by Working
In 1936 she divorced her husband and moved back to England, where she applied for a job with an employment agency, but was considered too old to be a secretary. She was asked if she played bridge – perhaps they thought she might be hired as a companion. In any event she ‘was sent down to Westerham… and had an interview’. Hill waited patiently in the drawing room until Mrs Churchill arrived to ask her if she were willing to work at night. Hill agreed. Then Churchill
came down in a boiler suit and looking all very pink and white. I was struck by the fairness of his skin, very white… he stared glaring at me sitting down… I didn’t really know if I got the job or not. But Mrs Pearman, already working there, wrote to me and said you’ve got the job and will you start next week.
Churchill asked her only if she could do shorthand and typing.
In July 1937, as the political situation in Europe worsened, and his political and literary work grew, Churchill decided that he needed a resident secretary in addition to Violet Pearman and Grace Hamblin, both of whom came each day from their homes nearby. That would permit him to dictate into the early hours of the morning ‘without a taxi having to be summoned to take a wilting secretary home’.7 His choice was Kathleen Hill. As the first ‘resident secretary’ at Chartwell she lived in that house, and when she travelled with Churchill to London to work at Morpeth Mansions,* she returned every night to sleep at Chartwell. Mrs Pearman divided up the job, keeping for herself the personal work, while assigning to Hill all the literary work. Over the years, Hill set up and managed some of the accounting procedures and kept the minutes of all the meetings on book publications, due dates and delays, as well as income payments.8 She also set up systems to track the salaries of the staff and the amounts they would owe in income tax.9 In January 1943, acting as rather more than a typist, she ‘suggested an early deal on a third volume of war speeches while military victories were fresh in the public mind’, and recommended that tax advice be sought from Lloyds Bank. She straightened out complex problems with film rights for A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.10
The original plan had been that she would also work for Mrs Churchill, who was an early riser and wanted a secretary to come into her bedroom at 8.30 in the morning to help with her own correspondence and with managing the household. We had ‘trouble getting servants and that sort of thing’. Hill would work for Mrs Churchill in the mornings, rest during the afternoon, and then work for Churchill at nights, sometimes until 2 or 3 a.m. She seldom had a break, for there was simply too much work and the travel between Morpeth Mansions and Chartwell disrupted the hours she might have taken off. One reason why Hill preferred working at Chartwell to working at the London flat was ‘the very good telephone service. Even at three o’clock in the morning. At the end of our working session… he used to ring up… the Daily Mail… [to] know the latest news. He always had to be on the spot, the latest news before he went to bed.’ And every morning while still in bed, as all secretaries attested, Churchill read nine or more daily newspapers, before, during and after the war. In 1947, according to Denis Kelly, Churchill ‘took sixteen newspapers [on his bed in the mornings], from The Times to the Daily Worker’.11
Hill recalled the excitement of Chartwell when Churchill was in residence.
I had never been in a house like that before. It was alive, restless. When he was away it was still as a mouse. When he was there it was vibrating. So much happened… that I was bewildered by it all. He could be very ruthless. He used to get impatient with delays. He was a disappointed man waiting for the call to serve his country.12
Another reason for preferring Chartwell might have been ‘For the first time, they had a little dining room in the sort of basement… a nice little dining room… [for me and] whoever was on duty.’ There was also quite an extensive domestic staff at Chartwell: butler, head parlourmaid, housemaids, Lady Churchill’s maid and the much-loved cook, Mrs Landemare, who often provided an early breakfast for the young ladies who worked into the early hours of the morning.
