by Working
Kinna was born into a family with a long tradition of army service. His father, Captain Thomas Kinna, had been decorated for his part in the relief of Ladysmith (28 February 1900) during the Boer War, a battle in which Churchill, then an armed correspondent for the Morning Post, had also played a role.9 Kinna hoped to become a parliamentary reporter, and after school learned shorthand and typing. He took shorthand at a phenomenal 150 words per minute and typed at 90 words per minute on the clunky machines of that era,10 the latter matching the speed at which Churchill dictated.11
Kinna won the All-England Championship award for secretarial skills. When war with Germany seemed almost certain, one of his brothers told him to enlist, which he did, joining the reserves. In early 1939, having been called up, he was promoted to Lance Corporal, assigned to the Intelligence Corps, because the company needed a skilled secretary, and asked to sign the Official Secrets Act. Kinna was then sent to Paris to work for the war cabinet secretariat, presumably meeting Churchill there, when the new prime minister travelled several times to France to meet with French officials to, according to Kinna, ‘urge them to carry on the struggle’. Kinna then worked at the British Embassy in Paris as clerk to the Duke of Windsor, who had settled there with his new wife, the former Wallis Simpson. One of the chores he performed for the duke was burning some of the embassy files as the Germans neared Paris. Shortly before the Germans entered Paris, the duke was spirited away to safety in Spain, abandoning his newly recruited secretary. When the Germans occupied Paris, Kinna fled, hitchhiking to the coast, and then catching a ride on a cruiser bound for Britain.
So good was his reputation that Kinna was ordered by Downing Street to Washington aboard the battleship King George V to work with the American, British and Canadian staffs, who were secretly ‘setting up the joint staff mission’, the so-called ABC-1 meetings. These meetings between January and March 1941 were convened to plan for the possible entry of the United States into the Second World War. After Washington, Kinna returned to Britain, unsure of what to do next. When Churchill’s Private Secretaries were planning what was to be the first meeting between President Roosevelt and the prime minister in August 1941, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, John Martin, Churchill’s Principal Private Secretary, sent for Kinna. He told Kinna: ‘This is very secret. The prime minister is going on an important trip and we want you to come and do the best you can with all the correspondence and dictation and all that.’
It was assumed that a female secretary – it would have been Kathleen Hill – should not go on such a trip. The feeling was ‘No females – good heavens, no.’12 For one thing, at this early stage in the war, with U-boats prowling the Atlantic, it was considered inappropriate to expose a non-military, civilian woman to so dangerous a journey. Perhaps more important were the traditions of the British navy, ‘generations of men of the British Navy who had guarded their ships as jealously as they had guarded our shores’.13 That inhibition faded as the war progressed and women proved quite up to managing among male sailors, as did Churchill’s secretaries, often to their and the sailors’ delight. Women could also handle dangerous assignments: Christine Granville spied on Germany and became known as ‘Churchill’s favourite spy’,14 while Josephine Butler’s exploits behind enemy lines are detailed in her book, Cyanide in My Shoe.
In at least one particular, the British proved more adaptable to the introduction of women on battleships and at conferences than did the Americans. By the time of the Churchill–Roosevelt Conference in Cairo, prelude to the Teheran Conference with Stalin, ‘The Chiefs of Staff found it was not necessary to have only uniformed staff, as the Americans did, and General Eisenhower was once overheard remarking to [General Sir Leslie] Hollis: “You don’t put your girls in uniform then?” Hollis replied: “It wouldn’t make them any more reliable if we did.”’15
It was also thought that accommodations ‘in war time on a battle ship’ would cause problems were a woman to be on board. Kinna reports that he was always assigned ‘a nice cabin, [one of] the officers’ cabins… delightful and well furbished’, but it was certainly not feasible for the female secretaries to live alongside the male officers aboard a battleship with shared bathing and toilet facilities. That problem was later solved in part by assigning to the women ‘their own batman’, but one woman noted that ‘it seemed strange sending off all their clothes, even their underwear, on a mainly male battleship’. And stranger still when one of the women ‘lost one of her “smalls” so there was some embarrassment when a seaman was assigned to tracking it down’.16
Kinna also thought that ‘sailors would have loved to have a few of the girls on board to break the monotony but it wasn’t possible really’. But Kathleen Hill, by then accustomed to the prime minister’s work habits, might not have found it as annoying as did Kinna to be awakened early with the sailors, especially after taking dictation until two or three in the morning.
What was true of the space on battleships was also true of the space on many trains. When Churchill met with Turkey’s President İnönü in January 1943 (in a failed effort to persuade him to bring Turkey into the war on the side of the Allies) the chosen site was a train in the middle of the most barren part of the country. Kinna found himself ‘living in a train’ with the British officials – no female secretary would have been included in this intimate – and unusual – meeting, during which Kinna met President İnönü.
