Both in peacetime and even more so in war, Winston Churchill constantly needed an overworked secretarial staff to help him maintain his prodigious output. The secretaries – as opposed to the principal private secretaries who were advisors – were almost all young women who took dictation in short hand and typed his correspondence, books, reports, articles, and speeches. The duties of these staff members could occasionally range beyond the secretarial to include serving as Churchill’s zoo keeper, managing his bills, hiring household staff, and, in the case of the long-serving Grace Hamblin destroying the much-hated Sutherland portrait of Churchill. Cita Stelzer, author of Dinner with Churchill, has published an entertaining account of the personal secretaries who worked for Churchill in Working with Winston: The Unsung Women behind Britain’s Greatest Statesman. Relying on the valuable oral histories recorded with the secretaries by the Churchill Archives, Stelzer includes chapters on Violet Pearman, Grace Hamblin, Kathleen Hill, Jo Sturdee, Marian Holmes, Elizabeth Gilliatt, Lettice Marston, Cecily Gemmell, Jane Portal, Doreen Pugh, Catherine Snelling, and Patrick Kinna, the lone male secretary that worked for Churchill.
Shining through in the memories of the secretaries as recounted in this volume is their admiration for Churchill. The work was, however, demanding and the schedule grueling. It was a high-pressure world with stressful conditions and heavy workloads and Churchill was not the easiest man to work for. Although adjudged by Stelzer not entirely inconsiderate with his staff, he could be impatient and bark and shout. Churchill “expected the surrounding world to adjust to him regardless of changing circumstances. And his personal staff did the adjusting.” The secretaries had to be always ready for a summons and took dictation from Churchill everywhere: cars, trains, planes, ships, walking in the garden, and even the bath. On occasions when Churchill realized he had been too rough on his secretaries – or it had been brought to his attention – he would seek to make amends with a gesture or compliment, never, however, an apology. The secretaries understood the importance of their work at the very highest level of the British government. The work was exciting and Churchill was charming and funny.
Stelzer provides much interesting insight into the relationship of Churchill and his secretarial staff. Although they accompanied him everywhere, including on holidays, they were never intimates. He never called them by their first names, nearly always just “miss,” and beyond the odd remark did not have personal conversations with them. As Jane Portal recalls, “I never had a conversation with him the whole time I worked with him. He wasn’t interested in me and I didn’t expect him to be.” Included alongside the eleven women in Working with Winston is Kinna, the only male shorthand typist in Churchill’s circle. At the start of the Second World War it was a rule that civilian women could not be exposed to the dangers and rigors of overseas trips and thus Kinna was held in reserve for such times. This convention was abandoned during the war and there was no hesitation about two female secretaries (Holmes and Layton) accompanying Churchill on the flying visit to Athens in December 1944 where there was on-going chaotic street fighting.
Churchill’s secretaries were expected to be discreet and anonymous to the extent that, as revealed in an anecdote from early in the Second World War, Kathleen Hill was airbrushed out of a photograph that was published in the newspapers of Churchill leaving his London home enroute to the Admiralty. With Working with Winston Stelzer has reversed that airbrushing and restored the secretaries to their proper place in Churchill’s story.