by Working
Unlike the other secretaries, Churchill called her ‘Mrs Hill’, perhaps because she was a bit older and married. Or perhaps later when he had more secretaries he was less apt to depend on – and call for – one specific person. He wanted to be called ‘Mr Churchill’, saying ‘I was born Mr Churchill and I’ll die Mr Churchill. He would not be called sir by us. With the servants, perhaps.’
Since almost every paper was kept,¶ files and the filing systems were a problem. At first, there were simple wooden slats, ‘no real proper cupboard’, and tin boxes; later there was a filing system for letters, organized by Mrs Pearman, and considered ‘nothing short of a miracle’.37 This system worked well from 1929 until 1939. The papers used in his book The World Crisis, Churchill’s six-volume history of the First World War, were stored in a black tin box, as were his personal financial papers. Hill enlarged and maintained this filing system.
Hill served as Churchill’s bookkeeper, in addition to performing her other duties. She was responsible for writing cheques for the domestic staff, and also for the workers at Chartwell such as architects, builders and repairmen. ‘There always seemed to be some building work going on… there was so much going on that it was hard to keep a record of what was going on.’ Hill was also responsible for keeping track of staff members’ salaries, so that they could pay their income tax.38
Hill mentions the same female visitors that other secretaries noted, including the aristocratic socialites Venetia Stanley Montagu, Violet Bonham Carter and Sylvia Henley, as well as family members. The officer and government official Desmond Morton was a regular dinner guest at Chartwell. Other visitors included Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran), who became Churchill’s doctor and frequently accompanied Churchill on foreign tours. Wilson was first introduced to Churchill by Brendan Bracken, two weeks after his patient became prime minister, but Churchill wanted no doctor fluttering and fretting around him, so he issued an order, Hill recalls: ‘keep that old fool away from me.’ However, some sources suggest that the government assigned Wilson to monitor the newly installed prime minister, others say that Beaverbrook suggested Wilson. In any case, Wilson would become a familiar presence in Churchill’s life (once he became familiar with his face), and he would become well-known to all the secretaries, although these intrepid women earn few mentions in his published diaries.
In September 1939 Churchill joined the Chamberlain government and became First Lord of the Admiralty once again. Hill, ‘who accompanied him, later recalled how he rushed up to the First Lord’s Room and went up to a cupboard in the panelling. I held my breath. He flung the door open with a dramatic gesture – there, behind the panelling was a large map showing the disposition of the German ships on the day he had left the Admiralty in 1915 – twenty-four years before’.39
She later remembered that ‘When Winston was at the Admiralty, the place was buzzing with atmosphere, with electricity. When he was away, on tour, it was dead, dead, dead.’ She said, ‘Chartwell was vibrating – you never knew what was going to happen next when he was there. It came to life.’ Several other secretaries noticed the excitement Churchill brought to any office, any task, any room or indeed any dinner table.
Hill ‘had to sort through the flood of letters that reached Churchill from the public after his appointment to the Admiralty, and to decide which ones to put before him. One of these letters was from a young Conservative, apologizing for having tried to oust Churchill from his constituency earlier that year’. Hill sent the letter to Churchill with her note attached, saying: ‘Please read this.’ He did, and this was the response he dictated to her: ‘I certainly think that Englishmen ought to start fair with one another from the outset in so grievous a struggle and so far as I am concerned the past is dead.’40 He had great powers of forgiveness. Bracken said about him: ‘Hard fighter as he is in debate, he is a man almost devoid of rancour. A defeat does not sour him.’41
In early November 1939, as First Lord and with the added responsibility of a seat on the special War Cabinet Committee, Churchill took a destroyer to Boulogne and then the train to Paris to meet with the French military command. Admiral Darlan had provided his own train to bring Churchill to Paris. ‘It was his [Churchill’s] first war time visit across the channel, his hundredth trip to France since he had first gone there, as a boy, with his father, more than fifty years before. His love of France was profound.’42 With him at the Ritz Hotel was Hill, who recalled that ‘Paris didn’t seem like a place that was under the cloud of war. The war was on, but life seemed to be going on as normal in Paris then.’ Of course, the Paris that she and Churchill were seeing was not the Paris of ordinary Parisians. On arrival, he met with his French naval counterparts, promising British help and cooperation, as he did at a later meeting with the French prime minister, Daladier. That night he gave a dinner in a private room at the Ritz and the next morning, ‘using his room at the Ritz as an office, he dictated a number of departmental minutes’ to Hill.
