Working with Winston

by Working

  Holmes had met the new prime minister in Potsdam when they had drinks at the mess together with General Ismay, but ‘it is difficult always to hear what he says in his staccato mode of speech’.108 At once she flew back to Potsdam with Attlee and the new Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin to be available at the resumption of the interrupted Potsdam Conference. As a permanent civil servant, Holmes was now working for the new prime minister along with John Peck. Such is the smooth transition that is arranged by the civil service at its best. Smooth it may have been, but also a transition to a far duller assignment. Holmes noted in her diary: ‘It is the difference between champagne and unsalted water. He calls us in only when he wants to dictate something. No conversation or pleasantries, wit or capricious behaviour.’109

  But this happened only after she had said goodbye to the wartime prime minister with whom she had shared so many adventures. ‘Determined not to seem upset,’ she approached Churchill while he was still in bed.110 Holmes’s last entry as Churchill’s secretary is worth quoting fully. He said to her:

  ‘Perhaps they can do better than me, especially on housing and coal… It must have been very hard putting up with all my bad tempers. You have been wonderful, sharing all the secrets and flying off with me… [You will] always have a place in my memory.’ It was very emotional and by this time we were both in tears… as I withdrew from the room, he blew me a kiss. What a sadness to so suddenly stop working for what surely must be the greatest P.M. we will ever have. There was never a dull moment.111

  In 1965 she was invited to Churchill’s funeral at St Paul’s and recalls the very emotional moment when his face came up on the monitor, a photograph taken some time in 1940. Then, she said, she and the others ‘dissolved into tears… and with some former colleagues went back to No. 10 [she was working there at the time] and… cried into our gin… We knew we were happy [then], as Dylan Thomas would say.’

  In 1957 Holmes had married Steve Walker, a history master at St Benedict’s School, Ealing, with whom she had three sons and a daughter. Following Walker’s death in 1974, Holmes married James Spicer, an engineer, in 1979. She died in 2001, at the age of eighty.112

  * According to Charles Moore, there has only ever been one Garden Room Boy.

  † Flowers were generally brought from either Chequers or Chartwell back to Downing Street.

  ‡ When Harry Hopkins, FDR’s closest advisor, was visiting, he held meetings in the downstairs guest bathroom, with his coat on, as it was the only reliably heated room in the house.

  § This shows Churchill’s absorption in politics even during his leisure hours, as when he described the Battle of Jutland using the cutlery on his dinner table during a social dinner, and his choice of plays and films, such as Henry V.

  ¶ A favourite card game of Churchill’s. Played by two people with two packs of cards.

  # Detective Inspector Bill Hughes, one of Churchill’s regular bodyguards.

  ** A black-and-white film starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, That Hamilton Woman was shot in the United States in late 1940 and released in 1941. On 2 August 1941, as Churchill prepared to sail to meet President Roosevelt for the first time, he insisted on seeing the film again. He was so disappointed that the film had already been sent back to Korda’s offices that he ordered: ‘put people across the road to stop them [the film delivery van and driver]’. The Churchill Documents, Vol. 16, p. 1027, from Oliver Hoare’s Diary. On 8 August Cadogan’s Diary notes that the prime minister and his officers aboard the Prince of Wales watched the film for the fifth time and Churchill was ‘moved to tears’. This was the night before his first meeting with Roosevelt aboard the USS Augusta. We can assume that Kinna also saw the film.

  †† Given to the British by the Americans, but really on loan. Prime Minister Attlee later returned the plane to the United States.

  7

  Elizabeth Gilliatt

  ‘It was hard work indeed. We didn’t get any break

  for the work there.’

  Gilliatt describing a trip to Switzerland with Churchill,

  Elizabeth Gilliatt, oral history.

  ‘The thing I thought was so marvellous about him was

  that he did not waste an instant and he did not waste any

  of the talents that the almighty had given him.’

  Elizabeth Gilliatt, oral history

  ‘I noticed the gift for intense concentration: while he

  worked away, everything else ceased to exist for him.

  “I like working,” Churchill said with satisfaction.’

