Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Cooking for Churchill: Georgina Landemare

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Clear soup, Irish stew and steamed puddings - this was the war work of Georgina Landemare, the Churchills’ longest-serving cook.Throughout the war years, Georgina served the Prime Minister, delegations of diplomats and the occasional royal, as well as the other staff of 10 Downing Street, Chequers and the War Rooms.Annie Gray is back with Kate today to introduce us to Georgina; why she went into the service industry, where she learnt to cook the French way, and how she managed to make the most of wartime rations (with a few top-ups here and there).*WARNING there are adult words and themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Lovely bit twixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning to protect you from yourselves and most importantly protect you from me and the kind of awfulness that I like to talk about on the airwaves. What are we talking about today? Well, we're talking about Churchill,

which is we're already into controversial territory. But we're talking about food, actually. We're talking about the kind of food that Churchill like to eat. I don't think that's particularly shocking, but you know what, you just might not want to listen to someone talking about food. Oh, and I'll definitely be swearing. Definitely. I don't think there's anything weird than that, actually. So if you're all right with that, I'm all right with that. Let's do it. Picture the scene, betwixters. You are in your kitchen. You are serving up, oh, a simple soup, perhaps some radish rosettes. I can't cook at all, so honestly anything is impressive to me. But, but back to the scene.

you're waiting for your guests to arrive. But these aren't just regular guests. No, no, no. They are kings, queens, world leaders, just generally really important people, far more important than us plums anyway. And what ingredients do you have? What is it that you're working with?

Well, rations, actually. Oh, and there's also air raids going on and your kitchen has already been bombed. This chaotic scene would have been a regular occurrence for Georgina Landemeyer, who was the head of Winston and Clementine Churchill's kitchen, kitchen from 1940 till 1954. Today, betwixt the sheets, I'm going to find out what this lady cooked, who she was, what it was like to work for the Churchill's, and how the hell do you

prepare a banquet feast in the middle of an air raid. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in

Society with me, Kate Lister. For the cook Georgina Landermere, war-time work was, oh, just a little bit different than that of the rest of Britain. She was in the kitchen, trying to make the most out of her rations to cook the Prime Minister and his guests their favourite meals. But despite the thousands of books on Churchill, not much as being a bit of written about Georgina. So today I am talking to the one the only the amazing, Annie Gray, who has done research into the life and types of food that Georgina made. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It's the sheets. It's only Annie Gray. Well, hey, thank you for inviting me back again.

Just had so much fun talking to you about Queen Victoria's eating habits that I knew I had to have you back. And today we're talking about Churchill's eating habits. Why not? Well, I think you're specialise in sort of slightly problematic, somewhat odious, big eating characters. Nice. Why Churchill? What attracted you to this person and what he ate? Essentially, having written about Victoria and Victorian food, I thought, wouldn't it be lovely to take that story a bit further on and look at 20th century food and also domestic service, because there's a lot of books about servants. There are an awful lot of programmes about servants. There's a lot of Downton Abbey effect. And not a lot of understanding about the complexities of servant life and domestic life. So domestic service notoriously was the biggest employer of women, which means to me that you cannot divorce the history of women from the history of domestic service.

You've got 31% of women employing domestic service, and most women go through that, whether it's just working as a char, or working in house or whatever. So what I wanted to do was talk about 20th century food, domestic service, all these ideas were milling around in my head, but I couldn't actually come up with an idea to pull them together. And then I was in an archive and that thing you do, I mean, certainly as a writer I do it, is I need inspiration. I'm going to go to an archive and I'm going to stand there and I'm just going to kind of wait for something to hit me. And I was pulling books out going, no, not inspiring, no, no, oh, what's this?

And I found this book called Recipes from Number 10 written by Winston Churchill's cook. And I thought, gosh, how interesting, but I'm sure someone's written about her because it's a really obvious topic. Given there are a thousand biographers of Churchill, someone would have covered his cook. So I went off and I couldn't stop thinking about her because I thought, gosh, you know, that is a person who's got a real hook for the public, who clearly ate a lot, who was right at the thick of things. What was he eating? So I did some research into her and discovered nobody had written about her, but her granddaughter was still alive. So I got in contact with her granddaughter, a lady called Eddie Brocklesby, who is Britain's oldest Ironman competitor and is amazing. And she said, yeah, I'd love you to write about my grandmother.

I've tried and I can't find any information out. So if you can do better than me, please have a go. here's my family archives such as we've got this is what we know she was absolutely just so welcoming so I went away and deep dived into georgina landermar's life and it was fascinating so the Churchill part of it is kind of a hook so it's about her and Churchill's kind of the way in so it's kind of a you think you want to know about Churchill but secretly I'm going to tell you all about the life of this incredible woman who reflects the lives of women everywhere in the 20th century who by doing so reflects the lives of all of our ancestors, so it's really about all of us.

It's a very clever way in to, not necessarily Churchill's life, but his way of life. And there's been loads written about him, but it's sort of like bringing out this part of his experience that we don't know very much about, and certainly shining a light on this woman whose name I'd never heard, Antoine knew I was going to be talking about you. No, and I think that's such a shame, because, I mean, there's a biography of his constituency party chairman, for God's sake. People are obsessed with, Churchill. Every 10 years there's a new biography of Churchill and there's a limit to what you can say. But he is interesting and he is very problematic and he's larger than life. He gets voted as Britain's

greatest person a lot and you think, but most people, I think in the street, know him as the wartime prime minister. They don't realise that he had a career before that. They don't realize he got into office again in 1951 when he almost certainly had dementia. They don't know a lot about him and what they do know comes from this kind of very legend-style idea of him, films like the darkest hour and all those kind of things. So they've all got this image of him. And I think actually when you look at his food, when you look at how he treated his servant, when you look at the household set up, the big thing you start to realise is that, yeah, there's Churchill, like him, loathing, whatever. There's no denying that he did lead the country in a time of terrible war and he did do some great things for a period of about four years.

