No More Champagne

by David Lough

  Five days before the wedding, on 12 September, all parties agreed that the main life insurance policy would stay at £10,000, but that Churchill would arrange for a ‘reverse annuity’ policy; this would pay Clementine an extra £300 a year if Churchill died before his mother. On her death, Clementine would inherit at least this sum, and probably more, from Lord Randolph’s will trust.39

  Mr Humbert’s bill of more than £350 for his fees and stamp duty came as an unwelcome surprise to the groom, but Nicholl, Manisty explained that it was quite usual for ‘the Husband to pay the Lady’s legal charges’.40 The £50 fee for the marriage service at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, seems like good value by comparison. ‘The bride was pale, as was the bridegroom,’ Wilfrid Scawen Blunt noted in his diary. ‘Winston’s responses were clearly made in a pleasant voice, Clementine’s inaudible.’41 Beatrice Webb’s assessment was more practical: Clementine was ‘a charming lady, well bred and pretty and earnest withal – but not rich, by no means a good match, which is to Winston’s credit’.42

  The groom gave the bride a pair of Burmese rubies and a gold wedding ring, for which he finished paying three years later.43 Their wedding presents included thirty items of jewellery and more than two hundred of silver, sixty of them duplicates, for which silversmiths offered a credit to be put towards a silver plate service to be engraved with the Marlborough crest. The same crest featured on the tip of the gold-capped Malacca cane presented by Edward VII. Sir Ernest Cassel gave them a more practical £500 in cash.

  *1 Edward Marsh (1872–1953), classical scholar; private secretary to Churchill in each of his ministerial posts 1905–29; knighted 1937. Marsh collected the paintings of British watercolourists and published the works of young poets in his Georgian Poetry anthologies.

  *2 From 4 to 5 per cent on 11 October 1906 and to 6 per cent on 19 October.

  *3 The Jerome family’s contribution to Lord and Lady Randolph’s marriage settlement.

  *4 Lord Randolph Churchill’s will trust, now supplemented by the 7th duke of Marlborough’s personal estate after the death of his widow.

  *5 The Marlborough family’s contribution to their parents’ marriage settlement.

  *6 The alternative candidates were Bay Middleton, a dashing army officer killed in a riding accident in 1892 or Lady Blanche’s brother-in-law Bertie Mitford, later Lord Redesdale. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a friend of Lady Blanche, recorded in his diary on 22 June 1892 that she had told him both Clementine and Kitty were Bay Middleton’s children – see Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1971), p. 271.

  7

  ‘The Pug is décassé’

  The HMS Enchantress Years, 1909–14

  Exchange rate $5 = £1

  Inflation multiples: US x 25; UK x 90

  CHURCHILL’S MOTHER REDECORATED 12 Bolton Street in late 1908 while the couple honeymooned in Italy, with results that pleased neither her daughter-in-law’s taste nor her son’s wallet. Churchill sold £500-worth of investments, but was still unable to pay for more than a proportion of his bills: Hatchard the bookseller, for example, received just £25 of the £88 he owed. Churchill asked his solicitor whether he might be able to borrow against his possible inheritance of the Garron Tower estate, but his solicitor’s response was discouraging: ‘I have received a quotation which in my view is too high,’ he reported back.1

  Nevertheless, there was still sufficient money to keep essentials such as wine and cigars flowing. Churchill calculated that he spent an average of £1,160 with the family’s wine merchants each year between 1908 and 1914; part of the appeal of Randolph Payne & Sons was that they were happy to provide long-established account-holders such as the Churchills with almost as much credit as a bank – by 1914 the amount Churchill owed the firm was regularly over £500.2 His cigar suppliers, J. Grunebaum & Sons, were almost as flexible: Churchill was smoking about a dozen cigars a day, costing more than £13 a month, but he had not paid one of Grunebaum’s bills for five years.3

  Soon their first child was on the way, and the Churchills realized they would have to move out of Mount Street before it arrived in the middle of 1909. Churchill was anxious to extract a premium for the remainder of the lease – ‘It is absolutely necessary to the furnishing of another house,’ he explained to his mother4 – but by March, when Clementine was five months pregnant, no takers had emerged. Churchill had to hand over the lease to a local doctor without any payment while they stayed with Guest cousins until their new home in Pimlico was ready.

