by Working
Another general election was indeed called for October 1951. Churchill, almost seventy-seven years old, campaigned in earnest, once again travelling the country in the ‘almost presidential’ train, with scores of staff. His love of campaigning, which had not yet deserted him, and his optimism about the outcome of the election had him in good humour, and produced still another play on someone’s name. ‘There was somebody called George Christ from Conservative Central Office… Mr Churchill used to say… “Ask Christ to come down.”’35
Sturdee had organized the campaign office at 27 Hyde Park Gate, ‘with charts of all the constituencies… We had a red pencil for the Labour Party and blue one for the Conservatives, and as the results came in we wrote them up on the charts, working throughout the night, as Churchill eagerly watched, but pretty sure of the outcome.’ Despite the fact that Labour polled almost a quarter of a million more votes than the Conservatives and their National Liberal allies, and won the most votes any political party in Britain’s history had ever won, the Conservative Party obtained a seventeen-seat majority. At Buckingham Palace Churchill agreed to form a government at the request of George VI, and Mrs Churchill and the secretarial staff scrambled to move Churchill back into Downing Street without any interruption in his working day, while he began to put ‘his chickens in coops’, as Gemmell recalls his description of putting together his cabinet.
Senior members came to Hyde Park Gate to accept their new places, among them Portal’s uncle Rab Butler, who became chancellor of the exchequer, second in rank only to the prime minister. Once the ‘inner cabinet’ was formed, Churchill wanted to go to Chartwell to get some rest and asked Mrs Churchill to open the house. Advisors opposed this move, saying he had not completed his government and that it could not be done from Chartwell. Churchill promised that he ‘would take one of my young ladies down to Chartwell and as long as they have got the telephone numbers it’s going to be perfectly simple. They will get them [prospective ministers] on the telephone and I will appoint them.’ This caused pandemonium. However, Churchill got his way and as Portals notes, ‘I went down with him to Chartwell.’ Chartwell was not fully staffed, so the valet had to do the cooking for Churchill, Portal and the detectives. At least Churchill did not have to carry out the now-famous threat made earlier when Chartwell was closed and without staff but he longed to go there: ‘I shall cook for myself. I can boil an egg. I have seen it done.’36
At Chartwell, Portal set up her own system for ministerial appointments, with three columns listing names of potential government ministers and pencilling in the decisions made by Churchill. But either because pressure on the new prime minister to return to London increased, or because he had all the rest he required, they drove back to London, where he ‘moved into this totally different environment of Number 10 with the official machine working’. Churchill asked Jock Colville to return with him to Downing Street. Although Colville was reluctant to ‘disrupt his domestic life’, according to Portal, he agreed. ‘We always gave up everything willingly and quite rightly.’ The organizational structure was not characterized by rigid lines. Portal and Gilliatt were transferred to the government payroll – or at least Portal so recollects – and all Churchill’s personal secretaries worked in tandem with the in-place civil-servant Garden Room Girls, who were the ‘young, highly qualified, bright girls who looked after the prime minister and the Private Secretaries’ needs’. The Head of the Garden Room Girls, Sheila Minto,37 sorted the mail, sending the personal items upstairs, and leaving the bulk of it to be handled by her staff. Later, when needed, she would become a personal secretary to the prime minister.
The relations between the private and personal offices at Number 10 are complicated and can differ under every prime minister. But they were even more complex now because of Churchill’s insatiable demand for secretarial help and his ability to work simultaneously on both personal and public matters. For our purposes all we need to know is that, as Portal explains, they
did all his dictation and all his personal affairs [family and household matters, book contract negotiations, etc.]. We were the communication between the upstairs and the private office [downstairs]… [Occasionally] he would use a certain member of the Garden Room [staff]. All telephone calls would go through the private office. If they decided the prime minister should speak to whoever it was, then they would come to us and we would listen in and [a record of the call would be kept].