As the workload increased, a new secretary, Mary Shearburn, was brought in. She had been working for a few months at Chartwell and was now brought up to London to help with dictation at the Admiralty.# Shearburn proved as loyal and inventive as her predecessors and successors. When Churchill entrusted her with some papers to carry from the Orkney Islands, back to London, on a night train and in a sleeping compartment by herself, he asked what she would do if someone attacked her to get the box of papers. ‘I would scream at the top of my voice,’ Shearburn said. ‘You know it is the best way of discouraging unwelcome attentions of any sort. It attracts so much publicity.’ Her husband Detective Inspector Thompson tells us, ‘Winston then grinned and nodded his head, adding: “You may well be right. I should never [have] thought of it.”’43
Churchill took an incidental decision at this time. He ‘agreed to the department store Harrods’ request to transfer twenty-two varieties of rare fish into [his] lakes; in return he could keep as many fish as he chose at the war’s end.’44 Hill and the other secretaries would have managed this intriguing piscatorial manoeuvre.
After Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 he knew that the Germans intended to invade Britain. Plans were made to evacuate the government, codenamed Black Move. The prime minister, his private office and his family would be moved to the house in Spetchley Park’s 4,500 acres, near Worcester, and Hill was included on the list of those to be evacuated with the PM. One morning in late June 1940 Churchill was in bed, at Chequers, dressed in ‘a red dressing gown, smoking a cigar’,45 dictating minutes to Hill requesting information from the Admiralty about possible landing areas the Germans might use, and how the weather and tides might affect the choice of landing spots. It is not reported whether, as was the case a few days earlier, Hill, taking dictation, was seated
at the foot of his bed with a typewriter. His box, half full of papers, stood open on his bed and by his side a vast chromium-plated cuspidor46 to throw his cigars into [and] demanding the candle to light his cigar. His black cat Nelson, who had quite replaced our old Number 10 black cat, sprawled at the end of the bed and every now and then Winston would gaze at it affectionately and say, ‘Cat, darling.’47
Churchill said that ‘Nelson was doing [a lot] for the war effort since Nelson served as the prime ministerial hot water bottle’.48 Churchill’s Private Secretary Jock Colville, and perhaps others, were also in the room.
Churchill could at times show consideration for his secretaries, as we have seen. In early January 1940 Churchill was aboard HMS Codrington, once again on his way to France. Churchill was on the bridge with the captain and halfway across the channel, when he said: ‘I know it is not usual for ladies to be on the bridge of a destroyer in wartime, but I would be glad if you would give my secretary a cup of tea. I am going down to your cabin to work.’49 Hill got her cup of tea aboard the British destroyer. Hill also notes that Churchill ‘would never let us carry things… or run up and down stairs quickly. He was afraid we would get a heart attack.’50 When flying at
high altitudes, he constantly warned his staff to ‘blow out their ears on landing and take-offs’.51
On another occasion, in November 1940, Colville describes the scene as Hill takes dictation in Churchill’s bedroom at Chequers:
He lay there in his four-post bed with its flowery chintz hangings, his bed table by his side. Hill sat patiently opposite while he chewed his cigar, drunk frequent sips of ice water, fidgeted his toes beneath the bed clothes and murmured stertorously** under his breath what he contemplated saying… to watch him compose some telegram or minute for dictation is to make one feel that one is present at the birth of a child, so tense is his expression, so restless his turnings from side to side, so curious the noises he emits under his breath.52
The unflappable secretary took all this for granted and steadily took down his words.
