Working with Winston

by Working

  Everyone who worked for him seems to have ended up adoring him. When asked why that was so, Snelling said simply:

  He just was extremely adorable. I mean not to the world… There was something likable and more than that, when you were working for him it was partly his aura of what he’d been through all his life. I mean he’d been a pretty great man since 1912… so you had all that plus his extreme humanness. And he didn’t act like a great man. He always thought he was pretty great, I think… but he took it for granted without being conceited… But with all that he had quite a lot of humility in a way… normalness, I think, and humanity… still a very approachable man and lovable.

  Churchill remembered her in his will with £400, worth about £7,500 today.

  Churchill the historian made one last gesture to the benefit of future historians. He directed that all his papers be filed and labelled in an orderly manner, and ready to send on to his son Randolph Churchill, who had been designated to write the biography of his father.

  * The households were run by Grace Hamblin, with Lady Churchill supervising.

  † Later changed to a ‘regular big bed’.

  ‡ Dating from Norman times, an honorary position as defender of five coastal towns in southern England (Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich) – hence its use of the French word for five, cinque. Churchill had received this honour in 1946.

  § This key was kept on his watch chain, which included several ‘various lovely things on it like cigar-piercers and his [gold] winkle cuff from the Hastings Winkle Club’. Churchill was the honorary chairman of the Hastings Winkle Club, a charity organization founded in 1900 by Hastings fishermen to aid poor families in the area. In addition to its local members, there were more famous ones such as Churchill, Field Marshal Montgomery and the late Queen Mother, all of whom considered membership an honour. Their motto was ‘winkle up’. To Snelling it was ‘one of those mad English clubs’. Also on the watch chain was ‘a ring that had belonged to somebody’. His father? Intriguing.

  EPILOGUE

  MY HOPE IS that by reporting what these extraordinary women – and one man – recall of working with Winston, and consulting related sources, I have added something to our knowledge of this man who preserved our freedoms and way of life. From these women we learned the true extent to which work was his all-consuming passion. As a result, he was often insensitive to the needs of those around him – their need for sleep, for time off to be with their families on holidays, for a simple slowing of the pace of work. But the drive that resulted in such insensitivity was not based solely on a desire for personal recognition and aggrandizement, although those motives were certainly present. The apparent lack of attention to the needs of his secretaries, the over-riding importance of much of his work, was rooted in a deep concern for the welfare of the British people. Were they to live henceforth in a democracy or under the thumb of a brutal dictator? Would they have enough to eat, despite the constraints of war, and was it possible for the burden of shortages to be shared as equitably as any government was capable of arranging? Churchill cared passionately about the circumstances of people’s daily lives – indeed, such concerns had led him as a young parliamentarian to become an early advocate of many features of the modern welfare state. Most of all, he wanted to try his utmost to preserve for the British people everything his country stood for. John Keegan says it best ‘Churchill reacted to the day-by-day unfolding of the war less by intellect, great though his intellect was, than by force of character. Churchill’s moral character determined all he did. [He] was moved by a passion for liberty and moral grandeur, above all the moral grandeur which his own country, first, and then the alliance of the English-speaking democracies epitomized.’1

  We learned, too, that his absorption in his work did not preclude shows of kindness. When it was full steam ahead on a project, Pugh and Kinna found him ‘inconsiderate’. But when he was less pressed, they joined Snelling, Hill and Holmes in recollecting how ‘considerate’ he could be. A man whose first reaction when seeing a secretary injured was whether she could take down dictation despite her injury, could also notice that a secretary was working in a cold room and build a fire for her, or borrow an extra coat from some sailors for a secretary given too short notice of a trip to wintry Athens to pack a proper coat. A man who seemingly viewed his secretaries as interchangeable parts, to be summoned by the call ‘Miss’, could also arrange long-term care for a secretary who died while in his service and for the tuition of her daughter. Walter Thompson, a Churchill bodyguard married to one of Churchill’s secretaries, spoke of a man ‘angry and inconsiderate’ one minute and ‘full of impish kindness’ the next.2

  In the end, these women who worked so closely with Churchill concluded that his kindnesses outweighed his frequent lack of consideration. Almost all characterize him as ‘lovable’ (Gemmell, Gilliatt, Snelling); ‘kind’ (Holmes, Kinna, Pugh, Snelling); ‘compassionate’ (Holmes, Pearman); and ‘sweet’ (Gemmell, Pugh, Sturdee).

  Looking back over the adjectives used by these women, and by this author to characterize the stories they tell, the most frequently used is ‘considerate’. Sharing second place are ‘kind’ and ‘impatient’, followed by ‘lovable’, ‘generous’, ‘curious’, ‘irritable’. All accurate.