Hill had the job of ringing the employment agencies and doing the first interviews for any openings in the domestic staff – a task she hated. She must also have hated turning down requests for interviews and/or jobs from unqualified applicants – a task she took on herself. Keeping track of expenses was another chore. For example, in June 1939 she spent £1.10/4 (about £68 in today’s money) on advertising for a new secretary, to be charged to Churchill’s literary account.13 In July of 1939 she bought, on approval, three maps of Switzerland, to be delivered to Morpeth Mansions, from Edward Stanford, cartographer to the king. Perhaps Churchill was considering the boundaries of neutral states, for he could hardly have been planning a trip there. Hill arranged for an account to be set up for a regular messenger service – something Churchill used constantly. Her schedule was often changed without much notice – ‘every day was different… We had to play it as it came.’ An added problem was Churchill’s constant tardiness: his friend Sir Edward Marsh observed: ‘Winston’s disregard of time when there is anything he wants to do is sublime – he firmly believes it waits for him.’14 A Foreign Office official, Alexander Cadogan, reviewing a speech in the prime ministerial bedroom, said: ‘[Churchill is] due to make it at 11, and did not upheave himself out of bed until 10:40.’15 Throughout his life, all the secretaries – and Churchill’s valet Sawyers, as well as Mrs Churchill – struggled with Churchill’s last-minute demands and his lateness for meals and meetings.
In those days, she said, the valet would bring up all the mail for Churchill, while he was still in bed eating his breakfast. That system would change as the volume of mail increased. Churchill would then decide what to answer or what could simply be acknowledged. If Mrs Churchill had finished her own work or if she were away, Hill sometimes helped Churchill in the mornings. ‘I had to do everything,’ she recalls, especially after Mrs Pearman had a stroke. They had tried to bring in some temporary help, but that didn’t last – either for financial reasons, as the Churchills were always trying to cut their administrative costs, or because the new ‘girls’ were unwilling to work the required hours, or to put up with an often-difficult boss. Churchill could be irritable and moody, but one ‘just took it in one’s stride. I mean everything as it came’, and then waited for the inevitable remorse and a sign from Churchill that all was forgiven. As Jane Portal put it many years later, when Churchill had a fit of temper, ‘just get out of the room’ for a while, and all will be forgiven when you return.16
In one incident General Hastings Ismay found Hill outside the cabinet room ‘in obvious distress’. He asked Churchill if he had been bullying her and a puzzled prime minister replied, ‘Oh, dear! I must put that right.’ He rang for Hill and very gently said, ‘Please take this letter,’ which he dictated slowly and more clearly than was his custom. ‘My dear Mr Ambassador, I fully agree with you.’ That was it. He asked Hill to type it immediately and when she returned he studied it carefully and said, ‘That is a very good piece of typing. It is beautifully done. Thank you very much!’ When an astonished Hill left the room, ‘He turned to Ismay with the air of a conjurer demonstrating just how easily a difficult feat could be accomplished!’17
If Hill were working at night, it was mostly taking dictation on Marlborough, which Churchill was rushing to finish so that he could start work on A History of the English-Speaking Peoples – he needed the money that both books would produce.
In general, Hill accompanied Churchill on his travels, but with one notable exception, of which he was exceptionally proud. In 1938, travelling as a private citizen before he was called back into government, Churchill decided to visit Château de l’Horizon in the south of France. He announced to Maxine Elliott, one of his favourite hostesses, ‘My dear Maxine, do you realize I have come all the way from London without my man?’ Elliott replied, ‘Winston, how terribly brave of you.’18
Hill often travelled with him to London for his appearances in the House, making sure her portable typewriter w
as in the ‘old Daimler’ with her (as did Mrs Pearman when it was her turn to go up to London). Hill would type speeches in the car, trying not to make herself sick; cars were unheated in those days, so her fingers were frozen. Another time, she handed Churchill the pages of his speech in the House of Commons a matter of minutes before he strode into the chamber to deliver it. These were tense moments.
