Working with Winston

by Working

  Martin encouraged friendly relations between all staff levels at Downing Street, believing this would make the work more enjoyable and the tense, long and late hours worked more tolerable. He became friendly enough with Watson to ask her to join him for lunch to act as a sort of chaperone, the other guest being the woman to whom he would soon become engaged and eventually marry. On Christmas Day 1942 Martin became engaged to his future wife. He ‘arranged a lunch party for all the shorthand writers and others on duty’ in order to introduce his fiancée to the staff. Someone had given him a Welsh turkey and ‘our Swedish cook produced an excellent meal,’11 writes Holmes. Watson reported back to Martin that ‘everyone was captivated by her’.12 The camaraderie and mutual support among all of Churchill’s staff was to last through the war years and beyond, their shared devotion to him making common ground. Churchill, of course, was aware of Martin’s efforts to maintain morale, and despite the pressures on the wartime prime minister to cope with the enormous paper flow and other work for which he was responsible, never interfered with this use of his staff’s time to create loyalty and affection between his staff members. Churchill was capable of being as sensitive to his staff’s morale as he was to the morale of the British people, suffering under wartime restrictions, especially rationing.

  Churchill’s method of interviewing was idiosyncratic. When Martin was finally ushered into the prime minister’s office in the House of Commons several weeks after coming to Number 10, Churchill looked him up and down with a ‘searching gaze’ and said, ‘I understand that you are going to be one of my Secretaries.’13 That was it. Martin assumed he had been hired. This method of taking on new staff after only a ‘searching gaze’ probably reflects Churchill’s faith in the vetting process that preceded his initial meeting with new additions, perhaps supplemented by private calls to the many informed sources he had accumulated in a lifetime of journalism and politics. It was repeated with many of the female personal secretaries.

  Marian Holmes’s days as a Downing Street typist came to an end when one of Churchill’s female secretaries became ill, creating an opening on the prime minister’s personal staff. Holmes believes that the Private Secretaries took an informal vote and settled on promoting one of the typists to work directly with Churchill – she thinks her sponsor was John Martin.

  Holmes’s interview, if we can call it that, was similar to Martin’s. She was working nights and Churchill needed to dictate. Leslie Rowan, one of the Private Secretaries, brought Holmes into Churchill’s office at around 11 p.m. and said, ‘Excuse me, Sir, this is Miss Holmes.’ She writes: ‘he was sitting… in a deep armchair reading some documents.’14 The prime minister did not respond to Rowan, and instead started dictating. Holmes immediately sat down and began to type on ‘the relatively silent typewriter’.15 When Churchill finished dictating, he simply said, ‘Give me’ or simply ‘Give’ (meaning the typed sheets). She handed them over and rose to leave the room. She reports that Churchill said something like, ‘Where the hell are you going?’ Or in a ‘loud voice DAMMIT! Don’t go. I’ve only just started.’16 Finally, he looked up at her and ‘his face changed totally, there was that beatific grin, and he said, “Do sit down… when I shout, I’m not shouting at you, I’m thinking of the work”… I’d been accepted.’17 She learned, as did others, that Churchill never let his temper simmer; he allowed it to boil over, but it always came off the boil very quickly. Barely a week later he said to her: ‘You are doing very well,’ in effect making her a member of the prime ministerial work family.18 Like the other personal secretaries, Holmes signed the Official Secrets Act, which placed strict limits on what she could tell outsiders about her work. This is one reason she declined an invitation to give a talk about her experiences in Moscow when she returned with Churchill after his meetings with Stalin in October 1944. ‘I would be billed as “Just Back From Moscow”. Declined of course,’19 she notes in her diary – which, of course, she was prohibited from keeping,20 a prohibition she, like Colville and many others, ignored, to the benefit of historians.

  In addition to the Official Secrets Act there was an additional constraint: there could be only one star, one person reporting Churchill’s version of what transpired in the Soviet Union. Personal secretaries, and all others on the prime minister’s staff, were meant to stay in the background, and not only for security reasons.

