Working with Winston

by Working

  Marston toured Venice with Mrs Churchill,

  [if] she wanted company… The food was always marvellous… It was great fun. And there were all the islands to visit around Venice, Torcello, Murano and Burano. And we used to go off for the day and ring up beforehand and order lunch at some marvellous place overhung with vines. And all the locals used to get terribly excited that he [or his party, sometimes, including Jane Portal, were] coming.

  Ample compensation for the fact that when with Churchill she often had to take dictation ‘as they flew along in a motor launch’ through the canals of Venice.11

  Churchill was right: Attlee was forced to call a general election for October 1951. The Tories won and Churchill was again prime minister. Marston says that ‘One woke up and found oneself going to Number 10… There were great preparations for sort of moving to Number 10 and shutting up the house of Hyde Park Gate.’ Almost all his personal staff went with him, but, as with his first stay in Number 10, they ‘had a separate office apart from the civil service side… the government side was quite separate [from his personal staff]’. However, the increased workload forced Churchill to use some of the Number 10 staff as well as his own. He had known some of the senior civil-service secretaries at Number 10, so there was no need for him to do what he disliked – adjust to new faces.

  But Marston did sense a slight loss. She felt that the personal secretaries ‘didn’t have quite the same status… I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it. It was just different. It was all very official… the government servants and messengers.’ But Churchill’s way of working never changed: ‘he didn’t alter his way of living… apart from the fact that he was sort of slowing down… he was not working so late at night,’ and his increasing deafness made his usual schedule take longer and tire him out more.

  Marston continued to work for Churchill from Hyde Park Gate – and occasionally at Chequers, dealing with constituency matters, as well as being ‘in charge of all secretarial matters relating to the war memoirs’.12 In 1953 she married Robert Shillingford, a pilot she had met when touring an RAF base with Churchill. After her marriage, she lived in Wells and did all Churchill’s constituency work, which was sent to her. She volunteered, as several other former secretaries did, to help for big events such as his eightieth birthday in 1954 and his golden wedding anniversary in 1958, both of which generated ‘massive correspondence to deal with’ and presents to acknowledge from around the world. Two days before his eighty-ninth birthday in 1963, Churchill went to the House of Commons in a wheelchair, and that night he dined at The Other Club. But his working life was winding down.13 Marston volunteered to help with the massive amounts of congratulatory letters, telegrams and presents that came flooding in. Churchill dictated a letter to her on 6 December 1963, thanking her for her work and saying, ‘Thank you for your kindness in helping to deal with my correspondence on November 30. I understand that you wish me to regard this [work] as a gift for my birthday and I much appreciate all your valuable assistance,’ signed personally by him ‘with every good wish, yours very sincerely’.

  When Churchill died in 1965 Marston went back to work at Hyde Park Gate to help with funeral arrangements and the masses of correspondence. She was ‘devastated’ when he died, but ‘he had certainly earned his rest’.

  Marston and her husband Robert Shillingford established a branch of the Cancer Research campaign. She died in 1988, aged sixty-nine, and had worked for Churchill for nineteen years. When Churchill died in 1965, he left her £200, about £3,700 in today’s money.

  * After the defeat of Germany in 1945, a Control Commission was set up to support the military government, which was in place at that time. The military government was gradually phased out and the Control Commission took over the role of ‘local government’. It was responsible for Public Safety, Health, Transport, Housing and Intelligence. The forward HQ was in Cumberland House, Berlin. Recruits had to be over twenty-one, and were recruited from civil servants, the Foreign Office and demobbed military personnel. See the BRIXMIS website: http://www.brixmis.co.uk.

  † It was rare for Churchill to be on the streets by himself. In late 1947 Sturdee says that Churchill got stuck in a dense fog and was unable to be driven home. So ‘he walked from Hyde Park Corner to Knightsbridge, got fed up, I suppose, and spent the night at the Hyde Park Hotel’. Marston, summoned to the hotel, to work, noted ‘I found him in bed. He spent the day there. He rather enjoyed it.’ In Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Never Despair 1945–1965, Vol. VIII, p. 306.

