Working with Winston

by Working

  11

  Doreen Pugh

  ‘After the announcement in May 1963 that he would not

  contest the approaching election, the last stimulus was

  taken from his life.’

  Doreen Pugh, oral history

  ‘it was a cruel fate which ordained that Churchill should

  survive till the age of ninety.’

  Anthony Storr1

  APRIL 1955 WAS not the happiest of times for Churchill. He had just resigned as prime minister. He and Mrs Churchill were on holiday in Syracuse, Sicily, when a general election was called for May, requiring their immediate return to Britain so that Churchill could once again defend his seat in the House of Commons. He probably had mixed feelings about that interruption to their trip. He had found the Greek ruins interesting and a worthy subject for his paintbrush. In the long letter to the queen, cited earlier (see Chapter 7), he wrote, ‘Our hotel rises out of the sinister quarries in which six thousand Athenian prisoners of war toiled and slaved to death in 413 BC… [I am painting] a picture of a cavern’s mouth near the listening gallery whose echoes brought secrets to the ears of Dionysius.’2

  On the other hand, the weather was vile, a condition he always found disagreeable when on a painting trip. On Churchill’s return, he met with two new secretaries that Jo Sturdee had interviewed and provisionally hired as one-month temporaries to help handle the mountain of work that still descended on his office. One was Doreen Pugh, who had returned to Britain from her travels in Australia and needed to find work. She was later described as ‘short, rather petite, brunette’.3 She registered with Mrs Hoster’s agency. She was then asked to interview with Jo Sturdee in her Mayfair office, mainly because ‘they thought I knew about pressure and speed and that sort of thing,’ as she had worked for Reuters. Because the electricity had failed in the office, it was too dark for Pugh and Sturdee to see each other clearly, but they persisted and the interview was successfully concluded. Sturdee sent Pugh off to the Hyde Park Hotel where Sir Winston (as he had by then become) was ‘camping’ until the house at 28 Hyde Park Gate could be re-established. The secretaries worked next door at 27 Hyde Park Gate, now set up as an ‘airy, agreeable and accessible’ office after it was found that Number 28 was not large enough to accommodate Churchill’s office and staff. Anthony Montague Browne, his Private Secretary, would also have his office at Number 27, next door to the new secretaries’ office.4

  Interviewed at the same time was another woman who would become a Churchill secretary, Gillian Maturin, who had come over from New Zealand and was temporarily cooking in Scotland for the Queen Mother. Churchill had lost most of his staff after his resignation as prime minister. As Pugh recalls: ‘Jane Portal had left to get married and Liz Gilliatt was tired out, so they thought they’d better get someone in for a month’ to cope with the increase in correspondence since the resignation. Both were hired, but on a one-month temporary basis. In the event, Maturin stayed with Churchill for a little more than three years, while Pugh remained with him until his death some ten years later.

  Both Pugh and Maturin survived the usual interview process, which was either carelessly perfunctory or a mere formality after Sturdee approved of the applicants. Pugh was so nervous at the prospect of being interviewed by Churchill that her hands were shaking as she was taken up to meet the former prime minister in ‘this great bed’. Her first impression of him, she recalls, despite her nervousness at being interviewed by a man who by then was widely recognized as one of the all-time greatest statesmen, was of his ‘beautiful skin… lovely skin and a lovely expression. It was sort of sweet really. And lovely hands,’ as so many others have noticed.

  Pugh’s later recollection, perhaps having heard from Gilliatt who had been on this trip with the Churchills, is that the Syracuse holiday wasn’t ‘at all happy or successful’, and she sympathized with his unhappiness. After all, ‘he had just given up being Prime [sic]… and it was an ominous sort of place I think, awful ruins’. This characterization of the Greek ruins was more likely hers than his. Pugh could not have known that an important success of the Syracuse trip was the idea for Churchill College, planned and mostly financed with funds raised by Jock Colville and Lord Cherwell.