Finally, there was one insurmountable barrier to women working with Churchill: he ‘loved dictating… in his bath which obviously he could not do with his ladies’. In a letter to his mother, a fourteen-year-old Churchill wrote about a fellow student at Harrow: ‘Milbanke* is writing this for me as I am having a bath.’ It was a habit he kept for the rest of his life, to great advantage.17 Male staff noted that he would submerge himself in the tub and come up spitting, pretending to be a fountain, or blowing bubbles or using the sponges to show the positions of battleships, much like he did at dinner tables with salt-and-pepper shakers and cutlery. As we shall see, as the war wore on, Churchill’s female secretaries found a way of dealing with his bath times, perching outside the bathroom and taking dictation as best they could.
Despite all of these very compelling reasons for replacing Kathleen Hill with Kinna, he was nevertheless uneasy about accepting. There was such a strong sense of staff cohesion that he felt badly that he was asked on this trip rather than his co-worker. ‘Here she was slaving away [Kinna often likened anyone working for Churchill to slaves] 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 didn’t. I didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t go.’ Nevertheless, Hill’s time to join her boss on these trips would soon come.
Before sailing, Hill briefed Kinna, telling him how to use the famous klop or hole punch through which string was run to bind multi-page memoranda, how to ‘clean his pens frequently, fill his inkwells, [making] sure he never runs out of ink’, probably with blue and/or red ink, which Churchill used on occasion. Also ‘his little mask if he wants a cat nap, his little black mask that goes over his eyes’.
The trip to Washington began when the train left Marylebone Station, stopping near Chequers to pick up the prime minister. ‘Train’ might be a misnomer. ‘In fact, Churchill’s train was a mobile hotel, office and communications centre.’ Also wartime rationing rules did not apply either on the train or on the HMS Prince of Wales.18
Well-briefed and ready, Kinna was summoned to Churchill’s cabin aboard the Prince of Wales and remembers ‘his first words to me were “this is a melancholy story.”’ Not realizing that Churchill (as was his habit with new staff) had ignored any greeting to get straight on with work, and had begun dictating a memorandum, Kinna responded, ‘Oh yes, sir. He [Churchill] said, “take it down!!” But everything went well on the trip.’ As with the female secretaries, after an initial kerfuffle, either out of impatience to get on with work or deliberately to give a ne
wcomer ‘a fairly taxing time’ (initiation by fire) or a bit of both, the way was smooth. ‘Once you were in, you were in totally and unconditionally,’19 and all early errors were forgiven.20
Kinna’s first impressions of Churchill were of his ‘greatness and power… not as tall as I expected. He used to walk round with great deliberate footsteps with this sort of pensive look and quite frankly he terrified me because I felt I was near this tremendous man and who am I to be here.’ Kinna reported that the sailors aboard the Prince of Wales asked him for Churchill’s old cigar butts, whether for smoking later or for selling at some future date is unclear, although those sailors could never have imagined how much an old Churchill cigar butt would one day be worth.
While on the trip, Kinna carried the personal letter from King George VI that Churchill was charged with handing to President Roosevelt when they met face to face. He found the work constant: ‘[I] had to be on call always on all these trips during the war. One was never sort of a tourist… Never had a moment.’ Although there was one notable exception in Italy later in the war, as we shall see.
In addition to the letter from the king, Kinna was responsible for far bulkier items, such as
a large standard typewriter, silent one, with large type… [like] the ones used in the Annexe and No. 10. It would have been much easier to have taken a portable but the prime minister would have objected to the noise and wouldn’t like the small type… The only way to transport these standard noiseless typewriters was to have made huge cases [so] the machines could just slide in and wouldn’t be damaged and [could] be kept locked… [when we arrived] without any delay, the first thing to unpack would be the typewriter because almost certainly the PM immediately would want some dictation or even some typewriting done straight away.
And certainly, there never was a dull moment. ‘One morning’ he recalls
I was taking dictation from WSC in his cabin feeling none too well because of the very rough seas, my feelings being aggravated by the PM’s cigar smoke, I could hear some matelots whistling and I knew only too well from experience that the PM could not bear whistling at any time. I hoped he would not hear it – but he did! Suddenly, he angrily told me to… tell those sailors to stop… I had a shrewd idea what they would say to me! However… I hastily left his cabin, not knowing quite what to do, I think I said a few hurried prayers (two quick Hail Marys) and the whistling miraculously stopped. The prime minister obviously believing that I had quieted the ship’s company!21
Later, he recalled the incident: ‘I thought this was the end of my career at sea because I knew exactly what the sailors would tell me to do if I asked them please would you mind stop whistling.’ But Kinna ‘was very proud of himself when he got home’.
