NURSING CHURCHILL
THE HUMAN AND SELDOM-SEEN SIDE OF WINSTON CHURCHILL IS REVEALED BY THE NURSE WHO LOOKED AFTER HIM WHEN HE WAS STRICKEN WITH PNEUMONIA IN 1943
Author: Jill Rose Publisher: Amberley Price: £9.99 Released: 15 September
“The patient is all he is cracked up to be.” So wrote Doris Miles to her husband, who was serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. It was February 1943, with the outcome of the war still very much in the balance, and the patient in question was none other than Winston Churchill, who had returned from a whirlwind month of visits to Morocco, Egypt, Turkey and Cyprus. As he dined privately with his wife, the Prime Minister was taken ill with a high temperature, which was diagnosed by his doctor Sir Charles Wilson as pneumonia.
Wilson hired Dorothy Pugh and Doris Miles, two staff nurses from the private wing of St Mary’s Hospital, to attend Churchill. On the evening of 19 February, Miles was told to go immediately to the Prime Minister’s residence as night nurse. Miles soon realised that getting Churchill to stay in bed was one thing – getting him to rest was quite another. Three days into the job, she noted: “PM kept finger on bell pretty much all day.” Churchill was not about to allow some trifle like pneumonia slow him down, despite being urged by King George VI to “take this opportunity for a rest”.
Miles’s daughter Jill Rose has assembled a collection of her mother’s letters and personal observations of her “difficult patient” at that critical time during the war. The book provides a fascinating insight into those precarious days in Churchill’s life. It is clear that Miles developed what can only be described as a fascination with the “old boy” and his daily routine, starting with his habit of rising at noon and never going to bed before 2am. “What a man,” she exclaims in one of her letters.