  Churchill had considered buying 33 Eccleston Square for £2,000, but he decided to lease it instead after winning a rent reduction to £195 a year to help pay for bathroom improvements;5 the economics looked less sound once the cost of the work required to panelling the front room and a library and extend the dining room rose to £475.6 Clementine had to settle for reusing the Bolton Street curtains and carpets, and resorted to ‘cheap linoleum’ to finish the last servants’ rooms.7

  They moved in ten weeks before their first child Diana arrived on 11 July 1909. After the birth, Clementine recuperated at a small house on Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Horsham estate, while Diana remained in London with her father and nanny. The couple were reunited for their first wedding anniversary, which they spent near Strasburg, observing German army manoeuvres.

  On their return Clementine left her husband in London, taking the baby, her nanny and a maid to the Crest Hotel in Crowborough, Sussex, forty miles south. Churchill sent regular cheques and visited most weekends, but after paying bills for Diana’s delivery and the building works, he had to report at the end of October that ‘the Pug is décassé for the moment’.*1 Their cash position would improve, he assured an alarmed Clementine, once Hodder & Stoughton had paid him a £150 advance for a book of his recent speeches that it was about to publish entitled Liberalism and the Social Problem.8 Despite his cash shortage, Churchill visited the jewellers on Christmas Eve to buy Clementine a pair of pearl and diamond earrings costing £45, for which he paid three years later.9

  During 1908 and 1909 Asquith’s government had set out a programme of radical policies to lay the foundations of Britain’s modern welfare state, some of which – such as the Coal Mines (Eight Hours) Bill, which improved the lot of miners – it fell to Churchill to guide through Parliament. In response to the economic setbacks of 1907–8, employers reduced wages, which led to strikes and lockouts – in January it was the shipwrights; in February the engineers; in May the shipyards on the Tyne, Merseyside and Clyde. All of which kept Churchill busy in 1909 as President of the Board of Trade.

  Borrowing from Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s ideas, Churchill introduced labour exchanges and laid the foundations for compulsory unemployment insurance and old age pensions, but the measures all cost money. In January 1909, Lord Rothschild predicted a ‘predatory, certainly spiteful and very revengeful budget’ to his Paris partners,10 and when the chancellor, David Lloyd George, unveiled it at the end of April, he was quite clear that his objective was to redistribute money from the landed class toward those living in poverty and squalor. He raised tax on petrol, cars, alcohol and tobacco, while making concessions for those on modest incomes, especially married men with children. For the first time, ‘unearned’ investment income was to be taxed at a higher rate than ‘earned’ income (at 1s.2d. rather than 1s. in the pound), a new super-tax was introduced on incomes above £5,000 (at rates of up to 1s.9d. in the pound) and the top rates of death duty were almost doubled. Landowners faced a new duty on undeveloped acres, a 20 per cent charge on increases in land values and 10 per cent duty on increases in capital values at the end of leases. Lloyd George deployed all his rhetorical skills to win popular support: ‘a fully-equipped duke cost as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts,’ he claimed in a well-publicized speech at Limehouse, ‘and dukes are just as great a terror and last longer.’11

  Grandson of a duke but strongly supportive of the measures, Churchill faced accusat
ions of class treachery among his former Conservative and Unionist colleagues. Cartoons illustrated a radical cabinet minister hounding the landed class in Westminster before retiring to the luxury of Blenheim Palace for the weekend. Most people on middle-class incomes of up to £2,000 were hardly affected and then only by small changes in death duty, Churchill claimed in the House of Commons: ‘The chief burden of the increase of taxation is placed upon the main body of wealthy classes in this country... and that is a class which, in opportunities of pleasure, in all the amenities of life, and in freedom from penalties, obligations, and dangers, is more fortunate than any other equally numerous class of citizens in any age or in any country.’12

