Cecily Gemmell

Cecily Gemmell was born in Bangalore, British India, on 25 December 1928. Her father, Colonel Geoffrey Woodburn Gemmell, was a map surveyor in the Indian Army, described by The New York Times as second to the surveyor general, and The Observer recorded him as a surveyor with the Rajput Regiment. Her mother, Winifred Grace Hall, accompanied him on survey trips, and the couple spent a month or two at a time camping in the jungle.

She was named after her father's youngest brother, Cecil, who had been killed in France at the end of the First World War, and she was always known to family and friends by his nickname, Chips. The family returned to England in the summer of 1945.

She was educated at The New School, known as "Harrow on the Hooghly", a school founded in Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the start of the Second World War and later moved to Darjeeling before it disbanded in 1944.

Back in England she studied at Mrs Hoster's Secretarial College, a secretarial school and employment agency long used by the Churchill family. The college had been evacuated to Lincolnshire during the war, where she practised her shorthand on the vicar's Sunday sermons, before it returned to London. She was about to graduate in 1947 when Churchill's office asked for a new secretary.

In the summer of 1947 she was one of three young women sent to be interviewed for Churchill's office. "I looked the toughest, so I was taken," she later said. Her first meeting with Churchill took place at 28 Hyde Park Gate, where he was recovering in bed from a hospital stay.

She began by helping Churchill's literary assistant, Denis Kelly, catalogue the wartime papers at Chartwell for the war memoirs. After several months she was summoned to work with Churchill directly, taking his dictation onto a typewriter beside his bed late at night. Her first transcript was poor and he told her she had not got "one word in 50 right", but on her second attempt he said, "I knew you could do it." She once mistyped the Battle of Britain line as "the field of human conscience", and recalled him almost in tears that she did not know one of the greatest quotations in the world.

The work was relentless. Churchill often dictated until 5am, and secretaries took down his words outside the bathroom or beside him as he laid bricks. Her other duties included walking his dog and washing his paintbrushes. She travelled with him to Monte Carlo, Marrakesh, Lake Como, the Dolomites and Blenheim Palace, and to the racecourses where his horses ran. When he returned as prime minister in 1951 she accompanied him to the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, then moved to work for Clementine Churchill until 1953.

In 1953 she said a final goodbye to Churchill in the Cabinet Room ("I think he kissed me and I practically died on the spot") and moved to New York to work as a secretary at Life magazine. She stayed at Life for nine years and then worked for many years in a similar role at Time Inc. In 1954 she saw Churchill again during his visit to President Eisenhower, and Life's founder Henry Luce gave her a look that suggested she was making the story up when she passed on Churchill's regards.

She lived in Midtown Manhattan for the rest of her life.

A lover of late nights, she became a regular at the jazz clubs near her Midtown apartment. "I never wanted the party to end," she explained, "and the jazz clubs stayed open the latest!" There she met the jazz pianist John Bunch, best known as Tony Bennett's accompanist and a sideman with Benny Goodman. She moved in with him in the spring of 1977, and they married on New Year's Day 1998. Bunch died in 2010. They had no children, and no immediate family survived her.

In later life she worried that Churchill was being remembered as dour or glum, "not at all the man I worked for", according to The Daily Telegraph. She described him as puckish, kind and mischievous, did impressions of his laugh, and remembered her years in his office as full of laughter. She was equally frank that he drove his staff hard and could be furious when work went wrong, though his anger passed quickly. Her loyalty never wavered: "I'd have thrown myself under a bus for the Old Man."

Churchill employed a line of personal secretaries, all but one of them women, stretching back to 1902. At her death Cecily Gemmell was the last of them. Her recollections, recorded for the Churchill Archives Centre in 1986 and for Martin Gilbert's 1992 BBC series Churchill, are among the most vivid first-hand accounts of how Churchill composed his war memoirs and speeches. The Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge holds her oral history interview, and Wesleyan University holds a 1980 recorded interview with her made in New York.

She was a long-standing friend of Chartwell Booksellers in Manhattan and made a cameo appearance in its 2023 video reading of Cita Stelzer's Working with Winston, a book about Churchill's secretaries, released on her 95th birthday.

Churchill painted her portrait, one of the few portraits he made, and gave it to her as a Christmas present at 10 Downing Street. He was so pleased with the surprise that he could not keep it, asking her, "Do you know what you're getting for Christmas? You're going to get your picture." The painting illustrated her obituaries in 2026.

She appeared in interviews for Martin Gilbert's BBC documentary Churchill, broadcast in four parts in 1992, and has an IMDb listing for her documentary appearances.

Cecily Gemmell died in New York City on Thursday 8 October 2026, aged 97. Her caretaker, Mary Pizzarelli, confirmed the death to The New York Times. No cause of death has been made public, and no funeral or burial details have been published.

The New York Times obituary, by Barry Singer, appeared the same day. It had been written in advance from interviews with her, and she had read it. Further obituaries appeared in The Times (12 October), The Daily Telegraph (14 October), The Observer (16 October) and The Economist (29 October), and The Economist's daily podcast The Intelligence discussed her life.