  A. L. Rowse1

  ELIZABETH GILLIATT WAS born in 1920. She started working in Downing Street as a shorthand typist in 1943. Thanks to a recommendation from friends of her father, Sir William Gilliatt, consulting gynaecologist to the queen,2 she was elevated to a Garden Room Girl slot, where she worked for the five Private Secretaries, including the ‘remarkable lady, Miss Watson’, who handled the parliamentary questions. Incoming mail from the general public – and there was a lot of it – had to be acknowledged. Gilliatt had been warned there would be a great deal of such mail addressed to the prime minister to sort and mark. Private Secretaries marked some of it ‘ACK’, for ‘acknowledge’, some ‘AFS’ for ‘acknowledge with Churchill signature’ and a short note. The Churchill Archives are filled with personal letters, on a wide variety of subjects, written and signed by Gilliatt and other personal secretaries, as well as by Churchill himself.

  Her first contact with Churchill was the day of the ‘terrible election in 1945’, when he passed her in a hallway and said ‘Good morning, good afternoon or whatever and no sign of upset at all. I thought it was wonderful.’ At that time, she was working for Churchill’s successor, Clement Attlee, and discovered that working for Mr Attlee ‘wasn’t quite so much fun [although he was] a nice person’. She decided that she would seek a post with Churchill, who had retained his parliamentary seat and was then Leader of the Opposition. She explained to Patrick Kinna that working for Attlee was not as exciting as working for Churchill. ‘It’s not the same… it’s not the same,’ she repeated. Kinna recommended her for a position with Churchill and she interviewed with Kathleen Hill, who was retiring and whom Gilliatt would replace. Hill took her in to see Churchill, then living at 28 Hyde Park Gate. In his typically informal interviewing style, Churchill, who was in bed, said, ‘I hear you’d like to come and work for me. I said yes, very much, thank you,’ and that was it. In short, Churchill interviewed Gilliatt as he did others – in a perfunctory manner. ‘Churchill believed he could sum up a man in… swift scrutiny. Later I was to see him reject a candidate after an equally abrupt examination,’ said one of his Private Secretaries.3

  Of course, it might also have been that he was confident that his staff, who performed the initial interviews and checked references, knew what he needed. Gilliatt worked for him for the next nine years. After all, Gilliatt had been recommended by the queen’s physician, then by Kinna, vetted by Miss Watson and interviewed by Hill – an impressive gauntlet to have run. It proved a good choice. Only one year later, Churchill trusted her enough to advise Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Indian Muslim leader, to communicate with him only through Gilliatt and that in his responses he should always sign himself ‘Gilliatt’.4

  When Gilliatt joined his staff in early 1946, Churchill was moving between 28 Hyde Park Gate, the Commons office of the Leader of the Opposition, and Chartwell. When he was returned to office in 1951, Chequers was his again to use, and was added to the list of offices and residences among which the secretaries would shuffle.

  Gilliatt was

  expected to go to Chartwell with him at weekends; he was never without anyone… even if he went from Hyde Park Gate to the [nearby] House of Commons he always had a secretary with him… We used to go everywhere with him: to the House, if he went away to stay with a friend, accommodation would be booked for us nearby and we could come in every day and work in the friend’s house.

  She said of typing
his speeches, ‘It’s just that you were in a different place when you typed them,’ either Hyde Park Gate or Chartwell or in-between. As we have seen, Churchill worked and dictated everywhere, on trains, aeroplanes and in cars. Gilliatt recalls that trains were the most difficult, ‘because the train would jerk and you’d land on the wrong letter. It was very difficult indeed and you couldn’t keep the blinds down or else someone… on the station [would say] “Oh look!” That sort of thing.’ And the personal secretaries went with him everywhere. ‘That really was very tiring,’ she recalled, and even once fell asleep while working for him. ‘But he was so nice about it. I think he was horrified to see how much he tired us out.’