No one had any time off. On the trip to Placentia Bay, Churchill’s Principal Private Secretary John Martin, and Sawyers, his valet, worked very long hours together. ‘One of the most remarkable characters on the PM’s staff,’ wrote the Conservative politician Charles Mott-Radclyffe, ‘was his shorthand-writer, Patrick Kinna, who shadowed him everywhere, taking down almost every sentence uttered from some discreet place of vantage, within hearing but out of sight. He would then disappear and type the memorandum or the draft telegram.’22
Kinna’s recollections, like those of so many other wartime visitors to America, was of ‘fantastic’ food.
One could not believe such lovely food existed. Steaks were about four times the size of anything I had ever seen for many many years. All the lovely fresh fruits… whenever I was coming home by sea or air, I would cram my cases and perhaps some of the document cases with tin fruits and… stockings for my sisters, and perfumes. Very unfair but after all rather human.
Kinna was not the only one to benefit from access to American food. The WRNS, who ‘had not seen an orange for almost four years’, were exposed to orangeade and quickly ordered additional rounds, some with maraschino cherries.23
Churchill must have agreed with Mott-Radclyffe’s assessment. When the British team returned to Downing Street from the Churchill–Roosevelt meeting in late August 1941 John Martin wrote to Kinna saying the prime minister was very pleased with his work and
thought it a wise thing if I joined the staff at No. 10 particularly to be available for these trips. Martin obviously thought I was going to be delighted over this but I wasn’t because then strangely enough I was young and thought I ought to do something outside Whitehall. To John Martin’s surprise, I said, could I have a week to think about this? When Martin recovered his breath [he agreed to the week’s delay].
After considering the offer, Kinna returned to Martin’s office and said
I’m very honoured and flattered but I’ve decide not to come. When [Martin] had recovered his strength and breath again, he said this is as near a royal command as you are likely to get, young man, and I think you are going to join us at No. 10. We are going to take you out of the army and put you on the staff of the Treasury and we hope you will start on a certain date. I then saw the point.
Jock Colville notes: ‘When Winston Churchill wanted something and chose to exercise his persuasive gift, there were few who found it possible to refuse.’24 Churchill had his way.
Kinna was based in the Annexe and sat and worked alongside the several Private Secretaries – not with the female secretaries. He recalls that
I would deal with all the messages to the PM from the theatres of war and President Roosevelt… and receiving the C boxes which were the secret service boxes… making sure they went into one of the PPS’s boxes for transmission to the PM… I was almost a Private Secretary. I wasn’t called a Private Secretary. [They] were very high-grade permanent civil servants and I was a back entrant. Very interesting because the PM always referred to the Private Secretaries as young gentlemen but I was always referred to as Mr Kinna so I didn’t reach the higher level. They were all very friendly.
However, Kinna says he ‘was not one of the young gentlemen. I was there to work and work I did. But he [Churchill] was always very nice but we were not on a social level.’
Staff relations were friendly at all levels. Kinna records glowing memories of the several female typists with whom he worked. So, too, with the Private Secretaries. During the long hours of wartime work Churchill ‘occasionally had a little sort of pleasant evening in the Private Secretary’s mess in the Annexe. We had a very good cook there, Brendan Bracken’s [Swedish] cook, she used to produce lovely meals and Jack Churchill, Winston’s brother, often would invite very interesting characters along… one was able to relax and laugh.’ No females were invited to these gatherings. He continues: ‘There was a nice rapport with… everybody and I was very happy there. I loved it. My only complaint was that I used to get so tired because we had so many trips abroad – and generally in those days no girls went.’
The ‘young gentlemen’ had direct access to the prime minister’s office; Kinna and the other shorthand typists did not. They had to wait to be summoned. At the start of his secondment to Number 10, Kinna was held in special reserve for foreign trips. But gradually, as the other staff grew to rely on him, he did ‘the 8 o’clock duty in the morning… [especially if the Private Secretaries] probably had a very busy day the previous day and night’. One early morning, he was asked to ring Anthony Eden, who
was living at the Foreign Office… it seemed to ring when he was in the bath so he wasn’t very pleased about that and I would put him through to the PM… We were not supposed to listen in to these calls early in the morning but it was understood that we should in case the PM decided to arrange a meeting and not tell his Private Secretaries that he had arranged it.
As Kinna began to have closer contact with Churchill, he realized that there were certain problems. Churchill was a ‘very difficult’ man to work for, as we have seen with the female secretaries. ‘At times, an exacting and somewhat exasperating master to serve. He was apt to take little account of the difficulties under which people might be working.’25 On the ret
urn trip from Moscow in August 1942, the group stopped in Cairo where the heat was unbearable in those pre-air conditioning days. ‘At the hottest part of the day’26 Churchill wanted to dictate a letter to Mrs Churchill, but in his bedroom Kinna saw only a fairly low table, on which he
plunked down his heavy typewriter… Churchill… started dictating very quickly because he was in rather angry mood having been with Stalin which was understandable… the legs of the table kept shaking… nothing was making sense that was coming out of the typewriter. I had to stop him which made him even more angry… finished up by putting it on a chest of drawers and trying to reach the keyboard but we got by and nothing more was said.
