April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 117, Winter 2002-03

Page 18

By Richard M. Langworth

“Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified;
Her loyalty she kept, her love, her zeal.”

Beloved by all Churchills, and the organizations that bear the name, Churchill Centre honorary member Grace Hamblin died at her home in Westerham, Kent on the morning of Tuesday, 15th October, aged 93. Aware she was ailing, I had just sent her some little thing in the post; Carole Kenwright of Chartwell said it arrived in time, and she was able to read from it to Miss Hamblin for a few minutes.

2025 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 42nd International Churchill Conference. Washington, DC | October 9-11, 2025

2025 International Churchill Conference

Grace Hamblin was the longest serving and most loyally devoted of Winston Churchill’s inner circle, arriving at Chartwell in 1932 as an assistant to then-principal private secretary Violet Pearman. She spent virtually her entire career as private secretary, first to Winston and from 1939 to Clementine Churchill. In 1966 she became the first Administrator of Chartwell, serving through 1973. In 1974 she was secretary to the Churchill Centenary Exhibition at Somerset House in London.

She was one of the few around Winston Churchill who refused any opportunity for personal profit out of her long years and inside knowledge, though she was often consulted, most recently by the producers of the HBO/BBC film “The Gathering Storm.” Moreover, she loyally kept her promise to Churchill “never to write,” although we were fortunate to have her as guest of honor at the 1987 Churchill Conference in Dallas, where she delivered one of the warmest personal accounts of life at Chartwell ever heard. First published in our 1987 Proceedings, her words appear again opposite.

Grace was kind and obliging to everyone she met, but there were two kinds of people up with which she would not put: those who questioned or belittled Sir Winston’s achievements, and slapdash admirers who were careless with their facts. To serious searchers for the truth, she was an inspiration to “get it right.” Though she would never accept the suggestion, she was a great woman, a privilege to know, one of the few alive whose Churchill experience dated to the early Wilderness Years.

The messages received at the news of her passing were touching and heartfelt. I could not however help thinking that it was time for her to go: a time when duty, honor and country seem so often to be replaced by irresponsibility, dishonor and nihilism, sacrifice by greed, unity by politics, righteous wrath by pleas for accommodation. Grace Hamblin was alive and sentient and at the center in 1940, the year Churchill said “nothing surpasses”; she could scarcely have understood the world we live in now.

Winston Churchill placed too much trust in certain intimates who took advantage of their relationship in various ways and even helped to create flawed pictures of the man. Grace Hamblin was not one of them.

In the first of his 1935 “Chartwell Bulletins,” sent to his absent wife on 1 January 1935, Winston Churchill recalled in another context Milton’s description of the seraph Abdiel in Paradise. Change the gender and the words apply alike to Grace Hamblin: “Among innumerable false, unmoved; Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified; Her loyalty she kept, her love, her zeal.”