One night, her first night as she recalls, Hill was summoned to the Chartwell dining room where Churchill asked her to ‘Fetch me klop.’ She had seen in his study some volumes by the German historian Onno Klopp, so she brought those fourteen volumes of the professor’s Der Fall des Hauses Stuart und die Succession des Hauses Hannover (1875–88) down two flights of steps, as she puts it, ‘clutching them up to my chin’ to the dining room. ‘God Almighty!’ Churchill roared. ‘[He] looked at me in amazement… good try, very well done but not what I wanted,’ he said.19 What he wanted was his ‘klop’, a word he had invented ‘for reasons of onomatopoeia’, which was a metal paper-piercer that would allow a tag (often called a Treasury tag) to be used to tie pages together. ‘He detested staples and paper clips,’ because, as he told one secretary, ‘they are very dangerous as they pick up and hold together wrong papers.’20 It was another Churchillian invented word. ‘Once Churchill realized that he had hurt Mrs Hill’s feelings, however, he complimented her on her handwriting.’21
Churchill continued to develop his own rules of language and punctuation: ‘aircraft’ rather than ‘aeroplane’; seasons and points of the compass to be spelled with a capital. He also used words such as ‘pray’ as in ‘Pray let me have a report.’22 ‘Churchill used it deliberately and anachronistically even though it was almost as old-fashioned as “prithee”… Attempting to persuade the British people to look back hundreds of years to similar moments of national peril, Churchill found it helpful to adopt anachronistic language.’23
When at Chartwell, if Churchill were laying bricks for a cottage or a wall, Hill would have to run outside, climb up the ladders and give him any messages that had come in. He would dictate an answer, which she would take down, then she would run back inside to type it up. She estimates each of these running trips may have been as much as a quarter of a mile, several times a day. When she accompanied Churchill to Blenheim, she again had to race around the palace as there was only one telephone then and that was in the gun room, some considerable distance from where Churchill was working. She said: ‘so I had to go quite a long way and down long passages to do any telephoning and it wasn’t very pleasant’. Running up and down ladders and along the back corridors of the palace must have been strenuous – and cold, as Hamblin describes – in addition to the actual typing.
Churchill used the telephone extensively. In what he called his Factory, the ground-floor office where the secretaries worked, he would ask to be connected to one of his many colleagues – he was in ‘constant contact’ with many people, Hill recalls. One day, early in her time with him, he ‘flopped down in the office and said: “Call the doctor, I don’t feel very well.” “Who’s your doctor?” I asked. He answered “Dr Scott, he died”’ – a different recollection from Hamblin’s of a dentist named Fish (see Chapter 2). So she looked in the address book under Scott and found the name of his successor. And Churchill could be less than explicit in his demands. One day he asked Hill to place a call to someone named Ian who lived in Sussex. She asked herself who might know this man and called Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s lifelong friend and Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS)† from 1940 to 1941, for the answer – apparently, a man called Ian had been at a dinner with Churchill and he wanted to follow up on a conversation they had.
There were, of course, times when secretarial ingenuity could not suffice, and then Churchill had to be consulted. On one such occasion a secretary was directed to discover whether or not Churchill had greeted the ninth Duke of Marlborough and his new wife when they returned to London from their honeymoon. When ‘find out’ proved an insufficient instruction, Churchill directed the secretary to his Story of the Malakand Field Force. ‘If you find out I was out with the Field Force at the time the happy couple were returning to London,’ he said, ‘I could not have been there to meet them. I have never enjoyed the ability to be in more than one place at a time.’24
The secretaries had to be ready for everything. One of Churchill’s Private Secretaries recorded that one lesson he learned from Churchill, ‘which all my career has helped to emphasize: never be surprised by anything; always be ready to deal with the unexpected by unorthodox or improvised methods, and, above all, notice and care’.25 In September 1939, when Churchill was again First Lord of the Admiralty, Hill had accompanied Churchill to a meeting at the Admiralty. Surrounded by the Sea Lords, Churchill was signing documents with his traditional red ink with an old-fashioned stylo pen. In those days, the pens had to be filled ‘with a rubber top… they were beastly. They were always going out of order.’ But when Churchill ‘got the red pen out of his pocket and it got blocked up or something… I quickly handed him… his pen that I had newly filled up. He said, “see how well I trained her.”’ In fact, no one had trained Hill to be prepared for this. She had thought ahead and wanted to be ready for any eventuality – a valuable trait if you were working for Churchill. He expected everything to be done for his convenience and the secretaries had to anticipate his every need. They also had to adapt to changing circumstances, as the dictating load increased. Hill ‘in order to accelerate the work… instead of taking shorthand notes and then typing them out, typed directly onto Admiralty notepaper as Churchill was dictating… [later] she did the same directly onto 10 Downing Street paper’.26
In early 1939 Churchill had his two shotguns examined by the gunmaker James Woodward & Sons. The firm recommended several repairs, including ‘re-joint 2 pairs of barrels (At present the barrels are very loose in the action due to fair wear and tear).’ It was Hill who sent off the guns and, at Churchill’s instructions, paid the repair bill in full, keeping track of both the estimate and the money paid.27 Was Churchill beginning to worry about his personal safety or was he thinking of a shooting break after the war ended? Or perhaps they had belonged to his father.