But how easy is it to do great things when you've got a support team? I could be writing millions of books if I had someone doing my laundry and cooking for me and picking up my pants and running my bath. And, you know, it's that idea that behind every great person lies an enormous team. And it's that that I wanted to get at to shed some light on the way it worked. I don't know about that. I think some of our recent prime ministers have been absolutely useless. I'm sure they had teams of people behind them. Oh, I'm not saying having a team makes you great.

I would agree with you that you're going to have a huge team. You've got to have the right team and you also have to have, you know, things like intelligence and charisma and, you know, morals, small things that many of our latest Prime Ministers seem to have lacked a bit of. Right. Let's talk about this woman herself. Georgiana Landmar, Landmaier. Georgina Landmar. So her husband was French. She was born Georgina Young, so much plainer. Okay, Landmar. Oh, I like it. I like right. So tell me what is her origin story then. Where does she come from? She is unbelievably typical. That's one of the things I found really lovely about her. She's all of our grounds, or great grounds, or great, great grounds, depending on how old you are, if you're listening to this. So she was born in 1882 in a village called Oldbury, which is sort of

on the border between Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, around there. Today, it's this kind of boogie commuter village where you go into it, there's a village green, and there's a cute little shop, and there's a station about three miles down the road. So she was born there. She was the older to five. Her mum had been in domestic service. Her father was a coachman. He worked for very wealthy individuals and obviously her mother had given up work because she was busy pumping out babies and all the rest of it and moving with her father as well, who was a coachman, shuttles a lot between London and Berkshire and then across the Wales at one point as well. You know, so far, so absolutely typical, rural working class, very much the respectable working class that we don't

hear a lot about, I think, as historians. We often talk about people in poverty, and that's about a third of the population at the time and we hear about the rich and we often hear about the middle classes but that sort of slice of nearly a third of the population who were just respectable working class just getting on with it is a really sizable part of the community and that's where she is they don't have the vote at this point because they don't have any property qualifications they're just they're kind of the backbone she ends up living in london for a long time because her father gets a new job in london so they go and they live near lost a rogue shoe station which is now I think a shopping centre, but at the time was a set of muse.

So they lived above the coach house. And it was so achingly typical. You know, she went to school till she was 12, and then she left school, and then they changed the rules about when you had to go to school till, so she went back for a bit. And she said she quite liked school. And then she left school, and she didn't know what to do,

so she did some nannying work for a little bit. I mean, bear in mind she's 14. Christ, that's scary, isn't it? 14. I know, you think she's 14, oh my God. And then her family had a stern word with her and said she needed to settle down to a career. So she ended up getting a job as what she called a number six in Kensington Palace Gardens,

which is a number six in the kitchen, so the lowest of the low. But in a really rich household, the idea of having six people in your kitchen straight off, you go, right, okay, this is a significant household. And what's really interesting about you is that most servants worked in small households. So we think of servants, especially Victorian-Edwardian ones, and we all think, downtown abbey, or big country houses, or national trust. But actually 75% of women worked in really small households of one or two servants, middle class households.

And she didn't. She worked only ever worked in really wealthy households, only ever worked in big, Nouveau-Riche, you know, bling-bling money-bags households. And she worked a way up through the kitchens in that way, which is an interesting trajectory because just so many people didn't do that. So she was clearly quite determined.

So if she's number six in like a really blingy kitchen, even though that's like the lowest, would that have been well paid or is it still shit pay? It's still shit pay. She's probably on, I don't know, 18, 19, 20 pounds a year, something like that. It's better than many. It's not as good as some. And also because she's a woman at that point,

she would never have been able to even aspire to earning as much as men. So at that point in time, if you were wealthy enough, you wanted a French male cook. And that was it. If you were a Duke of wherever, you want a French man in your kitchen. And if you can't have a French man, you'll have an English man and you'll pay him a little bit less. And if you can't have an English man, you'll have a woman

but you kind of want a woman who's trained under a man cook because that way it will give you that prestige, preferably a French man cook. So it's ever so the levels of, well, I'll pay you it more because actually you trained under Monsieur is really infinite. So even when she went into the kitchen she went into, she must have known that she was going to hit. It wasn't so much a glass ceiling. It was a kind of massive cement fixture held up with iron bars.

And that was what most people did was going to service, although none of her siblings did. All of her siblings went into the new careers that were opening up. So things like design in the case of her brothers and working at the post office, working in shops, those kind of things. So this is an era really 1880s, 1890s was an era where careers for women were changing quite rapidly, largely because of the number of new jobs in shops in particular, but also in new technologies like telephony and typing and things like that.

So as a number six then, bearing in mind she ends up being a cook, so we'll get there. But what's she doing as a number six? What was your job description as a number six? Was she cooking? She's a scullery made at that point. So mainly cleaning, plucking. She kept a memoir, did old Georgina, which I was very excited by,

when I discovered it, when I found it, was given it by her granddaughter. But unfortunately, she started writing this thing in the late 1970s when she was in her 90s, and things were not going well at home. So she wrote this memoir, longhand, obviously. And then she tore it up and put it down the sink. And it's an amazing document.

