Churchill liked to work in bed: Once his cat bit his toe while he was on the phone... he kicked it, shouting ‘Get off, you fool... oh sorry, not you’
PROPPED up with pillows and puffing on a Cuban cigar, Winston Churchill barked a speech from his bed.
It was May 1941 and the British PM was in the early years of his tenure, locked in battle with Nazi Germany.
At his side was 23-year-old personal secretary Elizabeth Layton, frantically recording every word uttered by her pit bull boss.
Elizabeth’s memoirs, published months before her death, recall how Churchill would dictate his famous speeches late into the night, sometimes until 4.30am, ruminating around the room in his red, green and gold dressing-gown.
He would be up again at 8am, with Elizabeth and her typewriter back at his bedside.
Her story features in Hollywood’s latest biopic Darkest Hour, with Gary Oldman’s performance as the PM securing him a Golden Globe.
Kristin Scott Thomas plays wife Clementine while Lily James takes on the role of Elizabeth.
In her autobiography, Recollections of The Great Man, Elizabeth remembers Churchill’s “prodigious capacity for work” – which was also expected from all those around him.
She wrote: “We of his personal
Elizabeth, front, at a reunion staff were called upon to put forth the maximum effort of which our frames, nerves and minds were capable. I do not think this was only because it was wartime… I believe he has always been a fairly exacting employer. Mr Churchill found it more restful to work in bed, and because of the great calls upon his strength he was urged by medical advisers to do so often.
“Every day before dinner, which was at 8.30pm, he would have a sleep, from which he would awake refreshed and ready – which perhaps his staff were not – for another day’s work before bedtime.
“This was very seldom before 2 o’clock and might be anything up to 4.30am. ‘It’s amazing,’ they told me, ‘how quickly you get used to going to bed at 2.30am.’”
Elizabeth, from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, also remembers the way Churchill liked his speeches laid out in verse form and his habit of lighting cigars from a candle.
His notoriously spiky nature and propensity for tantrums also extended beyond his inner circle.
One outburst involved his beloved cat Smokey and Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Francis Brooke.
She says: “Mr Churchill sat in bed and Smokey sat on the blankets watching him. The Prime Minister’s