  In typical Churchill fashion, she and Maturin, both presumably having survived the Churchill ‘searching gaze’ described by John Martin when he was interviewed some fifteen years earlier (see Chapter 6), started work the next morning. ‘Incredible, really! And we rolled off to Chartwell with him and the detectives’. No vetting beyond the Sturdee interview, no security protocols – at least none are recorded.

  Because Chartwell was not yet fully open, they all ‘camped together in the cottage [in the grounds of Chartwell] and [Maturin] cooked his breakfast’. Like Maturin, Pugh did not distinguish between ordinary secretarial work and personal chores. Like all the other Churchill staffers, she interpreted her job to include non-election work: she fretted over ‘a tank of tropical fish and he [Churchill] was very concerned that the right thing happen to them and it was arranged that they should go to the zoo.’ When the chauffeur or detective was not available, she drove him around the grounds of Chartwell over ‘tracks to visit his pig farm’. Churchill slotted in his hobbies, while Pugh typed his speeches for the election and worked on canvassing and other schedules. An unusual overlap of political and personal work. ‘The pleasures of Chartwell’ were myriad.

  Pugh might have been nervous at first, but ‘after about a week I wasn’t frightened anymore and I went on and on in my diary*… saying how endearing and funny and sweet he was.’ At the same time, she understood how ‘shattering it was for him to retire’.5 Hers was much the same reaction as the other personal secretaries: fear gave way to respect, and eventually, as these women worked closely with him, they learned to adore Churchill the man.

  Pugh vividly recalls two features of her experience working with Churchill: the enduring loyalty of former secretaries, and how hard everyone worked to keep up with the relentless pace of her boss. ‘How kind everybody was, the old secretaries who came back and were always on the end of the phone. How kind they were.’ The former secretaries in a very real sense remained part of the team of women that made it possible for Churchill to work as productively as he did. That is surely a testimonial to the enduring loyalty his kindness elicited from an often-overworked staff. Listening to the oral histories these women left suggests that they very much liked being called in to help, because even after retirement most of them felt close to – and responsible for – Churchill and his work, which they knew from their own experience to be so important to him and the nation.

  As for the hard work, ‘I think I’d also forgotten how terribly hard we worked, actually. We worked very long hours because there was a terrific backlog.’ This is no surprise, since Maturin and Pugh – both new, both presumably temporary – constituted almost the entire secretarial staff. At Chartwell she worked on all aspects of the 1955 election, yet more unusual overlap. Churchill was to canvass in his constituency – he was running for re-election in Woodford – and there were constituency visits to be coordinated with the police, detectives and local politicians. This was his nineteenth contest and, as he wrote to Bernard Baruch, ‘I cannot say it is either a novelty or a pleasure.’6 He was eighty years old and beginning to consider how to finish the volumes of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

  And there were the speeches. Churchill dictated a ‘large portion of it himself… a lot of dictating, and that was quite nerve-wracking very quickly learning to hear it and get it and to spell… It was lovely learning [to type] speech notes… which I didn’t find difficult, because it was just like journalese… those sorts of shortenings they used in newspaper writing’ when she worked at Reuters, proving that Sturdee was wise to see prior work experience as an important qualification for the secretarial job for which Pugh was applying. Pugh took down the dictation in shorthand, then typed it up as a draft, which Churchill edited, returning it to the s
ecretaries, who converted it into Churchill’s famous ‘psalm’ format, ‘based on how we heard him speaking, and he never seemed to object’.7 Churchill found it easier to memorize from that format and then deliver his speeches, allowing him to put his emphases in the right places. ‘And all the time there was a lot of other work to do and a lot of catching up and mountains of things which wanted attention.’