  9

  Cecily ‘Chips’ Gemmell

  ‘I’d have thrown myself under the

  bus practically for the Old Man.’*

  ‘Chips’ Gemmell, oral history

  ‘Contemporaries forgave his many foibles, attributing all

  these traits to the eccentricity of genius.’

  General Walter Bedell Smith1

  BORN IN 1929, Cecily ‘Chips’ Gemmell was another graduate from Mrs Hoster’s Employment Agency, the secretarial college and placement service for women, highly regarded by employers. She applied for employment with Churchill and was interviewed by Jo Sturdee, who was managing Churchill’s staff and offices at a time when Churchill was Leader of the Opposition. Sturdee says Gemmell described herself as ‘a country girl [who] would much rather work at Chartwell’, which was fine with Churchill, since ‘they needed extra help there too’. She was hired, aged eighteen, she thinks because she ‘looked the toughest and having passed Sturdee’s eagle eye, I then went to see the Old Man who had just come back from the hospital’. He was in the downstairs dining room at 28 Hyde Park Gate, where ‘I was ushered into… this terrifying presence sitting up in bed’. She was offered the job and accepted, despite a fear of working for Churchill. ‘If it had been somebody like [Franklin] Roosevelt, who I somehow pictured as a very kindly person… I would have no hesitation accepting a job like that.’

  She began work in the summer of 1947 and remained with Churchill for four years, before transferring to Mrs Churchill for another two. Since her father was in India and her mother was staying with friends in Britain, Gemmell was housed in a cottage called Over the Way (opposite the Pitts Cottage restaurant) in Westerham, the town in which Chartwell is located, bicycling daily to Chartwell (‘up an incredibly steep hill’). But since Churchill was unwilling to pay for the rental of the cottage on weekends, and Gemmell had nowhere to go, she was forced to pay for her weekend stays in the cottage. When hiring Gemmell, Sturdee emphasized the importance of secrecy and discretion, as she did with all the secretaries she approved for hire or hired herself. Gemmell says ‘Jo [Sturdee] put the fear of God into one. One must not say anything about the Churchills because the press was very interested and we were privy to EVERYTHING there and we were TRUSTED completely and expected to keep our mouths shut.’ Of course this was essential during the war years when national security was of grave concern and they were all required to sign the Official Secrets Act. But even after 1945 secrecy was maintained to ensure the Churchills’ privacy and safety.

  Gemmell’s first big task was working as a typist with Denis Kelly, who set up the muniment room at Chartwell to sort, date and catalogue all of Churchill’s papers in preparation for writing his war memoirs, and to establish an archive on which he could draw. Churchill had charged Kelly with ‘making Cosmos out of Chaos’.2 In other words, establish the Archives3 and then help out with writing the war memoirs, a chore that could not start until the archiving was completed, and a determination made of whether Churchill or the government owned the papers. Kelly was a lawyer who continued to handle his legal cases up in London, so when he left Chartwell, carrying his gown and wig in what looked like his dirty laundry bag (but was in fact his barrister’s bag), Gemmell continued on her own, working regular office hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., in a semi-basement area converted into a muniment room.†

  Gemmell, now working as an archivist as well as a trained typist, had had no training in creating an archive, except what Kelly
taught her – and it is not clear what, if anything, Kelly knew about archiving before he undertook this task.‡ But whatever experience he lacked as an archivist, he seems to have made up for in enthusiasm. Sturdee recalls that Kelly would come into her office and excitedly announce, ‘Oh, I found a most interesting document today.’