The 20-odd pages that survive are remarkable. They're so sharp, and they're so accurate. and her memory was amazing. So the memoir stops just as she becomes number six. So she says I was number six and I remember my little tiny copper moulds and she remembered cleaning tiny copper mould and also the pull-down bed that she slept on

and having to make up the beds for the other maids as well. So she was very much and would very much have been about preparation. So peeling things, scrubbing things, cleaning things, gutting things, plucking things. Breaking up ice would probably have been one of her tasks to set ice cream and things like that, obviously cleaning pans,

and generally learning by being around the other maids and by doing basic preparation tasks, you worked your way up, very much learn on the job. And she did work her way up fairly quickly. So she went from number six to then somewhere in the middle by 1981 when she was working for a man called Edward Kilburn. He'd come back over from India, he'd been a colonial administrator, made lots of money and now had this beautiful house just near Paddington,

and she was working there for a while. And at that point, she'd kind of worked away slightly. further up so by then she was a kitchen maid so doing lots more cooking and the normal where it worked was at some point you'd start cooking mainly for the servants because they were notoriously picky so you had to get it right and then you'd also be doing prep work for the upper table and you'd learn by doing lots and lots of different things and the stuff she was cooking was very much Edwardian nouveau riche so if you can mould it you mould it if it looks like what it started off as it's wrong in hindsight we know world war one's going to come and smash it all

into oblivion and you do look at the food and you think you can kind of see that this is like kind of Rome just as Nero is fiddling because everything is forced to a kind of stupendous visual degree. So to give you an example, I've got a book by Mrs. DeSalis and she was one of these sort of indefatigable Victorian writers and everything in her book is moulded, all of her entrees, which is the sort of fancy dishes that would sit kind of in about the third or fourth place on the dinner. So if she was going to do, say, I don't know, a tongue dish, he would take a tongue, tongue, push the tongue through a sieve to make tongue puree, mix the tongue puree with a bit of food colouring to booge it up a bit, add in some gelatin and maybe some more sources and then put that

into a tongue mould so it looked like a tongue, or possibly a mould with some crossed golf cues on because why not? And then you demold it and then you serve it on a bed of, you know, something green. But the time you finish, you're like, how do I know? I've got no idea what this is. It's why you need written menus by that point because there was absolutely no way you could guess what anything was. And it took ages. nightmare from the 70s? All that salads in Aspick and jelly nightmares and all of that stuff. Is that what they're doing? Yes, but I would say it's better than the 70s. The 70s aspects were basically a direct line back to the Edwardian period, but crap. So you take Edwardian food, everything's beautiful ingredients, you're probably still making your own jelly,

or you might be in a really high-end kitchen by boiling calves feet. You could buy packet gelatin by then. But everything's beautiful and wonderful and very rich. And then you fast forward through to the 70s, where everything that be stripped back, has been stripped back, and you buy your aspic in a tin, and you just reheat it on the hob and you chuck in some whatever. And suddenly you've got something that's brown with some stuff floating in it and it looks like the bottom of a pond on a really bad day. And it doesn't taste very good either and it's very, very boingy and most people's worst nightmare. But in the Victorian and Edwardian period, that just would have been genuinely very good, even if you would also have suffered gout a lot because, yeah.

Wow. Okay. So she's worked a way up to senior cook making jellies and mooses and other remolded goods. And everything. I mean, you know, roasting things, plucking things and putting wings under bodies and your truffles coming out of your ears. And food was incredible. It was what was known as Rishashe food, which was sort of something new and exciting.

It would be the equivalent, I suppose, of just learning to do molecular cuisine today and spending your time with syringes, doing really cutting-edge stuff, but that did taste good. There were exhibitions put on so that you could learn how to make the best kind of turtle soup

and your cooks could go along and train. It's a fascinating world. Was it usual for a woman to be a cook at this point? Because we do that. Like, cooking is a woman's business. We've been blogging the kitchen. Blu-blow-blow-blah. All that shite.

There's like a real thing about cooking being gendered. And yet, when we're talking about like chefs, that suddenly seems to be quite masculine. In fact, even today. Go to Google image search and put in chef, you'll get mainly pictures of men. Put in cook, you'll get mainly pictures of women. It is very genders. So domestic cooking inevitably has often fallen to the woman

because the woman's role is to have children and then look after the children and then do all the domestic tasks. So cooking, the preparation of food, has often fallen to women, usually fall into women in a domestic context. And that's still true today. So if you look at statistically, even in liberated households, the woman, especially when there are children involved, will do most of the quotidian cooking. And the man might breeze in on a Saturday night and cook some high-flutin thing and leave the washing up everywhere. And yes, that's a gender stereotype, but it's all statistically true. The same with barbecuing when men like to poke the fire. you know, actually don't produce anything edible

because somebody else has had to produce a salad. I feel my cynicism. But at a professional level, it's always been men. In medieval period, you wouldn't have found a woman in a professional kitchen at all. And you don't really get women in professional kitchens until the 17th century because they're cheap. So they start to creep in. They've been in kitchens and things like that.

