Two Formidable Correspondents of the Archive Centre

By Anna Mathias, Churchill Archives Centre researcher and editor of The Greyhound Diary by Judy Montagu (published 2025, Zuleika Books)

My research at the Churchill Archive Centre for a family memoir has produced both historical and personal gems. The book will focus on my parents; a bohemian American father, Milton Gendel and English heiress Judy Montagu, but more celebrated friends and relations, and their letters, supply the ballast for the project.

Two of the great correspondents of the Archive – Mary Churchill and Diana Cooper – were women who supported and enhanced their menfolk, Winston Churchill and Duff Cooper. All were important figures in opposing Nazism, and eventually securing an Allied victory. Although the Second War is a fundamental part of the story, it is the more private bonds of family, love and wit that will emerge from their correspondence.

Diana Cooper adopted my father as a friend in Rome in the mid-1950’s, and schemed to matchmake my mother, her goddaughter, succeeding with their marriage in 1962, and my birth the year after. A letter of 1964 in the Archive from Diana to Patrick Leigh Fermor (“Darling Paddles” it starts) supplies a flattering verdict of my babyhood: “…It’s the most intelligent child for under one…dressed à la Madame Piaff in black stockings…” The following year the photograph below was taken in Rome by my father and shows Diana helping me into my baptismal dress.

The christening gave me ten godparents including my mother’s cousin Mary Churchill. The archive is rich in letters between them, their familial ties strengthened by joining the ATS together in 1941. Even when neither the recipient nor sender my mother is almost always mentioned: “Give Judy my love.” adds Clementine Churchill in a letter to Mary of 1942. In a long letter to Clementine from training camp Mary enthuses over the cream buns, and reports that she and Judy are content not to have been preferentially over-promoted on arrival, but will remain as Privates: “…when we DO get our stripes this will be of our own deserving.” The bond between them is expressed in the plural pronouns she uses. On being separated into different battalions the following year, their sorrow is evident in their letters as well as those of their parents.

Following my mother’s early death in 1972, my godparents became central to my upbringing and this photograph shows me with Mary on the morning of my Confirmation in August 1976. One of the most moving documents I have found in the Archive was the revelatory speech Mary gave at my wedding in 1995 providing insight into my mother’s wartime achievements: “…Judy went into the army School of Gunnery… would have qualified as one of the first women gunnery officers and showed Judy’s clear, powerful intellect.”