Cecily Gemmell, Winston Churchill’s last surviving personal secretary, who took down the British prime minister’s speeches as he composed them aloud, died on Thursday in New York City. She was 97.
Her caretaker, Mary Pizzarelli, confirmed the death.
Ms. Gemmell, known as Chips, first entered Churchill’s orbit in the summer of 1947 at the age of 18, arriving in the still-stunned aftermath of his 1945 general election defeat as Britain’s wartime prime minister. His reputation as the man who had saved the world from Hitler’s tyranny was titanic, but his electoral ejection from No. 10 Downing Street before final victory — Germany had surrendered, Japan had not — remained humbling.
Youth was a requirement for a Churchill stenotyping secretary. “The Old Man,” as he was known, dictated so long and so late into the night, as a rule, that stamina was essential. Ms. Gemmell joined a team of extraordinarily bright and capable, if often exhausted, young women, and a proud line of exceptional Churchill personal secretaries (all but one of them female) that extended back through both world wars to 1902. At her death, Ms. Gemmell was the last.
Ms. Gemmell was ushered into Churchill’s presence for the first time at his new postwar London residence, 28 Hyde Park Gate. Churchill was just back from a hospital stay. His bed had been moved into the downstairs dining room and he was sitting up in it, smoking a cigar. The teenage Ms. Gemmell was on the verge of graduating from the venerable Mrs. Hoster’s Secretarial College, which the Churchills had long used as a kind of employment agency.
“I was terrified of him,” Ms. Gemmell later recalled, but he was “very benign.”
“‘How do you do, my dear?’ he asked. I think I shook his hand,” she recalled for the oral history project at the Churchill Archives. “He seemed so incredibly friendly that I felt emboldened to talk to him.” Jo Sturdee Onslow, Churchill’s secretary in chief, “had to rush me away,” she said. “But on that interview, my life started.”
Ms. Gemmell was initially assigned to Churchill’s literary assistant, Denis Kelly, cataloging the prime minister’s World War II papers in anticipation of Churchill writing his war memoirs. The cache was housed at Chartwell, Churchill’s country home in the county of Kent, and so a place was found for Ms. Gemmell to live in the nearby village of Westerham. She bicycled back and forth to Chartwell, pushing the bike up “an incredibly steep hill” that, at least, “was a cinch coming back down.”
She worked in what she described as the semi-basement of the Muniment Room at Chartwell — “completely untrained,” but tasked with organizing the monumental paper trail of Churchill’s wartime existence. She saw virtually no one other than Mr. Kelly, along with “everybody’s socks — the socks of the famous,” from her obscured vantage. She would “look up and see Anthony Eden’s pink socks leaving the room,” she recalled, referring to the foreign secretary who would later briefly become prime minister. “All I saw of the famous were their socks.”
The cataloging finally ended and, at last, Ms. Gemmell was summoned to work with Churchill himself one evening after dinner at Chartwell. “There he was,” she said, “sitting up in his four-poster bed in his little bedroom, with brandy and cigars, and there was a card table with a typewriter on it. ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘Put your paper in.’”
Her initial efforts were shaky. “The nervousness of someone dictating right onto the typewriter was enough,” she later said in an interview, “but the fact that it was ‘him,’ and he was hard to hear, and I really couldn’t understand all he said, but I couldn’t stop and say, ‘I can’t hear you,’ and the typewriters, which were ‘silent’ — very little clack — had a very hard action, which made it very hard to type.
“I just kept thinking, ‘This is only a nightmare; I’m going to wake up, this isn’t real.’ And I think that thought kept me going.”
Cecily Gemmell was born in Bangalore, India, on Dec. 25, 1928. Her father, Col. Geoffrey Woodburn Gemmell, was a map surveyor in the Indian Army, second to the surveyor general. Her mother, Winifred Grace Hall, accompanied and assisted her husband on his field trips. “My mother managed the domestic side of things,” Ms. Gemmell recalled. “She loved camping and walking many miles a day. They were out in the jungles for a month or two at a time.”
Named for her father’s youngest brother, Cecil, who had been killed in France at the end of World War I, Ms. Gemmell would always be known to her family and friends by her uncle’s nickname, Chips. She was educated at The New School (known as Harrow on the Hooghly), which had been founded in Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the outset of World War II and then transported to Darjeeling, before disbanding in 1944.
The family returned to England in the summer of 1945. There, Ms. Gemmell completed her education at Mrs. Hoster’s — initially in Lincolnshire, where the school had been evacuated to during the war, before returning with the school to London.
Ms. Gemmell was back again in London with Churchill when he was returned as prime minister in 1951. She accompanied her boss to the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street; to the racecourses where his thoroughbreds ran; to Monte Carlo, where he gambled; to Blenheim Palace, where he was born; to Marrakesh, Lake Como and the Dolomites, where he painted.
One day Churchill asked Ms. Gemmell to sit for a portrait. It was quite an honor; he painted very few. Come Christmastime at No. 10, he planned to present the painting to her as a gift. “Do you know what you’re getting for Christmas?” he chortled, unable to keep his own secret. “You’re going to get your picture.”
Ms. Gemmell eventually volunteered to work for Churchill’s wife, Clementine, where the strain was considerably less. She retired from active Churchill duty in 1953 and moved to New York City, securing a high-level secretarial job at Life magazine.
She remained with Life for nine years, and worked at Time Inc. in a similar role for many years more. During this time, she became a habitué of the jazz clubs near her Midtown apartment. (“I never wanted the party to end,” she once explained, “and the jazz clubs stayed open the latest!”)
One night, Ms. Gemmell met the pianist John Bunch, a longtime accompanist of Tony Bennett’s, as well as a sideman with Benny Goodman. In the spring of 1977, she moved in with him. They were married on New Year’s Day 1998. Mr. Bunch died in 2010; no immediate family members survive.
Ms. Gemmell’s final year in the Churchills’ employ, 1953, was the year that Winston Churchill was knighted.
“I ran across him in a corridor at No. 10,” she later remembered. “I couldn’t think what to call him; I’d been ruminating about it, with some consternation. Finally, I blurted out, ‘Good morning, Sir Winston.’ He gave one of his wonderful sort of inward chuckles and I heard him quietly say, ‘Don’t be so cheeky.’”
The post Cecily Gemmell Has Died. She Was Churchill’s Last Surviving Secretary. appeared first on New York Times.
