Rose Ethel Kathleen Hill was born in August 1900, the daughter of William Spratt. After training as a shorthand typist, she worked as Chief Clerk for the Automobile Association and Motor Union Insurance Company in Portsmouth, 1917-24, also playing as first violin with the Portsmouth Philharmonic Society, 1918-24. She married George Hill, an Indian Army officer, having [?] one son, who later succeeded to his father’s baronetcy as Sir Richard Hill; she then moved to Calcutta, where she first became a District Commissioner of Girl Guides, Bengal-Nagpur Railway, 1928-30 and then Secretary to the Chief Commissioner of Girl Guides for All-India, 1930-32. Hill had kept up her music as well, and while in India broadcast as a solo violinist from Calcutta, Bombay and Delhi, 1935-36.

She and her husband were divorced in 1936 and Hill returned to Britain, where in July 1937 she became personal secretary to Winston Churchill (actually his first residential secretary at Chartwell, Kent) and from 1939 personal private secretary, a position which she was to retain until 1946. Before the war her duties mainly related to Churchill’s literary work, but she also helped Clementine Churchill, and carried on living at Chartwell until 1939, when the house was closed up for the duration of the war. She received the MBE in 1941 and after Churchill’s election defeat became curator of Chequers, the prime minister’s official country residence, in 1946, remaining in this post until her retirement in 1969. She died in 1992.