Working with Winston

by Working

  She says: ‘If you’re staying at the royal palaces, you always dine with the party: the king and queen or whoever it is… you had your own footman standing behind your chair if you were lunching or dining’ – shades of the splendour that awed Kathleen Hill when she accompanied Churchill to the Sassoon’s Port Lympne, with the important difference that Hill was an observer, but Sturdee was the beneficiary of her very own footman. Sturdee seems different from the other secretaries as she was included in social events that would not have been open to prior young ladies. Earlier and later secretaries would not have stayed in royal palaces or been included in dinners at the British embassy in Washington. We can only speculate about why Sturdee was able to fit in like this.

  In late December 1949 Churchill, hoping to paint, decided on a sunny vacation. He flew to Madeira, taking Mrs Churchill and two secretaries, Sturdee and Gilliatt. They sailed down, staying at Reid’s Hotel, where the owners assigned a manager to look after the Churchills and, no doubt, help the young ladies set up their office. Because there was no airfield on the island the work bags took longer to arrive by ship. Sturdee wrote home that ‘I must say that it has been nice not to get a bag full of work every day, as usual.’53 Although she found the English community there provincial, she did write home that, one day, she and Gilliatt were invited out to lunch to meet some ‘eligibles and returned to the office at 4.30 to check on Mr C to be told he was working… someone must work sometimes [he said]. He is being very sweet though and after dinner, when we flit in in our long dresses (hoping he won’t work)… he always relents and says all right, you can go and enjoy yourselves.’ But she found ‘the standing and dancing all the time tiring. … Bathing a bit… it is best in the mornings between 8.30 and 2.’54 This is a rare view of the very few hours off the young ladies had – perhaps because the bags of work and newspapers could not arrive every day.

  In February 1950 the Tories narrowly lost a general election called by Prime Minister Attlee, leaving Churchill free to resume his travels. Early in October Sturdee travelled with him on an official trip to Copenhagen, Denmark, staying at the Fredensborg or Frederiksberg Palace (different palaces, but the audio recording on file at the archives is unclear). She was told that ‘members of the resistance were the only ones allowed to meet Mr Churchill and his party… the Court was now made up of people who had fought in the resistance.’ At one dinner, unusual for Churchill secretaries, Sturdee was seated next to Admiral Vedel, Commander of the Danish Navy during the Second World War. He told her: ‘I think I had the worst job of anyone in the war… I was the one who had to scuttle the Danish Navy so the Germans wouldn’t get it… we were a maritime nation and it was all we had.’ As on most trips, to mark the end of his working day, Churchill liked his chilled consommé, usually brought to him by his valet. On one occasion, the valet had gone home early, so Sturdee – with the help of some Danish aides-de-camp – bought Churchill his good-night soup. Or so one story goes. Another has it that the Danish king brought it to him – memories fade and recollections can vary.55 Either way, Churchill got his soup and slept as soundly as he always did.

  Then, in December, it was off once more to Marrakesh, with Gemmell and Sturdee in tow. That work/play trip ended early in the new year, 1951, when the responsibilities of the Leader of the Opposition required a return to Britain and attention to politics. Churchill undoubtedly recognized that Labour’s majority was insufficient to keep it in power for very long, and that Attlee would soon call a new general election, but he decided on still another European trip, this one ending in Venice. Jane Portal and Lettice Marston accompanied him to help complete the last volume of his memoirs before the general election he was certain would return him to power.56 As he expected, a general election was called for 25 October, cutting short his stay in Venice and requiring a quick flight back to Britain. Sturdee, back home, arranged the complicated flight details on a private charter aircraft to get them home in time to campaign throughout the country.