  Inexperienced in the real world of work, untrained and largely untutored, with an employer who struck fear into her heart, Gemmell confronted hundreds of black tin boxes and literally thousands of unsorted documents. The physical work environment didn’t make her life any easier: the rooms were next to the oil-burning furnace, which ‘roared away most of the year since Churchill hated a cold house’. Electrical wiring was ‘distinctly primitive… and Churchill reluctantly agreed to purchase fire-resistant steel cabinets’4 in which Gemmell filed the archived materials; probably pursuant to a system she developed, just as Grace Hamblin earlier developed a system for keeping track of and controlling Chartwell expenses. It cannot have been easy for Gemmell to work under these conditions, but she persevered, recalling ‘total confusion’.

  At this point, she was not yet working for Churchill directly, but she did smell his cigar smoke and hear his voice, all of which made her ‘tremble, and in a way thinking I would never get to the point where I was going to work for him’. But get to that point she did.

  When the archiving was complete, she was transferred to Churchill’s secretarial staff and summoned one night, after dinner, to his bedroom, to take dictation, or ‘take down’ as the chore was called. There this fearsome figure was, sitting in his four-poster bed amid the inevitable newspapers, brandy, cigars and ashtrays and an occasional cat. Sitting on the card table next to him was the noiseless typewriter. She recalls: ‘I don’t know why I just didn’t fall on the floor. So frightened I was shaking.’ It was unusual for him to dictate from his bed after dinner and he did so only when he had dined alone. But Churchill started dictating and she started ‘typing away like mad’, having to type extra hard as the silent typewriter required extra pressure on the keys. She ‘kept thinking this is a nightmare. I’m going to wake up. This isn’t for real… The thought kept me going and I went typing, typing away and he went dictating, dictating away.’ He stopped, she handed him what she had typed, he said goodnight ‘with a big smile’ and she left the room. But the next morning Churchill came into the office, dressed in his siren suit (called by his staff, although not in his presence, ‘his rompers’)5 and monogramed slippers, ‘THREW the papers on the ground and he said to me “You haven’t got one word in fifty right!”’

  A big part of the problem was that Churchill had been working on a speech, composing it as he dictated, always a tense time. Gemmell confirms that he spent many hours crafting each speech. When dictating one to her, she says ‘He probably did have little themes on pieces of paper, but it was straight out of the mind… It was very hard for him to do speeches… This was something he’d spent a lot of time and energy on, and to have it come out as gobbledygook was terrible to him… Goodness knows why he accepted me after. That was what was so wonderful about him.’

  After lunch, he wanted to dictate again and Sturdee sent her up the back stairs – probably believing in the old axiom that getting back on the horse after being thrown is a good idea. She typed his words and handed them to him: ‘He looked at it and he said, “I knew you could do it,” and then one was okay… He was terribly magnanimous. After the yell, it was then forgotten and you started again.’ That characteristic, noted earlier by Kinna and later by Portal, has been clear to all students of Churchill’s character: ‘For Churchill, the greatest error was to indulge in the emotions of revenge and spite,’ notes one scholar of Churchill’s behaviour during the fraught negotiations over Irish neutrality during the Second World War.6 Gemmell recalls:

  On the whole, after you had been reprimanded and shouted at… then you were accepted again with a clean slate… Yes, I used to get shouted at. The typewriter wasn’t in the car when he wanted it [or] on the plane. Things like that… one had done something silly, one would get shouted at. So I think he could get irritated quite easily. But then once the shouting was over, then start again… He could make you feel absolutely down in the dumps or absolutely walking on a cloud.

  Gemmell was eighteen, the other secretary was nineteen, and after working on a speech for Churchill, when he was getting ready to leave to give the talk, he called for ‘the young ladies and he would say, “Thank you very much. You did very well,” and then he would be off in a flurry of coats, drivers and detectives. And one just felt wonderful, which was sweet of him.’ Gemmell and Portal were the ‘young ladies’, Sturdee and Gilliatt the older ones, although they were only in their mid-twenties. Magnanimity, of course, was practised not only in private, but lauded as a virtue in several speeches, as well as being part of the moral of his war memoirs: ‘In victory, magnanimity.’§

