Dan Snow's History Hit - Churchill's Cook

Episode Date: February 23, 2020

Annie Gray is a wonderful historian and broadcaster. Her latest project is a biography of the woman who cooked for Churchill. Georgina Landemare was one of the few people able to cope with the demands, eccentricities and public nudity that came with working for the Churchills. Where all the other servants came and went fairly rapidly, she remained in the family's service and helped Churchill through the war years, not just feeding him but helping his efforts to lead or cajole by providing sumptuous meals for him, his guests and subordinates.I talked to Annie about what was like being a woman in domestic service in this period as well as the challenges of working for Winston.....

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. Winston Churchill, you may have heard of him. You may have come across him in your studies, in your musings about history. Winston Churchill was a man who liked only the finest things in life. He liked grand houses like Blenheim Palace in which he was born. He liked good food, he liked good cigars, wine, the best company, he liked it all. And that's why this new biography of his longest serving chef is so fascinating. The brilliant Annie Gray, the fantastic food

historian and writer, has written a biography of Georgina Landemar, who was a cook that would tolerate the Churchill family. She put up with them for much longer than most of their other domestic staff. And this book is a wonderful exploration of what Churchill and his wife liked to eat, how they liked to eat it, and how they used food to achieve political and strategic ends. It's really good fun. And you had a good time doing this. It made us convinced that we need to do some cooking in an actual kitchen next time, do some historical cooking. So watch this space. You can watch so many of our interviews, so many of our other programs on History Hit TV. It's the world's best digital history channel.

Go and check it out. If you use the code POD6, P-O-D-6, as you know, exclusive to podcast listeners. You get to listen to all these podcasts without the ads. You get to watch hundreds of documentaries we've got up on there. Please go to historyhit.tv and use the code POD6. Go and check it out. Enjoy. Annie Gray.

Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Love the book. The story that you start with is so tragic. Oh God, isn't it? Tell me about this woman and what her granddaughter found her doing. Her granddaughter, who is still alive and was brilliant when I was writing the book, told me the story of 1977, I it was Eddie the granddaughter would have been I guess in her 30s 40s and she came upstairs to her grandmother's granny flat which was

built over the garage where she lived with her son-in-law and a daughter so Eddie goes upstairs finds her grandmother standing at the sink shredding this set of papers shredding them into tiny little pieces and then pushing them down the plug hole and running water on them. And Eddie said, what are you doing? And her grandmother said, it's my memoir, but nobody wants to read it, nobody at all. Your father says no one's interested in my life. So she was methodically pushing this set of handwritten pages with fountain pens, of course the blue ink was running everywhere, down the sink to get rid of her memoir of her life. And Eddie saved 27 pages of it, which is all that's left. And it covers about the first 13 years of Georgina's life and all of the rest is

somewhere, probably stuck in a fatberg, understand more. And so tell me about Georgina. Who was this old lady and what kind of life had she led? Georgina Landermar was well into her 90s by the time she shredded her memoir, so she'd lived a very, very good life by anybody's standards, but especially by the standards of someone who was a domestic servant to the rich and famous, it's got to be said. She was born in 1882 in Hertfordshire, grew up very much in a rural upbringing, moved to London with her parents because her father was a coachman, went into service, so on, just the path of so many other girls at that point.

But then she married a French chef, she trained herself up, she became a leading society chef in the 1920s and 30s, and then in 1933 she worked for a couple of weekends for Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine. They really adored her cooking cooking but couldn't afford her. And then when war broke out in 1940, so just after the war broke out, Georgina looked around her and realised that life as a jobbing cook, probably in 1940, all those debutante balls and glorious suppers were going to dry up. So she offered her services to Clementine Churchill who accepted and she ended up cooking for the Churchills on and off for about the next 16 years, mainly on. She cooked for them full time for 14 years and she was their longest serving cook. So a remarkable life, really very much at the forefront of what was happening in politics during the Second World War and indeed after

it. So she was in Downing Street during Churchill's premiership? Yes, so she was there from all the way from when he first became Prime Minister right to 1945 when he left office after the Labour Party got elected and she came back with him to Downing Street in 1951 as well when he was re-elected. So her time with him really did coincide with his time as Prime Minister at one of the most pivotal points really in British history. Did he care about food? A lot. He cared about booze a lot as well. I would suggest that his girth, which was not insubstantial, was more about what he drank than what he ate. But he loved food. I would say he