  And almost to a woman they stayed with him until outside events required them to leave his service; and then would return, unbidden, at times when they knew the workload would overwhelm their successors. Portal describes his ‘temper like lightning and gone quickly’, followed by a ‘quiet smile… no grudges, no malice’. Holmes characterizes the smile as ‘beatific’ when he told her, ‘When I shout, I’m not shouting at you, I’m thinking of the work.’ By and large, the secretaries who worked for him knew and accepted that explanation – that it was work, and important work, that caused his eruptions – and gave little weight to his outbursts in their ultimate appraisals of the man. One appraisal was provided by Holmes to Sir Martin Gilbert in a letter written some four decades after leaving Churchill’s service: ‘In all his moods – totally absorbed in the serious matter of the moment, agonized over some piece of wartime bad news, suffused with compassion, sentimental and in tears, truculent, bitingly sarcastic, mischievous or hilariously funny – he was at all times entertaining, humane and lovable.’3

  We learn, too, from the oral histories left us by these women (and one man) and by poring over the observations of diarists and others, that Churchill was quite simply spoiled. He felt no need to abandon the lifelong experience of having his wishes become someone else’s command; to Churchill, that was the natural order of things. A friend’s observation that ‘Mr Churchill is easily satisfied with the best’4 understates what it took to satisfy him. Yes, the best Cuban cigars and French champagne; food sent at his request by his wife from London’s best shops even while he served in the trenches during the Great War, and a bathtub shipped to him from Britain; housing accommodation so costly that his wife often could not cope, unable to see how the family might avoid the financial ruin that befell her mother, who was like Winston an inveterate gambler. This was a man, a fair reading of his secretaries’ accounts tells us, who constructed a world around himself and expected others to reproduce it wherever he went. On a train to Scotland, he expected a secretary to arrange to have his bed from home installed. On a dangerous flight to a conference with Roosevelt and Stalin, he expected – without having to ask – that the bedside table in his cabin contain his cigars, ashtray, writing implements and other items precisely as they were laid out on his bedside table at Chartwell, and in Downing Street, and in Chequers – and in any home in which he was a guest.

  Obviously, this was the self-indulgent behaviour of the self-styled brightest of all glow-worms. Less obviously, it was the behaviour of a man who was an exquisitely efficient time manager. Churchill productively used the time saved by the fact that no change of venue could interrupt his work routine. The routine that enabled him to manage the Second World War
as both prime minister and minister of defence was fixed: there would always be someone available to take down his ideas and instructions. There was a secretary at his bedside when he woke, and another at night until he retired after dinner and a film.

  Those who fought fatigue to take down his histories left us with some of the finest volumes ever written about his ancestor and the history of the times in which he himself lived. It might be said, without drifting into sycophancy, that the world benefitted substantially from his insistence that all around him put the meeting of his needs – demands – at the top of their list of priorities. This made him at times ‘unreasonable’ (Sturdee), and ‘exasperating’ (Kinna), a view shared more than occasionally by the military commanders whom Churchill often pressed to take actions they deemed unfeasible. But it resulted in a legacy from which the world still benefits.

  Time management, conscious or otherwise, was only one of Churchill’s management skills. The chaos that seemed to characterize his operations – trips suddenly cancelled, others suddenly scheduled, unrelated projects pursued simultaneously – could be maintained only because of the vetting process that brought to his staff these attractive, clever, talented and self-confident women. Somewhere along the line the people charged with finding applicants, and then sorting those suitable for an interview with Churchill, developed a search method that worked. They used a combination of private contacts and tests of skills at taking dictation to find candidates suitable for presentation to Churchill. They sought the best of what would be to him – a man who disliked dealing with new faces – the best of the new faces available. The cursory nature of the look-over that constituted a final interview by Churchill himself was possible only because of his faith in the prior winnowing process. And in the trial by fire he devised to separate those who could add to his productivity from those who could not.

  By today’s standard of multiple interviews, psychological testing and other paraphernalia of human resources departments, this was a primitive method indeed. But the results speak for themselves, or in our case speak to us from those who joined the adventure that working for Winston surely was. The process worked, as did Churchill’s method of generally allowing the secretaries to decide among themselves how to divide the chores and set individual work schedules.

  These women also share with us a man quite different from that seen by British voters. The Victorian gentleman in the three-piece dark suit, walking stick in hand, and with a perfectly folded white pocket handkerchief was much photographed. Slightly different was the man in the one-piece siren suit – odd, but not inappropriate in wartime. But the man who sat in bed, a budgie on his head and a cat chewing on his toes, whisky and cigar in hand early in the morning, as seen in a cartoon by David Wilson, was an image he did not care to project widely. ‘Eccentric’ says Gemmell, and so he was. Eccentricity on this scale requires a degree of self-confidence that must come in part from being born in Blenheim Palace, in part from a sense of the class to which he belonged, and in part from self-knowledge of his qualities as a statesman, historian, soldier, painter and racehorse owner.

  Churchill’s secretaries also throw a bit of light on the bouts of what has come to be called his ‘black dog’, which may be the periods in which Pugh describes him as ‘disconsolate’ or ‘despondent’ and Hill as ‘moody’. It should come as no surprise that there were times when Churchill suffered the frustration – indeed, the indignity – of seeing clearly what Hitler had in store for his country, a vision to which Britain’s political elite steadfastly remained blind. He was not merely ignored but derided for warning that Britain would pay dearly for a lack of military preparation. In short, when the black dog barked it was not without cause. And there were times when the stresses associated with the extraordinary work burdens he bore undoubtedly contributed to his emotional discomfort.

