News to gladden the hearts of you Churchill-hounds out there: we have recently received two small (but exciting) collections which belonged to two more of Churchill’s secretaries: Kathleen Hill and Lettice Marston (later Lettice Shillingford).
To begin with Mrs Hill, as she was generally known. She was the first of Churchill’s personal secretaries to live in at Chartwell (and so was expected to work into the early hours), from 1937, when she joined the team, until 1939, when the house was closed up for the duration of the war.
Before the war Mrs Hill’s duties mainly related to Churchill’s prodigious output of literary work, but as personal private secretary from 1939 until 1946, she was expected to turn her supremely competent hand to pretty much anything (and certainly as cataloguers the initials KH at the bottom of a letter became extremely familiar). After Churchill’s election defeat at the end of the war Mrs Hill became curator of Chequers, the prime minister’s official country residence, remaining in this post from 1946 until her retirement in 1969.
Besides some fun personal material (she must have been a keen cook, to judge by the number of recipes in her papers, as well as a professional-standard violinist) Mrs Hill also kept a treasure trove of personal letters, photographs and souvenirs, not just from the Churchill family, but also from the many other notables she had got to know while running Chequers. There are also a few pages from a memoir which she began (but never got very far with, alas) describing Churchill’s methods of composing and dictating his great wartime speeches, his emotional return to the Admiralty in 1939, and the sheer energy which made him so exciting (and clearly challenging) to work for. She also kept detailed lists of all the weekend guests who stayed at Chequers, 1940-64, including notes on rooms, menus and film nights (these only while Clement Attlee was Prime Minister, sadly), which are going to be extremely useful for future historians!
One of Hill’s many tasks was to interview new secretaries, which is where the second of our fabulous duo, Lettice Marston comes in (Hill gave her the job on probation over lunch in a London restaurant in 1946). Marston had been recommended by Churchill’s former Chief of Staff General Ismay, whom she had worked with over arrangements for the Potsdam Conference, and her archive does contain a few Potsdam souvenirs. Like Hill before her, Marston’s main task was to be helping with Churchill’s literary work (chiefly his war memoirs) and also taking down his speeches, helping with his vast correspondence and later taking over the running of his constituency affairs.
Unlike her predecessor though, Marston kept a small but highly detailed series of personal diaries in her early years on the Churchill team; these only run from 1946-48, but Marston writes down everything that happens. It’s very clear how much affection she had for her employer, like all his staff, and also how demanding (and irritating) he could be, as when working right up to the wire on a big speech for a rally at Blenheim:
[4 Aug 1947]. “Mr C tried to cut down speech, but it ended by being 5,400 words. Completed by lunch-time to put into short notes. Then he started to get into a flap about my being single-handed & not being able to get it done. Told him not to dishearten me & he piped down a bit …. I typed solidly 3 ½ hours to complete short notes & finished at 5pm. Mr C had fortunately gone to sleep. Mr Maudling a great help in checking. Mr C very pleased to have it 1 ½ hours beforehand!”
When it occurred to him, Churchill could be considerate, though this clearly had its limits, as when he fusses over Marston having to return to her lodgings late at night in the pouring rain (but clearly didn’t think to send her home early):
[26 May 1946]. “Pouring wet night. Just as I was leaving Mr C phoned down to ask how I was going to get to the cottage. ‘I shall run all the way’ I said. ‘Well come now & meet me at the bottom of the stairs by the glass door & I’ll give you something to put on.’ As a result I was dressed up by him in his mackintosh, & made to step into his enormous rubber boots. While so doing he planted one of his old trilby hats on my head & told me to waddle down!”
We don’t know why Marston suddenly stopped keeping her diary, but given the punishing hours that she and all Churchill’s other secretaries had to work (a brief flirtation with a dictation machine was not a success, so it was back to night and day dictation for Marston and her colleagues) it seems likely that there just weren’t enough hours in the day. Besides her diaries, Marston, like Hill, retained a number of letters and photographs from the family, and other souvenirs of her work, including a George VI despatch box which she had been given for her papers, which is a step up from what you usually find archives housed in.
These two wonderful little archives form just two of over 40 collections which we now hold from Churchill’s staff and colleagues (plus 17 separate family collections), and as is the nature of archives, each one helps to flesh out the picture a bit more. Will there be more to come? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Katharine Thomson, Archivist, April 2025