And you've often had cases where, say, a man is an innkeeper and his wife might be doing the cooking because it's just an extension of his home really at that point. But in terms of domestic, professional kitchens, no women. You see that, especially in the royal levels, so there are no women in the royal kitchens until, I think, about 1816, that's when the first woman starts work at the lowest level in the royal kitchens. And by the time Georgina starts cooking, the 1880s, Queen Victoria's kitchens still have, you know, start for 45, of which 15 are women,

and they're all at the low levels. You cannot get higher. So in the wealthiest of kitchens, it's all still men, because men can cook better than women, and men don't have any wives and children or anything like that to distract them, and it's all about the man. But most people couldn't afford a man, or they brought a man in just occasionally as a job and cook, and they did have women. So anyone who was barren or below really probably didn't have a male cook. So by the 1880s, the vast majority of cooks were women, except if you were titled, anybody who's sort of above an earl, you kind of assume a man in the kitchen. And when Georgina met her husband, Paul, who was a French chef, he had done exactly that. He'd come across from France to cook

at the highest level in British aristocratic households and hotel kitchens, which again were all men. So that gender imbalance really was very much there. I mean, again, downtown Abbey, Mrs Patnal wouldn't have existed. She would have been a man until after the war. Really? I mean, I know their finances are dodgy and all that kind of stuff, but they're keeping up appearances, you'd have had a man. After the war, once they'd gone, no, no, sorry, we lost all the money.

Fine to have a woman. So Georgina made cook in 1905 for a millionaire called Robert Alatini. So fabulously wealthy, because it was all new money, had decided he was going to keep a female cook, cheaper, didn't have quite so many hang-ups. Had he been old-landed money, he probably would have had a man. But she made cook, in her own right, in this household that wanted this sort of very fancy, re-shaix, incredibly intricate, very lovely Edwardian cookery. But there's no way she could have made the leap to work for aristocrats at that point

because she didn't have the French training that she would have needed. I'll be back with Annie after this short break. Aeroplanes, space suits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own. We uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects.

We managed to put two men on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. Unpack invention myths. So the prince's widow immediately becomes certain. Thomas Edison stole her husband's invention and her husband disappeared around the same time can only have been eliminated by Thomas Edison, who at the time is arguably the most famous person in the West. And look backwards to understand technologies that are still in progress.

You know, when people turn around to me and say, oh, why would you want to live forever? Life's rubbish. I just think that's a bit sad. I think it's a worthwhile thing to do. And the thing that really makes it worthwhile is the fact that you could make it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. I've boosted her credentials the fact that she married a French chef, that she could just be like, yes, I have got my ovaries with me today, but I am married to this French chef person.

Therefore, you must pay me more money. Yeah, I mean, even she said that being married to a French chef meant that she could train at the footsteps of a master, as it were. And I'm sure it was a love match because he was 23 years older than her. So he was, like, a year older than her dad, and already had a load of children from his first marriage. So he was born in Paris in the 1850s, lived through the siege of Paris. I don't know whether we ate elephant or not,

classically trained on what I would call the fast track French chef career path. So he did his apprenticeship. He then went and worked in Nice and he worked in the resorts of northern France and he worked in restaurants in Paris and he was clearly going places and then he stopped going places. First of all, had a child, then got married, legitimising the child as he did so. And then at some point sort of stopped being on the fast track and clearly his career had stopped for whatever reason.

So he came over to the UK, as a lot of French chefs did, and started working almost certainly in hotels. He also worked at Clumber Park as well, the Duke of Newcastle, quite a long time. And then he ran a boarding house, and then his wife died. And a few months later, no more than three months later, he married Georgina. So that suggests a strong love match

and also something dodgy that I don't want to think about. Well, move swiftly past that one then. Oh yeah, she was younger than his daughter. Anyway, but all his children who left home by his point. It's all gone a bit Leonardo DiCaprio, isn't it? Well, it's very Victorian. Whenever you read Victorian romance novels, there's always some older man who's quite clearly revolting in hoary, and then this sort of 18-year-old, Nubal female, who's like, I love you.

And the older man goes, there's nothing wrong with this. So anyway, she marries him. She had a child called Marcell in 1913 who died very soon after birth, which obviously was horrible, tragic. And then she later on had a daughter who did survive. But they don't seem to have been particularly focused on children. And assuming he wasn't firing blanks by that point, you know, he had had quite a few before, so he was really quite virile. But whether they were using contraception, whether he was going older, whether they didn't want children, whatever.

They only had one surviving daughter. And they seemed to have worked together as a unit. So at this point, I think they went freelance. And it's quite difficult to tell because researching working class women's hard anyway, and in the 20th century, there's just no trace of them. So she seems to have been working with him as a catering team. There's one really tantalizing photograph of them in a country house kitchen. somewhere probably in southwest London and it's a photocopy of a picture

the original no longer exists because it was sent to the Times a long time ago, so 15, 16 years ago to use for an article and they never returned it and they're in a kitchen and there's Georgina looking kind of pugnacious and fighty and her husband with this enormous moustache and then two completely random people

who presumably are their resistance I'm assuming it's a coming-of-age party or a supper or something of that ilk you know, maybe a wedding and the photographer has gone to snap a paper picture of the caterers and that's what it is. So later on she said, yeah, absolutely it did her, no harm whatsoever. But she did very obviously learn the French repertoire from him. They went over to Paris to visit his family a few times. He introduced to lots of people that she needed

to know, that kind of thing. He was very well connected. And she learned a lot at his side and they continued to work together until 1933, when rather unsurprisingly, given the cigar scenario, he died of lung cancer. Oh, that's a bit sad. I mean, it can't have been unexpected given the age gap. Just as I was saying that, I was like, yeah, but they are all dead now, okay, it was going to happen eventually. But how does she end up working for Churchill then? How do these paths collide? Well, after Paul died, she clearly thought to herself, what am I going to do? Am I going back in-house? I don't think I want to do that. I mean, you know what it's like once you've tasted a bit of freelance life? You don't want an employer again. She could earn more as a job in cook as well, because she would have been able to charge per gig rather than be on a set salary.