  The tales told by his secretaries throw two rays of light on this well picked-over phenomenon. The first, told by Gemmell, relates his eruption at the word ‘suicide’ and his insistence that discussion of it be stopped. As we know from his letters to Mrs Churchill, he worried about his bouts of depression to the point of considering medical help. The second insight is that none of the secretaries, in their oral histories, mentioned ‘black dog’, and none reported that there were times when Churchill simply could not work – even when suffering from pneumonia or some other major ailment. This provides some support for the observation that however much he suffered from depression – which must have been considerably when the Tories lost the first post-war election – Churchill maintained his prodigious work schedule. First, he reorganized his staff and turned its direction over to Jo Sturdee, freeing himself from the distraction of a staff reorganization and new faces. Then, Churchill almost immediately resumed work on his history of the Second World War and on the multiple projects to which he was committed. Unless all of these women decided that such a problem was not the sort of thing one discussed with interviewers, creating permanent records to be consulted by future generations, we can conclude that the physical resilience that allowed Churchill to deliver a major speech shortly after his stroke, also characterized any emotional setbacks he might have experienced.

  We also learn something about the women themselves. In an age in which women’s opportunities were limited, in which they were expected to be more obedient than innovative, these women refused to live down to such expectations. Thrown into contact with Stalin’s security thugs, Roosevelt’s robust secret service contingent, thousands of homesick and female-deprived soldiers, sailors and airmen, they handled themselves with style and dignity, without adopting frosty exteriors. Faced with problems with which no secretarial school could have prepared them, from shipping Churchill’s goldfish to Roosevelt without killing them, to setting up systems that allowed their boss to follow the performance of his shares, to conveying authority when answering correspondence directed at a too-busy Churchill, they retained their aplomb. Yes, they could be rattled on occasion by a boss so intent on his work that he ignored the effect of his impatience on his secretary. But that was rare, and recovery almost instantaneous. It was their work as well as the performance of women in factories during the war that helped persuade Churchill that the roles of women needed re-examination – although backsliding did occur when it came to demobilization, with men given priority so they could find civilian jobs. It was assumed that women would return to home-making.

  It is impossible – writing in the second decade of the twenty-first century – to avoid asking whether any of the tasks assigned to these women were demeaning or constituted what today would be call harassment. After all, when he finally retired for the night Gemmell, the last secretary on duty, seeing Churchill’s stocking feet protruding from under his bedclothes, removed his socks. She is unclear as to whether she just assumed that chore or was asked to perform it, but in either event ‘I never thought anything of it… I just thought it was fun… anything that would let me get to bed.’ When he paced the floor of his bedroom in the morning, dictating non-stop, it might be after leaping from bed wearing only a short bed jacket that did not cover all the parts of his anatomy that want covering, at one point giving Holmes ‘the best view of his behind that I have ever had’. All unacceptable by the standards of our time, but none, according to their own accounts, upsetting to the women who worked for him and accepted these experiences as just part of the job. Times, and with them job descriptions, change.

  Finally, almost all of the secretaries described that great intangible – the electricity when Churchill entered a room, the presence of what we now call ‘charisma’. As detective Thompson put it, his boss ‘wasn’t dull to be around’.5 There was a ‘buzz’, a noticeable step up in the pace of activity when he returned to the Admiralty and again when he moved on to Number 10. Neither Chamberlain before him nor Attlee after him had that intangible quality. It had tangible effects, not least motivating those around him to do better, to do more, to cater to his needs and by extension th
e nation’s. That is clear from the historical records left us by the women (and one man) who worked for Churchill, records that constitute a valuable addition to the body of knowledge we have about what working with Winston was really like.

  APPENDIX 1

  Operation Desperate

  Collegiality seemed to come naturally to Churchill’s secretaries. They worked long hours, made their own decisions as to the division of their many chores, and with no quarrels. Occasionally, they erupted in humour, and a sophisticated, cheeky humour it was. In May 1942, as Churchill and his military staff prepared for a trip to the US, several of the female secretaries wrote a spoof memo, Operation Desperate, to the War Cabinet outlining their needs. Headed ‘To Be Burnt Before Reading’, they asked that ‘vital commodities’ such as cosmetics, chocolates and silk stockings, preferably in Mist Beige colour, be brought back from the US.

  APPENDIX 2

  The black mollies

  Because Churchill’s curiosity was boundless, his interests wide-ranging and his contacts extensive, the incoming volume of mail was enormous. Nevertheless, his secretaries knew what letters he would want to see immediately, and which they should keep in mind should he later choose to respond. In November 1950, a five-year-old boy, Andrew Cruikshank, who shared a birth date with Churchill, offered the prime minister twelve black mollies as a birthday present, which Churchill was pleased to accept for his fish tanks at Chequers. More than half a year later, Churchill, who had thanked the boy when the mollies arrived, asked Jane Portal to remind him of the boy’s name, so he might write to let the boy know how the mollies were doing. That Churchill thought to do that, and Portal instantly found the boy’s letter, testifies to his kindness and her efficiency.