  Sturdee often accompanied Churchill on his campaign trips across Great Britain, during which he somehow managed to continue work on his memoirs. She was relieved to find that all the political events were handled by the Conservative Central Office apparatus. But not travel details. Churchill travelled the country in a special train – with all meals, communications, stops and other travellers arranged by Sturdee, with help from the Conservative Party, including several detectives and telephone operators to handle the vast number of phone calls into and out from the train. She set up her ‘office on the train even if you were not going very far… because he would want to dictate’. Often one secretary stayed on the train, while the other one attended the speech in person. She explains that she often sat in to listen to Churchill’s speeches, because ‘it was a good thing to be there so that [I] could alter any alternations he made to his text… it was important that any alterations to his speeches’ be made, so that an accurate record would be kept of what he actually said. Nothing had changed from the days in which a secretary would attend his speeches in the House of Commons and take down his speeches so that historians would have an accurate record of what he said. Churchill wanted his part in the history through which he lived recorded properly.

  No surprise to Churchill, the Tories won, and Churchill became prime minister again at the age of seventy-seven, when the world seemed headed for a Cold War or worse. He took Gilliatt and Portal to Number 10 with him, where they would work closely with the existing civil-service typists already in Downing Street. Sturdee would help out as much as she could. Marston remained at Hyde Park Gate to handle secretarial matters related to the memoirs, and constituency matters. These women also experienced something new. With the pressures for ‘Action This Day’ less severe than during Churchill’s wartime service in Downing Street, Sturdee had introduced an innovation: annual two-week vacations for secretaries.

  Sturdee recalls that in Downing Street the Churchills each had a bedroom on the top floor and a drawing room with the secretaries’ office on that floor as well. Other secretaries have different memories, which might explain why Churchill would complain to her: ‘Why don’t I see you these days… I can’t have you out there [meaning in the Downing Street pool]. Let’s make changes. I’ll see to it.’ And he did. There was no precedent, as she says:

  Mr Churchill had been the first prime minister to have his own personal secretaries… he broke the mould… during the war… We kept our own dignity even if we were pushed to one side… the civil side had forgotten probably that Mr Churchill had been used to having his personal secretaries… [but] the main thing is the work. The work just goes on just the same [at Chequers and Downing Street and also at Chartwell].

  In 1952, when George VI died, Churchill, working from bed at Downing Street, dictated to Sturdee the speech he would deliver to the House of Commons five days later. ‘I could hardly see for the tears. They were going plunk plunk on my notebook,’ she says, ‘while the guns [were] being fired by His Majesty’s soldiers… in a royal salute.’ Big Ben was silenced during the state funeral.57 But it was Jane Portal who was with Churchill when he welcomed the new queen home from Kenya and it was Portal who took down the immediate and very moving words of his tribute to George VI, broadcast to the nation the afternoon of Queen Elizabeth’s arrival.

  Sturdee recalls Churchill’s first impressions of the new queen:

  We must protect her. She’s such a young girl. And we must save some of those boring things that she has to do… [The prime minister] suggested to her that she might ease up on these investitures, they need not be so long. She need not have so many of them… [If] she gave up doing the junior ranks and just do the senior ranks of the various orders. Her reply was that the junior ones were the very ones [she] would do because the senior ranks know me anyway.

  Sturdee’s last trip with Churchill, she thinks, was to Jamaica in January 1953, when he was writing and editing the last few chapters of his war memoirs. Churchill took his personal secretaries
with him on this trip – not ones from the government – as the work was personal and not related to his prime ministerial chores. Gilliatt was there as well, although her oral history does not mention the work she did there.

  After returning from Jamaica, Sturdee ‘decided the time had come… they of course tried to persuade me not to, but I said no, it’s time [for her to resign].’ Towards the end of her work with Churchill, she describes some pressures from MPs for Churchill to resign, but she is reluctant in her oral history to describe either Churchill’s increasing deafness or his thoughts about whether or not Anthony Eden should or could succeed him.

