Working with Winston

by Working

  ‘He had wanted the cabinet to allow him to visit Stalin and they would not let him. Anthony [Eden] in particular would not let him go.’ Churchill ‘felt it was his last deed in his life to bring about world peace. He felt he could get through to him [Stalin]. And everybody told him he could not.’ Stalin’s death, in March, a few months before the coronation, increased Churchill’s eagerness to meet with the Russians, to see if he could strike some sort of deal with Uncle Joe’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. That was not to be.

  After the coronation, Portal describes the seventy-nine-year-old Churchill as ‘totally exhausted’. Two weeks later, while still at dinner in Downing Street for the Italian prime minister, Churchill had a serious stroke. Portal was not on duty that night, but when she arrived at Number 10 at 8 a.m. the next morning she was told the prime minister was not well. In the office, ‘Lord Moran, Colville, the Soames and, of course, Mrs Churchill were all trying to persuade the PM not to take a cabinet meeting that morning, and Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House that afternoon.’ Churchill insisted on chairing the cabinet, but agreed not to attend the House. Dr Russell Brain, Churchill’s neurologist, was summoned and he ‘insisted’ that Churchill go to Chartwell for a complete rest.

  Not surprisingly, the accounts of Churchill’s secretaries vary. Portal went down to Chartwell in the car behind his, because ‘he said he was not going to work in the car and that was very significant’. But Gilliatt, the senior young lady, did accompany the prime minister in the first car, and she says the prime minister was in no condition to work: ‘He was walking unsteadily. Oh! Things weren’t at all good.’ Gilliatt reports that Churchill’s speech was slurred, and Portal noticed that ‘he had to be helped up the two steps that go up to [the house at] Chartwell.’ In the days that followed, neither seems to have been in constant contact with a very ill Churchill, as Portal says that she and Gilliatt ‘were kept away’. Portal believes the more serious stroke occurred that night at Chartwell, as ‘he could not get out of bed’. Colville and the family then decided ‘that the queen should be informed and that the prime minister wished to continue in office, but he must have a complete rest, providing the queen agreed, [an agreement] made through her private secretary Sir Alan Lascelles that he should continue.’ At Colville’s suggestion, the press barons agreed among themselves to keep the knowledge of the seriousness of his illness away from the public, a decision still much debated today. Bulletins were issued saying simply the prime minister needs a complete rest, and freeing the press to cover the Princess Margaret–Peter Townsend story.

  The crisis was compounded by the fact that Foreign Secretary Eden was in America being treated for a serious ailment. That left the chancellor of the exchequer, Portal’s uncle Rab Butler, in charge. His niece, who stayed at Chartwell for three months, at one point told him that Churchill was ‘probably going to die, he’s very ill.’ Portal’s concern was understandable, given the seriousness of the stroke and its rather horrifying symptoms. But she did not reckon with what Colville described as her boss’s ‘recuperative powers, both physical and mental, [which] invariably outstrip all expectations and after a week he began rapidly to improve, although his powers of concentration appeared slight.’49 Portal adds

  I don’t believe he thought he was going to die or else it was masked by an absolute determination to live… We fixed up a special desk for him to be able to put a book on, because he could not move his left side… He just sat in bed totally immersed in the whole of the political novels of Trollope.¶ If he got tired one of us would spend a half an hour and turn pages for him. He would still say has anything come in. [I would] take the [ministerial] box up and show him a few things. But really work was not coming through. In fact, Rab was doing the work… Somehow we got through the months… Miss Gilliatt and I were there to run the office50… The use of his limbs came back really remarkably quickly. He had a limp… a slight slur… He had physical therapy.

  In early September Churchill ‘had to – I say had to, because he really wasn’t up to it – he went to stay at Balmoral to visit the queen… [It] tired him.’ It apparently took more than a stroke to force Churchill to cancel this regularly scheduled visit by every one of her prime ministers.

