by Working
On another trip in 1949, scheduled by Churchill because he was told President Truman would be in the audience to hear him speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Churchill learned that the president would not be able to attend after all. Churchill wanted to order the big ship to turn around and return to Britain, ‘but thank goodness Lady Churchill was there and she calmed him down… Very interesting.’ Gilliatt characterizes that trip as ‘a busy one. I don’t remember having much time off then.’
On still another of their visits to America, Churchill decided, after five days of meetings in New York and Washington, some of them with president-elect Eisenhower, that he would like to have some time in sunny Jamaica. President Truman graciously lent his plane, the Independence, named after his Missouri home town. The flight was rough enough for his staff to worry about his health. But Churchill ‘ate a huge steak for lunch and had his usual brandy and cigar in President Truman’s magnificently fitted aircraft’.9 The weather in Jamaica was not good, but Gilliatt recalls she ‘ran into frightful trouble one day because he was sitting on the beach painting and I was swimming and I am not a good swimmer… I was swimming away busily on my breast stroke and there was Sir Winston back on the beach. Churchill worriedly asked, “Has she got to the buoys yet?”, repeating the question. When Gilliatt came ashore from her swim, Churchill said “You really mustn’t do that, Miss. I’m responsible for you and you went out much too far.”’ He could at times worry about his staff and they appreciated it. A cynic might attribute Churchill’s concern to the fact that Gilliatt was in Jamaica not to swim but to take dictation as Churchill revised the third volume of his war memoirs.
Gilliatt learned early on – when she accompanied Churchill to a villa on Lake Geneva to work on a major speech to be given in Zurich, and on his memoirs – that these trips could be exhausting, even if a second secretary, in this case Marston, came along. ‘It was hard work indeed. We didn’t get any break for the work there.’ Several years later she put the same thought a bit differently: when Churchill was working on his memoirs, ‘he really did go at it hammer and tongs’. Even when sitting for a portrait, this one by Sir Oswald Birley, he would dictate to Gilliatt, ‘because he could not relax’.10
To the lesson that work was the dominant feature of Churchill’s life, add two more, these learned on a trip to La Capponcina: pack carefully, and use the power conveyed by working for Winston.11 Gilliatt forgot her little teddy bear at the hotel at which she was put up. The teddy was a favourite which she had had since she was five years old. So she cabled the hotel and asked to have it returned to her. Three weeks later the little bear arrived in a matchbox, addressed to Gilliatt c/o The Right Honourable Winston Churchill. If Churchill had heard about this, he would have found it amusing, I’m sure. And the hotel’s obliging attitude was still another perk, a less famous guest might not have such attention paid to left-behind articles.
Still another trip took Gilliatt to Marrakesh, which she ‘loved’, although she had to work the usual long hours. But it was not all work. On Churchill’s trip to Marrakesh in December 1947 Gilliatt and Sturdee were included in a festive Christmas Eve dinner party, along with Sarah Churchill (then Mrs Vic Oliver) at La Mamounia. Churchill wanted all those who had forgone their Christmas at home to enjoy the evening, which Gilliatt and Sturdee most certainly did, since Churchill danced with each of them, as well as with Sarah and Mrs Deakin, and ‘a good-looking fair lady, otherwise unidentified’.12
Even when Churchill and his guests went on ‘long lunch picnics we were always along. [We] probably didn’t have lunch at the same table necessarily, but [we] were certainly allowed to go. It was a most elaborate picnic… tables and chairs and napkins and knives and forks.’ She also went along on picnics in the South of France, as Churchill was very fond of eating outdoors, even during the war. But at ‘jaunts’, as Gilliatt called them, he had to have a secretary or two present, primarily because he might want to dictate, but also because he sought to include his secretaries in such adventures whenever he could, just as he included Holmes and Layton when Stalin invited him to the Bolshoi Ballet during the prime minister’s 1944 visit to Moscow.
