No More Champagne

by David Lough

  When his aunt Leonie questioned the wisdom of writing a novel, Churchill explained it simply:

  Il faut vivre... Finance! Ah I confess I shudder. I do not know whither we are descending. I felt a horrid sordid beast to do what I did, but I had to contemplate the possibility of Mama marrying – perhaps a poor man that I disliked... I have withdrawn the conditions now, but only because I have confidence in my ability to keep myself from squalor by journalism in the ultimate issue... Her silence always makes me pessimistic and forlorn. Indeed the future is very black. I can never afford to go into Politics after the properties are so reduced. Fancy half is spent... Am I extravagant? Perhaps, but consider the scale. £2,000 would pay every farthing I owe in the world and more. I neither race nor drink nor gamble, nor squander my money on concubines and I don’t worry over accounts and small details and hence pay about twice as much as I need for the little pleasure there is in this cross-grained existence.6

  By the time he dispatched the novel’s first ten chapters to his mother in mid-May, Churchill’s spirits had begun to recover. To save an agent’s commission, he wanted Jennie to sell the book directly to Longman, although she was to accept nothing ‘less than £100 down and all rights reserved’.7 He planned to leave India in the middle of June, drop his ‘native servant and campaigning kit’ on the way in Cairo and spend three weeks in England, before setting off back to the Nile on 20 July. Before he left, he would settle his Indian debts by selling his polo ponies and reclaiming a loan that he had made to Hugo Baring. Baring had been forced to leave the Hussars because, as Churchill pointedly explained to his mother, ‘his father only left him two hundred a year’.8 Churchill’s unpaid bills in London were now more than £1,000, but only two, he maintained, were ‘pressing’. The rest would have to wait.*2

  The England to which Churchill returned was changing only slowly, especially the City where Jack had just started work as a private secretary to his grandmother’s neighbour Sir Ernest Cassel. The stock exchange boasted a hat-rack one-eighth of a mile long to accommodate its 4,000 male members. A leading merchant bank, Kleinwort, had surrounded its sole female employee with a screen to placate a partner who had agreed to her employment only on condition that he never had to set eyes on her. Its rival, Schroder, had just installed its first telephone, on the condition that its number remained ex-directory, lest incoming calls distract the staff from their work.9

  Outside London Churchill tested his political ambitions by addressing two public meetings, but he also spent time in the City dealing with the fall-out from his mother’s financial difficulties. As he had feared, Lumley announced that Jennie would no longer be able to afford to pay either Winston’s or Jack’s allowances, suggesting instead that Winston should borrow against his future inheritances to fund their living expenses for the next three years. Life insurance companies, Lumley explained, made it their business to lend against ‘reversionary’ interests, such as his expectations from his grandfather’s and father’s estate once both his grandmother and mother had died; although they would insist that the risk of Winston dying before them was covered by life insurance on top of interest charges.

  Lumley expected Churchill to be able to raise the full £3,500 that he needed to pay off all his bills and to fund three years’ living expenses, but Norwich Union would not lend more than £2,000 without guarantors for the balance. Unenthusiastic about the loan, Churchill gladly abandoned his search for backers to deal with the unwelcome news that General Kitchener had reversed Churchill’s appointment in the Sudan in favour of a rival correspondent.

  Churchill was not to be beaten. He marshalled the combined forces of the prime minister Lord Salisbury, Lady St Helier and her friend the adjutant general, before the death of a subaltern allowed his supernumerary appointment to the 21st Lancers, one of the two British regiments attached to the force. ‘It is understood that you will proceed at your own expense,’ the War Office’s letter stated, ‘and that in the event of your being killed or wounded in the impending operations, or for any other reason, no charge of any kind will fall upon British army funds.’10

  Churchill redrafted his will, arranged a series of war dispatches with The Morning Post at £10 a time11 and instructed his mother to sell the resulting book to Longman. Then he set off three days later, handing his mother a script to use in case he was recalled:

  Arguments: 1. I have spent on the Egyptian business. Chargers 70 Telegrams 20 Ticket 20 Servant from India 20 Kit 30 Total 160. If forfeited – a heavy pecuniary fine. & poor. 2. Failing Egypt, you are afraid that I shall leave. I shall... 12

  The sea voyage between Marseilles and Cairo provided the time Churchill needed to resume his search for loan guarantors. Churchill explained the background of Jennie’s scheme, to his cousin, the duke of Marlborough, in a letter, which he sent on arrival at Luxor.