The goal was the same for everyone: keep the office running as smoothly and efficiently as possible in the nation’s interest. That goal at times required one of the Garden Room Girls to take dictation from Churchill when the workload overwhelmed his personal secretaries. And unlike the ladies who worked with Churchill, that chore was not always greeted with joy. Jane Parsons, who worked as a Garden Room Girl from 1946 until 1981, complained that Churchill was incapable of considering the needs of others when the mood was upon him. She hated taking dictation in the car, the budgie flying around, smoke pouring from Churchill’s cigar.38 Fortunately for all, occasions when he called on Garden Room Girls, whose main job was taking down from the Private Secretaries, were rare. But Sheila Minto thrived under pressure, as many of Churchill’s earlier secretaries had.
Churchill’s decision to bring with him his own personal secretaries, something done only once before (and by Churchill in his first premiership), reflected what Portal calls his ‘habit of plucking people out and taking them with him’. This allowed him to recognize and reward talent, hard work and loyalty, and avoid accustoming himself to new faces, which he very much disliked doing.
The Churchills’ flat was at the top of Number 10 Downing Street. It had a large ‘beautiful room with windows overlooking Horse Guards Parade’, and the young ladies had their office on that floor as well. He left ‘his bedroom door open and we left our office door open, so all the had to do was to shout for us… “MISS!”’
In or out of office, at home at Chartwell or Chequers or at Downing Street, Churchill’s work habits did not change. He remained in bed in the mornings, and met with staff and visitors, both British and foreign, in his bedroom, at the top of the house. Pets on the bed and Toby, his budgie, flying around the room, with an affection for Rab Butler’s bald head,39 and, ‘there were times when a secretary would be taking dictation with Toby busy biting at her ear’.40 Churchill would go downstairs for cabinet meetings or ‘if there were a crisis’.
With Churchill ageing, it is no surprise that jockeying to succeed him was the order of the day. Portal, brought up as she had been in Rab Butler’s very political house, was acutely aware of what was going on. Eden was ‘certainly impatient’ and Rab Butler, too, saw ‘his chances’ to become prime minister should Churchill resign. Butler, as chancellors of the exchequer do, was living at Number 11 Downing Street and could come and go frequently through the door that connected Numbers 10 and 11, so Portal saw her uncle regularly. She says that ‘Churchill was very sweet about Rab being my uncle and he liked me to be around if Rab were there. And if Rab was making a big speech, he always said, “See that The Portal is in the chamber”… arranging that I sat in the Private Secretary’s box in the House of Commons on the floor of the House’. Churchill at his thoughtful best.
Portal confirms that she, too, had to take down his many speeches in the House verbatim and reconcile them for printing in Hansard.† That took precedence over almost all other work flowing from a prime minister whose capacity for work was undiminished by age, at least so far. Despite the help from the Garden Room Girls, Portal and her cohorts worked long hours. She was on duty at night and, if Churchill had an official dinner, she would leave her telephone number with the ever-helpful switchboard girls and return at once to Downing Street or Chequers, usually about four nights out of seven. If she were out with friends, the switchboard would call to say, ‘Would Miss Portal please ring her mother as soon as possible?’, indicating she was to go at once to Downing Street, but without revealing her destination. Sometimes t
he ever-helpful switchboard girls would hang up her work dresses, so that the Misses could quickly change into appropriate clothing before going into Churchill’s presence to take down.
Portal and Gilliatt, who became the closest of friends,‡ a friendship that would last a lifetime, established a work system. Churchill alternated weekends at Chartwell and Chequers: Portal liked working at Chartwell, and Gilliatt preferred Chequers. But as always, such an arrangement was flexible, subject to change to meet the prime minister’s needs. Chequers was used for large official parties for heads of state, as Chartwell was too small, so they worked wherever they were needed, whenever they were needed. There was a noticeable difference between working at Chartwell and Chequers: ‘a different atmosphere at [Chequers]. We were more distant… We waited to be called for. We weren’t just around the house. Each women’s armed service took it in turn to cook and run Chequers, to be the valets… the WRNS in the war, [with] the WAFS looking after Chequers [when we were there].’ Kathleen Hill had been appointed Curator there and had ‘her own flat and we would have our meals with Mrs Hill [always referred to that way] in her flat, unless we were invited to join the official party which was not very often. If Rab came, I would often be included unless there were a lot of cabinet ministers there.’