  By mid-September Portal says he was well enough to travel to Lord Beaverbrook’s villa, La Capponcina, taking her, the Soameses and the Colvilles. As Churchill wrote to the queen in his thank-you letter for the Balmoral stay: ‘I am now here in warm sunshine and delightful villa built by the dressmaker, Molyneux… I shall not often leave the garden where I am installing my painting tackle, and reading for the first time (!) Coningsby [a political novel by Disraeli, published in 1844].’51

  As the guests departed, Portal found herself alone with Churchill, and her record of that experience may be one of the most revealing ever recorded about Churchill the man, and therefore worth extended citation here.

  INTERVIEWER: You were really his companion.

  PORTAL: Yes. One never felt as if one was a companion. I never felt like… because what I felt was that I was actually employed by him. The family was the companions. I was always very much aware of this – that we were there to do our job, and this made no difference to the emotional feeling of loyalty and affection – deep, deep affection. But there was a border line that you didn’t cross, because it wouldn’t have been right and it wouldn’t have been welcome… We would work through meals or just sit in silence. There would never be any question of conversation with… Churchill. I never had a conversation with him the whole of the time I worked with him. He wasn’t interested in me and I didn’t expect him to be. I would have been horrified if he had been, I think. It was not the way the relationship existed. And I’m sure that was the same for all of us… He wanted his own privacy in his own world.

  I always knew that he was very fond of me, because his face used to light up and his face was always full of expression, and if he didn’t like somebody it was perfectly obvious and if he did it was perfectly obvious.

  After returning to London in late September, Churchill approved the final preface to the final volume of his war memoirs, a volume he titled Triumph and Tragedy, because ‘the overwhelming victory of the Grand Alliance has failed so far to bring general peace to our anxious world’.52 A peace that Churchill would continue to pursue for the remainder of his working life.

  Most important, he was back at work, determined to finish A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which he had been contracted for in late 1932, to be completed by 1939. Hitler upset that schedule, and in late 1953, more than two decades after the original contract had been signed, the seventy-nine-year-old author began thinking about how to organize the research and writing for A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by reading the sections he had already drafted. He also continued working on the speech he was scheduled to deliver at the Conservative Party Conference in Margate in mid-October. Churchill had written to Moran from the South of France: ‘Everything depends on whether I can face October 10 [the Margate speech]. I could not walk up the floor of the House of Commons at present. You must help me, Charles.’53 And Portal had written to her uncle Rab: ‘The PM has been in the depths of depression. He broods continually whether to give up or not… He is preparing a speech for Margate but wonders how long he can be on his pins to deliver it.’54

  Churchill knew that Eden – not in the best of health himself – Butler and others eager for him to step down, would be watching for any sign of physical or mental weakness. When the time arrived for the speech, Portal travelled to Margate to ‘prepare the living quarters and the practical arrangements… We rented a house in Margate… seeing that all the telephones were put in and all [the] scramblers’ that allowed conversations to be conducted in complete secrecy.55 Churchill spoke, standing on those ‘pins’ for fifty minutes, and, says Portal, agreeing with the clear majority of the audience,56 it was an ‘enormous success… There was a tremendous feeling of euphoria afterwards that he’d made it, and
he himself was so relieved. He felt that nobody had the right then to pressure him to go,’ Portal recalls. ‘Very few men can have got over such a paralysis in so lion-hearted a manner,’ wrote Butler.57

  After they returned to London, a black cat was found on the front steps of Downing Street. ‘ “It has brought me luck,” [Churchill] said, stroking the purring cat. “It shall be called Margate. Rufus II… has gone to bed in a sulk”… Churchill later reported to his wife “Rufus is becoming gradually reconciled. Generally, the domestic situation is tranquil.”’58 Whichever secretary typed that letter must have smiled knowingly, or ruefully if she was not as enthusiastic about caring for Churchill’s pets as he was.

