Tale of an Upstairs Maid

Maryland McCormick, wife of the Chicago Tribune's Publisher Robert Rutherford McCormick and writer of a weekly column for the Trib and Washington's Post and Times-Herald, had what seemed like a stroke of bad luck. Laid up with bronchitis, she could not get around to scout up subjects for her column, passed the time talking to her upstairs maid, who has worked in the household for more than 30 years. The result was a lively column about Prime Minister Churchill, when he was the house guest of Anglophobe Colonel McCormick 25 years ago.

Churchill's entourage, the maid recalled, consisted of a male secretary and a valet-bodyguard. Since Churchill had a bad cold, the valet instructed the maid to get two dozen handkerchiefs, each a yard square and imported from the British Isles. Wrote the colonel's lady: "Churchill was really a demigod to this fellow . . . This cocky detective said that Mr. Churchill had the mind of the century and there was nothing that he did not know or could not understand."

Every day Churchill was up at 11, ate a large breakfast washed down with sherry, had a massage, started on Martinis at 1, and capped them with "a bounteous lunch" at 1:30, drank cocktails or sherry from 5 until dinner at 8, "lots of champagne at dinner," then brandy, and worked until 3 or 4 a.m. Wrote Columnist McCormick: "The colonel is a fair trencherman himself, but the Englishman's capacity amazed him."

Mrs. McCormick reflected that "much water has run over the dam since then. The colonel's ideas . . . are far different from those of his former guest . . . But are their ideas so far apart? If Churchill were in the service of our Government, would he not be called an isolationist?"

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