Serving the Greatest Briton | Winston Churchill's secretary

Winston Churchill died 40 years ago but he’s not forgotten. BBC viewers recently voted him the Greatest Briton in history. Earlier this month, television regulators banned a commercial that mocked him, deeming it “grossly offensive”. Now a museum devoted to the great man is about to open.

Alongside the Queen at the ceremony in Whitehall next month will be a man named Patrick Kinna – one of the few people still alive who worked closely with Churchill during the second world war.

Two weeks ago I went to see Kinna at his home in Brighton. I rang the bell and after a few minutes the door was opened by a small man wearing neatly cropped hair, shirt and tie, and a blue velvet jacket. He led me through glazed internal double doors. Then, to my surprise, the 91-year-old capered up several flights to the top floor, where he waited patiently for me, puffing heavily, to catch up.

In his sitting room we took our places at sofas on either side of an artificial fire and, after a few moments of idle chat, Kinna asked if I’d like some tea. We withdrew into the adjacent kitchen where he had laid out a fine porcelain tea service. Kinna prepared the afternoon refreshment with strict ceremonial correctness: warming the pot first, then serving tea-leaves from a caddy. He also insisted on carrying through the heavy tray himself, then conveyed over a three-tiered cake-stand piled high with biscuits.

While he was still pottering about, I asked if Churchill liked tea. “Winston liked whisky,” Kinna said. But perhaps sensing that the answer jarred a little, he added that the elegant tables before us once belonged to the great man. “After he died, Lady Churchill said she would like to give me something that Winston had used. She sent her chauffeur with them.”

I was impressed that Kinna first-named Churchill. Was he given permission to do that? “Ooh, never. It was always ‘prime minister’.” But then, Churchill was one of a very few national leaders granted the compliment of first-name familiarity by Britons who never so much as saw him. (Another was “Maggie”. Blair, despite vast parliamentary majorities and his wartime leadership, seems unlikely to be honoured with “Tony”.)

Kinna was born in 1913, the youngest of seven children, to a military family in south London. Hoping to become a parliamentary reporter, he enrolled after school to learn shorthand and typing. As war with Hitler’s Germany became increasingly likely, Kinna’s brothers, already in the services, told him he must sign up before it was too late. So he joined the reserves, “rather than end up in the catering corps, washing dishes”.

Sent to Aldershot in the general call-up, he spent his first night in a tent on the parade ground. The next morning, orderlies told him he was going to France, where he learned he was to serve as clerk to Major-General HRH The Duke of Windsor. “I was very pleased.” Kinna served the former king for nearly a year. He found him “a nice person, full of smiles” but never met Wallis Simpson. He’s glad about that: “We had heard rumours about her.” (He doesn’t elaborate.)

As the Germans drew nearer, an order came through that the Duke should leave Paris immediately. “I never saw him again,” Kinna told me. “But he wrote to apologise for not having had the opportunity to say thank you for my work, and hoping I would get through the war safely.”

I met Kinna at the height of the furore over Prince Harry’s Nazi fancy dress costume. Conscious that Kinna’s “nice” Duke of Windsor met Hitler, I asked what Kinna thought of Harry’s costume. I expected him to be forgiving. But he rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Awful! So stupid!” Not just ignorance? Isn’t it that young people don’t know much about the war that seems so long ago? “No, it wasn’t ignorant. It was stupid. Dreadful. He should apologise.”

Kinna’s family were delighted and proud to hear about his work with the Duke, but something more exciting was yet to come. He got a telephone call asking him to 10 Downing Street. “They said: ‘The prime minister [Churchill, by that time, had inherited the job from Neville Chamberlain] wants to see [American president Franklin] Roosevelt in the mid-Atlantic. He needs you to go with him as clerk.’”

Why was Kinna chosen? “If I say it myself – and I know I shouldn’t – I had 150 words per minute at shorthand and 90 wpm typing. I was ideal for the job.”

So he set off for Scotland to join Churchill’s warship. In his pocket he had a letter, handwritten by the king, for Churchill to present to Roosevelt. On the outward journey, Churchill was relatively inactive, reading Hornblower novels and watching films. Kinna’s orders were surprising. “I was told that the prime minister could not bear whistling,” he told me. “I was instructed that if I heard the sailors whistle, I was to tell them to stop it. Soon enough, we heard them whistling and I was sent out to stop the noise. I thought, if I tell them to stop, I know what they will tell me . . .” He went outside, said a few prayers and the whistling stopped.

Kinna had never been on a battleship before. He had a cabin to himself, but little time to enjoy it once Churchill started thrashing out the so-called Atlantic Charter with Roosevelt. Roy Jenkins, in his biography of Churchill, notes that the prime minister’s “dictating fluency” threatened “to smother the president in a flood of long messages.” Kinna seemed to support this view: “I was terribly busy all the time. I spent days and days typing.”