  Passions ran high as the House of Lords threatened to reject the ‘People’s Budget’: Lord Revelstoke, senior partner of the merchant bank Baring, spoke for many in the City when he used the upper chamber to blame the government for an ‘unparalleled depreciation in British credit and British stocks’. Investors in British government bonds had nearly quadrupled the real purchasing power of their money during almost a century of falling prices between the end of the Napoleonic wars and 1897, he claimed, but now ‘Consols’*2 had fallen by 6 per cent and English railways by 10 per cent, ‘a steady and hopeless depreciation of the securities in which the most conservative of us have been brought up to pin our faith’.13 The House of Commons passed the measures by a comfortable majority, but they were defeated in the House of Lords. By asking the king to dissolve Parliament and test popular support at a general election in January, Asquith deprived Churchill of his usual New Year holiday.

  The prospect of fresh election expenses was an unwelcome one, coming on top of bank borrowings that already stood at over £2,000 by early 1910.14 It coincided with an approach that Churchill had just received from a Dundee constituent and philanthropist, James Caird,*3 who had made a fortune in the jute business, and now asked his MP how he might make a useful financial contribution to the cause of free trade. When Churchill suggested funding a programme of lectures on the subject up and down the country, Caird sent him a personal cheque for £10,000, and followed up with further contributions of £12,000 during 1910,15 suggesting that the minister was much the better placed man to disburse the funds. Banking the funds in a separate ‘C’ account at Cox & Co., Churchill handed them out gradually during 1910, mainly through the Free Trade Union, which accounted meticulously for its expenditure until it slowed down its activity during 1911 and sent Churchill a cheque for the surplus in its accounts, taking his balance of Caird funds in his account back up to £1,500 on 1 April.16 Despite the temptations of handling funds that dwarfed his own means, there is no sign that Churchill conflated any of Caird’s money with his own at this stage and his calculations of his net worth during the period scrupulously excluded it.

  Nevertheless Churchill’s private office found it difficult to disentangle his ministerial from his electoral expenses during the campaign of January 1910 as the minister rushed between London, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Dundee and the south, commandeering a special train from Dundee to Edinburgh and his own steamer from Southampton to the Isle of Wight. ‘If a cheque is sent to [Mr Eason] for £11, and one for £4 sent to the Chief Whip, the Chief Whip’s cheque for £7-8-1 can be paid into the Home Secretary’s a/c at Cox & Co., and the whole thing is finished,’ wrote one private secretary.17 Churchill broke off his return journey to London for a shooting party at Warter Priory in Yorkshire, where he found his fellow guests ‘puissant, presentable, radical in preponderance – a rare combination’.18*4 Clementine tried to encourage the habit of the Edwardian country house weekend but it was never a Churchill favourite, however hard he tried. The diary of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt describes him arriving for one that autumn, ‘dressed in a little close-fitting, fur-lined jacket, tight leggings and gaiters, and a little round hat, which with his half-mischievous face, made him look, as Miss Lawrence said, the exact figure of Puck’.19 Churchill preferred the meat of politics: ‘How much more power and great business are to me than this kind of thing, pleasant tho’ it seems by contrast to our humble modes of entertainment,’ he explained to Clementine.20

  Churchill was re-elected, but with a reduced majority of fewer than 400 votes over his Labour opponent, part of a wider loss of ground by the Liberal Party, which ended with only two more seats than the Tories. Asquith remained in power with the help of Irish Nationalist and Labour votes and offered Churchill a move to the Irish Office as an alternative to staying at the Board of Trade. As tactfully as he could, Churchill declined both, suggesting either the Admiralty or the Home Office instead and slipping in a subtle reminder that for the last two years he had sacrificed the full pay of a secretary of state. Early in February, he became home secretary, paid a salary of £5,000 a year that took him for the first time into Lloyd George’s new super-tax bracket, a privilege enjoyed in the tax’s early years by only some 10,000 of the country’s top taxpayers.21

