by Working
That was when Kinna (like Hamblin, who described that period when she and Layton shared a room at La Mamounia44 as ‘three lovely weeks in Marrakesh, never to be forgotten’) seized an opportunity for a period of liberation from the demands of his boss. When the work pace slowed during Churchill’s recuperation, Kinna was not called for by the patient as frequently as was usually the case. So he planned to try to visit his brother, who was serving somewhere in Italy. General Alexander, a Kinna favourite, arranged to have him flown to Naples and ‘dropped… on the runway… I walked along to some officers and said please can… you find out where [my brother] was. They were very helpful, found out where he was stationed and gave me a jeep. I stayed the night [with him] in his mess.’ Later his brother asked the Americans if they had a plane going back to Tunis.
[T]hey had a Dakota and I was put on board. … I was beginning to get worried that my absence might be noticed. The pilot said… I’m coming down in Sicily. I’ll stay a few hours. I’ve got a girlfriend there I want to visit. I could have killed him… but had to wait patiently in the plane.
This adventure was made possible by the fact that Kinna had earlier formed a relationship with General Alexander. No such bond existed between the general and any female staff, none would have dared make such a request.
During this stay in North Africa, one of Kinna’s most moving moments was on Christmas Eve. Kinna and Sawyers, both Roman Catholics,45
had heard there was going to be a midnight mass in Carthage Cathedral high up on a hill overlooking the city of Tunis… we arranged for someone to take us there in their jeep and as we were getting nearer this enormous cathedral, the bells were being pealed and when we went inside, we found the cathedral full of [armed] forces people in their various uniforms and various nationalities… all started singing hymns… I think it was the most memorable midnight mass I have ever attended.
And an experience that made the difficulties and, at times, lack of consideration by Churchill well worth bearing.
With time and, for the most part, some rest, Churchill improved, helped by his own robust constitution and the Americans who provided many of his medical requirements, as well as food and lodgings for the prime minister’s staff. In fact, the Americans had imported a nutritionist‡ to watch over Churchill’s menus – although she cooked the partridges for ‘an hour and half: the result was concrete. Sawyers rashly informed the American cook that Mrs Landemare cooks partridges for only fifteen minutes.’46 The New Year’s Eve party went rather better. Churchill invited everyone regardless of rank or status to see in the new year at his Villa Taylor (owned by rich Americans). ‘All formed a circle to sing Auld Lang Syne,’47 ‘followed by the prime minister complaining in stentorian voice – “Clemmie – there’s a wasp in my punch.”’48
The party had flown to Marrakesh with the plan that Churchill would recuperate more fully there. But as Churchill improved, his work increased, despite his family’s pleadings to slow down enough until he was completely recovered – a plea they knew he would never heed. As a result, Kinna’s workload also increased, although he, too, was understandably exhausted. But he recalls that he made many good friends in Tunis and, after the war, returned often to visit them.
Throughout the war Kinna met the famous politicians and military men who were planning and conducting what was a war to save Western civilization – an opportunity routinely denied the female secretaries who had no basis on which to form opinions and therefore none are expressed during their oral history interviews.
Here’s Kinna on various famous people he encountered.
Roosevelt: ‘He was very friendly. Always very considerate.’ One day, while working at Roosevelt’s Hyde Park weekend home he ‘heard a terrific noise and was nearly trampled to death because Eleanor Roosevelt was rushing out in her riding habit… I was nearly knocked for six.’§ Kinna believed that
if Roosevelt had not more or less got on the side of Stalin, I think the world today would have been very different. I blame him for a lot of the present-day situation… I’m sure the Americans might be very angry if I said this but one had the impression, at least I had the impression, that the Americans all the time were trying to push the English aside. I think they were jealous of our empire.
Stalin: ‘I shook the bloody hand of Stalin… I was terrified. He had the coldest eyes… cunning and very evil… Very uncouth and rather a tough chap.’49 ‘A very powerful evil treacherous man but very impressive… I remember so well at the conference he criticized British intelligence saying your intelligence is not as good as Russian intelligence. I think that was probably fairly true because we all know the Russians are pretty ruthless at getting the information they want and spend a lot of time and money on it.¶
General Smuts: ‘A humanitarian who always seemed a little concerned about me’ (as we saw in his concern for Kinna working in Egyptian heat).
General Ismay: ‘[A]n absolute dear… a great man.’ Kinna had first worked for him in Paris at the Hotel de Crillon, just before the war started when he had to
type up the preliminary minutes of decisions taken at the War Council in Paris… [Churchill] thought the world of General Ismay as he always called him. [Ismay] always knew his work on the military side and would express his own opinions in a nice gentle way and Winston used to listen to him very very carefully. He would say Pug [Ismay’s nickname] did a wonderful job during the war… I kept in touch with him after the war as well.
General Alexander was a Kinna favourite: ‘everyone liked him very much’.