  Like Holmes, many staff members kept notes and diaries; others wrote letters home when accompanying the prime minister on his travels. Luckily for historians, these documents eventually found their way into the Churchill Archives. They provide exciting insights into Churchill’s work habits, his interactions with his staff, and his own reactions as he travelled the world managing the war. We do not know whether Churchill knew of Holmes’s diary, but we do know he learned to trust her completely. And in July 1944 Churchill was heard to say that she is the ‘sort of girl who’d rather die than have secrets torn out of her’.21 The prime minister and the military leadership depended on the fact that the personal secretaries were entirely reliable – during the war many of them were privy to secrets known to very few indeed. Grace Hamblin describes Holmes as ‘fair-haired and blue-eyed, like a fairy… Apparently he [Churchill] said to Mrs Churchill when she first appeared, “Oh dear, she’s very young. I mustn’t frighten her.”’22

  Asked about her usual day, Holmes explains that because she never knew when Churchill would call for her, she was always on her toes, ready to be summoned seven days a week, at any time during the twenty-four-hour day. If there were any gaps in the flow of work to her from the prime minister, the Private Secretaries would ask her to file FCO telegrams, cabinet minutes and other private memos. Or Holmes and her co-workers would work for one of the Private Secretaries and for visiting ministers such as Anthony Eden: ‘Occasionally, we might do something for him. Certainly when we were bored we did.’ Perhaps Eden didn’t know this …

  Often there were two personal secretaries on duty, one to work from 7 a.m. until dinner time, the other to be on call from dinner until the prime minister went to bed, usually between 2 and 3 a.m.

  Holmes emphasizes that Churchill dictated to her everywhere, ‘wherever we were: in cars, on trains, on planes, on ships everywhere’, including walking in the garden. She describes it all as being ‘very stimulating’. She recalls driving ‘back to town with the PM. He dictated most of the way and it was a balancing act, as we were driven at great speed, trying to keep dispatch boxes from falling on the flowers,† finding the right papers and taking dictation all at the same time.’ And using her ankle to hold open the black dispatch box on which he was working. These black boxes accompanied him everywhere and only Churchill and his personal staff carried the keys. They contained the filing system that Churchill himself had organized23 to handle the ‘farrago of operational, civil, political and scientific matter’ descending on him.24 Not to mention the cigar smoke.

  Holmes most loved working at Chequers,25 where it was, if anything, busier than in London, with military officers, politicians, friends and family gathered there every weekend. Even ‘baby Winston [aged about four] knocked on [her] door and I let him come into play for a while’. Once as they drove away, some of the grandchildren were waving and yelling: ‘Don’t go, Grandpa!’26

  Churchill ‘used the opportunity of having these… distinguished visitors down, there was also purpose to it… there’d be a mass of generals… John Winant [American Ambassador to Great Britain] and all kinds of people.’27 Plus the Private Secretaries and, of course, Mrs Churchill. No relaxation on these weekends: constant work. Holmes’s diary lists her bedtimes when she was finished with work, most often 3 or 3.30 a.m., when the prime minister had finished dictating.28

  Holmes did have help at Chequers. The arrangement was that two of Churchill’s four personal secretaries would go down to Chequers every weekend, the other two getting alternate weekends off. Holmes usually worked with Kathleen Hill, the senior personal secretary. When she was working there, she
and Hill dined, not with the family, as did the Private Secretaries, but with the guards and security personnel and the manager of Chequers (later called the Curator)29 in a small private dining room elsewhere. Levels of social distinction were maintained at Chequers, even in wartime.

  At times when at Chequers, Holmes worked for Mrs Churchill, sometimes ‘just listening, actually’. Holmes recalls that someone once described Mrs Churchill’s conversations as being ‘like chasing a butterfly with a dragnet. But I much enjoyed her lively talk about prefabricated houses, flying bombs, rest centres and all manner of diverse subjects.’30 On another occasion, Mrs Churchill’s conversation was ‘as lively as ever. It ranged from elections to the best method of committing suicide.’31 Not unlike her husband, whose curiosity was boundless and who encouraged conversations covering wide-ranging topics. Except, of course, suicide (see Chapter 7).