  The potential threat of a Margate fiasco having been successfully met, and having been awarded the prestigious honour, the Order of the Garter, by the queen, Sir Winston, as he had become, turned to resurrecting the Bermuda meeting with President Eisenhower, which had been cancelled when he had a stroke. Because of Churchill’s amazing recovery, the meeting was now reset, this time for December 1953, shortly after his seventy-ninth birthday. Colville, Pitblado and Eden were on the seventeen-hour flight, with only two stops, as was Portal, the lone personal secretary to make the trip, but several Garden Room Girls, as well as some Foreign Office girls, were in Bermuda to assist the Principal Private Secretaries. Portal (perhaps unaware that Churchill had selected Bermuda in part because he thought its golf course would be an added attraction for Eisenhower) explains that Bermuda was chosen because of the good weather at that time of the year and very good hotels and facilities. Churchill may also have had in mind showing off a British colony at its best. There were no cars on the island, but two had been sent ahead for Churchill’s use. ‘Nothing of importance happened… just an ordinary normal summit. What he really wanted was to be able to see and talk with Eisenhower to whom he was absolutely devoted and [they] had a great friendship because of the war… They were close friends, real friends.’

  Portal was there for about a week of glorious weather with ‘midnight bathing parties… I had a good time. Churchill was still working away… he could not stop this dictating.’ One midnight, as she was on the beach bathing with others, ‘a message came down that that the prime minister wished to work and would I kindly go back at once. I’d been swimming and I went back to the hotel with my hair dripping down my neck, into his bedroom where he was dictating telegrams to Lord Moran [his doctor, who] looked rather irritated, naturally.’ The doctor may have been good at some things, but taking down was not his job. Another account says that the prime minister was trying to dictate to Anthony Eden, who also resented it. Portal goes on: ‘Churchill looked up at me in that typical way that I have such a vivid memory of, this rotund lovely complexioned face that was totally unlined, with blue eyes and the petulant look that said, “Where have you been? You look like a drowned rat.”’ Eden’s Private Secretary said that ‘poor Jane Portal took the brunt of it [abandoning Churchill]. The old boy kept repeating, “You left me all alone.”’59

  ‘It was a wonderful experience for me,’ Portal says, ‘for the prime minister it was a journey to see an old friend.’ However, she notes that ‘nothing was achieved at that summit’. Bermuda might not have achieved anything, but Churchill did not give up and returned to Washington in June 1954, the third visit of his peacetime premiership. Portal was along on all these trips, and on this one travelled with him in the Stratocruiser, which had been nicknamed ‘Canopus’,# on a nine-hour flight with one stop at Gander. Colville describes the purpose of this trip ‘was to convince the President that we must cooperate more fruitfully in the atomic and hydrogen sphere and that we, the Americans and British, must go and talk to the Russians in an effort to avert war.’60 To no avail.

  In Washington, Portal stayed in a hotel, but set up her office within the White House, next to Churchill’s bedroom, and

  did all work there… a great deal of very hard work. Wandering around the White House and feeling that it was very much like being at Chequers, that you could go anywhere, walk out a door and there would be the President… all very relaxed… and we had the cinema… and I think Churchill felt he had achieved something at that conference.

  He then proceeded to New York to visit his old friend, financier Bernard Baruch, while Portal ‘was allowed to come back [to Britain] for personal reasons, in that my sister was getting married and I could come back by air’. Which meant that when Churchill decided to return home on the Queen Elizabeth ‘to give him a rest’, Gilliatt was on board, so he could continue, as he always did, to dictate. It would have been impossible for Churchill to guess the storm he would confront some months after returning home.