General Montgomery was not a Kinna favourite:
Although a very good general, he didn’t like the lower echelons very much. I remember on one occasion a cable went from the PM’s office to Montgomery saying he was planning to come out to see him [to watch the battle of the Rhine] and his party would consist of the following two: Leslie Rowan and myself and would he arrange accommodation. A very curt reply came back saying: ‘I will be pleased to see you, prime minister, but I cannot accommodate your staff.’ Fortunately, Field Marshal Alexander accommodated Leslie Rowan and me and so we had the great pleasure of dining in his mess with him, which was much nicer than being with Monty I can assure you.
The prime minister solved the problem created by the not-always-easy-to-deal-with Montgomery by advising:
it would be necessary for me to have somewhere twenty or thirty miles further back in a train, or perhaps a railway coach, where I can keep a Private Secretary and Mr Kinna who deals with facilities for scrambling messages… I do not need them all at the front… A motor cyclist or two would keep in contact with this ‘base’.50
The prime minister deemed Kinna essential, even on a short trip to a battle site.
Randolph Churchill:
Randolph I didn’t like at all… not many people did unfortunately. He was an awkward person and I always used to be sad or rather worried when I knew he was flying from somewhere to meet his father on these trips abroad because I knew it would cause great arguments between father and son… I think it was in Cairo one day, he came up to me and started telling me what to do – what he wanted done… the only time I was ever rude to him or anyone in the Churchill family when I told him exactly what my functions were… I didn’t come all this way to work for him.
No female shorthand typist would have had the temerity to say this to a man, no matter how rude, and especially not to the son of their employer, the prime minister.
Sarah Churchill:
I adored Sarah. Everybody did. She was my favourite… [because] she realizes we were poor slaves and didn’t have much of a let up… she might perhaps when dinner was over and Winston and whoever was visiting were having conferences, she would come into my office in her Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) uniform looking terribly beautiful, sit on the desk and talk… very very friendly and no side at all… everyone stopped working for a while to gossip with Sarah.
And despite what at times seemed to be Churchill’s inhumane
treatment of him, Kinna fondly remembered his boss’s humour, which had a way of showing Kinna that he was one of a small, very special group. He recalled that on a flight back from Europe, the Dakota on which he and Churchill were flying began to lose altitude. Churchill jokingly suggested they might have ‘to jettison one or more of the passengers’. Turning to Kinna, he said, ‘No use throwing you out, there’s not enough of you to make a ham sandwich.’51 Much later, in February 1945, while waiting to fly back to Britain from Cairo, Churchill again teased Kinna about his slight build, saying, ‘If we come down in the desert, you would not be much good as a meal.’52
And there was the kindness – a characteristic often subordinated to the pressures of war. Kinna recalls
when the prime minister had time which wasn’t very often he could be very considerate, very kind. I remember we were flying somewhere or other in a converted bomber… and it was becoming very cold. We didn’t have any modern comforts. [Churchill] had the only bunk bed quite rightly, and I had to sleep in the bomb bay with one or two others… I remember he said you are going to be very cold tonight. [He] was dressed in his RAF gear and took off his RAF overcoat and put it around me. I thought that was really something.
Much like when the two secretaries were working in the cold Hawtrey Room at Chequers without a fire and Churchill insisted on lighting a fire for them. Or when Churchill insisted on getting a spare coat for Holmes during the Christmas 1944 visit to Athens, of which more below.
After the election defeat of 1945 Churchill wished to say goodbye personally to his closest staff and assembled them in the Private Secretaries’ room, just outside the cabinet room. And
to my surprise [Churchill] said: come in, Mr Kinna, so he had me in first – probably thought he’d get rid of me first, I don’t know. I closed the door. He sat at his usual seat at the cabinet table. I sat directly opposite and then he started reminiscing about all our perilous trips together abroad, and mentioned various countries we’d been to and the people we’d met… becoming very sad… and then he said the British people don’t want me anymore. And he had tears running down his cheeks and I had tears running down mine as well. It was all rather sad.53
Kinna was here exposed to Churchill’s well-known willingness to cry unashamedly when overcome with emotion. Virginia Cowles reports him in tears when seeing a small shop in ruins after a bombing raid, because the owner had lost both his home and his livelihood. At the christening of Randolph’s son, Winston Junior, Churchill, ‘with tears streaming down his cheeks’, murmured, ‘Poor infant, to be born into such a world as this.’54 And Ismay is reported to have said that Churchill ‘cries equally from pleasure or from sadness, [and] cried and sobbed from the moment he set foot in France [in December 1944].’55 His show of emotion was not confined to weeping. ‘Anyone who ever heard Churchill chuckle cannot realize the fun that lay in that noise. It was between a chuckle and a snort, and it was apt to be followed by a sound from deep in his chest that sounded like “oomph”, repeated several times as the joke was rolling around and maturing.’56
Sometime later Kinna was summoned to Claridge’s to meet Churchill, who offered him the job of being secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, as Churchill then had become. Kinna recalled:
I again felt I could not do justice because after all these years, really long hours, so, I hope, I gracefully declined. But I suggested Elizabeth Gilliatt would be ideal. And that I think was more or less the end of my very delightful, very hard, wonderful connection with Winston Churchill.
Kinna then spent some years working as a secretary to Ernest Bevin at the Foreign Office until Bevin’s death in 1951. After that, Kinna worked in the private sector as a company director and retired to Brighton in 1973.