Secretaries were often present on important occasions, important to the nation, but also to the family. There were no divisions between Churchill’s work and life. Hill was there in late 1941 when the dreadful news came through to Churchill that both warships HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales had been sunk in the Pacific. She later recalled: ‘I sat in the corner of the room silently and unobtrusively… when he was upset I used to try to be invisible. When the two ships went down I was there. That was a terrible moment.’ Churchill recalls being ‘thankful to be alone. In all the war I never received a more direct shock.’53
She also joined Grace Hamblin and Elizabeth Layton during the latter part of Churchill’s recuperation in Marrakesh, a period sufficiently extended to require that quite a large contingent be brought from London, so that Churchill could continue to manage affairs of state. ‘It was almost as if the centre of British government had been moved from Whitehall to Marrakesh.’54
Oddly, Hill does not mention travelling to Quebec with Churchill for the Octagon meeting in September 1944, as one of the four secretaries who went with him.
After the war, when the family reopened Chartwell, which had been closed for the duration of the war, Churchill set about rearranging his books. The beautifully bound leather editions of the translations of his own works – into Norwegian and Swedish, for example – he called his ‘Snobs Library’, his best books. He also had a gramophone there and loved to play Boer War songs, such as ‘Soldiers of the Queen’. In preparation for the move out of the prime ministerial limelight, Churchill asked Hill to establish ‘a secretarial schedule for his life as Leader of the Opposition’. Her memo to him and Lady Churchill says: ‘I cannot conceive a plan whereby we could manage with less than three secretaries plus the assistance of Miss Hamblin at Chartwell on alternate weekends.’ She continued: ‘at Chartwell, the off-duty secretary… would answer telephones, prepare meals, wash dishes, make beds etc.’55
Kathleen Hill received an MBE in 1941. After the election defeat in 1945, she was appointed Curator of Chequers in 1946, where she worked until 1969. On Boxing Day 1952 she and her son Richard, who ‘succeeded to a baronetcy, becoming the 10th Baronet, were luncheon guests of Churchill at Chequers’.56 Kathleen Hill officially retired in 1970 and died aged ninety-two in 1992.
* The Churchill penthouse had once been occupied by David Lloyd George (British prime minister 1916–22). Hill recalls that she still received letters there addressed to Miss Frances Stevenson, long-time mistress, personal secretary and confidante of the Welsh politician. She became his second wife in 1943, becoming Frances Lloyd George, Countess Lloyd George of Dwyfor.
† A Parliamentary Private Secretary is a member of parliament appointed by a minister as an assistant, to be their ‘eyes and ears’ in the House of Commons. PPSs are selected from the ranks of backbench MPs.
‡ Today the house is a hotel with many of the luxurious features and rooms intact.
§ An example of the language gap separating the United Kingdom and the United States. To ‘lay an egg’ in America is to fail badly. In Britain it can mean to bring forth a successful result, as it does in this instance.
¶ Except when Lady Churchill decided to ‘have a tearing-up session of old photographs, etc., which I rather regretted’. And so do we all regret this.
# Shearburn would later marry Detective Inspector Walter Thompson, Churchill’s principal bodyguard, and she would later type his memoirs, since made into a TV documentary.
** A descriptive adjective also used by Lieutenant General Sir Ian Jacob.
4
Patrick Kinna
‘No females – good heavens, no.’
Elizabeth Layton1
‘Here she [Kathleen Hill] was slaving away… in the Annexe and had slaved away before the war in the Admiralty with him and yet these exciting trips, she wasn’t having those. I thought she deserved them… I used to get so tired because we had so many trips abroad – and generally in those days no girls went.’