So she went off to go and be a society chef. And by this point, post-first World War, times have changed. much more accepted as leading society chefs by now. So she started cooking for the Churchill's for the first time, I think, 1933. And by this point, she was cooking for loads of people in their set. Is she getting quite a name? Yes. By this point, she's the person you want to cater your thing. So she did the occasional weekend for them. She did the occasional week for them if their main cook was away. Churchill was not a poor man. He was basically an Edwardian with a lot of money, Edwardian semi-aristocrat, but he always spent more than he earned.

So if he was given a book advance, he would spend it five times before he'd started writing the book. And that was a bit awkward because it meant he had no money, but the promise of lots of money. So they employed really crappy cooks, often young girls, and Clementine Churchill, Winston Churchill's wife, would sort of train them up.

And she was very good. She knew her way around a cookbook because her own mother had led this sort of bizarrely rackety life where they moved to Diep to get away from her violent father and her mother had done a lot of cooking and written cookery columns for newspapers and that kind of thing. So Clementine knew how to cook and she said she'd spend a lot of time at sort of debutante balls

studying cookbooks so she could think of dishes. But they couldn't retain servants because they were terrible employers. They didn't pay very much. And they were really scathing about their servants and actually some of the ways they talk about their servants in letters, especially to a modern viewpoint. It really quite nasty.

But I think what happened was, like so many people, they had a crappy cook most of the time and then when they wanted to push the boat out, they got in the caterers and they would either employ gunters who were one of the big London caterers or they would employ an actual cook to do all the meals if it was a weekend house party and that's where Georgina came in but they couldn't really afford them. There was one amazing menu book. The Churchill Archive was obviously the backbone of most of Georgina's story once she started working

for Winston Churchill but in common with an awful lot of archives especially of this ilk when the archive was given to the Churchill College and as part of the college set up this, an amazing archive was endowed. But the archive is mainly political. But you struggle to find anything about his domestic life because at the time, in the 60s, people like, people want to know about the speeches, the war stuff. The man and the war.

And did I mention the war? And they didn't want to know about home boring things with food. So there would have been a menu book for every single year, which detailed what the servants were eating and what the family were eating. Very, very few of them survived. There's a run of them after the war. but there's one before the war for 1936-37 and it's a beautiful document

because you've got this sort of very unformed almost schoolchild like handwriting of their normal cook which shows that they were eating things like baked beans on toast for their tea which is brilliant and then suddenly you've got Georgina's handwriting that kicks in and when I found that book I was getting really discouraged because I couldn't find anything

I mean I knew the book would be about evoking a way of life as much as telling Georgina's story because that was what it was always intended to be but I wasn't finding her and it was like oh my God I'm just searching through so much stuff and there's just nothing here and then I opened this book and then Georgina's handwriting which is so distinctive just kind of swam into view

and I just thought okay everything's going to be fine because her menus are in this gorgeous copper plate and all of her menus were in French Do you think they were having beans on toast because they really liked beans on toast or because that's all that their crappy cook could do? I think it's a mixture of the two I mean Churchill liked to talk about how he really

liked plain foods. Man of the people, yeah. Absolutely. And you think, well, you know, it's like Churchill did like to be seen as someone who, as he put it, ate butcher's meat every day, by which he largely meant beef as opposed to game. He liked Irish stew. Well, he genuinely did. But he was also an Edwardian who really liked things that gave him gout. So a lot of plover's eggs, caviar, he loved caviar, you know. So of course, that's what he wanted to eat. But when you add in a budget that's not great and then a cook you can't cook you end up with the bait beans on taste. I mean there's various diet truths in the archive so he kept suffering from indigestion and wanting to lose weight. So he consults various doctors and they all write to him and say well this is what you

should eat and this is what you should cut down on which itself is illuminating because it tells you what he was eating and obviously he ignores them all. So you know he gets told a minimum of red meat at one point and you can have chicken and white fish and green vegetables and you can have some rivitas and things like that and not too much eggs and bacon and ham and it just adds up and adds up and adds up. So he got this and he clearly licked it and went, so he found another doctor to give him another opinion. Is it true that he had a bottle of champagne for breakfast?

Or similar? Or is that a myth? He used to have a thing called mouthwash, which was whiskey diluted with lots of soda. And as part of the experiment for this book, I like to throw myself into it wholeheartedly. I did eat 1930s food for about a year, and I tried drinking mouthwash.

I mean, it's a nice enough drink, if you like a really, really diluted whiskey. And it doesn't get you pissed. But when you drink it steadily throughout the day and then you kind of go and have half a bottle of wine at lunchtime and then you hit the port. He gave up brandy for a year at one point because somebody betting me couldn't do it. And because he needed the money, he took the bet. He was, I think when you look at his alcohol consumption, I don't think there's any doubt that he was an alcoholic. But he he was a fully functioning, very lucid alcoholic. So I interviewed one of his last surviving secretaries and she just said, you know, he would not have been able to dictate the stuff

he dictated to us at two in the morning, where he inebriated to the point of not being able to function. And you do get highly functioning alcoholics where it doesn't seem to affect them. And I think that was where he lay. So we've got Winston Churchill, who is a functioning alcoholic, swinging his mouth washer out the day, then moving on to the port.