Churchill recommended him for an MBE in 1945 and, it is said, the two men exchanged white geraniums on their birthdays.57
In 1984 Kinna was one of a group of secretaries that had worked with Churchill who, in the presence of the queen, attended the opening of the museum now known as the Cabinet War Rooms, so beautifully preserved that ‘you can practically still smell the cigar smoke’.58 He was the last surviving male member of Churchill’s wartime private office.59 Kinna died in March 2009 aged ninety-five.
* Sir John Milbanke won a Victoria Cross in the Boer War and was killed at Gallipoli.
† Charles Wilson, later Lord Moran.
‡ This shows the concern that the Americans felt for the prime minister’s well-being.
§ An expression derived from cricket (when hitting the ball over the boundary scores six runs, the maximum for one shot), meaning devastated, shocked or upset.
¶ It is unusual to have a secretary express stout political opinions, as few of the female secretaries did in their oral histories.
5
Jo Sturdee
‘We all dressed quietly… we did not
dress flamboyantly.’
‘You see we were meant to merge into the
background and not be noticed.’
‘It was his joy to work.’
Jo Sturdee, oral history
NINA EDITH STURDEE – always known as ‘Jo’, later Countess of Onslow – was one of the most significant of Churchill’s personal secretaries, and not only because she was responsible for vetting and training many of the women whose recollections of working with Churchill are related here. She served Churchill during the war years of 1942 to 1945, after which she became his main personal secretary from 1945 to 1953. That gave her an almost unique view of the man in and out of office, as a leader of his wartime government, as the Leader of the Opposition to the first post-war government, and once again as prime minister, this time struggling to prevent the nuclearized post-war world from repeating the mistakes of the last war and bringing about still another conflict.
Born in 1922 and ‘educated at a convent’, Sturdee trained as a shorthand typist at the Mayfair Secretarial College and then worked in a solicitor’s office. In October 1941, feeling she ought to do something more for the war effort, and having been turned down by the WRNS, she applied to Mrs Hoster’s agency which kept a listing of available jobs, although she had not trained with them. ‘If you went to [any] of those so-called smart secretarial colleges in London they guaranteed you a job at the end of their training at not less than two pounds ten [shillings] a week (about £110 in today’s money) which was big stuff in those days.’ She was offered an interview with a cabinet minister whom the agency refused to identify, and who stressed that several others were also being considered. In her interviews at Downing Street, she first saw Kathleen Hill and then Mags Stenhouse, a civil servant in charge of Number 10 staffing, about whom we will learn more.
Sturdee is one of the few who mentioned a security vetting process – probably because she was being hired straight into Downing Street during the war. She recalled her father having a sandwich and beer for lunch one day when a stranger sat down next to him, asking ‘a whole lot of impertinent questions’. In retrospect, Sturdee and her father decided the man had been checking her background for potential security risks. She was hired, in part because Hill noticed her ‘impeccable manners’.1
Sturdee was finally told she would be working for the prime minister, on his personal staff, under Kathleen Hill who was also supervising Elizabeth Layton. No one instructed her in proper office attire: ‘We all dressed quietly… we did not dress flamboyantly… You see we were meant to merge into the background and not be noticed.’ She says she wore ‘a neat little suit and a white blouse half the time, or a twin set and pearls, dark colours’. Layton notes, ‘We were not able to be very smartly dressed – neither time nor [ration] coupons allowed for that; but one and all we made it a rule always to appear neat and groomed, hair in order and properly made-up.’2 There was no formal dress code to guide these women, merely a sense of what was proper and what was not. However, Vanda Salmon, who worked for Churchill when he was Leader of the Opposition, might have stretched things a bit when she appeared fo
r her interview ‘wearing my best navy-blue suit and a rather fetching hat with a red feather in it (we all wore hats to work in those days)’.3
The Churchills did not give Sturdee a clothing allowance, but Mrs Churchill did advise her always to wear white gloves if she were meeting royalty, ‘[you] must never present a bare hand to [them]… they must not ever touch anything but white.’ And, as we shall see, Sturdee learned to ‘Never, ever go abroad without a long dress. You always had to have at least one, if not two, long dresses.’ Joan Bright, as always, an independent civilian woman, but who worked closely with military men and women, said that she ‘kept her own clothes on the dark side and tailored, looking uniformed, thinking that this gave me more authority’.4 And she had a great deal of authority as General Ismay’s de facto office manager.5
It would be some months before Sturdee met the prime minister. Before that fateful day, she worked on constituency matters, copying out letters that Hill had drafted in order to get the hang of answering letters. She called herself
happy to be the dogsbody*… doing the ‘ruddy’ press clippings. A whole packet came in every day depending on what the prime minister had been up to. [I] had to read them all and decide [which to keep]… and so I think we kept… probably depending on which was the best report, probably The Times or the Telegraph and then always the lesser ones like the Mirror.
But, she added, they kept all the bad reports too, as well as the ones from the ‘left-wing newspapers’. Churchill had every national and several regional newspapers on his bed when he woke up every morning and he read them all, beginning with the ‘left-wing [ones] and finishing with The Times’.