  In September 1954 the House of Commons had voted that a fitting tribute and gift on Churchill’s eightieth birthday in November 1954 would be a portrait. Portal says that Aneurin Bevan’s wife Jennie Lee, a committed socialist and MP, knew and recommended the painter Graham Sutherland. Churchill ‘agreed to it [the sittings] reluctantly, as he had seen the Beaverbrook portrait [by Sutherland and thought it] an awful portrait’. Perhaps he was encouraged to agree by the fact that the art historian and broadcaster Sir Kenneth Clark (Lord Clark) had also recommended Sutherland for this portrait. In the event, Churchill posed in his own studio at Chartwell, and Sutherland came over from Saltwood, Clark’s Norman castle in Kent, where he was living as a guest. Painters usually do not like to have their work seen in progress and Sutherland allowed no one to see his painting, covering it and locking the studio after each sitting. However, in October, Clark invited Lady Churchill (as she had become) to view the picture. Lady Churchill, Portal tells us, ‘was very quiet and subdued when she returned from Saltwood, but said nothing’.

  Later, the prime minister obtained a black and white photograph of the painting and showed it to Portal, asking her opinion. This rather contradicts the image of a man who would never engage her in conversation and with whom she did not deem it proper to have one. Or perhaps the stroke had softened his personality or he had a softness for Portal, because of her uncles. She

  said at once, ‘I think it’s terrible… how awful’… He said, ‘My dear, I’ve got to accept it.’ The others were called in to see the photograph, and the people who loved him said ‘How terrible’… It made him look like a senile old man who had not done up his fly buttons… It was not the man I knew. [There was] something malevolent about it which I never felt about him. [There was] no malevolence… He was deeply wounded by it. To him it was an insult and to Lady Churchill it was a deep insult [too].

  Portal says Churchill saw the painting

  as a similar rejection… to the blow of 1945… This was another rejection, but worse… For an old man of eighty to leave this world on that note [for] posterity… It’s cruel. And he minded. He was upset about it, and we didn’t want him to be upset about anything. I think that is another way that we should have noticed his age… We didn’t like him being upset about things. We protected him from anything that was going to upset him. We kept messages from him.

  There was much discussion as to whether he could or should turn it down, but he finally agreed to accept the portrait, and gave ‘an extremely amusing speech about it’. And we now know from Grace Hamblin’s history what happened to the painting: it was secretly destroyed and never again discussed within the family (see Chapter 2).

  In March 1955 Churchill told Portal he would resign on 5 April and then go on a private holiday. When he returned, he would start work at once and asked Portal to go to the muniment room at Chartwell and get all his manuscripts – and A. J. P. Taylor’s notes – so that he could complete A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. She found the yellowing pages, which he had begun in the 1930s, and, handing them to him, he said:

  ‘I am going to get to work straightaway on writing… and will you come?’ No, he would never have said ‘Will you come?’… He said, ‘I want you to come.’ I believe they were going to take a villa in Crete and have a period there for him to adj
ust to retirement. I believe they did go, but in early April I left because I got married.

  In fact, the villa was in Syracuse in Sicily, not Crete.

  Portal left, but not before one last, arduous task. On 1 March Churchill delivered what he knew would be his last major speech in the Commons, introducing the annual Defence White Paper. In it, he would announce Britain’s plans to build its own hydrogen bomb. It was fifty-four years after he had first spoken there.61 According to Portal, he spent a total of twenty hours preparing the speech and ‘Dictated it all by himself.’62 Portal’s memories of Churchill are how ‘exhilarating, romantic, expansive, humane and generous a person he was’.

  In 1975 Portal married Charles Williams, Baron Williams of Elvel. Lord and Lady Williams live in London and until recently Portal had been the Secretary to The Other Club, which, founded in 1911, continues to meet.

  * Churchill was diligent in suggestions about the screen play, and even wrote dialogue for it that found its way into the script of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia twenty-five years later.

  † Portal had taken down the text for the speech that Churchill gave at Westminster Hall on his eightieth birthday, 30 November 1954. When the actor Robert Hardy later recited that speech in 2015, Portal was in the audience.

  ‡ Elizabeth Gilliatt is godmother to Portal’s son, Justin Welby, now the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  § Chartwell is the only one of his houses in which he had a permanent studio and gallery.

  ¶ The Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope.

  # The name of a star, as well as a navigator for King Menelaus of Sparta during the Trojan War.