wasn't particularly or necessarily as discerning as his wife. Clementine was the one who was the gourmet, the really picky one who knew superb food and knew exactly how to cook it as well. Winston was an Edwardian aristocrat though and like any man of his class he knew about food, he liked to consume a lot of it, he liked things that were glorious, rich, gorgeously well cooked and the best of everything. But more than that as well he used food and especially dinner party food as a tool for diplomacy. So for him the food was important but everything around the food was even more important. It would be unthinkable to put on a bad dinner because no one would come again

and especially at the point in the 1930s when Georgina first started cooking for him when he was in what's known as his wilderness years, those were the years when he was putting together alliances, colluding with people, inviting his cronies and sometimes people who disagreed with him as well down to Chartwell to host these extraordinary weekends where everyone would get together and argue and debate and put together policy really over the dinner table. So the food was absolutely vital and during the war it became even more important because

that was a time of rationing. So if you knew you could go over to Winston Churchill's house and have a really good dinner, and that meant you'd be inveigled into discussing policy, well, it was worth it for the quail. So are you suggesting that Winston Churchill didn't have to obey the laws of rationing during the war? He had to obey the laws of rationing on paper, in the same way that everybody had to obey the laws of rationing on paper.

But just as Mr and Mrs Smith living out in Royston would have rabbits and perhaps keep a pig and their own hens and grow their own and also ask their friends for various things they were growing so Churchill had the same kind of networks it's just that where Mr and Mrs Smith in Royston have a small vegetable garden and grow a few carrots Winston Churchill had Chartwell which was a large country estate, and checkers. And where Mr and Mrs Smith are being perhaps given, I don't know, a couple of sausages from their friend's pig, Winston Churchill is being sent sides of venison from Balmoral, from the king. So his access to things beyond the ration was very, very large. And in addition

to that, there were also diplomatic coupons and diplomatic points as well. So he was genuinely entitled to extra stuff. And he got sent gifts. So all sorts of things on one occasion, a primary school full of children all sent him an egg each from their hens, all with their names on. So they all got sent a signed book back again and he had 24 eggs. So before we keep talking about him, let's talk more about Georgina. What was her life like? What sort of conditions was she working under? let's talk more about Georgina. What was her life like? What conditions was she working under? Let's talk about the war years.

The war years were, I think, very, very stressful, obviously for everybody who lived through them, regardless of whether or not they were working at Downing Street, because death surrounded people, there were bombs falling, all the usual things that go into the war. For her, it was doubly difficult, because Winston and Clementine Churchill were just, they weren't brilliant employers. He was known for his erratic hours and for being very, very demanding on his staff, all of them, secretaries and domestic staff.

And Clementine lived on her nerves so she was frequently frayed, very, very stressed and prone to sort of outbursts. So as employers they'd already lost a lot of servants leading up to this point and after the war they became blacklisted by pretty much every employment agency in London. So they weren't fantastic to work for. On the other hand if like Georgina you worked for them and you got on with them then it was fantastic. So she was very very loyal to them and she did get on with them. She lived at Downing Street in the rooms above the main house, there still are rooms in the attic. But the family then had an extra bit built for them, what became known as the Downing Street Annex after bombs fell in the back garden and smashed through the kitchen. So

she also probably had rooms in the annex. So kind of shuttling between two sites. They also regularly went to Chequers, so she would shuttle as well over to Chequers to go and cook. So three sites. Anywhere they were visiting she might go with them but usually not and the food had to be cooked in the Downing Street kitchen in the kitchen at the annex. Churchill would then change his mind as to where he was dining so if the food had been cooked one place it would have to get to the other place so that the car would be brought round and she'd get in the back with the food wrapped in shawls and be driven to the next they're not very far away but far enough away that if you've got an enormous pot of stew it's a little problematic in the blackout with rubble everywhere so they were onerous conditions and she didn't