  There was also the problems of becoming accustomed to working in a speeding car and of the clunky, silent typewriter, but these difficulties had some rewards. Pugh recalled with fondness a car trip to Chequers to discuss the Suez crisis with Anthony Eden, then prime minister. Churchill had notes with him, but wanted to dictate additional points in the car, so he ordered Pugh to bring the typewriter. It was a high-speed journey, probably with a police escort. She said: ‘He dictated and I could not type with the car going along… It was a huge, heavy typewriter. [But] he was being terribly helpful in helping me turn the paper and handing me pencils and rubbers and being very sweet and funny.’ They stopped in a lay-by for a few minutes to allow her to finish the notes. ‘When we arrived, Eden came racing down the steps to greet him. Sir Winston had all the papers clutched in his hand. He said: she typed this. Eden went on about something and not really paying much attention. [Churchill repeated] She typed it in the car! It was awfully sweet.’ Churchill was proud of her efforts and let her – and Eden – know it.

  The month went by and these two ‘temporary’ secretaries stayed in place. No one asked them to stay, it was simply assumed they would stay and, of course, work as hard as ever. Pugh recollects that ‘there was a terrific lot going on and after the election he was seeing ever so many people… people to meet with and going out to dinners… He was going all the time… being given various freedoms and honours… They all needed a speech from him.’ When Churchill needed to dictate, he would call out ‘ “Miss Um-Uh” or “MISS”, said loud enough it should bring you.’ ‘MISS’ was his traditional summons for a shorthand/typist/secretary to come to him, dictation pad and pencil at the ready. He had no need to abandon the lifetime experience of having his commands obeyed: to Churchill, that was the natural order of things, and somehow he had no need to persuade his staff of that fact. I attribute this to the excitement of the job, his treatment of those who laboured on his behalf, and the structure of society at the time.

  Pugh believes he would never have used her Christian name, as he was from ‘a past age… and treated everyone with terrific respect… tremendously polite’. Mrs Churchill, on the other hand, always called the secretaries by their Christian names and was deeply interested in their private lives, ‘very keen on romance’. But, Pugh thought, it would never have ‘crossed his mind that we had any other lives. But he wasn’t being selfish, it was just the way he operated.’ On the other hand, Mrs Churchill, as she aged, lost much of her comfort in her husband’s company, and sought friendships with some of the female personal secretaries, as she trusted their discretion and their shared histories. Pugh often lunched with her from ‘one to two-thirty, exactly as she got tired’.8

  Churchill resumed the work on A History of the English-Speaking Peoples that he had laid aside during the war, and the several volumes of which would be published between 1956 and 1958. These volumes were a large part of Pugh’s workload and she thought of it as ‘very enjoyable’. He had received the first cheque for £500 from Cassell, the publishers, in September 1934, some twenty-two years and one world war earlier.9,10

  That workload began early in the morning with sorting the mail before Churchill rang for her. Pugh then took the mail up to him in bed and put it on ‘a little rickety round table’ with two files on it: one marked ‘To See’ and the other ‘To Sign’. The Private Secretary on duty also marked some letters ‘GP’ for ‘General Public’. Among them were ‘mad letters… certain mad people that wrote every day. Because I think great people attract certain regular maddies. We got very few obscene ones, I’m happy to say.’ Pugh reports that the ‘mad letters’ were turned over to Monica Graham, a friend of Lettice Marston’s, perhaps for transmission to the security services. At times the Private Secretary on duty would have sorted the mail, putting the most important items on top, but Pugh quickly learned what Churchill should see immediately, or in some instances not at all. He would go through the mail and ‘mark them all, dictate on them or whatever’. She also brought him the engagement cards for that day, showing his appointments, often filled in in pen by different hands, making it hard to make changes or additions.

  After working in bed all morning and getting up in time for lunch, Churchill would ‘go to the House if it was midweek, straight after lunch, smartly’ – this is after his resignation as prime minister. It was at this time, after his re-election to the House at the age of eighty, that Pugh began to notice a certain decline both in his capacity to work and in the demands made upon him, a decline she felt was very gradual. The secretaries continued to treat him as they had in the past, but ‘towards the end of the day when there wasn’t so much [work or news] he’d ring the bell and say, “Is there anything?” You’d hope desperately that there was something.’

  His workload expanded significantly around his eightieth birthday in late November. Even out of office, the former prime minister received ‘hundreds and hundreds of telegrams wishing him a happy birthday and he sent hundreds of replies… Every single one he saw’ and replied to. Christmas was very busy as well, although Lady Churchill and her staff did all the buying and present-giving, including the gifts for his female secretaries.

