Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [4]
The Private Office devised a system whereby Churchill could have everything he needed at his fingertips. That system revolved around the Prime Minister’s traditional locked boxes that went with him—or were brought to him by messenger—wherever he might be: at 10 Downing Street; at Chequers; at his most frequented base, the above-ground secret wartime “Number Ten Annexe” (one floor above the underground Cabinet War Rooms); in the Cabinet War Rooms themselves whenever they were used during an air raid; and during travels throughout Britain and overseas. Churchill devised the arrangement of the boxes himself, a system, John Peck commented, “peculiarly Winston’s own, and it was in a sense the nerve centre of his war effort.” Inside the box, the first set of folders was marked “Top of the Box” and contained those items, covering every aspect of the war effort, considered by the Private Office to be particularly urgent. The next set of folders was labelled “Foreign Office Telegrams”: Churchill liked to follow closely what the ambassadors were sending and what they were being sent. Then came “Service Telegrams,” the exchanges between the three Service Ministers and the principal commanders in the field. Next were “Periodical Returns.” As Peck explained: “He was keenly interested in the development of new equipment. He was also much concerned about the necessity for speed and punctuality in delivery despite bombing, breakdown and other causes of delay.” These Periodical Returns included monthly, weekly and even—where Churchill considered them necessary—daily reports on production, technical developments, manpower, training, tank and aircraft strengths, and much else. They enabled Churchill to make sure, as Peck expressed it, “that there were no disasters due to lack of zeal or direction in the back rooms.”
Also in the daily budget of locked boxes—in addition to the buff-coloured boxes containing Secret Intelligence material and material from the Joint Intelligence Committee, to which Churchill alone had the key—were files on parliamentary questions that Churchill had to answer, letters for signature, a folder marked “To See” with items that his Private Office thought he would be interested in, a special file from General Ismay with reports from the Chiefs of Staff, and a folder of documents that Churchill himself had marked “R Week-end”: things he wanted to be returned to him at the weekend when he would have more time to study them.
Churchill worked through his boxes every morning, before he got out of bed; every evening, often until late into the night if the material in the boxes made such working necessary; and throughout the weekends— generating a stream of Minutes of his own, seeking information. Often he would mark on a document the instruction “Ismay to explain” or “Prof Lindemann to advise” on some statistic; or, on one occasion at least, the single word “elucidate.”
The pressure of work on any British Prime Minister, let alone a wartime Prime Minister, is formidable. (I once spent an evening watching John Major working his way through his boxes in the flat at Downing Street. As soon as he had finished going through one box, with all its challenges and burdens, another was brought up to him, and so on, from