When at Chequers, Portal worked in the secretaries’ office in front of the house, overlooking the lawn. She recalls watching as Churchill and Attlee met – Attlee, who lived nearby, came over very often on a Sunday and they would go and sit: ‘Two old men sitting in the garden and talk[ing] about the war. It was very private. A very special friendship.’ Another frequent visitor, close friend and wartime colleague in the coalition government was Ernest Bevin – but that was a ‘London friendship’ and Churchill would often go to Bevin’s chambers in the House for visits. The friendships that had been formed while working together during the war endured in the face of later partisan differences, and even survived Churchill’s ill-conceived ‘Gestapo’ campaign broadcast (in which he had warned that Attlee’s socialist government ‘would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo’).
One night, returning late from a dinner at The Other Club, with many of his oldest friends, accompanied by Portal, the driver hit and killed a badger in the road. Churchill at once had the car stopped, got out and took the badger in his arms, saying kindly as he patted it, ‘Poor, poor, badger, it’s not your fault.’ Churchill had the badger skinned and stuffed and kept it over his bedside.41 He was, of course, responsible for the death and stuffing of the badger. There is no other record of any interest in animals that were stuffed. In 1908, however, he seems to have been contacted by a firm selling
modelled heads of ‘1 Rhinoceros, 1 zebra, 1 warthog, 1 wildebeest… 1 Thomson’s gazelle and the dressing of three zebra skins at a total cost of £32.7.0’… The firm, believing it had an order from Colonel Gordon Wilson on Churchill’s behalf, asked, ‘We have no instructions to put in hand a Rhinoceros Table. Do you wish us to do so?’
Churchill declined: reminders of dead animals upset him, as did the film Portal selected showing the death of a white horse.42
Mags Stenhouse had ordered that all the young ladies who travelled with the prime minister had to wear a hat; a ‘great expenditure,’ Portal recalls
a great addition to my wardrobe. [It] would be stuffed on to my head in the hall… I felt thoroughly self-conscious about it. The prime minister would come down – he always walked very quickly and before you knew it he would be in the car and everybody would be waiting [for you] with the door open so you had to be on your toes… and [ready] with our notebooks, the pencil, the hat… Sometimes Rufus II… and a messenger carrying our enormous typewriter, in case the speech was not perfect. [Churchill] was a perfectionist.
Bullock, the chauffeur, was ready and would have the ‘occasional’ seat down and the typewriter put on top of the seat and I would sit… and type as we drove. It was appalling.’
This astonishing pace of his work sometimes left Churchill time for a bit of fun with those with whom he was working. When there were gaps in the typing, Churchill would burst out with doggerel, such as: ‘She was the Admiral’s daughter, but her bathing suit never got wet.’43 President Roosevelt noticed this at their first meeting in 1941 at Placentia Bay. FDR cabled Churchill shortly after the conference: ‘It’s fun to be in the same decade with you.’
