January 1, 1970

Introduced by Richard M. Langworth

Grace Hamblin was a Chartwell secretary from 1932-65 and the first National Trust administrator from 1966-73. More than just a home, she knew Chartwell as Churchill’s chief leisure-time activity: a vast cornucopia of hobbies, from landscaping and bricklaying to painting and a vast array of pets — dogs, cats, goldfish, butterflies, tropical fish, even a budgerigar named ‘Toby’. Whenever they were driving down and approached the property ‘he’d cast everything aside. All the papers would go flying and the car rug on the floor … everything would be pushed aside, ready to leap out. And he’d say, “Ah, Chartwell”.’

She promised Sir Winston she would ‘never write’, and she made only one speech — this one, to the 1987 Churchill conference — full of inside observations that could have come from no one else. In a letter to his absent wife in 1935, Churchill recalled in another context Milton’s Seraph Abdiel in Paradise Lost. Changing only the gender, Milton exactly describes Miss Hamblin: ‘Among innumerable false, unmoved; Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified; Her loyalty she kept, her love, her zeal.’

Read the full article here: ‘Frabjous Days: Chartwell Memories 1932-1965’, by Grace Hamblin Finest Hour 117, Winter 2002-03, scroll to page 18.