Finest Hour Winter 2019

Working with Winston Winston Churchill worked with many people in various capacities, from soldiers serving together in the field and cabinet colleagues to those who worked to support his career as a Member of Parliament and professional writer. He also employed a wide variety of domestic staff over the course of his long life. In this issue we look at a cross section of these associates and their remarkable stories. Churchill employed many “young ladies” as secretaries to take dictation at all hours and type up the results as he wrote his books and prepared his speeches. Cita Stelzer examines Churchill from the perspective of these remarkable women, who found their time serving the Greatest Briton to be trying, tiring, and exhilarating all at once. One young lady who worked for Churchill during…

Email: info@winstonchurchill.org 10 August 1954 CHARTWELL—My Darling, Here I stay in bed most of the time and only go out to feed the fish. Gabriel [Clementine’s Siamese cat] gets on very well with everyone except his yellow rival. He is very friendly to me and Rufus [the poodle] and most attractive. One gets no consolation at this moment from the animal world. All the Chartwell rabbits are dead [from myxomatosis] and now the poor foxes have nothing to eat, so they attack the little pigs and of course have eaten the few pheasants. It is said they will perish and migrate and that then there will be no one to cope with the beetles and rats. On the other side the Swans are well, and the Zoo came down yesterday to clip their wings…

In the course of his long career, Winston Churchill published numerous histories (earning him the Nobel Prize for Literature) containing some thirteen million words. He also produced untold memoranda, letters, directives, and an estimated 5,000 speeches for delivery in the House of Commons and to audiences in Britain, America, Canada, the Soviet Union, and other countries, as well as over the wireless. When completed, The Churchill Documents, published by Hillsdale College, will consist of twenty-three hefty volumes. And those volumes do not include his published books. Without the help of his many talented and devoted personal secretaries, such an enormous, high-quality output would almost certainly have been impossible. Most of it was dictated to his teams of ever-present secretaries, some of it while in cars, planes, trains, and some of…

As an Oxford undergraduate Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, kept his own pack of harriers, nine couple of hounds supervised by a whip dressed in livery. At Blenheim Palace, where Winston was born in 1874, twenty gamekeepers wearing brown breeches, green velvet coats with brass buttons and black billycock hats, assisted by an army of loaders and beaters, ensured that the Duke of Marlborough’s field sports, often attended by royalty, were conducted like military operations. The immense stable block, housing carriage horses as well as a score of magnificent hunters, was run by a platoon of grooms, and in the great house some eighty servants were on hand to cope with a large dog population. Gladys—wife of Winston’s cousin Sunny, ninth Duke of Marlborough—was said to walk around on a…

1. Anita Leslie, The Gilt and the Gingerbread (London: Hutchinson, 1981), p. 134. 2. Churchill Archive Centre (hereafter cited CAC), NEMO 3/1/70. 3. CAC, HAMB 1/1. 4. CAC, CHAR 1/286/40, 30 October 1936. 5. CAC, CHAR 2/466, 11 October 1943. 6. Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965), p. 264. 7. Diana Cooper, “The Lion’s Heart,” in Atlantic Monthly 215, no. 3 (March 1965), p. 59. 8. John S. Churchill, Crowded Canvas: The Memoirs of John Spencer Churchill (London: Odhams, 1961), p. 151. 9. Edmund Murray, Churchill’s Bodyguard (London: W. H. Allen, 1987), p. 129. 10. Mary Soames, ed., Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (London: Doubleday, 1998), p. 422. 11. CAC, CHAR, 1/383/16. 12. CAC, CHUR 1/130/90, 11 November 1945. 13. CAC, CHWL 4/4, Churchill to Plater, 28 April…

Watching Winston Churchill was no easy task. The use of personal bodyguards for Churchill began in 1921 and continued for the rest of his life. The story of the remarkable men who guarded him exemplifies courage and devotion that never wavered. Here follows a look at the two longest-serving bodyguards, Walter Thompson and Edmund Murray, and two others of notable interest, Bill Day and Neville Bullock. WALTER H. THOMPSON On 9 November 1920, the Director of Intelligence at Scotland Yard told Churchill, then a Liberal MP and the Secretary of State for War and Air, that a Sinn Fein cell in Glasgow had decided there should be kidnapping reprisals in Britain for reprisals in Ireland. Among those to be kidnapped were Churchill and Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Churchill was warned not…