  Taking down speeches and transcribing them was only one use to which Gemmell put her training in her early days with Churchill. In addition to his duties in the House, and his large and varied social obligations, Churchill was writing his war memoirs. As Churchill dictated, Gemmell would type on to ‘long galley sheets, the backs of the galleys he had seen proofs on, and we’d type on those, double spacing’. Because she had been so young during the war, many of the proper names he used were unfamiliar to her, requiring her to check her transcription against a list of names. Churchill would then correct her draft with a pen, most likely the ‘beautiful gold one’7 he prized. ‘And then, after you’d done a night’s work, it would be packed up in a package and left in the pantry and the car would come and pick it up and take it down to the station [at Westerham] and it would go straight up to the printers. Usually the printers would be able to run it off during the day and it would come back… in galley form, which must have been incredibly expensive.’ Fortunately, ‘Churchill had a special contractual provision, allowing for excess printing costs to be met,’ presumably by the publisher.8

  On one occasion, while dictating his war memoirs, Churchill quoted the famous phrase ‘never in the field of human conflict’. Gemmell, a teenager during the war, does not believe she had ever heard it. When she ‘typed “never in the field of human consciousness” and he read it, he was almost crying, and said “It’s clear you haven’t heard one of the greatest quotations in the world.” Almost crying because he was quite conceited.’ Graebner says that Churchill ‘was always pleased to be reminded of his own great phrases and was particularly happy when someone corrected his misquoting himself – something he frequently did as he grew older.’9

  Because Gemmell preferred working in Chartwell to working in London, Sturdee did her best to arrange an accommodating work schedule more easily done on weekends, because Churchill usually moved his base to Chartwell from London on Thursday evening. Gemmell would bicycle or hike up to Chartwell on Friday morning, over the fields and hills, to arrive at about 9 a.m. Churchill would have arrived the night before, bringing with him the black and red boxes which Gemmell then sorted and arranged for him to work from. The other secretary on duty at Chartwell on weekends would arrive about noon, driven down from London in a police car, bringing with her the London mail and additional work and several newspapers. On these weekends at Chartwell, Gemmell would work nights, with other secretaries working days. When working very late into the night, she would sleep at Chartwell in one of the maids’ rooms or down the road at the butler’s cottage, waking early to complete the transcription of whatever Churchill had dictated that evening. Churchill took no part in arranging their schedules, their camaraderie allowing them to work things out in Churchill’s interests.

  Looking back, she recalls:

  It was hard work… He would go to bed anytime up to five or six in the morning… and then he would say, ‘What time do you think you could get up in the morning?’ When he asked you something like that, one would have done anything for him… and say, ‘Would you like me in sort of early?’ He would
say, ‘Oh, that would be very nice.’ And one would say… when he asked you something like that, one would have done anything for him… Sometimes there would be lovely, lovely evenings, but they didn’t happen very often, when he would buzz down to the office and he would say, ‘You can go to bed. I’m not going to work.’

  Whenever the secretaries needed a break, they would get up and excuse themselves. Churchill would invariably say, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’m just going downstairs to the office for a moment.’ ‘Well, don’t be long,’ he would say. While Gemmell was gone, he would sign a few copies of his books, which he meant to give as gifts, especially thank-you gifts, usually signing only his name, with no further inscription.¶ A chore he hated.

  At Chartwell, dictation of the war memoirs went on, and the advisors arrived to ‘dine and sleep’, as the engagement cards put it. The advisors were Lieutenant General Sir Henry Pownall (military), Commodore G. R. G. Allen (naval, known as ‘full steam ahead and damn the consequences Allen’) – both of whom Gemmell adored, as did the other secretaries. And William Deakin, who had helped Churchill on his biography of Marlborough and who, Gemmell says, was the political advisor. Sometimes these advisors were at Chartwell alone, sometimes all at the same time, having arguments and discussions, ‘all mucking in… Sometimes I would not know when one was being dictated to and when one was not, because they would all be talking.’