  Churchill continued his lifelong habit of taking a rest in the afternoon, and had a bed installed in his room at the Commons. Gilliatt recalls that one day she had to fill his hot-water bottle for his afternoon nap. She ran along to the ‘ladies cloakroom [reserved for members only] to fill the hot water bottle from the tap… And a lady member came in and she said: “What are you doing?”’ Gilliatt answered truthfully, but not completely, saying she ‘was filling a hot water bottle’ and fled – members covet their privileges, of which exclusive use of strategically placed toilets is one.

  Gilliatt’s first assignment was to type from his complete notes some of the speeches Churchill had delivered to secret sessions of the House of Commons during the war, for inclusion in the Secret Sessions Speeches book that was subsequently published.5 She also learned to use the new telephone that had two separate lines – it is hard to imagine today how advanced that must have seemed then. For nearly a decade, Gilliatt worked for Churchill, ‘a devoted member of the small inner circle which made possible Churchill’s mastery of so many spheres of activity’. One of her recollections of those years was that Churchill ‘didn’t waste a single talent’.6

  The personal secretaries divided the work among themselves, with each getting separate responsibilities. But they were nevertheless a team. As Gilliatt explains: ‘[A]part from dividing the correspondence up a bit, if we were with him, we had to do whatever he did and it didn’t matter whether it was your section or not.’ One advantage of this arrangement is that it permitted each secretary to snatch some much-treasured time off, with the others picking up the load. Gilliatt recalls that they ‘used to have a fortnight [off]… it was simply that the others worked harder than ever when one of us was away.’

  It should be noted that teamwork and a willingness to go that extra mile for one’s boss was not characteristic of all of Britain’s working men and women. The smooth functioning of Churchill’s overworked staff is a tribute to his ability to exact huge amounts of work by communicating to them the importance of what they were doing and by distributing such perks as the jobs permitted. With what appears to have been a smile and approval at just the right time.

  Jo Sturdee was on the Churchill team when Gilliatt arrived – and Lettice Marston arrived later from General Ismay’s office. As the work increased, two more personal secretaries – Cecily ‘Chips’ Gemmell and Jane Portal – were added. Nevertheless, the late nights continued – ‘even sometimes until 3 or 3.30 a.m.’ But, says Gilliatt: ‘[H]e was the most lovable person… I don’t say you didn’t mind, you sort of cursed under your breath, but it didn’t spoil the enjoyment of the job.’

  Although ‘enjoyment’ was not always the right word to describe the job of being Churchill’s secretary. Very rarely was Churchill’s office closed for holidays. Gilliatt recalls one Christmas Eve at Chartwell when she was ‘the last one left… about half past five, and I think the police were going to take [me] back to London… I was frightfully tired… and he wouldn’t let me go. So I wiped off my makeup and hoped that Mrs Churchill would come, which she did.’ Using a technique deployed decades earlier by Hamblin, Gilliatt appealed to Mrs Churchill to intervene with her husband. She obligingly did, saying, ‘Darling, Miss Gilliatt looks terribly tired. You’d very [sic] much let her go.’ He did. Gilliatt then said goodnight to Sir Winston and thanked him for letting her go, adding, ‘I do hope everything will be all right.’ He said: ‘It won’t be, it won’t be!’ Not always the cheery optimist, he could succumb to despondency, in this instance because he was totally dependent on the office staffs, who had decided to take off Christmas Eve.

  As if the workload of a Leader of the Opposition were not enough, Churchill proceeded with his history of the Second World War, which he was determined to complete, because he wanted his history to become the standard version of that great conflict. One of Gilliatt’s tasks was to take dictation for those books or ‘he would possibly have drafts from some of the people helping him write it, [then] he would either order out the draft and give it to you to type or dictate from the draft changing it. We did a lot on that.’

  Churchill never did separate his personal and private lives and duties, which added still another dimension to the work days of his secretaries. In addition to her secretarial duties she had the task of arranging for the shipment of special worms from Yorkshire to feed the golden orfe.* And when the worms arrived at Westerham train station (closest to Chartwell), Gilliatt would have to collect them and bring the worms to Chartwell. Not your average job! Churchill’s care and even love for animals (and butterflies, which he called his ‘flying fairies’)7 lasted throughout his life.