  You are acquainted with the state of my mother’s finances... The arrangement was based on the understanding that I should forthwith raise a fresh loan – sufficient to pay my own allowance of £500 per annum and an allowance of £200 to Jack – for three years; my mother’s income being so much reduced by the interest and premium of her loan that she could no longer afford to make these payments... You ask ‘why three years?’ The idea is that in three years the Duchess*3 will perhaps have died and the funds accruing to my mother at her death will enable her to resume the payment of my allowance. The financial unsoundness of this arrangement – based as it is on an uncertainty – hardly a probability – will no doubt strike you.13

  He also wrote to Jennie, complaining that she had failed to send the promised money to await him in Cairo: ‘I have to pay £40 for one charger, £35 for the other & £20 subs to the mess. I am settling these by cheque and I trust you will arrange that Cox & Co. meet the amounts.’14

  By mid-August Churchill’s squadron was marching down the west bank of the Nile towards Khartoum. ‘Within the next ten days there will be a general action – perhaps a very severe one,’ he warned his mother. ‘I may be killed. I do not think so...’15 When battle was joined at Omdurman on 2 September, the 21st Lancers lost twenty men, while fifty were wounded in a short skirmish on the flank. It turned out to be the British cavalry’s last charge and was described by Churchill in a cable to The Morning Post.

  By the middle of October Churchill was back at Jennie’s London home, once more short of money. Only The Morning Post’s cheque for his fifteen letters saved him from having to accept the loan offered by his uncle. ‘When I look ahead, I see difficulties and am filled with apprehension, but more on my mother’s account than on my own,’ he told his uncle Moreton Frewen. ‘But I have not extravagant tastes, only creature comforts, and I am v[er]y conscious of my ability to earn my bread if need be.’16

  Jennie had failed to persuade Longman to pay an advance for Churchill’s novel Savrola or his planned book about the Sudan campaign, so Churchill asked his old agent to do battle. A. P. Watt justified his commission by arranging Savrola’s serialization in Macmillan’s Magazine for £100 before publication17 and at least extracted a choice between an advance or higher royalty rates for the Sudan book:18 confident of strong sales, Churchill chose in favour of higher royalties. ‘The only point I should suggest being altered,’ he told his agent, ‘is that Mr Longman should give me 25% on all copies over 5,000 sold and should not worry about advancing me £100 on the day of publication.’19 (Churchill’s decision to decline an advance was not a good one: by the time The River War was published almost a year later, the Boer War had captured the public’s attention. Sales only reached 3,000 in 1914.)

  Breaking off from an outing with the Quorn Hunt early in November, Churchill completed his Norwich Union loan, transferring £1,100 to pay the first year or so of his and Jack’s allowances into a new ‘Separate Account’ at Cox & Co.20 He asked Sir Ernest Cassel to invest the rest, but this precarious arrangement forced a rethink about his future: writing had already earned him five times as much as the army. ‘My allowance of £500 a ye
ar was not sufficient to meet the expenses of Polo and the Hussars,’ he explained in My Early Life. ‘I now saw that the only profession I had been taught would never yield me enough money to avoid getting into debt, let alone to dispense with my allowance and become completely independent as I desired.’

  Churchill decided to return to India only for the duration of the army polo championships, then to resign his commission in order to write and find a parliamentary seat. He made a call to Conservative Party headquarters to ask after his prospects of finding a seat. When the party manager asked how much he would be able to donate to any constituency interested in selecting him, Churchill could promise no more than to meet his own expenses. His family’s lack of money presented a serious obstacle to his career and neither his father’s reputation nor his own military background could offset this disadvantage, the party manager explained, giving examples of ‘cases where as much as a thousand pounds a year or more was paid by the member in subscriptions and charities in return for the honour of holding the seat. Risky seats could not afford to be so particular, and “forlorn hopes” were very cheap.’21

  Despite rough seas in December, Churchill spent the voyage to India working on The River War. On his arrival in India, however, he was greeted by the usual money problems. He shared his fears with his mother:

  It is appalling. In three years, I can’t think what will happen. God only knows. I detest business even more than you do. Years of trouble and squalor are before us. Poverty produced by thoughtlessness will rot your life of peace & happiness, mine of success.22

  Before leaving for the polo tournament, he asked her to secure access to his father’s papers so that he could one day write a biography. ‘The time has not come yet but in six or seven years it will have arrived – and I shall insist on undertaking the work,’ he told her. ‘I have every right and can do it much better than anyone else. From a financial point of view alone – the biography would be worth £2,000.’23

  After helping his regiment win the polo tournament by scoring three of his side’s four goals in the final, Churchill paid his Indian bills and ended up with a small surplus. He sailed home without his girlfriend, Pamela Plowden, to whom he wrote sadly: ‘My dear Miss Pamela, I have lived all my life seeing the most beautiful women London produces. Never have I seen one for whom I could forgo the business of life. Then I met you... Were I a dreamer of dreams, I would say... “Marry me – and I will conquer the world and lay it at your feet.”’ Marriage, however, required two conditions to be met. ‘Money and the consent of both parties. One certainly, both probably are absent. And this is such an old story...’24

  The growing drumbeat of war with the Boers of southern Africa’s Orange Free State and Transvaal greeted Churchill on his arrival home in London in April. Nevertheless he left the army as planned on 3 May and found that his plans for a political career moved more quickly than he had expected. Elders in the constituency of Oldham, near Manchester, had been showing an interest in adopting Churchill as their junior candidate at the next general election. However, when their senior sitting member suddenly died and their junior member resigned, Churchill found himself catapulted into fighting his first by-election.

  He lost narrowly, although he succeeded in attracting large public audiences. Afterwards, Churchill carefully thanked the owner of the new Daily Mail for his newspaper’s support and for providing his transport home. ‘I am sorry that neither of our enterprises were successful in Oldham,’ he told Alfred Harmsworth.*4 ‘But I don’t expect my career or your car will be seriously damaged.’25

  War in southern Africa grew steadily more likely during the summer, while Churchill worked at Blenheim on The River War. He was distracted by visits from Pamela Plowden and by his mother’s burgeoning relationship with an army officer almost half her age. Jennie had met George Cornwallis-West the previous a year while staying with her friend Daisy, Countess of Warwick. She had always declared herself most unlikely to remarry, unless for serious money: ‘If a perfect darling with at least £40,000 a year wants me very much, I might consider it,’ she told Daisy.26

  Cornwallis-West was certainly not in that league: his family had once owned 60,000 acres in Shropshire and northern Wales, but a dispute over his great-grandfather’s will and agricultural depression had produced division and decline. His parents had retreated to London, short of cash, after tenanting their one-sixth share of the estate, while George trod the well-worn path from Eton to Sandhurst and the Scots Guards. He had proposed to Jennie several times during the summer of 1899, undeterred by the opposition of his parents, his godfather the prince of Wales (whom some thought to be his natural father) and his regimental colonel, all of whom were shocked by the age difference. Churchill’s reaction was essentially practical. ‘Reflect most seriously on all the aspects of the question,’ he warned his mother, unclear how the cash-strapped George could ever keep his mother in the style to which she was accustomed. ‘Fine sentiments and empty stomachs do not accord.’27