So she's cooking for him at that point, not making his drinks. What about when the war hits? Is he on rations? Yes, everybody's on rations. But there's rations and there's rations, you know? So when war broke out, Georgina was. cooking in Exning House. So it's a new market and she was catering a big race season. She did a lot of the racing fraternity. So war broke out, obviously all hell breaks loose. They immediately do

this thing called the 1939 register, which for anybody who is listening, he's a genealogist or interested in family history they'll be familiar with, kind of like the census without much of the detail. But it shows you where everyone was at a point in time in 1939. The point in time is after a lot of people have already been evacuated. So when you look at the entry for Exning House, you've got Georgina, the housekeeper, and loads of 13-year-old boys. So that must have been fun, because they'd been evacuated from London, and they all had lice, and there was lots of complaints. You know, you read the local newspapers, and they're all like,

well, it's great that these children are being evacuated, but they don't know how to eat. They don't know how to use cutlery, and they've all got bugs. I think at that point she must have gone right. I'm pushing 50 by this point. I'm not quite sure what's going to go on, because actually in the last war, which I've already lived through, I know that all my clients basically packed up and moved into the Savoy. I need someone to work for.

I'm not ready to retire. I mean, she wouldn't have had much savings anyway. So who can I work for who's going to have a job? And I think she probably looked across at government and went, that bloke there really likes my cooking. I'm writing a letter. So she wrote to Clementine Churchill and basically said, do you want to cook?

And Clementine Churchill clearly thought, oh my God, we can't afford this woman. Our own cook's just gone off. She's just taken off to go live with her daughter. This woman will be amazing. And Winston Churchill knew the power of a dinner party. He knew how to get people into a room and network. And he'd used dinners throughout his career,

whether it was at the Savoy or whether it was at home, in order to forge the networks that he needed as a politician. And he was very, very good at doing that. She was a very, very good cook, obviously. So it matched Megan Heaven. And Clementine said she knew that Georgina would be able to make the best of the ration so that everyone, in inverted commons, everyone would be happy.

And that's what happened. So the way it worked was that yes, the Churchill's were rationed. In fact, everyone in the household was rationed. So if you had a household of more than one person, everyone would pool their ration books. So Georgina had, I don't know, seven or eight ration books, which were the Churchill's and the main servants. So she would go along to the registered place and she would pick up meat ration. And it would be the meat ration for everyone. So she brings them all home, looks at them all, and then works out what to cook for the family and also for the servants.

Then there were coupons, which came in a little bit later. So coupons you could choose whether to spaff 12 coupons on a beautiful. beautiful tin of tuna or two coupons on a really crappy tin of something that was maybe not really even fish. And then there were unrationed things. And then there were diplomatic rations and allowances for diplomacy and for diplomatic dinners. And then there's the grey area which everybody went through and everybody always will go through and that wasn't illegal and that wasn't a problem, but slightly different if you were Winston Churchill than if you were Mrs. Smith, you lived in Thetford. And that's the area where it comes to people giving you things and swapping you

things and what you can grow. So if I was to grow my own, you know, I might dig up my front lawn and I might put down some potatoes and lettuces. Well, you know, Churchill has Chartwell, which was mothballed for the war, but it did have quite a large market garden. And he had chequers, which also had its own gardens. And, you know, my friend up the road might say to me, I've got a spare rabbit, because I've been breeding them, shall I swap it for a parsnip? And I might go, great. And Churchill was mates with the king, who used to send him sides of venison on the train from Balmoral. So it's just a question of degree, really. There was certainly no meat shortage. Churchill never even noticed the fact that meat was rationed. You read the stuff that people are eating in number

10 and in the annex to number 10, which was built to housing so that it was slightly more bomb-proof. And it's things like fresh peaches and honey, which obviously come from the beehives at Chartwell and the peaches come from the market garden. Endless fresh eggs, because he got things like schoolchildren who kept flocks of hens were all sending him eggs, each of them with their names on, because Mr. Churchill was winning the war, so here was some fresh eggs. Oh, that's quite sweet. It's really sweet. Everyone else is living on dried eggs.

But I think if you'd asked anybody in the country, and certainly this happened towards the end of the war, if you'd said to them, is this fair, then of course it is, this man is winning the war for us, this man is stopping us being invaded by Hitler. And therefore we owe him. So we're going to send him our fresh eggs, and we're going to send him gifts of raisins.

I mean, gifts poured in throughout the whole war, and of course things were America, so he'd get crates of oranges that had come across on the US Air Force. My times have changed. Yes. And then after the war, when rationing got worse, you know, 19946 bread and potatoes went on the ration for the first time, which hadn't been ration during the war. But after the war, the Americans pulled out of the lease-lend agreements

and they stopped supplying us with cool things like spam because there was this idea that the defeated nations needed to be fed and not fall into poverty, which is quite right, because one of the problems after the First World War was that actually defeated nations were treated so badly. They then reacted against it. And there's a sort of statter around Vienna, which is that the average calories that people could access per day was 700 calories a day in the aftermath of the war. So at that point, it was like, you know what, Britain's, you've got enough calories. You're getting 3,000 calories a day, even if you don't like it because it's mainly potatoes. These people are starving to death. We don't want them to revolt. So at that point,

