While accompanying Winston Churchill as confidential assistant on every foreign trip he made as Prime Minister during four years, 1941-45, of the Second World War, the shorthand writer Patrick Kinna met most of the key Allied figures, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Joseph Stalin.

In addition to Pitman shorthand speeds of 150 words per minute, Kinna had a useful facility for taking dictation straight on to a manual typewriter at 50 words per minute. In the rather cramped bathroom at Chartwell Churchill would dictate to him from his bath, while Kinna typed in the only other place there was to sit, on top of the lavatory seat, with the typewriter on his knee. The typescript would be ready for the Prime Minister by the time his valet had towelled him dry.

Patrick Francis Kinna was born in 1913, the eighth child of Captain Thomnas Kinna, who as a boy had met Napoleon III when serving as an acolyte in the Catholic Church at Eltham, and was subsequently decorated for his part in the relief of Ladysmith.

A member of the Territorial Army Supplementary Reserve at the outbreak of war in 1939, Patrick Kinna was soon singled out for his secretarial skills and a facility in French, which led to him being sent almost at once to Paris as a member of the War Cabinet secretariat. There the 26-year-old dealt with correspondence between the French Government and the War Cabinet in London.

Escaping back to Britain as the French government capitulated in June 1940, he was assigned to be part of a highly delicate mission to the US, and in January 1941 found himself crossing the Atlantic at the same time as the new British Ambassador to the US, Lord Halifax, in the battleship King George V. Under the guise of a British food mission, Kinna and his companions were secretly to organise a joint staff operation in Washington, ready to work with London if and when the Americans came into the war: an arrangement that would have caused an uproar in the American press if it had leaked out at the time.

Kinna’s discretion and his commitment as part of this mission so impressed his superiors that a few weeks after his return to Britain he was briefed on another significant undertaking, this time a trip to Newfoundland, where Churchill and Roosevelt were to meet for the first time in August 1941.

Kinna was to accompany Churchill on board the battleship Prince of Wales, where he typed up the Atlantic Charter, the famous bipartite declaration of common principles that was to form the basis for peaceful relations in the postwar world.

On the second morning at sea, Kinna was summoned for the first time to the Prime Minister’s cabin, where he found Churchill lying on his bed. As Kinna related later: “He said ‘Sit’, so I sat, and suddenly some whistling started.

“Mr Churchill said: ‘Go and tell those sailors to stop whistling’. I had a good idea what sailors in wartime would tell me to do if I asked them any such thing. But I went out, saying a quick prayer, and by a miracle the whistling just stopped. I came back, still feeling very nervous, and Mr Churchill started dictating. Suddenly he said: ‘This is a melancholy story’. I said: ‘Oh yes, sir’. And he said: ‘No, take it down, you silly boy, I’m dictating’.”

After this inauspicious start their relationship improved to the extent that Churchill’s principal private secretary was instructed to take Kinna on to the Prime Minister’s personal staff at Downing Street as a confidential assistant. The unworldly Kinna hesitated. “Anyone else would have been thrilled,” he said, “but I didn’t know that I wanted to be in Downing Street for the whole war, so I asked the PPS if I could have time to think, and two days later told him I had decided against it. The PPS had restrained himself until then, but now he told me that this was the nearest thing to a royal command I was ever going to get. If the Prime Minister wanted me on his staff, then I started on Monday. So I did.”

As Charles Mott-Radclyffe, MP, was to recall, Kinna shadowed Churchill everywhere, “taking down almost every sentence uttered from some discreet place of vantage, within hearing but out of sight”. Kinna’s discretion and moral and physical courage, his courtesy, sense of humour, modesty and instinct for diplomacy, were exceptional, as was his capacity for work. He had only an occasional day off in four years, and Churchill, who had no conception of the meaning of unsocial hours, arranged for him to sleep in an adjoining room on foreign trips, to be on hand if a need arose for dictation in the small hours.

No one but an unswerving admirer of the Prime Minister would have lasted the course. “I think Mr Churchill was a most wonderful beast,” Kinna said later. “I can’t fault him in any way, and I thank heaven we had him in the war.”