ‘beautiful amaryllis lily’, which he insisted be regularly transported between Chartwell and London. The potted plant was given to him by Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, when Churchill was Leader of the Opposition.29
In the car Churchill would dictate just as he would in the quiet of his bedroom. Hamblin and Pearman agreed that Hamblin would make local trips in the car and Pearman would go on the longer trips with Churchill. If the trips for speeches and meetings were near Chartwell, Hamblin would drive her own ‘little car’. And of course, if she were driving, Churchill could not dictate to her. As she recalled: ‘[O]ne could escape that. I think the dictation in the car was a nightmare really.’ She often drove him to Blenheim, a place she did not much enjoy. Her recollection of working there was that it was ‘bleak and cold and one spent hours and hours in a huge room getting frozen. It seemed to be winter to me. And one was treated by the staff as rather a nuisance.’
To compound Hamblin’s difficulties, Churchill did not warn her when he wanted her to go up to London to work. On one such surprise trip from Chartwell she had ‘no hat’ or anything else. She worked until midnight and then went to a hotel, as the Churchills were staying in Morpeth Mansions, where there was clearly no room for her. He was, she says, a mixture of
kindness and harshness… He didn’t like us to leave the house… he didn’t like you to just go off. And you would go up to say good night, Mr Churchill, and if it had been a particularly bad day he would say ‘good night, my dear, it wasn’t your fault.’ But of course, it was… There was kindness. He didn’t want the sun to go down on harsh words.
She goes on: ‘I met… a girl who was working for him a little while before me… when she came to him she was eighteen, pretty, young, fair and dainty… so when he’d seen her, he said to Mrs Pearman “I mustn’t be rude to her because she was too gentle and wouldn’t take it.”’
Not only the working conditions, but the working hours remained unchanged for most of Churchill’s life, with an understandable increase during the war. Hamblin usually worked six days a week, at times seven. On some days she took dictation until about 2 a.m., had a short sleep and returned early enough to transcribe her shorthand notes for his review when he woke up. On other days, she would leave around 7 p.m.
, waiting until her counterpart arrived for night duty. She explains: ‘His work was his pleasure… and his hobbies were all part of his life… We had to take part in them all… Sunday was like any other day. We had to be on duty all the time… He liked the world to be busy and something happening all the time.’ Hamblin, speaking decades after her work with Churchill, can be forgiven if she recalls both a six-day working week and Sunday labour, which might or might not have been a regular feature of her job.
The peacetime routine that Hamblin describes would continue throughout the war, during which time there were more secretaries to shoulder the burden, working in relays to keep up with the prime minister’s massive output as he added direction of the war to his already crowded schedule. But almost everything else changed, abruptly. Churchill’s Wilderness Years came to a close on 3 September 1939. He was offered the Admiralty, a post from which he had been removed almost a quarter of a century before, leaving ‘in pain and sorrow’.30 Consistent with what was to become his famous ‘Action This Day’ policy, learned from Jackie Fisher,‡‡31 Churchill immediately took up his position as First Lord even before kissing hands two days later. The Board of Admiralty immediately sent its now famous signal to the fleet: ‘Winston is Back.’32