a lot of British aid, or lots of American aid, went to rebuilding Germany, rebuilding Austria. And you had a lot of people moaning in their diary saying, we have won the war. Why is it that we're worse off now? And that was certainly a really true feeling. So after, the war, rationing was felt a little more by Churchill, but then people started just sending him gifts saying, oh my God, you saved us. Here, have some raisins. And you could sponsor parcels to be sent to people. If you were an American, you could pay money and have a parcel made up and it would be sent to a starving English person. And sometimes that starving English person was Winston Churchill. But lots of people wrote and said, we owe you this. We're

prepared to go without because you saved us and therefore please have this food. And there is a real sense of gratitude, but there's also a sense of the fact that he couldn't turn anything down. So he got his fingers slapped when he was in Downing Street for never saying no to a gift because it caused quite a lot of embarrassment at various points. I bet. You want some dodgy ground there, as we have discovered of recent years, is accepting gifts?

It is, but there's a sense that there wasn't anything he wouldn't accept. During the war, he was told round to stop accepting cigars because there was a point where people suspected he might get poisoned by dodgy cigars. You know, it would be very easy. That's a fair point. Really easy for a Nazi agent to put cyanide in a cigar, send it to Churchill

because he chewed the ends as well, so he would have pulled that in. But then they started saying, well, we'll test them. We'll give them to some dogs to smoke. Give them to a poor person. Well, that was what they came up with as a solution. And I'll be fair to Churchill. He said, look, if I'm not allowed to smoke, I don't think it's fair to give them to a convalescent home full of soldiers.

So they just got sent back. Because you're reading it, and it's such a farce. There's this amazing pit with a stilton that got sent down from Manchester, and Churchill obviously accepted it. And then the storekeeper who gave it to him put a sign in the window saying, Stilton, as enjoyed by Mr Churchill. And someone wrote to Downing Street, went, hang on a minute, like no one's got any cheese. This is not fair.

So they dispatched this kind of crack team up to Manchester to go find out what was going on with his cheese. And then the building got bombed, so no one found out what was going on with the cheese. But after that, he was told, stop accepting random gifts of cheese. They didn't, because there's a brilliant bit with one of the secretaries right at the end of the war. the day is coming very, very soon. Everyone knows it's over and she just spends the whole day just carving up bits of Stilton to give to people. And it's just this endless, Stilton-induced nightmare in Downing Street.

It's a cheese fog. It was just, I was like, yeah, Stilton. Strangely, that's the symbol of the book, Stilton. I love that. We should keep talking about Churchill, I should mean. So she's got no shortage of ingredients to work with. No, not really. I mean, she does in that ingredients are rationed

and also, as Clementine said, they needed to be seen to be adhering to it as well, because it wasn't fair otherwise. Follow the spirit of the rules. They were within the rules, absolutely within the rules. And Georgina always said, you know, anyone could have come down at any point and said to her, I need to weigh your butter to check you haven't got too much. And she was really moral, but corners were cut, the portions were small.

There were all sorts of things. So Chetcher wanted to use the dining room at Downing Street an awful lot, but obviously kept getting bombed. So they used to cook in the annex, which is over the road, which is now the first floor of the Treasury building. So her kitchen was actually where the ladies' loo is now. they'd make these stews and then she'd be driven round it's only 100 yards but she'd be driven around carrying stews wrapped in shawls to unload them at Downing Street

because they wanted to use that dining room to prove that they were undefeated and they were not going to be defeated by Hitler and the kitchen was bombed at one point as well at Downing Street when she was cooking in it I'll put a damperer on it well and ruin the pudding according to her so it's the only bit where she appears in Churchill's memoir

and it's brilliant because he tells the story of the bombs are about to fall the sirens are going he marches majesterely down to the kitchen and there's the cook toiling among her pans and he says, Mrs. Landemar, you must go to the shelter. So she goes to the shelter and they come back up and the kitchen is a bomb, literal bomb site. There's rubble everywhere and he has saved her life

and he even says he had a premonition from the heavens or something. And she told the story much later. She was interviewed by Jane Beacquil. And she just goes, yeah, I was making a pudding. Couldn't turn it out. And Jane Beacour's going, hang on, the bombs are falling and you didn't want to leave your pudding. And she's going, no, well, you couldn't really.

It was like a souffle. And she comes up and she's like, there's rubble everywhere. awful. But I have cooked the pudding and it's a really nice pudding and I can sort of see, you know, you get a bit blazze after a while, bombs going on, but this thing's rising. You probably would, wouldn't you? Was she like friendly with the Churchill family? No, she was, I think once you've lived through four or five years of bombs falling and really nasty warfare and stress at this incredibly high level, you come out of that and you either hate each other or you're bonded for life. So by the end of it, she was known as

Mrs. Marr, she was very, very good friends of Mary Churchill, the Churchill's youngest daughter, later Mary Somes, who she talked to cook and gave her one of Paul Andamar's cookery books to teacher. So it was always a servant and employer relationship. So when she finally left largely through ill health, she was given the pension by the Churchill's that never rose, despite the fact that interest rates and everything else did, but it was £2 a year, all the way from 1956 to 1978, that's fine, and the state pension went up quite a lot in that time. So it was an employer-employee relationship, but on the other hand, after Churchill's death in particular, Clementine Churchill used to drive over to Georgina's granny flat where she lived above her daughter's

garage and used to go over and they used to have chocolate cake and watch TV together. So it was as close to relationship as it could be given the period in which they lived and the status with which they had, I would say. And certainly Georgina, she always said that she looked upon her time with Churchill as her war work. And she used to tell a beautiful story and it's in one of the secretary's diaries as well where there's sort of infamous occasion when Churchill's on the balcony giving his Vee-Day speech and everyone's sort of screaming and crying and all the rest of it. And he turned away from that balcony to go back inside, you know, massive congratulations, Mr. Churchill.