have much help either she had one kitchen maid possibly two kitchen mates to turn out meals not just for winston and clementine churchill but also for their daughter when she was visiting she was stationed in hyde park that that's Mary Soames as became. Then they've got their other children who popped in. Plus you've got any visiting dignitaries. The Churchill's entertained pretty much every night. And then the King would come over on Tuesdays for lunch as well. So she's really having to cater everything from her breakfast,

which is usually porridge, peaches, honey, toast, eggs, not very rationed, all the way up to quite interesting and quite illustrious banquets. And what sources have you got? Because you don't have the autobiography. Are there interviews with her? Are there accounts that she left? Or are there menus left in the archives? How do you get to grips with Georgina? An awful lot of very small sources, would say it really was sort of CSI history this one I naively went into it thinking oh there'll be loads you wrote for Churchill there's an enormous archive in Cambridge it'll be dead easy not really the archive tends to

privilege documents which I suspect that Churchill's thought would be interesting to future historians so it tends to be things like speeches written out in triplicate with changes and then typed up so you've got every single word of every single speech but you don't have the menu books that would have been there that should survive so there's a there are gaps in the archive which I think are interesting in and of themselves so for Georgina's life with the Churchills there's a couple of menu books there's one from 1937 which is fantastic because you can see their normal cook's writing which is very unformed and you can see what the cook is cooking which is baked beans on toast and steak and kidney pudding and quite sort of plebeian English dishes

and all of a sudden Georgina will appear for a weekend with this glorious flowing copper plate and it will be oeufs et carlates and gigot d'agneau and everything in French and then she'll disappear again and you'll have unrelenting kind of British dishes. There are then some many books for the post-war period so you've got menu books for the servants and a few for the household but it's quite difficult to compare because they don't always join up and also one of them is written partly in German which was slightly confusing when I found it but it turns out they employed Austrian and Swiss au pairs as one does when one doesn't have any money it appears. Then you've got some anecdotal

evidence from people that went to Downing Street and ate with Georgina so there are various politicians or dignitaries that visit church and then say we had this for dinner. Mary Soames's diaries they are a joy an absolute joy to read she was a teenager when the war broke up and joined up and was stationed just opposite Downing Street and her diaries are everything you'd imagine a teenager's diaries to be so it's a real mixture of I'm so depressed the war is awful absolutely terrible to I'm in love and I've just got engaged and it's amazing and I've got an incredible new hat and she does give lists of what she ate both in terms of at the barracks and also when she's with her mother and father so they are they were just one of the most beautiful

sources to read that I can describe and it really is kind of a real mixture of lots of things there are some and ledgers that give supplies so there are some bills and things like that for the army and navy stores but it really is teeny teeny teeny tiny little bits of information that you then have to extrapolate along with the background of her wider life. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

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Well, I think it changed quite a lot over her lifetime and over the time she was with them. She was known to the family as Mrs. Marr, rather than Mrs. Landermar, and that was a sort of, for the time, a relatively cosy, honorific that was given to her. And people would go down to the kitchen, visiting dignitaries, whoever it was, would go down to the kitchen and thank her for dinner, not least because she'd worked for an awful lot of them in her time as a jobbing cook. The children certainly knew her as a very, very close family retainer. I would hesitate to use the word friend. Eddie, Georgina's granddaughter, certainly thinks that Clementine and Georgina were friends. But of course, there's always that gulf of class between them. So Clementine later on once Churchill had died and even before then

actually used to go and visit Georgina sort of every week or every other week and her car would draw up outside this little house in Stanmore and out she'd get and they'd have tea and chocolate cake together and she'd get back in and drive off but Clementine always had staff with her, she always had a PA with her and there was always that gap between employer and employee. So they were very very close Georgina and Clementine and they were I would say as friendly as it is possible to be when one party is paying the other party's pension and where you've always got that gap of class and education and knowledge but Clementine was a very interesting figure and very lonely I think think, as well, towards the end of her life. And certainly she treated her secretaries almost as quasi-children.

And there were stories of her wandering down in her nightie to go and watch TV with her secretaries and things like that. So those lines did get very, very blurred. We hear about Churchill wandering around in less than a nightie. Oh, yes. No, wandering around in absolutely nothing. I mean, my goodness me, if it wasn't for the fact he was Churchill, he'd probably been arrested and put out somewhere. It's absolutely hilarious. Georgina used to take him his breakfast. So regularly got views of this enormous man sort of running around without any clothes on because he used to have his bath and then wander back to his bedroom. And there are tales of his valet running after him with a towel.