  As home secretary, Churchill’s duties ranged across maintaining law and order, running the police service, prisons, courts and passing legislation on criminal justice: he was kept busy by a rash of strikes across the mining and railway industries that required careful decisions on the use of police (and potentially troops); by severe over-crowding in Britain’s prisons; and by hotly contested debate over the extensions of the vote to female property-owners. On the strength of the government’s renewed electoral mandate, the new Parliament’s upper chamber had passed the previous year’s controversial budget, but a Parliament Bill that cautiously limited its future ability to amend Commons legislation was a step too far. The new king, George V, convened a constitutional conference of the main political parties, but its failure to reach agreement in November allowed Asquith to extract a secret pledge from the king to create as many peers as the bill’s passage needed if the Liberals fought and won a fresh election. A second dissolution within a year forced Churchill to return to Dundee, but the outcome across the country was little different: the balance of power remained held by the Irish Nationalist and Labour MPs, but Asquith’s government stayed in place.

  Even the doubled salary of a full secretary of state proved insufficient to meet Churchill’s personal spending, which reached £5,000 during the first year of his appointment, before either tax or election expenses.22 He sold some shares late in 1910, but preferred to borrow in 1911 to reduce the amounts owed to his wine, cigar, shirt and saddle suppliers, in each case more than £200.23 In return for the transfer of all his remaining share certificates, whether bought by Cassel, Grenfell or Nelke Phillips & Co., Cox & Co. agreed to triple his formal bank loan to £3,000, allowing him to pay Grunebaum in full for his cigars, while asking the rest to be content with half of the amounts he owed them.24

  The Churchills spent another summer largely apart after the birth of their second child, Randolph, at the end of May 1911. This time, it was Churchill rather than Clementine who took himself off, first to the Oxfordshire Yeomanry’s summer camp at Blenheim, then to stay with Sir Abe Bailey and American actress Maxine Elliott.*5 By the time he returned from the prince of Wales’s investiture, Clementine had left London with the children, their nurse and nursery maid and her own personal maid for a respite on the English coast at Seaford. The summer apart continued when the German and French governments’ confrontation at Agadir*6 prevented Churchill from joining her in the Alps.

  Churchill consoled himself by buying a new fifteen-horse-power, four-cylinder Napier Landaulette,25 intended to convey them both to Balmoral to stay with the new king and queen, but a misunderstanding over colours prevented the grand arrival. Churchill had ordered ‘the Marlborough hue’ without specifying its shade and it took Napier almost a week to find out. They were able to depart in style once Churchill had agreed to pay for a Napier engineer to travel from Euston to Balmoral to act as their chauffeur during a motor tour of Scotland that was designed to take in the Asquiths’ home near North Berwick. There the prime minister invited his minister to take over as F
irst Lord of the Admiralty, a post Churchill accepted with alacrity. It brought control of the world’s most powerful military force and two coveted privileges: use of the Royal Navy’s 4,000-ton yacht HMS Enchantress and of the fine eighteenth-century Admiralty House, overlooking Horse Guards Parade in central London. The official purpose of HMS Enchantress and her crew of 196 officers and ratings was to facilitate the First Lord’s visits to inspect the fleet, but it was understood that he should be allowed to entertain personal guests as long as their out-of-pocket expenses were met: Churchill was to spend eight of the next thirty-three months aboard her, attracting the satirical attentions of Punch magazine.26

  Admiralty House was a different proposition. The rent charged for some of London’s finest rooms was only £500 a year, but the First Lord was expected to meet the wages of twelve servants, seven more than the Churchills employed at Eccleston Square. Making calculations on Admiralty notepaper, Churchill decided that he could not afford the move: as a married man with two children, his monthly salary was already fully committed before even paying for staples such as wine, cigars and clothes. His judgement remained unmoved by the arrival of another £11,500 from James Caird,27 this time to encourage the cause of Home Rule for Ireland and Scotland. Caird limited himself to two early donations on this occasion, but it brought the amount that he had entrusted to Churchill’s judgement (and bank account) up to £33,500 within two years, a multiple of more than eight times Churchill’s own means at the time. For an ambitious young politician who could not match the easy means of many contemporaries, the ability to distribute largesse on this scale was extraordinary.