No More Champagne
Page 19
Churchill still needed yet another loan in March 1927 from Lord Randolph’s trust, but Butterworth’s first cheque for The Aftermath arrived just in time to help pay some pressing bills, even if these did not include Churchill’s super-tax bill which was already overdue by four months.47 ‘Everything is v[er]y comfortable in the house and seems to go with the utmost smoothness,’ he reported happily to Clementine. ‘Butterworth has sent the extra £1,500 advance on The Aftermath: & I have sent my first 2 articles (£1,000) to America – so that we can jog along. But August, Sept & Oct will be months of hard work at the book.’48
After a fourth Budget that concentrated on implementing Macmillan’s de-rating scheme, Churchill spent the summer of 1928 reining in military spending, based on an assumption (to be tested each year) that Britain would not be engaged ‘in any great war in the next decade’. Afterwards he settled down at Chartwell for a busy holiday season spent writing, in preparation for which he had secured help from extra secretaries and from a team of researchers led by Brigadier General Edmonds, the army’s senior historian.49 Edmonds had, in turn, recruited Owen O’Malley, a former Foreign Office official, who had been suspended for speculating on the French franc – not a serious crime in the eyes of his new employer.
Churchill gave O’Malley a list of official documents relevant to The Aftermath and O’Malley asked his former employer at the Foreign Office to send over copies. However, the list of documents was reduced considerably, apparently on the direct orders of Sir Austen Chamberlain, the foreign secretary. As reported to O’Malley, Sir Austen also insisted that Churchill submit his manuscript ‘for careful scrutiny’ by the Foreign Office’s historical adviser before publication.
Regarding this as a serious threat to his future literary livelihood, Churchill crafted a response for his secretary to sign, making it clear that he was quite capable of deciding for himself, as a minister, whether a passage was contentious or not. Foreign Office mandarins beat a temporary retreat, but later asked for proofs of the book when its launch date was announced in the press. This time, Churchill intervened personally with Sir Austen, agreeing that the Foreign Office should see the text in advance, but that any disputed passages would be ironed out in private between them.50
‘The beginning is the difficult part of a book,’ Churchill told Clementine after completing 3,000 words early in August.51 By the end of the month, he had reached 35,000 of the 100,000 words required, but was already worried about the timetable. A September visitor, James Scrymgeour-Wedderburn, described the Chartwell holiday routine:
[Churchill] works at bricklaying four hours a day, and lays 90 bricks an hour which is a very high output. He also spends a considerable time on a history of post-war Europe which he is writing. His ministerial work comes down from the Treasury every day, and he has to give some more hours to that. It is a marvel how much time he gives to his guests, talking sometimes for an hour after lunch and much longer after dinner.52
Although he reached 70,000 words by the end of September, Churchill knew that there would be no time for ‘polishing’ even if he did complete his quota by the October deadline. He therefore set about securing a postponement from Butterworth without losing his bonus for completion: he could of course meet the deadline if absolutely necessary, he told his publisher, but they would both gain if he took a little longer to add the extra 30,000 words that would justify a higher cover price. ‘Pray turn these matters over carefully in your mind,’ he urged. ‘Meanwhile I am forging ahead.’53 He snatched odd moments at the book during the autumn parliamentary season, then told the editor of The Times that he would have most of the text ten days after Christmas and the rest a week later.54
Increasingly convinced that the Conservatives would lose the 1929 general election, Churchill spent part of the autumn lining up future writing contracts to compensate for the loss of his ministerial salary. His own preference was for an ‘autobiographical book’, but his agent Curtis Brown suggested a fortnightly newspaper column written for worldwide syndication that could make ‘£300 to £400 per article... providing the subjects were of international interest, and providing you had, meanwhile, made a visit to America’.55 Then Churchill’s former agent A. P. Watt suggested a subject that had long interested Churchill: a biography of his ancestor John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough.*7
Watt unveiled a joint offer of £8,000 in advances, made by Hodder & Stoughton in Britain and Longman Green in America. ‘No doubt better terms can be obtained,’56 Churchill told Clementine, knowing that Butterworth had yet to make an offer. ‘You do drive a hard bargain,’ Butterworth complained, before matching his rivals’ bids and pointing out that his would not involve any commission.57 Hodder responded straightaway with a higher offer, but Churchill told both early in January 1929 that because Parliament had resumed he was too busy to decide for the time being.
Weeks later, as he prepared his fifth Budget, two more offers arrived. The first, £10,000 for British Empire rights alone, came from a textbook publisher, George Harrap,*8 who was keen to break into the publishing mainstream.58 The second offer, from Ferris Greenslet at the American publishers Houghton Mifflin, was $12,500 for the US rights on their own.59
Once the Budget was out of the way, Churchill summoned Harrap to Chartwell to set out his terms: he wanted a single contract worth at least £15,000 to cover both the US and British markets. Pointing Harrap confidently towards Houghton Mifflin as a willing American partner, he left to campaign in the general election, which had been called for May.