Travel was not the only perquisite the secretaries enjoyed. Another was the opportunity of meeting, or more precisely, getting to see the world’s VIPs, especially at Chequers, once Churchill became prime minister for the second time in October 1951. Gilliatt recalls that ‘at Chequers, the secretary’s office was just inside the door, so quite a lot of them [the VIPS] used to wander into the office before they saw him… They’d come in and see what the situation was.’ On trips abroad, she said, she would ‘see more of the VIPs… perhaps the Chiefs of Staff would come in and have to wait a bit, so they’d be in our office chatting together. That was the interesting thing about abroad.’ Of course, the staff never asked for autographs or to pose for photos. This was not yet the selfie era; they knew to keep to the background.
Another perk became available when Churchill developed his love for horse racing. When he was seventy-five he bought his first horse, a grey, called Colonist II, chosen with the help of his son-in-law Christopher Soames.13 As usual, when he went to the races he took a personal secretary with him in the car. Churchill had an enormous capacity to switch topics, dictating in the car on the way to the races, at times right up until the gate was raised. And even dictating in a dark car while driving with Elizabeth Layton in Moscow, although covered with ‘huge Russian fur rugs’.14 Knowing him so well, Gilliatt thought that there [must have been] something wrong if he hadn’t… been able to change his focus on such short notice.’
Gilliatt thought that Churchill was pleased when the personal secretaries bet on his horses, and so they did – and shared his joy when Colonist II won so many races. And Gilliatt was delighted when he had her join him in the paddock and enclosure, after all, he might have needed her to take down some idea or instruction.
Sometime in the spring of 1951 Elizabeth Gilliatt requested permission to leave, so she could travel with her father Sir William, the eminent physician, who was making a worldwide teaching and lecture tour, and he needed Liz as hostess because her mother was too ill to make the trip. Churchill was of course not happy at the temporary loss, but reluctantly agreed when her father explained to Churchill that he had ‘more right to her as she was his daughter. IF someone suitable could be found to fill in and if she promised to return.’ In her place Vanda Salmon was hired.
The return to Number 10 required some rearranging of the private and personal secretaries. Gilliatt was ‘delighted’ to have been asked to return to Downing Street with the once-again prime minister. In addition to staffing there were also some changes in the way Gilliatt worked for the prime minister, although she continued to take dictation and type for him. There was now a layer of officials between her and Churchill. If she had something urgent for him to see, she would have to ‘say very politely [to the Private Secretary on duty] “could this get into the box?” meaning would they put it into the box of work that they were preparing for the prime minister. She regretted not seeing as much of Churchill as she had when he was a private citizen: ‘And once I didn’t see him for a fortnight. I was rather annoyed about it. But it was perfectly normal.’ Sturdee also found herself cut off from regular contact with Churchill, but he somehow had the barriers removed in her case (as noted in Chapter 5). Such was Gilliatt’s personal loyalty to Churchill and the power of his charm that although no longer in continuous, direct contact with him, she continued to work uncomplainingly at her several tasks.
In June 1953, at a dinner party in Downing Street in honour of the Italian prime minister, Churchill suffered a major stroke. He was seventy-eight. ‘Things weren’t at all good,’ reflected Gilliatt. The appositely named Dr Russell Brain, Churchill’s neurologist, examined him and advised against his taking a scheduled cabinet meeting and an appearance later in the week in the House of Commons, which Churchill was insisting on attending. He did attend the cabin
et meeting, but was driven to Chartwell the next day. Gilliatt, who was with him in the car, noticed that he was ‘walking very unsteadily and his speech was slurred’. The personal secretaries and everyone in Downing Street knew ‘there was something wrong. I mean it was all around the office’. But it was not reported in the press, by agreement of the so-called press lords who tightly controlled the media in those days when print news was just about all that mattered in Britain.