  In 1953, at the ripe old age of thirty-one, Sturdee resigned. But, as with many other ‘former’ secretaries, she returned to help out when the existing staff could not handle the load. Delia Morton (now Drummond)## tells me that in 1956 she was hired by Sturdee to work through the backlog of fan mail that flooded in after Churchill’s resignation as prime minister. She organized the mail so that communications from ‘pottykins’ – another of Churchill’s invented words,58 this one for incoherent correspondents – were filed under ‘P’. Churchill was in the habit of stopping by her desk and asking to see the pottykins letters, which it turned out, included scribbles from Ezra Pound, filed of course under ‘P’ in bins called ‘pottykins’.59

  Jo Sturdee had seen the world’s greatest statesman through a global war, a period as Leader of the Opposition, and then again as prime minister as he tried to prevent the Cold War from triggering a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the West. She had travelled the world with him, participated in the drafting of a treasure trove of histories and memoirs, and made it possible for him to accomplish most, but not all, of his goals. In that year Sturdee was named in Elizabeth II’s Coronation Honours and awarded an MBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), among other things for public service outside the civil service. She went on to marry the Earl of Onslow, and passed away at the age of eighty-four in 2006. In his will, Churchill left her £200, about £3,750 today.

  * In British English, a ‘dogsbody’ is someone who does drudge work. A rough American equivalent would be a ‘gofer,’ ‘grunt’ or ‘lackey’.

  † After the war, between February and September 1946, on thirteen crossings, her Cunard colours repainted, the Queen Mary carried more than 12,000 European war brides and children to the United States and Canada.

  ‡ Sturdee sketched a floor plan of the cabin they shared and enclosed it in a letter to her family.

  § Small villas on the grounds of the former Czarist palaces had been turned into sanatoria for wounded and sick Soviet soldiers, hence their names.

  ¶ Secret Session speeches is the seventh and final volume of Churchill's war speeches. The book contains five speeches Churchill delivered in the House of Commons sitting in Secret Session – those of 20 June and 17 September 1940, 25 June 1941, and 23 April and 10 December 1942. These speeches were never meant to be publicly distributed and there were no recorded versions. The compiler of the speeches later relied on Churchill’s drafts and full texts – as saved by the personal secretaries – to reprint them. (Charles Eade is the editor.)

  # memories for dates are imprecise; see footnote, p. 198

  ** The young ladies shared many jokes about the differences between the Surf Club and the Serf Club.

  †† Much like he had to do after resigning in 1955, as he turned his mind to completing A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

  ‡‡ Sturdee, letter home (8 March 1946), WSC Archives. At the end of her letters home, Sturdee asks her family to ‘pass this letter to the… girls at No. 28 to read’ so they could all share the news. Not only did they agree among themselves to share the work, they also shared the news freely, knowing that it would all be kept confidential. When she was abroad, her letters to her family were sent back to Britain via the diplomatic bags and left unsealed so the girls ‘back home’ could read the news before sending them onwards to her family.

  §§ And for many other ‘dos’, as Bess Truman stayed in Independence, Missouri, while Truman was in the White House.

  ¶¶ Churchill usually edited his speeches with a red pen. See Layton, p. 28.

  ## Delia Morton worked for Churchill for two years from 1956 to 1958, and was interviewed and hired by Sturdee to handle the enormous volume of general and fan mail. She worked mostly at 27 Hyde Park Gate alongside Doreen Pugh.

  6

  Marian Holmes

  ‘You know, you must never ever be frightened of me when

  I shout. I’m not snapping at you, but thinking of the work.’

  Winston Churchill to Marian Holmes 1

  ‘He seems to have an insatiable thirst for work.’

  Marian Holmes, 1945 2

  ‘You are the indispensable slave.’

  Field Marshal Jan Smuts to Marian Holmes, 1945 3

  ‘There just wasn’t anybody to match him on the

  world scene.’

  Marian Holmes, oral history

  BORN IN 1921, Marian Holmes worked with Churchill from March 1943 until July 1945, when he was replaced as prime minister by the Labour Party’s Clement Attlee. In addition to working closely with Churchill at Number 10 Downing Street, Chartwell and other locations in the United Kingdom, Holmes travelled with Churchill as his personal secretary to several critical meetings: with President Roosevelt in Quebec and Hyde Park, to Athens in December 1944 to try to broker a settlement in the Greek civil war, and to summit meetings with the American president and Joseph Stalin in Yalta and Potsdam.