  The schedule was gruelling and Churchill unrelenting in his production of work. Although he imposed an unreasonable schedule on his secretaries, he was not otherwise inconsiderate. He instructed one of his Private Secretaries that Holmes, who had not gone to bed until 3.30 a.m.,32 ‘was not to be called until at least 10.30 in the morning’. And aware that Chequers was not an ideal work site – it was notoriously cold‡ – he did his best at times to make their work place as comfortably warm as he possibly could.

  The room in which the personal secretaries waited for the prime minister’s summons and typed his dictation had a fireplace, which the women often lit. But at times they worked in the Hawtrey Room, one of the grand public rooms at Chequers, so grand that the secretaries would not dare to light a fire, especially when they would be working there only for a short time. One evening the prime minister ‘caught me working in the Hawtrey Room and ticked me off for not lighting the fire. “You’ll catch your death of cold… Why do you do such mad things?”’33 On another occasion, Churchill literally took matters into his own hands. Worried that Holmes and Layton would be cold as they worked, and although the Hawtrey Room is quite wide and with only one fireplace on the long side of the room, quite hard to heat, Churchill knelt down and built up the fire himself, saying to them: ‘Oh, you poor things. You must light a fire and get your coats. It’s just as well I came in.’34 And when Churchill believed Holmes had succumbed to a cold, he told Sawyers, his valet, to send up a hot whisky toddy. Naturally, this consideration for their comfort endeared him to the secretaries, and more than made up for his occasional grumpiness and for the demanding work schedule.

  And he was not unaware that a bit of praise could have a wondrous effect on morale. On one occasion, the prime minister said to John Martin in Holmes’s presence: ‘We could always get some more young ladies down here [to handle increased work]. Of course, they won’t be as sweet and charming as the ones we’ve got here now.’ She was embarrassed, but the compliment undoubtedly made up for the many late nights, for many of the times he snapped at her or couldn’t control his impatience. Another compensation for this arduous schedule was to earn a place among those on whom Churchill, as a mark of affection, bestowed a nickname, in her case ‘Miss Sherlock’. In the case of Eric Seal, one of his Private Secretaries, Churchill played off the fact that seals can be found on ice floes and dubbed him Ice Floe, one of Churchill’s favourite puns on someone’s name.

  It might seem odd that these incidents of consideration, and some flattery, offset the punishing work schedule in his secretaries’ minds. The answer lies in their understanding of the importance of their task helping to win the war. In addition, the work was exciting and very varied, and their boss was at times funny. And in the fact that he would accept their suggestions for making their jobs easier and him more efficient. Holmes noticed that Churchill had ‘been getting into the habit of dictating into shorthand. He used to dictate this way only for speeches. Tonight, I persuaded him to revert to dictating straight on to the silent typewriter… He can see straight away what he has said and sign it… The majority of comments and directives he dictates never need correction.’35 He quickly saw the sense of that change, that it would permit him to get his work done more easily and quickly. That, after all, was what mattered most to him. When asked what could put Churchill in a bad mood, she thought whatever ‘he’d regard as inefficient’.

  Indeed, it was hard work and difficult problems that very often lifted Churchill’s mood, as Holmes – and indeed others on his team – could not help noticing. In October of 1943 he was consumed with the Italian campaign, the preliminary plans for Overlord and the thorny question of who would lead the invasion of continental Europe, as well as organizing a summit with President Roosevelt and Stalin. Noting his exhilaration at the combination of great challenges and hard work, Holmes wrote in her diary: ‘P.M. worked hard all morning. He was in high spirits and seems to have an insatiable thirst for work.’36 Such high spirits that she recalls he ‘began but did not finish, the jingle “There was a young lady of Crewe”.’ This is similar to Layton’s observation: ‘The prime minister always seemed at his most approachable and considerate and easiest to work for when there was a crisis on… In calmer times, when there was less to worry about, he would sometimes be irritable and easily upset.’37

