Lessons from Churchill's nurse: Keep calm, carry on, contribute

Winston Churchill stayed up late. Often, sleep eluded him, his mind consumed with beating Hitler. “I mean beat him and his powers of evil into death, dust and ashes,” he told the British people in March 1943.

One month before that speech, the prime min ister had been nursed back to health from severe pneumonia by a practical, talented nurse named Doris Miles.

Of all the nurses in London, Doris became Churchill's night nurse because she was a star at St. Mary's Hospital and she also shared his “get it done” work ethic. “My mother's character was positive, and she was very practical,” says Jill Rose, the second of Doris' four children, who lives in Lake Clarke Shores.

“She was loving but not sentimental, and, therefore, was a very good nurse.”

Jill collected her mother's wartime letters into a 2018 book, “Nursing Churchill: Wartime Life from the Private Letters of Winston Churchill's Nurse.”

Churchill's granddaughter, Emma Soames, wrote the foreword.

“Without nurse Miles' skills, this drama (World War II) could have had such a much worse outcome— not just for the prime minister personally and our family, but for the whole western world,” writes Soames, daughter of the youngest of Churchill's five children, Mary.

What Doris' letters show are a relationship among equals between Churchill and his nurse. He treated Doris like “a dear friend rather than a nurse,” she wrote in her letters to her husband, Roger, a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy.

She refers to Churchill as “V” and “Victory” and “the old boy,” whose jokes could make her “laugh like a drain.”

When Churchill would wake up in the wee hours, he would ask Miles her opinion of everything from religion and health care to the meaning of dreams.

He trusted her. After all, she had been an emergency room nurse during the London Blitz of 1940 and '41, when German bombs relentlessly pounded the country.

Londoners lived with no lights after dark for years — and, still, the bombs found their targets, sometimes exploding the air-raid shelters.

Horribly maimed bombing victims filled the emergency room night after night.

“When the bombs dropped, you just got under the patient's bed and then got up again,” Doris wrote.

She did not fret about what she could not control — but she worked mightily to control what she could. “The whole war experience — being separated from your loved ones, and never knowing whether they'd come back — for many years, this was part of their life,” Jill said last week. “It builds an extraordinary fortitude.”

That fortitude, that “stiff upper lip” character that helped Britain and, later, America and its allies defeat Hitler are the same traits we must call upon now to defeat coronavirus, Jill maintains.

“How did the Greatest Generation survive the sustained stress of World War II? The answer is, they just kept calm and carried on,” Jill says.

And they contributed to the wider society they sacrificed when necessary for the greater good. “We are dealing with external forces beyond our control now,” Jill says. “So we must take control of what we can, because there is so much we can't control. This is what both my mother and my grandmother, who was also a nurse, did. They must have had trepidations inside, but if they were afraid, it didn't show in what they wrote or spoke.”

Doris “was very bright and well-educated, and she could hold her own in political conversations with Winston Churchill,” which is clear in her letters, Jill says.

What's also clear is that both Doris and Winston shared an interest in others.

“They believed in stability and manners,” she says, “and also in the fact that the world is not just about us. Our own well-being is intimately connected with the well-being of others.”