  Gilliatt and the other personal secretaries had as little contact with their boss as possible when he was painting. ‘You had to be jolly careful if you had to go and ask him a question not to interrupt in a vital minute, otherwise there was a bit of an explosion. But if you waited until he got to the end of a cloud or whatever it was, you could somehow get away with it’ – if it were really important.

  They also tried to avoid direct contact when it was necessary to inform Churchill of the death of a friend or relative – or, in fact, just about anyone he knew. The very emotional Churchill always became visibly upset – although in the case of Franklin D. Roosevelt, not sufficiently upset to attend the funeral of his wartime ally. Rather than be the direct bearer of bad news, Gilliatt discovered the best way to deal with such news: inform Mrs Churchill and ask her to tell her husband.

  Because the division of labour among the staff was organized informally, when it came to arranging engagements, mistakes were almost inevitable. Churchill asked Gilliatt to invite a certain maharajah to lunch, naming the particular one he wanted to see. But, somehow, the maharajahs’ names got mixed up. When the wrong maharajah arrived, Churchill rushed along to the office saying, ‘You’ve asked the wrong maharaja,’† but Gilliatt’s voice and inflection on the oral history tapes don’t tell us whether Churchill was angry. Perhaps the years that have passed since the event have softened her memory, perhaps he wasn’t really angry, just bemused. Much like the mix-up when Churchill said, ‘invite Berlin to lunch’, but somehow Irving Berlin showed up instead of Isaiah Berlin. So far as can be determined, no staff members were either chastised or dismissed, even though Churchill took special care to arrange invitations to his table to suit his needs and interests.

  Then there was the time, as related by Gilliatt, when arrangements were being made to get Churchill’s special bed onto a train taking him to Scotland to give a speech. Whether it was the very same bed that Churchill had installed in the office of the Leader of the Opposition we do not know – but sleep was a balm, essential to Churchill. However, the very fact that such a bed-installing process was once again underway reminds us that as a junior officer during the First World War – before he became famous for leading his nation from the brink of disaster to victory in the following conflict – Churchill did not think it odd to have his bathtub shipped to him on the Western Front. In one case, both what Gilliatt describes as ‘the little man from British Rail’ charged with the responsibility of moving the bed onto the train, and Sir Alan Lascelles, private secretary to George VI, arrived at the same time to meet with Churchill. The secretaries confused the two. We do not know how Sir Alan or Churchill reacted when the conf
usion unfolded, or whether Sir Alan demanded that heads roll. They didn’t. Gilliatt dryly recalls: ‘We had our moments.’

  Nevertheless there were some perks to working for Churchill. Principal among them were the extra coupons issued to allow the secretaries to ‘have at least one exceptionally smart outfit for receptions, and to purchase decent trousers for wearing on the battleships that would carry them overseas.’ Especially prized were coupons for ‘the luxury of new shoes’, because leather was severely rationed.8

  There were visits to Switzerland, Jamaica, Bermuda, the United States and, of course, to La Capponcina, Lord Beaverbrook’s villa in Cap-d’Ail in the South of France, and to Marrakesh. Her first long trip with Churchill was one of what would prove to be several to America, often on the Queen Mary. This was a time when Churchill was crossing the ocean regularly to visit with President Truman, or to travel to Canada to deliver a speech, or to Fulton to warn of Soviet intentions. Or to reacquaint himself with Eisenhower.

  On the trips to America Gilliatt thoroughly enjoyed the Queen Mary, for reason obvious from the descriptions from several of her colleagues. And because the routine was often broken with memorable events, even though not all of them were pleasant. On one, the voyage was ‘quite rough’ and she did not feel well at all. Just as she was recovering a bit, Colville ‘breezed into the cabin and said, “I’m just going downstairs. I’ll have a steak and I’ll be feeling better.”’ This prompted Gilliatt, who until then ‘was doing all right’, to retreat quickly to her own cabin. But all of the trips to America aboard the Queen Mary allowed for meetings and chats with notables and VIPs, and some diversions, which was compensation enough for a bit of seasickness.