  The spurt in late-life activity for both Sir Winston and Lady Churchill naturally translated into a heavy, feverish workload for the secretaries. This led to the usual priority: work comes first. At ‘that first Christmas, he let us go off, I think, it was 8 p.m., the pair of us’, on Christmas Eve. Where work was concerned he could be less considerate. Doreen Pugh told Sir Martin Gilbert that ‘Sir Winston never quite understood why he had to let us off on that day!’ On the other hand, he did give each of the two secretaries £5 (about £130 in today’s money).† In fact, Churchill was not particularly insensitive to the needs of his staff at Christmas. But his need to work trumped that sensitivity. He was always torn between his desire to treat his secretaries with consideration and the unrelieved drive to get still more work done. As Pugh puts it, days and time off were ‘a sad story… about the first two years we got a fortnight, but our holidays were taxing, because the other person had to work through it for you.’

  Even at this late time of his life, in Churchill’s office everything was still put in writing, including a report by Pugh that Maturin would miss a few days because of the flu, acknowledged by him with his initials. Record-keeping in those days was considered necessary to orderly government, and Churchill as prime minister had taken the writing of official memoranda seeking ‘Action This Day’ to a high art. As he directed the War Cabinet Secretariat: ‘Let it be clearly understood that all directions emanating from me are made in writing, or should be immediately afterwards confirmed in writing, and that I do not accept any responsibility for matters relating to national defence on which I am alleged to have given decisions unless they are recorded in writing.’11 And Clementine once advised General Spears that her husband ‘often does not listen or does not hear if he is thinking of something else. But he will always consider a paper carefully in all its implications. He never forgets anything he sees in writing.’12 This directive is one reason – and an important one – why the secretaries found themselves struggling to keep up with Churchill’s flow of communications to his staff and government departments. This insistence by the prime minister was in sharp contrast to the policy of his American ally. It was ‘typical of Roosevelt’s meetings [that] no one kept minutes for the afternoon session at the White House’ preparing for the Casablanca meeting.13

  Knowing the importance of a written communication, Pugh and Maturin decided to put before Churchill a written request for a three-week holiday. They expl
ained that three weeks were more restful than two, to which Churchill responded, with a grin, as Pugh remembers, ‘I know that three weeks is better than two, but I can’t spare you.’ She had to accept his verdict, but the following year she and Maturin appealed to Lady Churchill, who took their side. This direct appeal to Lady Churchill was a bit unusual. Although the secretaries could always count on her for support, it was difficult for them to complain to her – they had to wait for her to notice their exhaustion or concern at workdays that generally ran from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., and perhaps later if a film was shown. For Christmas time off, they acted a bit more boldly.

  Knowing that they had his wife’s support, the secretaries followed the procedure laid down by their boss and noted their three-week holiday dates in a written memo to him. ‘Any message you wanted to get over to him, it was always in writing. It was just the way [he] always operated.’ Because ‘he wasn’t very good at figures and he probably didn’t quite understand, so he said, “Yes, that’s all right,” and he always signed things to affirm it… so after that we had our three weeks.’‡

  The routine of correspondence, visits to the House, speeches and other chores was followed by dinners, many of which I have described elsewhere.14 At Chartwell, he no longer had his long-time cook, the fabled Mrs Landemare, who had retired. But Pugh recalls that a gardener’s wife cooked occasionally for the Churchills; and there was a butler, Rose, and a valet, Kirkwood. One night when Mrs Churchill was away, Grace Hamblin was organizing the dinner. Churchill wanted to know what was for dinner, as Lord Cherwell, a vegetarian, would be dining with him. Grace told Churchill she was serving stuffed marrow, to which Churchill replied, ‘Oh, I don’t think he’d like that.’ Grace Hamblin explained that it was vegetable marrow. Churchill retorted, ‘Well put, that!’ Churchill once said: