It occurs to me, dear friends, that Angela and I have not yet formally introduced you to our business partner, Churchill. Actually, his name is William Sheffield Churchill, but we have never heard anyone call him anything but Churchill. He is certainly not a “Bill.”
We first met when he was my agent during the time I was living in Tuscany in the late ’70s. His small travel agency was located on a narrow cobblestone street just off Via Guicciardini in Florence. He had moved to Italy from Devon, England, and we became friends. He was world-weary back then, having one of those “how can I possibly do it all” attitudes.
He would put down his telephone when I visited his office and yell out to anyone who would listen, “Travel agent! Just another way of saying shopkeeper for the world.” He was in his early 30s, but he was always old.
Churchill knew the system. He cursed the airlines and charmed them whenever they were in his tiny, two-desk office. He told me he was moving to the States, he didn’t care where. He felt that commissions would be higher in America, and he felt that the traditional, full-service travel agency was on solid ground. He thought the tour operators in England had too much power, and he despaired as he tried to “create order in a country whose citizens prefer chaos.” “To an Italian, a schedule is merely a suggestion,” he would insist.
Churchill and I started talking about opening a business together. His wife worked on reading all of the great classics. My wife would be an integral part of the travel agency I wished to launch when I went back to the States.
Twenty-nine years ago, Churchill and I arrived in Naperville, Ill., for no particular reason. A sea captain, one Joseph Naper, had managed to run his ship aground and discovered the place, so we thought that might be a good omen to launch a cruise business. It has become Chicago’s largest bedroom suburb.
Churchill was opposed to our business model from the start. He felt that cruise- centric firms were great gambles. “One little Titanic, and what kind of business have you got?” he would ask repeatedly.
Churchill works in our Naperville office in a small back room around the corner from Kiersten and Sara’s office. It is furnished in a kind of distressed Victorian style. His wife left him for a Virgin Atlantic pilot eight years ago. At age 72, he still comes to work each day in a tie. He sits at one of those high librarian desks so that he looks down, through his bifocal lenses, on anyone who might solicit his opinion about travel. He looks very much like the maitre d’ in a posh British tearoom.
He has quite a following and is well known at British Airways, his airline of choice.
“I never want my clientele to be flying at 33,000 feet during turbulence without a proper explanation in the King’s English,” he is fond of saying. If Churchill books your trip you will almost certainly be routed through London.
He is also a fan of Abercrombie & Kent and the Orient Express brand. He seems unaware that they are now known as Belmond. He refuses to work by appointment and often has a small line of visitors waiting in the office to speak to him. He walks to Starbucks from time to time, always for tea, never for coffee, and when he comes back to the office it takes about 30 minutes before he stops complaining to our staff about the scones. He is the only person in our Naperville complex who wears a coat and tie to work each day. The only concession he makes to summer is to shed his vest.
Churchill has clients across the country. He has pushed us into serving various elements of an upscale clientele, whether they prefer cruises, escorted tours, or, as Churchill puts it, the only proper way to go anywhere, “bespoke arrangements.” His clients, for the most part, know what “bespoke” means. They have bespoke tailors when business takes them to London. When a client once asked him if he would recommend a Carnival Cruise, he responded “Why yes, if you mean as a gift for one of your servants”.
Churchill longs for the good old days when he could do it all on a slip of paper. Then came the GDSs, the airline-provided computer systems. Now, he is visibly upset whenever he must use the Internet. If his clients could see him cursing under his breath at “the madness of it all … who is to believe any of this drivel?” He only uses the internet when he has to, preferring telephone contact with both clients and his worldwide contacts. He busily takes notes on hand-stitched stationary using a quill pen. He refers to male clients as “Sir” as in “Sir Charles” and Sara says he calls his female clients “My Lady”.
Lately, he has been putting pressure on me to “tell these travel agents that they need to get back to basics.” He agrees with little that I write for Travel Weekly and feels that “like all things lacking a proper foundation, the internet will eventually fail”. He occasionally sniffs snuff a distracting habit that had Kiersten feeling she was sharing offices with a cocaine-addicted consultant. But the that turned out not to be true.
I argue with Churchill from time to time, but always in a gentlemanly manner. The last serious disagreement we had was when he wrote a letter to the President of Crystal Cruises asking that all of his clients with “peerage” be offered some sort of special compensation. He often complains that he spends his days on the phone speaking to suppliers who are “teenagers posing as professionals” and he always mentions how well educated Cunard’s Transatlantic reservations agents were in the 1950’s.
When I am asked when I will give up Churchill and Turen, I always reply that I will sell the day that Churchill decides to step down. For now, he is working on a group tour called “In the Footsteps of Dickens” which he intends to escort in 2021. Last year, he got us a “tea cozy” for Christmas.
He ends almost every work day by walking into Sara and Kiersten’s offices and bidding them “a fond farewell”. He then clicks his walking stick, heads to the door, muttering something about “what an absolutely ridiculous way to earn a living.”