  After graduating from Notre Dame School, an independent Catholic girls’ day school in Cobham, at the age of eighteen, Holmes attended a secretarial course, and then took the civil service exam, qualifying as a ‘copy typist’. Because Holmes came out at the top of the list of candidates taking the exam, she was first posted to the Treasury, considered the most important government agency, entitled to draw the best people. She was required to take a further exam in shorthand, as well as courses in maths, history, English and geography (that must have come in very handy later during her planning for and travelling with Churchill!). The Treasury job, she says in her oral history on file at the Churchill College Archives, had become a training ground and a path for many young women into private-sector jobs in the City – especially desirable since those jobs were only five days a week, whereas civil-service jobs included Saturdays.

  But Holmes’s rise in the civil service was sufficiently rapid to induce her to stay on, rather than migrate to the City. After only two weeks at the Treasury she was sent to Number 10 for an interview. Neville Chamberlain was then prime minister and the prime minister’s entire staff numbered only twenty-three people. Holmes was accepted at the starting level in Downing Street, in part, she believed, because her diction had been perfected at the convent and because her high ranking on the civil service exam led the examiners to decide she was worth training. It was probably less to do with her diction than she imagined, since all the secretarial candidates were speech-perfect. I asked Andrew Roberts about that at a gathering of Churchillians; his response is worth noting: ‘That’s how we avoid revolutions, by having lower-class people aspire to and absorb the manners of the upper classes. You can bet that, with the exception of Jane Portal, who came from a higher-class family than the others, the parents of Churchill’s secretaries didn’t speak the language of their daughters.’

  As was to become usual for Holmes, she passed several more exams and became a clerical office secretary. Like other secretaries with shorthand and typing skills, she was expected at times to remain overnight, available should she be needed. Beds were provided and breakfast was served by the prime minister’s personal ‘domestic’ staff.

  When Holmes joined Downing Street, there were only two women employed in non-secretarial positions. One, Edith Watson, ‘a spinster in her late fifties’,4 was, according to Elizabeth Gilliatt, ‘an elderly lady who handled the parliamentary questions’; she had been ther
e since the time of Lloyd George and would receive an MBE in June 1941. The other, a civil servant, Mrs Margaret Stenhouse, known as ‘Mags’, was in charge of Downing Street staffing and of Honours – meaning she probably received recommendations, sorted them and advised – a sensitive position, certainly. Holmes recalls that Stenhouse was ‘head girl at Cheltenham Ladies College. I think that says a lot [about her].’ And she later referred to her as ‘the top female banana at No. 10’. Holmes described Chamberlain’s office as ‘quiet’ – this is just before Munich.

  All of that changed when Churchill became prime minister in May 1940. ‘It was as if an electric current had gone through the place… suddenly all bustle and work and action this day… He cut out all the verbiage, the staff increased and the weekends vanished altogether.’ ‘Churchill arrived on the scene like a jet-propelled rocket,’ wrote Colville.5 ‘The late nights really were late nights.’6 ‘The air tingled.’7 By moving from the Admiralty to Number 10, Churchill went from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘centre’. ‘We [the War cabinet] had not the experience or the imagination to realise the difference between a human dynamo when humming on the periphery and when driving at the centre.’8 Having been vetted and chosen by Treasury staff for transfer to Number 10, John Martin reported to Downing Street for duty as one of the new PM’s Principal Private Secretaries, a post that despite its deceptive title is hardly secretarial as that designation is generally understood. Principal Private Secretaries – always male, their titles always capitalized – were the equivalent of senior policy staff and advisors. Not surprisingly, it being early May 1940, the prime minister was ‘too busy to see him [Martin]’ for a personal interview. So Stenhouse, who was then ‘head of the permanent staff of assistants in the Prime Minster’s office’,9 took Martin in hand and introduced him around. Martin, who stayed with Churchill until the end of the war, says of Stenhouse that to her ‘expert knowledge, wisdom and splendid leadership of “the girls” so much was due in the coming years’.10 The ‘girls’ are the Garden Room Girls, civil servants as distinct from Churchill’s personal secretaries. These typists were so named because they worked in an office facing onto the Downing Street garden. The secretaries today are still known as the Garden Room Girls.*