  By September war in the Transvaal seemed so likely that Churchill set aside The River War and sought a correspondent’s post accompanying Britain’s expeditionary force. The Daily Mail’s interest strengthened his hand with The Morning Post, to which he offered first refusal, provided they did not quibble with his terms. These were reputed to be the highest ever conceded to a war correspondent: a salary of £1,000 for the first four months, followed by £200 a month (the time to be measured from shore to shore), all expenses paid and Churchill to retain copyright, so that he could convert his dispatches into another book, provisionally entitled War in the Transvaal.*5 Bypassing his agent A. P. Watt, he hastily agreed terms with Longman, with whom he left the completed texts of The River War and Savrola, asking his mother to sign any paperwork.28

  Churchill sailed three days after war was declared, accompanied by his father’s old valet and aided by cash gifts from Lord Rothschild and Sir Ernest Cassel;29 he was also protected by special life insurance30 and sustained on the journey by six cases of wine and spirits.31 After a three-week voyage that coincided with the publication of The River War,32 Churchill disembarked at Cape Town to reach the war zone by train. Britain had underestimated the military prowess of its Boer opponents, who had succeeded during the early stages of the campaign in surrounding a large detachment of British troops at Ladysmith in Natal. Churchill sent Jack a private code by which he would pass on any military news likely to prove useful to his brother’s City career,33 and then set off for Estcourt, the closest point to the besieged British forces. Here he accepted a place on a probing mission towards Ladysmith commanded by a fellow North West Frontier officer, Captain Aylmer Haldane. However, their armoured train was attacked and derailed. Churchill helped to unblock the line while under fire, then went to direct the engine driver. He was confronted by a group of armed Boers and surrendered.

  Churchill was well treated by his captors. He wrote to the Boer secretary of state for war demanding his release on the grounds that he was a non-combatant and had taken no part in the defence of the train, a claim which local Boer commanders rebutted. Before Churchill’s offer of his parole to remain a non-combatant could be officially accepted, he had escaped. He eluded his captors in the darkness by happening to stumble on the one English home for miles around. The owners hid him down a mineshaft for five days at great personal risk, after which he was smuggled on to a freight train travelling to the neutral Portuguese enclave at Delagoa Bay; from there he moved on by boat to Lourenço Marques and then to Durban, where he was given a hero’s welcome on Christmas Eve.

  The publicity surrounding Churchill’s capture and escape helped to make him a household name back home. He returned to the action, however, to cover the fierce fighting around Ladysmith. General Sir Redvers Buller then gave him an unpaid lieutenancy in the South African Light Horse, a mobile force living largely off the land. ‘Meanwhile I dispatched a continual stream of letters and cables to The Morning Post,’ he later wrote, ‘and learned from them
that I commanded a wide and influential public.’34

  Returning to Cape Town when Ladysmith was relieved at the end of February, Churchill hoped for swift accreditation to the staff of the new commander-in-chief. However, neither Lord Roberts (his father’s old friend from India) nor his deputy General Kitchener was keen for the young journalist to be posted anywhere near them. A recent article on army chaplains had upset Roberts, while General Kitchener was still smarting from Churchill’s criticism in The River War of the British army’s treatment of wounded dervishes in the Sudan.

  While summoning support from two generals with whom he had served on the Indian frontier, Churchill spent his enforced leisure befriending the new duke of Westminster, one of three dukes to serve on Lord Roberts’s staff (alongside the dukes of Norfolk and Marlborough). The twenty-year-old duke had only three months earlier inherited property in London which generated an income exceeding £250,000 a year. He also owned three estates in Scotland and 30,000 acres around the family seat in Cheshire, where his staff numbered more than 300 and house parties could accommodate sixty guests. It was the start of a long friendship, which proved a mixed blessing to Churchill: generous beyond measure in hospitality to his friends, the duke drew Churchill into a circle whose lifestyle required more money than he ever commanded.35