What were Churchill’s first words to Kinna? “He said: ‘This is a melancholy story . . .’ I can’t remember what it was about, but I’ll never forget the words.”

Early in the war Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, noted that the prime minister was “very inconsiderate with his staff”, and Clementine Churchill warned her husband there was “a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough, sarcastic and overbearing manner”. Perhaps the warning proved effective, because Kinna remembers Churchill as “basically very kind, but if he was on the job then nothing else mattered and politeness didn’t come into it”. Does that mean he was rough, sarcastic and overbearing? “He could be rude. But not terribly. He might say to people: ‘That’s silly! You are so silly!’”

Not long after that shipboard encounter, Japan attacked Pearl Harbour and the US joined the war. By then, Kinna had received another call from Downing Street. “I thought, ‘Oh dear, what have I done wrong?’ But they said the PM wanted to say how very pleased he was with my work, the speed and accuracy, and wanted me to join his staff.” How did he react this time? “I always had plenty of cheek so I said I was flattered but needed time to think about it. I went home and spoke to my father and mother and they said it’s a great honour. So I accepted.”

From then on, Kinna accompanied Churchill on each of his many overseas trips. They were not always comfortable. Getting to Yalta, for instance, involved a six-hour drive from the airport along what Churchill called “the riviera of Hades”. On the way back, Churchill asked to have his clothes de-loused.

Kinna recalled another trip: “One year we spent Christmas in the White House. Winston went to the bathroom and told his valet to send me in. So I went along and there he was, as naked as the day he was born, getting in and out of the bath as he dictated. The poor valet was trying to dry him, but Winston wouldn’t give him a chance. Then there was a knock on the door and Winston went to open it himself, with nothing on. It was president Roosevelt, in his wheelchair. Winston said: ‘You see, Mr President, I have nothing to hide from you.’”

After travelling extensively with Churchill, Kinna got used to the prime minister’s eccentricities. As well as seeing Roosevelt, he saw Stalin at close quarters.

Roy Jenkins characterises Stalin’s dealings with Churchill, at the great wartime conferences, as attempts to “intimidate, bewilder and at the same time seduce”. Kinna recalls the first encounter, in Moscow, thus: “After our first meeting, Winston came back to the office we had been given in the Kremlin and said he wanted to dictate a telegram to Whitehall. He said: ‘I have just had a most terrible meeting with this terrible man Stalin remind you, prime minister, that all these rooms have been wired and Stalin will hear every word you said.’ The next morning Stalin came to Winston’s office. He had obviously heard. He was very nice and polite and sweet. He couldn’t afford to tell Winston to buzz off.”

In Kinna’s corridor, there’s a framed photograph taken in the Kremlin. “That’s Winston,” he told me. “That’s [Averell] Harriman, who came in place of Roosevelt. That’s Stalin.” There’s one other person pictured: a bespectacled young man perched on the edge of the sofa with an arm stretched familiarly behind Churchill. “That’s me.”

After the war, Churchill lost the general election. As leader of the opposition, he asked to see Kinna. “He started talking about the war and the places we had been and the things we’d seen together . . . Then he asked if I would continue as his private secretary. I felt very honoured, but I wanted to think about it. I was so tired, after all those years of long hours.” Churchill habitually worked late into the night – in Moscow on one occasion, he’d started a meeting with Stalin at 11pm. “I really didn’t want to do it,” Kinna recalled.

Churchill wrote back saying he completely understood. Kinna still has that letter, along with a handsome testimonial, dated August 30, 1945. The testimonial is typed – by whom Kinna didn’t recall – but the last paragraph is in Churchill’s handwriting: “He [Kinna] is a man of exceptional diligence, firmness of character and fidelity.” Quite a recommendation.

Then came another of those phone calls. This time it was Ernest Bevin, the wartime minister of Labour who was now foreign secretary. “I wasn’t Labour myself,” Kinna noted. “I was Conservative. But I liked Bevin. He said: ‘I hear you are not going with Winston and I tell you what you are going to do instead. You will come and work with me in the Foreign Office.”

In the Churchill museum, one of the first things visitors will see is a blown-up wartime cartoon showing Britain’s political leaders, including Churchill and Bevin, marching purposefully together. It’s hard to imagine Tony Blair striding alongside Michael Howard.

“One of the good things about politics then is that people across the different parties did have unity of effort. They might have argued, but only in private. I wouldn’t say that Winston was a great deal different from Bevin. They were both good Englishmen.”

Kinna worked with Bevin till he died, in office, in 1951. One of Bevin’s friends, a businessman with a timber company, offered Kinna his next job. It was fine, but hardly as glamorous as what had gone before. For Kinna, as indeed for Churchill, “life after the war did seem a bit of an anti-climax”.

First published 29 January 05. © The Financial Times