The superb but abrasive proofreader C C Wood worked for the publisher Spottiswoode and Company from 1890, moving to George G. Harrap and Company in 1912, where he became head of the editorial department, retiring in 1940. He first worked with Churchill in the 1930s, proof-reading his four-volume life of the Duke of Marlborough, which was being published by Harrap. Although not the easiest personality, Wood's main virtue, according to another of Churchill's literary assistants, Denis Kelly, was "a ruthless eye for misprints and inconsistencies". He also freely commented on what he considered to be stylistic errors, as well as grammatical ones, and was described by Churchill as “indefatigable, interminable, intolerable”.

When Churchill began work on his memoirs, 'The Second World War', he changed publishers, moving to Cassell and Company Limited in place of Harrap. Initially he did without a professional proofreader, declining Wood's repeated offers of help. However, in 1948, Cassell's published the first volume, 'The Gathering Storm', and given the embarrassing number of typographical errors (Wood described it as "a botch, a disgrace to the printer and publishers alike"), Churchill was obliged to recall him out of retirement. Wood was no easier to work with, rapidly managing to annoy both the rest of Churchill's large literary team of historians and advisers and Cassell's; the publisher told Churchill that he was “altering the sense and wording of many passages”. Yet Churchill recognized Wood's essential proof-reading skills and kept him on; according to Martin Gilbert, he was soon so entrenched that “at Chartwell, the process of proof-reading was known as ‘Wooding’”. While the final volumes of the war memoirs were still being completed in the 1950s, Wood was retained, turning his eagle eye to Churchill’s final work, 'A History of the English-Speaking Peoples'. Irritating to work with he may have been, but Wood was a key figure in Churchill's literary team, and was justly thanked by him in the acknowledgements pages of the books he had helped to craft.