BOOK OF THE WEEK
WORKING WITH WINSTON
by Cita Stelzer (Head of Zeus £20, 400 pp)
Fetch me klop!’ That was Winston Churchill, barking instructions to his quaking new secretary Kathleen Hill in 1937, on her first evening working for him.
‘Klop’ was Churchill’s private onomatopoeic word for his hole-puncher. But Kathleen had no idea what he meant.
In his study she’d noticed a 14-volume history of the Houses of Hanover, in German, by a historian called Onno Klopp. She thought Churchill must mean that, so she went to the study and staggered back with all 14 volumes.
‘God almighty!’ roared Churchill. Then he said: ‘Good try . . . but not what I wanted.’
Winston Churchill, pictured in his Downing Street office shortly before the end of the Second World War, a new book profiles the women who helped him
That was what it was like working for Churchill, as Cita Stelzer’s glorious new book, weaving together first-hand recollections by his secretaries, shows. It was straight in at the deep end.
You’d be summoned to the Presence — and if it was the morning, he’d be sitting in bed in his brocade dressing-gown, lighting his cigar from a candle, with his cat as a hot-water bottle, all nine daily papers strewn over the eiderdown and a whisky and soda to take him through to lunchtime.
He would start mumbling, ‘My dear Someone’, and you would immediately have to start ‘taking down’ — i.e. taking dictation.
A few days later, Churchill said to Hill: ‘Call the doctor. I don’t feel very well.’
‘Who’s your doctor?’ she asked.
‘Dr Scott, he died.’
Another day, it was simply: ‘Place a call to Ian who lives in Sussex.’
You needed to use your initiative in this job. ‘Taking down’ by the bedside was a doddle compared with Churchill’s other favoured dictating venues.
He liked to dictate when he was in the bath. The female secretaries had to sit demurely outside the door, and they could hear him coming up from underwater, spouting and blowing bubbles. His one male secretary, Patrick Kinna, was the only one who could accompany him into the bathroom.
Marian Holmes, Churchill’s secretary (left) pictured with Elizabeth Layton at Chequers
Staying at the White House during the War, Kinna was in the bathroom when Churchill’s bathrobe fell off at the very moment Roosevelt knocked and entered in his wheelchair. ‘You see, Mr President,’ Churchill said to him, ‘I have nothing to hide from you.’
Back at Chartwell, his Kent home, Churchill would dictate from the top of a ladder while laying bricks for a new cottage, and his secretaries had to take dictation perched a few rungs below. On his twice-weekly journeys between Chartwell and London, they would be expected to take dictation directly onto a typewriter. Feeling car-sick in the cigar-smoke-filled Daimler, squeezed among luggage, flowers and pets, was part of the job.
The pets weren’t just Rufus I or Rufus II (Churchill’s poodles) but also Toby the budgerigar, whom he let out of his cage on journeys, so the bird would flit about, nibbling your ear as you tried to type.
Other secretarial requirements included ordering worms for the special fish he kept at Chartwell, walking the poodles, ordering frames for his paintings and making sure the right kind of champagne was sent to wherever Churchill was staying in the world.
Exasperating and exhausting? Certainly. He expected his secretaries to work till 2.30-3am, and would then say: ‘What time do you think you could start in the morning?’
Back at Chartwell, his Kent home, Churchill would dictate from the top of a ladder while laying bricks for a new cottage, and his secretaries had to take dictation perched a few rungs below
They jokingly referred to themselves as ‘the serfs’ club’.
But the actual progression of emotions, on starting to work for him, went (according to Doreen Pugh, his secretary from 1955-65): ‘Fear — respect — adoration.’ Reading this book re-enforces one’s sense that Churchill was a truly great man, if ‘greatness’ means both statesmanlike brilliance and humanity.
Even at the darkest moment in May 1940, when the Germans were seemingly about to invade Britain, Churchill punctuated his morning’s dictating of urgent memos by gazing affectionately at Nelson, his cat, beside him on the eiderdown, and saying: ‘Cat, darling.’
His losses of temper were short-lived and he never bore grudges. Though a slave-driver (his initial reaction on hearing that any secretary was ill or injured was: ‘But can she still take down?’), he lit fires for them when they were cold and made sure they had hot toddies or cups of tea. His workaholism came from a lifelong drive to bring peace to a troubled world, and his foreign trips were a perk for the secretaries.
On one mission to Greece to sort out a civil war, the staff organised a jolly Christmas Day fancy-dress party. When the bearded Greek archbishop arrived, he was thought to be yet another staff member in fancy dress and was almost dragged into a beard-pulling contest.
Churchill could be conceited. Cecily ‘Chips’ Gemmell, taking dictation as he quoted from his own Battle of Britain speech, typed ‘Never in the field of human consciousness’ when it should have been ‘human conflict’ — and Churchill said: ‘It’s clear that you haven’t heard one of the greatest quotations in the world.’
WORKING WITH WINSTON by Cita Stelzer (Head of Zeus £20, 400 pp)
Many of his secretaries were well-brought-up gals who’d been poorly educated, and their lack of general knowledge and terrible spelling appalled Churchill. ‘You haven’t got one word in 50 right!’ he barked at Cecily on her first day.
But when she typed out an improved second draft, he said: ‘I knew you could do it.’ Beneath the fierceness was a deep well of unsentimental kindness.
In these days of HR departments, it’s refreshing to discover the simple procedure for landing a job for Churchill.
First, you were vetted by a secretary already working for him. Then she would send you to be ‘interviewed’ by the man himself.
When Jane Portal (who would later become the mother of the future Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby) went to be ‘interviewed’, Churchill walked round her, saying nothing. It felt to Jane as if she were ‘a heifer being inspected at a sale. Then he said: ‘You’ll do.’ ‘
Another devoted secretary, Grace Hamblin, was asked by Lady Churchill whether she had any ideas about how to quietly destroy the Graham Sutherland portrait of Winston, painted for his 80th birthday, which he detested.
Hamblin said she had a brother living nearby who would do it. ‘So in the dead of night we took it to his house and burned it in his garden . . . It was a deadly secret.’
That deed was far outside the usual secretarial brief, but as this fascinating book shows, Churchill’s secretaries would do anything to keep the great man happy.