There were larks, too. In August 1950, Portal was sitting by Churchill’s side as he painted in his Chartwell studio,§ ‘should he need anything’, as she put it to me in a recent private conversation. Quite suddenly he said: ‘I need a crocodile’ for a painting of Marrakesh, on which he was working. Being inventive, Portal searched for and found a children’s book in the house and traced a picture of a crocodile from it. Since every communication between Churchill and his staff had to be memorialized, Portal typed a note saying: ‘Mr Churchill. You wanted a picture of a crocodile. Will this one do?’ and handed him the note and tracing.44 Crocodiles, it seems, were often on Churchill’s mind, perhaps a reminder of his East Africa trip in 1907, and he used them to illustrate a point. In 1940, referring to nations attempting to appease Hitler, he famously said: ‘Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.’45
On 6 February 1952, a few months after Churchill became prime minister for the second time, George VI died, having suffered from emphysema and a lung removal for a cancerous tumour. Churchill had worked closely with the king, as his wartime prime minister from 1940 to 1945, and now once again as prime minister. Although the king’s death was not unexpected, it was a shock to his daughter and heir, the twenty-six-year-old Elizabeth, who at the time was on a tour in Kenya. Churchill was deeply moved both by the death of his sovereign and by a realization of the tremendous burden the young woman faced. He drove to the airport to greet Elizabeth and her husband Philip on their arrival from Kenya,46 taking Portal in the car with him, so that he could dictate his speech on the death of the king, which was scheduled to be broadcast that afternoon. He said, ‘I could do the broadcast. I know what I want to say, but I need to work at it very, very particularly. And so I would dictate in the car because I would have peace there.’ Portal goes on to recall:
No such things as car telephones then. And so he dictated the speech between Downing Street and Heathrow and it just came straight out. As he was sitting in the car dictating, the tears were pouring down his face and he was heaving with sobs… he was weeping at his own words and his own thoughts. [Churchill] was very moved, very obviously deeply moved… because he had this historical feeling [about] events.
As Churchill put it in his very moving BBC broadcast: ‘The king walked with death, as if death were a companion, an acquaintance, whom he recognized and did not fear. In the end, death came as a friend.’
At the airport, Portal and Evelyn Shuckburgh, Eden’s Principal Private Secretary, hid themselves behind another plane so they could witness this historic event, this passing of an era. She could see the entire cabinet, waiting on the tarmac for the plane to land with the prime minister closest to the bottom of the gangway.
Portal recalls that Princess Elizabeth shook hands with each member of the cabinet. Churchill continued to work on the broadcast when they arrived back at Downing Street. At one point, Colville and the other Principal Private Secretary, David Pitblado, asked her if he had finalized the speech, as they were eager to get broadcast mechanisms set up. She answered, ‘No, he had not, which was a bit naughty of me… I was trying to protect him… They must let him be for a time… He had a rest and the broadcast was marvellous.’ She took down the speech as delivered on the night of 7 February 1952 and had stayed up all night typing it for the permanent records.
The speech done, Churchill turned his attention to the relatively young queen-to-be. Portal speculates that Churchill was thinking of Lord Melbourne, who in the early nineteenth century mentored Queen Victoria when she was still a teenager.47
Churchill usually had a gre
at sense of history [that came] into everything he did. [Churchill] did teach her [Elizabeth], educate her and protect her and serve her and he was a deeply fond of her… he used to come back from his weekly Tuesday audiences and say, ‘She is so lovely, so beautiful.’ Apart from being true, it was also a romance, just part of his own character. But I think she must have felt the greatest dependence and affection for him.
Sixteen months later, on 2 June 1953, Elizabeth was crowned queen, an event to which Churchill had ‘looked forward… enormously,’ but about which he was greatly concerned. So concerned, says Portal, that ‘he asked his staff to sleep that night at Downing Street… We all had to sleep on camp beds’ to be ready for the ceremony and to be sure that they would not be delayed by traffic disruptions. One of his concerns was that the decision to televise the event – a decision he had unsuccessfully opposed – would add to the stress on the queen. Another was that the preparations ‘took up a lot of time. [He] was slightly impatient about all the events that [were] involved.’ So concerned was he about being diverted from foreign policy and other matters, that ‘when the day came [he was] almost reluctant to go. But go he did, in a closed, two-horse carriage with Clementine Churchill at his side.’48 After the coronation, Churchill unexpectedly did not finish the whole procession in his state coach, directing them to turn off to Downing Street, saying, ‘the government must go on and he must read the foreign telegrams and carry on’ with his search for peace with the Soviets.
