Q: When help was cheap

Moving right along, the 1911 Census was recently released in England. No address was “ex-directory” in those days. Winston Churchill is listed at 33 Eccleston Square, London (seventeen rooms) with wife Clementine, daughter Diana and eight servants. The help comprised a cook, nurse, lady’s maid, housemaid, parlor maid, under-parlor maid, kitchen maid and hall boy). Can this be so? —A.J., NSW, Australia

A: Absolutely.

By the 1920s and 1930s, when the Churchills were ensconced at Chartwell, the help had grown to fifteen or more, counting gardeners, handymen, secretaries and household staff. This was part of the reason Churchill had to write constantly, living, as he said, “from mouth to hand.”

Ah for the days when help was cheap. I once tried Churchill’s method of getting two days out of one by copying his Chartwell routine. The help (Barbara Langworth) was not amused.

Churchill’s daily routine

Wake around 8am for breakfast in bed. Remaining abed, you spend several hours reading correspondence, dictating replies and reading all the newspapers, including the Daily Worker.* (As he read, WSC would fling each sheet of newsprint on the floor, infuriating his valet.) Rise about 11am for your first bath, the help having drawn the water to exactly 98 degrees. The bath is “full immersion”: you must submerge and surface like a porpoise.

An expansive lunch follows, often with a special guest—from Germans bringing word of Hitler’s machinations to film stars like Charlie Chaplin. Next, a walk around the grounds, feeding the golden orfe and conversing with the black swans in the lake. Back to your first floor study (U.S. second floor) for more dictation, then a one-hour nap. The nap, Churchill explained, must never be compromised:

You must sleep some time between lunch and dinner, and no half-way measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one—well, at least one and a half, I’m sure. —To his Life magazine editor, Walter Graebner, 1946

Rising around 4pm, do a little more dictation and then enjoy a second bath before dressing for dinner. Dinner usually runs from around 8pm to 10pm or so. Churchill prefers voluble conversation, “with myself as the main conversationalist.”  Then a film—say two hours. Finally around midnight it’s time for serious work: dictating books, articles or speeches to the night help. Sometimes the boss needs two secretaries, working in stints. He once said with a twinkle: “I am feeling very fertile; I shall require two young women tonight.”

Sleep? Yes, around 3am or 4am to 8am. That gives you five or six total hours sleep per day, and really does mean you can cram two days’ activity into one. But without all that help, your roommate is going to hate you.

*About that Daily Worker

Percy G. Reid was a newspaper stringer who kept an eye on Chartwell for the London media. Reid had an infallible way of knowing if Churchill was in residence: the Daily Worker would be missing from the Westerham newsmonger’s. The newsstand proprietor ordered only one copy, since his only customer for the Worker was Churchill. If WSC was not at home, the Worker would remain unsold.

Reid’s remembrances are in his rather rare little paperback, Churchill: Townsman of Westerham. This really should go online sometime, because it offers a unique perspective on Sir Winston’s country life. Kentish folk (including “the help”) generally loved him. And they are severe judges of character.

Part 2: Alice Bateman

Two other Westerham common folk who benefitted from Churchill’s characteristic kindliness were Tom and Alice Bateman, farmers who scratched out a living near Chartwell. Percy Reid, a stringer for a London newspaper, who kept an eye on Chartwell doings after World War II, wrote charmingly of a cattle sale in his book, Churchill: Townsman of Westerham (Folkestone: Regency, 1969):

Capt. and Mrs. [Mary Churchill] Soames—who then lived at Chartwell Farm—were at the sale most of the time and [their children] Nicholas and Emma were also taking a child’s interest in what was going on. A daughter of one of the cows offered for sale that day grazed quietly in a less distinguished field nearby. As a calf it had been given to Tom and Alice Bateman, brother and sister, farming in a small way nearby, by Winston Churchill when he heard that they had been out of luck in their farming.

“Pedigree?” repeated Alice when asked about her two-year old Shorthorn: “I suppose we could have had the pedigree if we’d liked but then—we don’t farm their way.” A touch of rural common sense cropped up: “The paper wouldn’t make much difference to whether it was a good cow or not.”

Not surprisingly Alice Bateman had lots of time for Churchill. “Got more in his little finger than most of us have in our whole bodies,” she said. Alice worked for three years at Chartwell. “Not to sleep in,” she made clear, quickly. “Always has a word for you, has Winston. So has Mary, his daughter.”

Phil Johnson, a Westerham livery agent and sometime Churchill driver, told me a delightful story showing another side to Alice. Once the great man, being driven up the hill to Chartwell from Westerham village, found her trudging along the road to her farm and stopped his Humber limousine. His impulse was to offer her a lift, but realizing she would be too proud to accept one, he shouted encouragement: “Come on Alice, you can do better than that!”

“G’wan, you fat old man, you get out of that car and walk yourself, you’ll live longer!” Alice retorted.

“I’ll outlive you, Alice!” chuckled Churchill, who liked to claim (inaccurately) that he took exercise only as a pallbearer for friends who had exercised all their lives. “You will not!” Alice shot back. “And he didn’t,” Phil Johnson added, “Alice survived him by six or eight years.“

“Kent folk don’t make friends easily,” wrote Percy Reid. “Theirs is a sturdy independence which is readily mistaken for surly insularity. Once won over, however, Kentish people will remain your sincere if somewhat over-frank friends for good. It was somewhat on these lines that the unusual relationship, which finally developed between Westerham folk and Churchill and his family, grew up.”

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With thanks for kind assistance in research to Paul Courtenay, Phil Johnson and Andrew Roberts, and to a dear friend, the late Grace Hamblin.

continued in part 3…

A recent book by a distinguished historian suggests that Winston Churchill disdained common people. It cites another Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, during World War I, providing a tow to a broken-down motorist and giving two children a lift in his car. The writer adds: “It is hard to imagine Winston Churchill behaving in such a fashion.”

It is not hard at all. In fact, Churchill did frequent kind things for ordinary people he encountered, privately and without fanfare. We know about them only through his private correspondence, thanks to the official biography, Martin Gilbert, or the testimony of observers.

A prominent example is the gypsy couple Churchill befriended in Westerham. Grace Hamblin, longtime Churchill secretary and first administrator of Chartwell, recalled them in a 1987 speech to the International Churchill Society:

 There was a funny old gypsy living in the district, called Donkey Jack, because he had a donkey and trap, and a wife and a dog. My father, who was a farmer, called him a parasite, because he lived on stolen potatoes, strawberries and apples. But Sir Winston had a more romantic view. He thought it was wonderful. When Donkey Jack died, and his donkey had to be destroyed, there was nowhere for poor Mrs. Donkey Jack to go. It wouldn’t be safe for her to live on common land. Sir Winston allowed her to live in his wood, in a little gazebo which had been there for years, full of earwigs and that sort of thing, but she loved it. It would have been stupid to offer her a house because she wouldn’t have understood it. He knew just what would give her pleasure.

In 1935, Mrs. Donkey Jack suffered a fractured ankle. Churchill sent her to hospital for treatment, but, realizing her camp and her two dogs would be left unattended, asked his gardener Arnold to look after them.

“Should the worst be realized I shall try and get her into a decent home,” Churchill wrote his absent wife. “Meanwhile her savage dog (the little one) still stands a faithful sentry over her belongings. He allows Arnold to bring food at a respectable distance and consents to eat it, but otherwise he remains like the seraph Abdiel in Paradise Lost:

 ‘Among innumerable false, unmoved;

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified;

His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal.’”

continued in part 2…