And she'd just come up from the kitchen just in time to hear the end of the speech because inevitably she was cooking. And apparently he broke away from the people surrounding him and came rushing over to her and shook her hand, and said, I could not have done this without you. Oh. And that's a lovely thing. You know, you think for all his faults, that is a very human, very noble thing to do, actually, in some ways. At that moment in particular, when he must have been on our... high because he's just given this speech and the whole thing is finally over.

And she talked about having a number of occasions where he would show the humanity, I think. Picture on the wall where he'd point at them and say, I saw those boys go off and they didn't come back. So she saw the stress that he was under and I think became very, very attached to the family. So she kept cooking for them until 1956, well into her 70s. And that bond was very, very strong. My final question to you, although I could talk to her for forever and ever, is what happened to her? She retired and then she just spent her retirement eating.

chocolate cake. She was forced into retirement. She really didn't want to retire, but she had diverticulosis, she put on loads of weight, she went on holiday, you know, and there are letters from Winston Churchill to Clementine saying, well, Mrs. Landemarle has just been on holiday, and I hope it's done of some good, she's been away for nine days, and so she sort of got forced to retire through ill health, and then the cook that replaced her wasn't very good and used bovril in the gravy, so Georgina kept having to come back and the kind of cater occasions, and of course Churchill got kicked out office in 45, because basically the nation wanted the beverage report to be enacted well and good NHS and welfare states to be put in place.

And I think always that Churchill was associated with the war, everybody wanted to change, bring on the new. They always blamed it on returning soldiers. But then he came back into office in 1951, so she came back with him and she loved it because she came back and everyone was like, Georgina Landemort. Oh, Mrs. Landemar, you're back. And you know her grandchildren, you just come visit,

and they kind of go around the house. And she was respected, and all the children of the people she'd cooked for in this very long career. used to come down to the kitchen and say, oh, hi, how are you? And it's all lovely. So she retired, bummed around for a bit, so it had been really quite unhappy. She lived with her brother for a while. He'd trained his parrot to shout at her apparently. And then she ended up living above her daughter and son-in-law's house in Stanmore. It was quite a tense relationship with her daughter. So her son-in-law was very staunchly labour, as was her daughter by this point. So there's a very awkward occasion when Clementine Churchill rang up and said, I've got this spare TV. Do you want it? I've just been given it because it was a programme back.

Churchill on TV. She said, I've got a colour TV, I'll bring it over. And Georgine said, brilliant, brilliant, OK, yeah, and went downstairs and sort of said, oh, this TV's coming. And her daughter went, oh, do you think maybe you should wait like a week? Because this is like the Labour Party HQ. So the entire house is red. Just saying, awkward. And Georgina became very right wing. She was very staunchly pro-Churchal and pro-Torri. Politically, they were quite at odds. And also, because she'd worked the whole way through Yvonne's childhood, Avon had largely been brought up by Georgina's own mother. So it was a strange relationship, I think. And then it got to sort of 1978, everyone's dying. And Clementine Churchill was finally dying by this point as well. Again,

a very, very long life. And she sent her last Christmas cards and then died. So Georgina got a Christmas card from Clementine Churchill after knowing that Clementine Churchill was already dead. And her granddaughter said that she was in the old people saying by this point that Georgina had been put in and she just watched her cry. Georgina's daughter was by now dying of breast cancer. Her son-in-law was very ill as well. And it was a really horrible, unhappy time. She'd gone into an old people's home because she had cataract. She was still bright as a button, but frail. And then she died in 1978, sorry, 1977 when Clementine died, really of old age. She was 96, by that point. So, a good long life. And I think no regrets as well. She would tell certain selected stories over Sherry

and have all of the nurses in stitches. So I think it's one of those things where you think this is a very long life, well-lived, but one that really went under the radar. Because she didn't write her memoir, she didn't publish the memoir. And people by that point were being very dismissive of domestic service. This was the era of upstairs, downstairs, and reassessing domestic service and all of those misery memoirs that came out at that point, where people wanted to distance themselves from that era. And actually, I think there's so much to celebrate with her life.

And people say to me sometimes, oh, well, servants, they're like slaves, aren't they? Really not? Like, so, so not, that I can't even begin to explain how not so that is. It denies servants' agency in a way that I think is very reductionist. I don't think it is fair to say you're a servant, you do not have agency. Of course you do. You can leave. You can get another job, especially in the 20th century. And now I think we've reassessed that idea and we've come to realize that there's a lot more complexity. Therefore, I was able to write this book kind of thing and do it in a way that showed the nuances of her own life.

Annie, you've just been amazing to talk to again. And if people want to know more about you and your work, and they should, quite frankly, where can they find you? I do have a website, but better is probably Instagram or Twitter, where I'm at Dr. Annie Gray. and the book's Victory in the Kitchen, The Life of Churchill's Cook. It's got a beautiful pink cover, which is the kind of homage to Georgina's kickbook. Until next time, thank you so much, Annie. You're an absolute superstar. Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Annie for joining me again. I have so much fun talking to her.

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