So Winston, sir Winston, put this around you. So, no, she definitely got an eyeful, is all I can say. In terms of the food and the diplomacy, what are some of the... Are you able to identify certain meals, whether great moments with foreign dignitaries or whatever, that Churchill and Georgina worked together to try and create the perfect evening?

There are and there aren't. The menus are scarce. There's a couple of menus from royal luncheons, so when George V came over, there are a few where they are listed and they're certainly muted compared to earlier dinners but they're still all in French and there is no hint that there is much scarcity. Plover's eggs come up, surprising regularity, but then Plover's eggs were not rationed because you weirdly couldn't guarantee the supply of a plover's egg and so those those come up quite a lot along with things like sea kale which was a very Edwardian vegetable that most people in Britain wouldn't have been eating

by that point but would have been growing at Chartwell so would have been quite easy to get hold of. Churchill himself didn't have much of a role in the menu planning. He left most of that to Clementine, who was masterful at putting on a show. So after the Downing Street bomb, they sort of moved the dining room downstairs to what was not a very well-protected bunker, but at least it formed a little bit of protection. And apparently it did look quite like a bunker because it was quite sort of low and there weren't any windows and she had the whole thing decorated with creative use of flowers and a chintzy scheme, was able to set dress this room so that it felt quite cosy. So it was Clementine Churchill that sat down on a daily basis with Georgina and went through the

menu for every single day and would correct, you can see this in some of the earlier menu books, Georgina will write a menu down and Clementine will say actually let's try a shoulder of lamb instead of a leg for example. Clementine also had quite a significant recipe book collection and you can identify just a few of those recipe books from the early ledgers because she will put references in so she'll say GF 287 which once you've stared at it for a while you work out means Ambrose Heath's Good Food page 287. So you can put together a collection of Clementine's books from the notes that she's put in the corner. So very much it was her and Georgina sitting down together to put

together the menu and then Clementine masterminding everything else that went into it. So the wines, the decor, the tablecloth, even the company on occasion, and of course the seating plan, which was very important. When you go into the cabinet war rooms under London you see a little sort of sparse Spartan room that Churchill actually didn't stay in very often. No I think three times. Right so he was usually upstairs with the good food and their nice surroundings. Yes he decided that being in a bunker really wasn't the image he wanted to put across because he needed to be seen to be out there. Also because the annex existed after 1940 it was quite safe, it wasn't quite as safe as the cabinet war rooms but you know the cabinet war rooms wouldn't have survived

the direct hit anyway so it's a kind of a moot point. There is a kitchen at the cabinet war rooms and if you go around it today you'll see some of Georgina's batterie de cuisine there because her granddaughter donated some of it to the Churchill war rooms. So some of the copper pans that you see were Georgina's, there's a wooden tray that she was given either by Churchill or by Frank Sawyers who was Churchill's valet. So there's just a few little reminders of Georgina there. But she probably never cooked in that kitchen or if she did it was a boiled egg or boiling some tea, something like that. You do get a sense of place I think from it because the kitchen upstairs in the annex would have been relatively similar. So it would have had electricity rather than gas which obviously is slightly problematic if there are bombs falling

And it was a very very small space as well There's a ladies loo in the annex now where I suspect the kitchen was and I've been round it banging on the walls trying to Work out where the hollow bits were which slightly shocked the cleaner, I think but Just want to do these things, don't you? And did she accompany, because Churchill was so well-travelled as Prime Minister, unprecedented at the time, did she go with him on any of these trips? No, she didn't. When he went to France to recover after the war,

he tended to take a furnished house with his own staff. And during the war, he was usually being put up by whoever he was visiting. So he'd normally get the train to wherever he was embarking if he was going by sea somewhere she would provide the soup for the voyage he was absolutely addicted to soup it was one of his really big obsessions so she would send thermoses with him of both cold and hot soup so he could have hot soup whenever he wanted to and cold soup he would have before bed every night so it's a cold jellied soup cut up into pieces. It sounds extraordinarily bad, but he found it really helped him to sleep. So that would go with him. But other than that, once he then got on board a ship, it would be catered for by the Navy. And then he'd swap over to whichever ship he was getting to in the middle of the ocean, and then it would be