Patrick Kinna, oral history
NO CHRONICLE OF what it was like working with Winston would be complete without mention of the role played by Patrick Kinna, the only male shorthand typist in Churchill’s world. Kinna occupied that undefined middle ground between Churchill’s Private Secretaries (high-level civil servants operating out of Number 10) and the personal secretaries whose stories are told in this book. For reasons at which we can only guess, including social status, Kinna was never offered the title and civil service standing of a Private Secretary, although he eventually came to do many of the chores traditionally reserved for that group. But neither was he treated as just another secretary. The reason for that distinction is not difficult to determine: he was a man. During many of the years covered by this book the distinction between men and women was stark and meaningful, although increasingly blurred as the war wore on. Its final erasure can be attributed to Ernest Bevin’s introduction of registration for women, when, ‘on 18 December 1941, the National Service (No. 2) Act was passed, making conscription for women legal’.2 Single women and childless widows between twenty and thirty now had a wide range of choices for service. The Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) was the choice of service for many, and at their peak in 1944 numbered over 74,000. Even before registration ‘twelve female cypher officers, ten Chief WRNS special operators and a naval nursing sister were killed instantly when their ship, SS Aguila, was torpedoed on 19 August 1941 en route from Liverpool to Gibraltar.’3 Nevertheless, WRNS continued to serve on naval ships throughout the war. Robert Meiklejohn, the American diplomat Averell Harriman’s only private secretary, notes in his diary that on the 1943 voyage to America, passengers included ‘thirty WRNS code clerks to handle incoming messages for the PM’, who could receive but not send messages lest enemy submarines home in on the signal. Commander ‘Tommy’ Thompson, Churchill’s principal aide-de-camp, who travelled on all of Churchill’s trips, said this ‘drives the PM nuts’.4
Men were allowed to travel with the prime minister, but non-military, civilian women could not be exposed to the hazards of wartime travel. That, of course, changed during the war, and by its end it was considered acceptable for female secretaries to bear the risks of dangerous travel, at least on non-military ships. But for Churchill gender distinctions survived the end of hostilities in Europe. In July 1945 he issued a cabinet minute laying out plans for demobilization of the armed forces: ‘Women ought not to be treated the same as men.’ If the men are not brought home quickly they might become rebellious. ‘But women are an entirely different category. They do not mutiny or cause disturbances, and the sooner they are back at their homes the better.’5
Kinna, who could and did travel with Churchill on dangerous voyages, was not to be exposed to all the chores often assigned to the female personal secretaries, whose work is recorded in this book. In addition to taking down and transcribing Churchill’s massive output of speeches, memoranda and correspondence, often under trying conditions, the women who worked with Churchill were charged with feeding the fish at Chartwell, making certain that flowers and foodstuffs moved efficiently between Number 10 and the Churchills’ other residences, and
performing personal and household tasks, none of which are so much as mentioned by Kinna in his extensive interview for the Churchill Archives.
Kinna, born in September 1913, was described by Meiklejohn as ‘the PM’s very meek and Casper Milquetoastish stenographer’,6 which unfairly minimized his role. Jo Sturdee describes Kinna as
very much twixt-in-between, not a member of the ‘serfs club’ because he wasn’t with us so much… he would have qualified because he was such a darling… When Churchill went on these trips abroad… to the desert… where he would be behind enemy lines, where he would be with the fighting forces, Churchill said that women could not go there so that’s when Kinna was brought in to go as a shorthand typist. I [was] never so fast as he. He was marvellous. [But] we didn’t see much of him. He was so damn good and invaluable and so jolly that he then joined the No. 10 staff… doing confidential filing.
It is reported that Kinna’s typing was so fast that the keys stuck, so a ‘special portable typewriter with the keys shaved’ was ordered for his use. No other secretary mentions this special typewriter.7
Kinna was a key member of the team that worked with Churchill, his ill-defined job description reaching into the world of the Private Secretaries (senior civil servants), although not into the personal areas of Churchill’s life, which was reserved for the personal secretaries. When Kathleen Hill was taken ill and had to take an extended leave after removal of her appendix, Kinna was ‘brought along’ to help an overworked Elizabeth Layton. He disliked shorthand and typing, at which he was extraordinarily good, and between trips with the prime minister ‘he minded official documents and filing, arranged transport and so forth.’8 He must be included in this book not only to contrast his experience with that of the women who worked with Churchill, but also because his long service and revealing oral history tells us much about Churchill the man. Kinna’s experiences working with the prime minister provide both support for the observations of Churchill’s secretarial staff, and reveal characteristics not recorded by the women, who generally adopted an attitude more of staff and less of an equal. Kinna felt free to ask for favours, such as transport to visit his brother in Italy, which even the most self-confident of the secretaries (who even needed support from Mrs Churchill to plead for some time off at Christmas) would not consider requesting. So in Kinna’s history we benefit from the different perspective of a man who worked with Churchill neither as Private Secretary nor merely as a personal secretary. And someone for whom Churchill had great respect, so great that he included him in events to which only a small handful of people were invited.
