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| -Obits- |
| Elizabeth Nel - Wartime secretary to Winston Churchill |
| 2007-11-01 |
| The following is only an excerpt. As one of Churchill's team of personal secretaries from 1941 to 1945, Elizabeth Nel endured a punishing routine. In war-torn London, during the week she worked three consecutive days from 2pm to anything between 2am and 4.30am, with duties at Chequers every other weekend, both day and night, plus regular dictation in the car en route between the two venues. Many a night was spent typing before snatching three hours' sleep at 6am and starting another busy day's work at 10am. She coped because she was young (23 when she started working for Churchill) and robust after a healthy upbringing on the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Canada. It also helped that she became a fervent admirer of her employer — a man who, as she wrote in her engaging wartime memoir, Mr Churchill's Secretary, “was the spearhead of our stand against Nazism”. If he alternately barked at her, ignored her and teased her, she bore it for the sake of his occasional sunny smile and word of thanks. This, combined with his fatherly worries about her eating properly and keeping warm in wartime winters, inspired her to the most furious feelings of devotion and loyalty. “Let me say at once that neither I nor anyone else considered this treatment unfair,” she wrote. “The Prime Minister carried a heavy load.” To Nel fell the distinction of taking from Churchill his final night's dictation of the war in Europe, beginning late on May 7 and finishing at 3.45am on VE Day (for her, not untypical hours). As she came into his study on that final night, he said: “Well, the war's over. You've played your part.” She was born Elizabeth Layton in Suffolk in 1917. When she was 7 her family moved to Canada, but in 1936, at 19, she returned to Britain to train as a shorthand typist, staying on to work for an employment bureau. The outbreak of war found her on holiday in British Columbia, where a combination of family commitments and offical red tape obliged her to remain until December 1940. But by spring 1941 she was working in London for the Prisoners of War Department of the Red Cross, and it was then that she heard of a vacancy at Downing Street for a third personal secretary to the Prime Minister. She applied at once, and was taken on, starting work on May 5, 1941. Churchill, who disliked all changes of staff, had a particular horror of new shorthand typists, and so, during Layton's first few weeks at Number Ten, her two senior colleagues prepared her as best they could for what would eventually prove to be the ordeal of her first prime ministerial dictation. For the sake of speed, Churchill expected his secretaries to take his dictation straight on to a silent typewriter and to hand him a perfect typescript almost as soon as he finished. This wasn't easy when his cigar, speech impediment and habit of walking about conspired to make him inaudible. “When you don't hear you may ask him what he said if you're brave and prepared for a squash,” the other two secretaries advised Layton; “or you may put what you thought he said if you don't mind having your head snicked off; or you may leave a space and hope that from the sense you'll later realise what it was you missed, in which case you can creep back quietly on the typewriter and put it in — and hope he doesn't roar at you for fidgeting.” For Layton, the trouble started as soon as she sat down to take her first dictation. She didn't notice until it was too late that the silent typewriter had been left set at single spacing instead of the prime ministerially decreed double. On discovering her offence, Churchill “went off like a rocket” as she described it in her memoirs, and she was sent away to be replaced by a colleague. For weeks afterwards, she seemed unable to do anything right but then, in the small hours of one morning at Chequers, she produced a piece of shorthand writing that at last passed muster. Although the man she called the Boss or the Master still barked at her thereafter, she had turned a corner and won his confidence. |
| Posted by:mrp |
| #2 If any non Brits ever have the chance, go to the War Room in London. The amazing thing to me was the fact that the entire English war team operated in the square footage of a typical American house (2000 square ft maybe?). That included the executive staffs of the Royal Navy, Air Force, Army as well as the very manual logistics tracking of all merchant ships around the world. The administrative staff shared 4 typewriters for everyone. While the new renovations to the museum have been sexxed up with graphics and displays for the MTV genereation, I was simply overwelmed with the spartan surroundings of original war rooms. Don't forget the war room could have been knocked out with one bomb down a ventilation shaft. |
| Posted by: Capsu78 2007-11-01 14:01 |
| #1 Which reminds me - I just finished reading for the 2nd time, John Lukacs "5 Days in London, May 1940" in which those days of decision making during the evacuvation of Dunkirk, Churchill's new role as PM, his rivalry with Lord Halifax (another bloody appeasing diplomat) and Hitler's intentions as to invasion mark the real man in history. Best damn book on going or not going to war to defend your country and its ideals I have ever read. I'll bet Bush read it before March of 2003 and if he didn't he got lucky. |
| Posted by: Jack is Back! 2007-11-01 13:28 |