catered for by the Americans. And when they went to the White House, it was catered by Eleanor Roosevelt's extraordinarily awful cook, Mrs Nesbitt, who was renowned for the just horrific nature of her food. And of course, when they were abroad as well, the English were very, very conscious of the fact they needed to put on a show. There were lots and lots of anecdotes of them eating and then eating again and then eating literally for England because they need to be seen to be these kind of really hardcore heavyweight Brits and Churchill was certainly no exception to that. There are lots of reports of his breakfasts particularly while travelling which don't quite coincide with what he was eating when he was back in the UK so I think there was a level of kind of creating his own image that went out when he was

travelling abroad. And so at the end of it all how close were you able to get to Georgina? Do you know what she made of it all? Were you able to, what she really felt about the Churchills? Yes, no I would say. Her role that she played during the war? Yes to some extent there is an interview with her which is still online actually that the BBC did in the 1970s

with Joan Bakewell when she was in her early 90s and you do get I mean it's just lovely to hear her voice it's very rare as a historian to hear someone, to hear their intonations and to see them and the only point in that interview where she's visibly upset is where she talks about Churchill being put out of office in 1945. Oh it was the soldiers you see, it was the soldiers and you think well it wasn't just the soldiers but you do get this sense of unerring loyalty. She would never tell stories about the Churchills. Very later in life when she was in the geriatric ward after

a few sherrys apparently, she would tell a few stories but not very many. So I think it is possible to get quite close to Georgina. But when I wrote the book I wanted to do more than just tell her story as well anyway. I mean I wanted to look at her because I think she's a fantastic character and one who is overlooked in nearly every book about Churchill and yet she was so crucial that had the Germans invaded she would have been taken away with him, one of only 11 people named in a document in 1940. So she really was a really brilliant figure. But I also wanted to look at domestic service and what it was like to be a servant at a very very high level and as well to chart the course really of 20th century food.

So to some extent where I haven't been able to get to grips with Georgina for example in the early part of her marriage she was married she had children I know the bare bones but there's nothing that survives from that point you can still recreate what it would have been like to be her to a large extent by looking at the stories attached to other people and what we know is happening more generally and the food is endlessly fascinating as well so it's quite a nice thing to have to say well this is this woman's life she's fantastic but also look at these glorious things that surrounded her the food life in service isn't it brilliant to actually put all that together and revalue both a woman but also a type of person I suppose as well did she get any days off yes she did uh she well when she was younger she would have had a half day every two weeks as it. Did she get any days off? Yes, she did. Well, when she was younger,

she would have had a half day every two weeks. As it went over, she would have got more erratic days off because she was working for herself. With the Churchills, she did get a day off, either a half day or a day. I'm not quite sure which one because it's not written down. And she got, as well, holidays. So her family lived in Bristol, her daughter and her grandchildren,

and she would go off and visit them for a couple of weeks a year and also at Christmas, at which point the kitchen maid would have to take over. So yes, she did get holidays. She also took, I think, two weeks off directly after VE Day because everyone was absolutely knackered. So this real sense of, okay great we've won, I just want to sleep. So at that point she took two weeks off as well. She deserved it. And last thing is did she eat well? Yes nearly everybody who talks about her described her as rotund. She put that down to all the cream soups that she was preparing but it turned out that she had a medical condition which was probably why she put on lots of weight and later in life after she'd retired the Churchill

had paid for her to go to Harley Street to see a specialist who put her on lots of weight. And later in life, after she'd retired, the Churchill had paid for her to go to Harley Street to see a specialist who'd put her on lots of pills. And she went to go and see a new NHS doctor. He said, you don't need all of this rubbish. Come off those. And she lost nearly all the weight that she'd put on and became a really sort of quite slender, tiny little white haired old lady.

So, but yes, she certainly did eat well. Well, Annie Gray, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. The book is Victory in the Kitchen. Good luck with it. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money.

Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very,

very grateful. Thank you.