Dan Snow's History Hit - Cooking for Churchill: Georgina Landemare

Episode Date: March 24, 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.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hello my lovely BitTwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair dues 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 we're already into controversial territory, but we're talking about food actually. We're talking about the kind of food that Churchill liked 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 weirder than that, actually. So if you're all right with that, I'm all right with that. Let's do it. Picture the scene, Batricksters. You are in your kitchen. You are serving up, ooh, 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 plebs, 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 Landermeier who was the head of Winston and Clementine Churchill's 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 Churchills and how the hell do you prepare a banquet feast in the middle of an air raid the hell do you prepare a banquet feast in the middle of an air raid? Let's vote ERA! Let's vote now! Let's vote ERA! Let's vote now! Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful times. Goodness has nothing to do with it, does it? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. For the cook Georgina Landemeyer, wartime work was,ime work was 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 has been 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. Hello, welcome back to Betwixt 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 to 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 programs 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 employed in domestic service and most women go through that whether it's just working as a chart 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 biographies 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 what was 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 archive 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 Landemar's life and it was fascinating so the Churchill part of it is kind of partly 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 and I 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. You know, 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 person a lot and you think but most people i think in the street know him as the wartime prime minister they don't realize 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 setup what the big thing you start to realize is that yeah there's churchill like him loathe him 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 mean I would agree with you that you're gonna have a huge team but you've got to have the right team. And you also have to have, you know, things like intelligence and charisma and 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 Landmaier.

Georgina Landmaier. So her husband was French. She was born Georgina Young, so much plainer. OK, Landmaier. Oh, I like it. I like it. 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, 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 bougie 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 eldest of 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 moving with her father as well, who was a coachman. Shuttled a lot between London and Berkshire and then across Wales at one point as well. 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 gloucester road shoe station which is now i think a shopping center 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 her is that most servants worked in small households so you know we think of servants especially victorian edwardian ones and we all think downtown abbey or big country houses or national trust but actually 75 percent 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 her

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 were wealthy enough you wanted a French male cook and that was it you know 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 a 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 a bit 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 as 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 maid at that point,

so mainly cleaning, plucking. She kept a memoir, the old Georgina, which I was very excited by when I discovered it, when I found it. 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 molds and

she remembered cleaning tiny copper molds 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 scrubbing things, cleaning things, gutting things, plucking things. Breaking up ice would probably have been one of her tasks to set ice creams 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. 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 1901, 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 her way slightly further up. So by then she was a kitchen maid so doing lots more cooking and the normal way 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. DeSalas 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, she would take a tongue, boil the tongue, push the tongue through a sieve to make tongue puree, mix the tongue puree with a bit of food colouring to booze it up a bit, add in some gelatin and maybe

some more sauces 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 demould it and then you serve it on a bed of, you know, something green. By the time you finish, you're like, how do I know? I've got no idea what this is. It's why you needed written menus by that point because there was absolutely no way you could guess what anything was. And it took ages. This sounds like some nightmare from the 70s. All that salads in aspic 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 aspics 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 the 70s where everything that can 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 doesn't taste very good either and is very, very boingy and most people's worst nightmare. But in the Victorian and Edwardian period, that dish would have been genuinely very good, even if you would also have suffered gout a lot because, yeah. Wow.

Okay, so she's worked her way up to senior cook making jellies and mousses 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 recherche food which is 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 and 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 blowing in the kitchen 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 but in cook you'll get mainly pictures of women it is very gendered 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 fallen to 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 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 highfalutin 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 and, 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 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 level 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 staff of 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 jobbing 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, 1890s, 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 Britishish 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 patnell 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 our 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 recherche 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. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Would it have 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 legitimizing 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 we'll move swiftly past that one then oh yeah she was younger than his daughter anyway but all is shown left

home by this point it's all gone a bit leonardo dicaprio hasn't it well it's very victorian whenever you read victorian romance novels there's always some older man who's quite clearly revolting and hoary and then this sort of 18 year old nubile 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 marcel 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 assuming he wasn't firing blanks by that point you know he had had quite a few before so he was clearly quite virile but whether they were using contraception whether he was getting older whether they didn't want children whatever they only had

one surviving daughter and they seem 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 be 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 his enormous moustache and then two completely random people who presumably