  Holmes’s fondness for working at Chequers did not mean that she was not excited when the opportunity for foreign travel presented itself. She saw it as a great treat, even though the workload increased substantially. At the beginning of the war, foreign travel was considered too dangerous for women, so only Patrick Kinna, the only male personal secretary, and a whizz at shorthand, travelled with Churchill and his all-male entourage. However, as the war progressed, female secretaries were asked to make dangerous trips to distant locations for summits and other meetings. Holmes described her first trip, which was to the second Quebec Conference (Octagon, September 1944): ‘I was just told… would you like to go?’ Of course she would! She had never been abroad and called it her ‘first big travel adventure!’38 She had been secretly storing up clothing coupons and borrowing ‘some undies. It might be windy’39 and other clothes from Edith Watson, whose chores at Downing Street meant she would not be a candidate to accompany the prime minister. Secretly, not only because Churchill’s trip, destination and route were highly confidential, but because it would be the first time a female secretary had been allowed to travel and other candidates might have been more than a little put out at not being asked to go. Travel, after all, would become a major perk of the job.

  The trek to Quebec began on 5 September 1944. George VI lent the prime minister one of his special trains to transport Churchill and his large delegation to Greenock, Scotland, there to board the Queen Mary, lying offshore, for her trip across the Atlantic to Quebec. The Queen Mary had once been the most luxurious liner in the world, but since the outbreak of the war she had been used only to transport soldiers back and forth between the United States and the United Kingdom. The ship was now leased to the Americans to transport thousands of soldiers returning from the Normandy Campaign. Only three months earlier, Holmes, Layton and Hill had tensely awaited that invasion, on the prime minister’s special train, parked on a siding at Southampton, spending two and a half days there, in order to be near Southwick Manor, General Eisenhower’s command headquarters.

  For its VIP guest (and his staff), the top deck of the Queen Mary had been refurbished to its past luxury, the bar and dining rooms opened. Holmes shared a cabin with Kathleen Hill, ‘most luxurious for us’.

  Enemy submarines followed the Queen Mary, but Captain Pim maintained the map room that showed where the submarines were.40 Either because Churchill’s presence ensured adequate protection by destroyers or because, as Holmes put it, ‘One could never, ever, feel scared in the company of Churchill,’ she felt reassured – just as the British public seem to have been reassured by a Churchill walkabout or wireless broadcast in the worst days of the war. That feeling of safety was not confined to the crossing to Quebec. Holmes’s diary mentions that she ‘had to tell the PM that London was
again under severe air attack’, when, like other Londoners, she was one of the targets of the bombing, and she notes later, ‘still ducking the doodlebugs… Heavy raids. Spent the night ducking, both at the office and at lunchtime at Victoria.’41

  Some work was done on this voyage, but less than usual as Churchill, just two months shy of his seventieth birthday, was ‘quite ill… [we] feared that he was going to get pneumonia’. Brigadier Lionel Whitby, a doctor, and Nurse Pugh were also on board in case Lord Moran, Churchill’s regular doctor, needed their help. Downing Street had advised that the presence of the brigadier, a medical colleague of Lord Moran’s and an expert in blood transfusions, and Mrs Pugh (as she was to be known, and no relation of Doreen Pugh) was not to be disclosed as it might cause comment and worry. Churchill called the brigadier ‘Vampire’ (another Churchillian affectionate nickname), because of his medical speciality. Despite being ill – illness rarely stood between Churchill and a good dinner – the prime minister and his Private Secretaries dined on oysters and champagne on the first night out. We have seen Colville’s description of meals aboard ship in Chapter 5. Although they did not dine with Churchill and his advisors, it seems the staff had access to the same good and plentiful food, as meals on board were not subject to rationing.