Within two or three months the prime minister had recuperated sufficiently to be able to work on a speech he was to give at the upcoming Conservative Party Conference in Margate in October. ‘[Brendan] Bracken, one of the few men who knew of Churchill’s stroke, wrote “cheering beyond telling is this marvellous recovery.”’15 Gilliatt recalls that at Margate ‘all went well’ and Churchill could celebrate his eightieth birthday in good spirits. In poured ‘an awful lot of letters… They didn’t bring the mail up to us in trays but in huge wire baskets.’ The personal secretaries reviewed each letter or birthday card to determine whether or not the prime minister would see it, which depended on who sent it. For example, a letter and card from Madame Odette Pol-Roger would of course be sent into Churchill.‡ Some signatures were illegible, requiring close cooperation between the private and the personal secretaries to identify the sender. Gifts were another problem – there were hundreds of them from people and institutions around the globe. The secretaries opened all of them, logged them in and decided how they were acknowledged. Even when ‘a little boy, let’s say from Doncaster, a little boy of nine wrote in and sent a little present or something… somebody did send him a photograph. Important ones [gifts] had their destinations’; one a ‘marvellous cabinet of cigars, and that of course would have an honoured place. Books would mostly be at Chartwell.’ Gilliatt makes no mention of the gifts of large cheeses remembered by Sturdee.
There were many birthday parties, both public and private. The secretaries generally were not included, but Gilliatt was invited to Churchill’s eightieth and the unveiling in Westminster Hall of the infamous Sutherland portrait, which ‘I didn’t like… they hated it.’
Because of his stroke, Churchill had been forced to cancel his proposed summit meeting in Bermuda with President Eisenhower and the French – putting it off in the expectation of making a complete recovery. He rescheduled it for December 1953, hoping to persuade the Americans to agree to a summit with the new Soviet leader Georgy Malenkov. Unfortunately for Churchill, Eisenhower and his principal foreign policy advisor John Foster Dulles opposed any summit with the Soviets.
From Gilliatt’s point of view, the trip to Bermuda was somewhat more successful. For one thing, she got another dip in the sea, although Churchill – put off by the water’s temperature of 67 degrees – did not. For another, she had a rare, short but personal conversation with Churchill. Rare, because her relationship with him was purely business, with minimal exchanges of personal remarks or information, as with all the other secretaries. Churchill’s mind was on work. She had been surprised once when he asked her how old her father was. She said, ‘Sixty-two, Sir Winston.’ He replied, ‘Oh, he’s a mere chicken. I am seventy-two.’ As Gilliatt recalls, ‘There might be the odd remark like that, but no, there was no question of discussing things with him’.
No matter how long these women had worked for Churchill he never called them by their first names. It was always ‘Miss’, ‘the young lady’ or, rarely, ‘Miss Gilliatt’, or ‘Where’s the Miss?’ Unless he had a nickname for them, such as ‘The Portal’ for Jane Portal and ‘Miss Sherlock’ for Holmes, but these were not used regularly. He had a reason for calling them interchangeably ‘Miss’, as we saw in Chapter 2.
However, in Bermuda Churchill engaged Gilliatt in another rare personal conversation. She notes in her oral history on file at the Archives that there was no time on Sundays for
church or anything like that. But if one could go, one did. And he said to me one day, ‘Have you been to church, Miss?’ I said, ‘Well, no, Sir Winston,’ hoping to go later on. Churchill replied: ‘I’ll tell the Pope about you.’… I had a feeling – he had sort of a sympathy for the Catholic Church. I remember him giving me a lecture at Chartwell once… he said, ‘The attitude of your church to sex is absolutely marvellous’ or something like that.
Gilliatt, like those of her colleagues whom Churchill occasionally teased, and to whom he playfully assigned nicknames, felt special, singled out, as a result of this attention.
Churchill returned to Britain to face increasing pressure from Opposition leaders to resign, and, more importantly, from Anthony Eden, who had been pressing since 1945 to step into his shoes. Gilliatt hoped that Churchill would stay in office until he would ‘drop in his tracks… because I felt that he had so much still to give’. President Eisenhower privately felt that Churchill ought to resign and let Eden take over. Ike even went so far as to think that ‘Churchill should began planning his farewell address.’16 Gilliatt thought that ‘He’d hate resigning and I thought it a pity that he shouldn’t be allowed to carry on till he dropped. But I mean when a whole country depends on it, you can’t really do that, I think, – I’m afraid I wish he had been able to.’