are their assistants 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 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 her 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 1932, 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, Kate. 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 jobbing 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. Women are much more accepted as leading society chefs by now. So she started cooking for the Churchills for the first time, I think 1933. And by this point, she was cooking for loads of people in their 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 Dieppe 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, are 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 cater 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 so 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 setup this 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 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, from 1936-37, and it's a beautiful document because you've got this very unformed almost school child 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 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 food 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 plovers 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 baked 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 you've white fish and green vegetables and you can have some rye vitas 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 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 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 bet him he 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 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 swigging 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 who'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 exiting 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 gonna 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 made in heaven and clementine said she knew that georgina would be able to make the best of the ration so that everyone in inverted commas everyone would be happy and that's what happened so the way it worked was that yes the churchills were rationed in fact everyone in the household was rationed so if you had a household of more than one person everyone would pull their ration books so georgina had i don't know seven or eight ration books which were the churchills 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 the coupons you could choose whether to spaff 12 coupons on a 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 who 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 chart well. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Which was mothballed for the war, but it did have quite a large market garden.

And he had checkers, which also had its own gardens. And 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 house him 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 are 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 said to them is this fair they'd have gone 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 from America. So he'd get crates of oranges that had come across on the US Air Force. My, how times have changed. Yes. And then after the war, when rationing got worse, you know, 1946, bread and potatoes went on the ration for the first time,

which hadn't been rationed during the war. But the war the americans pulled out of the lease lend agreements 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 stat 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 3000 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 a lot of American aid went to rebuilding Germany rebuilding Austria and you had a lot of people moaning in their diaries 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 i mean you're on 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 roundly to stop accepting cigars because there was a point where people suspected he might get poisoned by dodgy cigars um you know it'd be very easy that's a fair point really easy for a nazi agent to put cyanide in a cigar send it to church 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 church and he said look if i'm not allowed to smoke them 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 pic 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 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, that's the symbol of the book, Stilton. I love that. We should keep talking about Georgiana. 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 Georgiana always said 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 as well you know so church wanted to use the dining room at downing street an awful lot but obviously it 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 around it's only 100 yards but she'd be driven around like 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.

That'll put a dampener 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, you know, the bombs are about to fall, the sirens are going. He marches magisterially down to the kitchen and there's the cook toiling among her pans. And he says, Mrs. Landemar, you must go to the the shelter so she goes to the shelter and they come back up but 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 bakewell and she just goes yeah i was making a pudding couldn't turn it out and jane bake was 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's like a souffle and she comes up she's like there's rubble everywhere it's awful but i have cooked the pudding and it is a really nice pudding and i can sort of see you know you get a bit blasé after a while the bombs going on but this thing's rising oh 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 with Mary Churchill the Churchill's youngest daughter later Mary Soames who she taught to cook and gave her one of Paul and Marr's cookery books to teach her. 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 Churchills 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. 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 a relationship as it could be given the period in which they lived and the status with which they had I would say 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 an infamous occasion when Churchill's on the balcony giving his V-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. 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. 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 a 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, pictures 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 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 you 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, Mrs Landemar has just been on holiday and I hope

it's done us 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 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 state to be put in place and i think always 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 landemar oh

mrs landemar you're back and you was like, Georgina Landemar. Oh, Mrs. Landemar, you're back. And, you know, her grandchildren used to come visit and they'd 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, sort of being really quite unhappy. She lived with her brother for a while. He trained his parrot to shout at her, apparently 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 labor 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 program about churchill on tv she said i've got a color tv i'll bring it over and georgina brilliant brilliant aka 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-churchill and pro-taurian politically they were quite at odds and also because she'd worked the whole way through Yvonne's childhood, Yvonne had largely been brought up by Georgina's own mother.

So it was a strange relationship, I think. And then it got to 1978 and 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's home

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 cataracts. She was still bright as a button, but frail. And 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 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 servants they're like slaves aren't they uh 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 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 realise 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 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 beautiful pink cover which is the kind of homage to georgina's kickback until next time thank you so much annie you're an absolute superstar superstar.

Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Annie for joining me again. I have so much fun talking to her. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if there's something that you desperately want us to look into, if you have a burning question, or if you just want to say hello

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