Churchill’s secretaries had to remain discreet and out of sight, regardless of whatever important work they were doing. When Churchill left his London home to return to the Admiralty, Hill was photographed on the doorstep waiting just behind him. ‘But when the photo was published in the newspapers the next morning, she was not there: she had been airbrushed out.’28 She was probably neither surprised nor disappointed.
There were some adventures. One of the trips was to Sir Philip Sassoon’s house at Port Lympne in Kent. Sassoon was a politician, art collector and flamboyant society host, and his house was known for its luxurious style and celebrity guests.‡ Hill was there working for Churchill when she ‘looked through and saw – [them] having dinner and there seemed to be a flunkey behind everybody’s chair’. She dined with the Churchill family only once or twice after the war, but at the Sassoons’ she was served pineapple cocktails by a butler, although not at the formal dinner table.
Much later, when Churchill was prime minister, Hill wrote under her own name to the Duchess of Marlborough about a dinner seating plan the duchess had sent to Churchill for his approval. Hill wrote that Churchill ‘very much hopes that he may sit next to yourself [the duchess] at dinner’.29 There was no division between his personal and public lives, and the secretaries had a role in both. Hill managed Churchill’s private dinner invitations too, as can be seen from her note to him on 5 August 1945 asking whom he would like to invite.
A varied job indeed. In early June 1941, the month in which Hill received an MBE,30 Lord Beaverbrook sent Churchill five dozen bottles of Deidesheimer Hofstück, 1937 vintage, a German Riesling wine. Hill suggested the thank-you telegram, which was to read: ‘Thank you so much for your exhilarating gift.’31 Churchill accepted her draft and the telegram was sent.
During th
e war, the Churchills and their entourage moved at weekends to stay at Ditchley Park, a country house in Oxfordshire, instead of Chequers, because it was feared that the German bombers would be able more easily to find the prime minister’s house, especially when the moon was full and could illuminate the driveway. The owners of Ditchley, Nancy and Ronald Tree, had some trouble feeding all their invited guests because of rationing restrictions, so Hill asked Churchill ‘if it would be in order to grant extra rations to Nancy Tree’s chef’.32
Chequers was a favourite family venue. Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames fondly recalls the four Christmases the family spent at Chequers: ‘the great rather gloomy house truly seemed to come to life and glow on those occasions, with blazing log fires, miraculous decorations made by Hill, a towering Christmas tree in the Great Hall’.33
In January 1939 Bill Deakin, one of Churchill’s most important researchers, wrote to Hill to ask for help in getting temporary resident visas for two Jewish shopkeepers in Bad Gastein, Austria. Mrs Churchill had skied there decades before and ‘bought some hats and clothes’ at their shop. Deakin suggested Hill send the letter to the German-Jewish Aid Committee, stating that Mrs Churchill ‘would like the matter attended to’.34 We do not know if they got their visas.
Hill recalls that while sometimes dictation came easily to Churchill, at other times it was tentative as he re-thought paragraphs or policies. One night he told her: ‘leave me, I’ll finish it in the morning’. When she arrived the next day, Churchill said to her, ‘I’ve laid an egg’ – that is, he had successfully written it.§ This was unusual, for ‘He didn’t [hand]write a script very often.’ Churchill liked egg references. As he once said: ‘I shall live on this history [A History of the English-Speaking Peoples]. I shall lay an egg a year – a volume every twelve months should not mean much work.’35 Thanks to Hill and his ‘prodigious memory’, he was able to do that. Cassell’s copies of the 1939 proofs were destroyed when the company’s premises were bombed later in the war. But Hill had the foresight to retain Churchill’s less polished drafts, from which he could recreate the destroyed versions when he returned to the research and writing after a hectic wartime premiership.36