Not surprisingly, Gilliatt was part of Churchill’s team until the last minute. ‘When he finally drove away from No 10, the day of his resignation [as prime minister], it was announced that he… drove away with an unknown woman. That was me.’17 Even under the most stressful and emotional situations Churchill needed a personal secretary with him, perhaps to take down, perhaps as a symbol that there was work still to be done, of which there was enough to sap the energies of a much younger man.
After his resignation, Churchill flew to Syracuse in Sicily for a much needed and well-earned vacation, taking Gilliatt along. She ‘didn’t find this trip easy at all… I don’t think he had settled to the fact [of his resignation] yet and I think he wasn’t very happy… but there was the dickens of a lot of work to do. Thankfully Jock Colville was with us and also Lady Churchill [as she had by then become] who helped to calm troubled waters when necessary.’ Lord Cherwell (Frederick Lindemann), a wartime colleague and one of Churchill’s closest friends, was also there. They stayed at the Grand Hotel Villa Politi, which on its current website announces ‘I never slept so well,’ signed W. Churchill and Lady Clementina, April 1955.
Friends, secretaries and Lady Churchill could not console him. The weather was not good and the Italians less than helpful: Gilliatt had ‘to ask about four times’ to get a response to her questions. ‘I mean if he wanted his room hotter, so you didn’t ask once for extra fire, you had to ask two or three times. And when you’re as busy as we were it made it very difficult and altogether a great loss.’ Churchill’s theory about the Italians’ lack of urgency is that they were angry with him for bringing English weather with him and were glad to see him leave Sicily and take his weather with him. The trip was not a success.
How could it be? Gilliatt thought ‘he was rather depressed’. Despite that, work continued at its usual pace. There were speeches to be written and delivered. He was still working on A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and there was an election coming up in which Churchill would have to defend his seat for the nineteenth time.18 Churchill’s success in so doing contributed to a Tory majority of fifty-nine seats.
When they returned to Britain, Gilliatt was exhausted, and two new secretaries, Doreen Pugh and Gillian Maturin, were taken on staff, presumably to clear up post-election correspondence and help with the completion of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Maturin stayed for three and a half years and Pugh for nearly ten years. As we shall see, both were ‘overcome by how sweet he was’, according to Pugh.19
In 1955 Gilliatt left Churchill’s employment. He bequeathed her £400 in his will, some £7,500 today. She died in 2004.
In his last letter to the queen after his resignation, Churchill wrote:
The historical atmosphere of Syracuse grows perceptibly upon me and my co
mpanions here as the days pass. Our hotel rises out of the sinister quarries in which six thousand Athenian prisoners of war were toiled and starved to death in 413 BC, and I am trying to paint a picture of a cavern’s mouth near the listening gallery whose echoes brought secrets to the ears of Dionysius. All this is agreeable to the mental and psychological processes of laying down direct responsibility for the guidance of great affairs and falling back upon the comforting reflection ‘I have done my best.’20
Indeed, he had.
* A specimen fish that can reach up to twenty-four inches in length and weigh as much as four pounds. It is golden in colour and lives just below the water’s surface, so they are easily seen. Churchill loved feeding them. During the war, Harrods asked Churchill to take twenty-two varieties of rare fish from the store into his lakes for safekeeping. As a thank-you, Harrods agreed Churchill could keep as many of them as he wished. In Lough, No More Champagne, p. 282.
† Gemmell tells the story in much the same way.
‡ Pol Roger champagne was Churchill’s favourite drink. He met Madame Pol-Roger at the British Embassy in Paris in 1944 and they became friends. He named one of his racehorses Pol Roger and it won the Black Prince Stakes in 1953. When Churchill died, she ordered that all bottles of champagne exported to Britain have a wide mourning band across the label. Champagne Pol Roger created their Prestige Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill in his honour.
8
Lettice Marston
‘Do you think that you could endure the
vicissitudes of this life?’
Lettice Marston, quoting Churchill, as she started work for him.