It was a surprise to Churchill and Harrap when Greenslet returned to Boston, refusing to pay a dollar more. Undeterred, Harrap asked Churchill for a month in which to find a replacement in New York. Churchill insisted on receiving a firm proposal from him for the British market first and Harrap responded by adding a generous five-year period for the work to be written.60 Still on the campaign trail, Churchill warned his old publisher Butterworth, who was in New York looking for his own US partner, that he was minded to settle with Harrap and deal with America separately after the election. Butterworth pleaded for a few days’ grace, but the cable that reached Churchill shortly afterwards came from Charles Scribner, not Butterworth. Acting independently for the first time, Scribner offered $25,000 for the US rights, double Houghton Mifflin’s price. Realizing that Harrap and Scribner together would take him to his £15,000 target, Churchill dismissed Butterworth, his publisher for more than a decade with little ceremony: ‘Am now in possession of an offer from Scribner’s for America and Harrap’s for English book rights which together are markedly superior to what you now kindly offer. Am therefore accepting both these offers.’61
*1 R. N. V. Hopkins (1880–1955), joined the Inland Revenue, Britain’s tax-collecting agency, 1902; chairman 1922–7; joined HM Treasury 1927, permanent secretary 1942–5; knighted 1920.
*2 As part of his ‘retirement’ as an author, Churchill was to ‘assign’ any royalties still to be earned by the books he had already written. He planned to sign them over to a new trust for his youngest daughter Mary, who was not a beneficiary of Churchill’s Elder Children’s Settlement (she had not been born when the trust was formed early in 1922).
*3 In 1926 Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin published On England; Lord Birkenhead published Famous Trials of History.
*4 The cost of wine and spirits ‘paid for’ at Chartwell during 1926 came to £309, but Churchill’s secretary underlined the distinction between ‘paid for’ and ‘consumed’. CHAR 1/192/14.
*5 Ray Long (1878–1935), reporter Indianapolis News 1900; editor-in-chief International Magazine Company 1919–31, publisher 1931–5; bankrupt 1933; committed suicide 1935.
*6 William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951), president San Francisco Examiner (owned by his father); introduced banner headlines 1887; controlled twenty daily, eleven Sunday newspapers (in thirteen US cities), magazine and film interests by late 1920s; fortunes declined during the Depression until a court-enforced reordering in 1937.
*8 George Harrap (1867–1938), managing director, George G. Harrap & Co. 1901; launched Harrap’s Standard French Dictionary; regarded as ‘a bit of a rough diamond’ by Britain’s gentlemanly publishing fraternity. See D. Flower, Fellows in Foolscap, p. 147.
13
‘Friends and former millionaires’
Making – and Losing – a New World Fortune, 1928–9
Exchange rate: $5 = £1
Inflation multiples: US x 14; UK x 50
ELECTORAL DEFEAT DULY arrived at the end of May 1929. Churchill’s personal majority in Epping fell to fewer than 5,000 votes, while the Labour Party’s 288 seats across the country outstripped the Conservatives’ 260 and the Liberals’ 59. Stanley Baldwin resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Ramsay MacDonald at the head of a minority Labour government dependent on Liberal support.
Churchill was well prepared for the loss of his ministerial salary and official home. Still using Treasury notepaper, he sketched out his financial prospects:1 he needed to pay £5,250 of overdue bills and find £3,750 for living expenses over the rest of the year. On the other hand, he expected to earn £12,700, mostly from writing. Nearly all the contracts for Marlborough: His Life and Times fell satisfactorily into place soon after the election, although Churchill had to concede a small reduction to Scribner after he found that he had awarded Canadian rights to both publishers. The only disappointment was that The Times, which had serialized each volume of The World Crisis, opted out of Marlborough, claiming that the subject was too dated for its readers. Fortunately, Lord Camrose,*1 another press owner whom Churchill had courted, was happy for his new purchase The Daily Telegraph2 to step into the breach.
When he lost office, Churchill still had eight articles to finish for Hearst’s International Magazine Company, then another twelve to write (at £500 each) for Hearst’s London rival, The Strand Magazine.3 Not content with this order book, he had agreed, just before the election, to meet Paul Reynolds,*2 a leading New York agent, who had spoken of the need to visit America to build up his readership. Churchill heard nothing more from him until June, when Reynolds suddenly produced an offer for six articles at $2,000 each from an upmarket magazine called Collier’s Weekly, edited by William Chenery.4 Churchill accepted, but declared that he could not start for at least a year while he completed his other commitments; a startled Reynolds could only repeat his advice to travel to America and meet Chenery face to face.
As it happened, Reynolds was pushing at an open door: Churchill alreadyc planned to mark his loss of office by taking a break from Britain, just as he had done in 1922, and Curtis Brown had also suggested visiting America rather than Europe. The idea looked even more appealing when Williams College offered to pay Churchill $1,500 plus $500 travel expenses to lecture in Massachusetts. This invitation came through the good offices of an American friend, Bernard Baruch,*3 whom Churchill had first encountered when he was munitions minister at the end of the Great War. Baruch had made his fortune in the American business world long before the war, chiefly by financing the extraction of mineral resources, and had then been appointed to head the American end of Allied munitions procurement after his country entered the conflict. He had shown an unusual level of trust in his British opposite number even before they met, but their friendship had blossomed in Paris during the Versailles peace negotiations. Baruch had gone on to become a very well-connected Wall Street investor: his personal dealing profits in 1925 had exceeded $2.6 million.5
Serious plans were soon underway for a Churchill family visit to Canada and the United States. The party was to include Churchill’s brother Jack and his son John, as well as Clementine and Randolph, and they were to sail westwards late in July, then cross Canada by train and move down the US West Coast to California, before returning eastwards by train to New York. In the best tradition of the British aristocracy’s younger sons, Churchill mobilized friends and acquaintances to fix free hospitality along the route, while he told Curtis Brown to syndicate newspaper articles in which he would write of his impressions.6
He leaned heavily on Bernard Baruch to suggest American hosts along the way: ‘I want to see the country and to meet the leaders of its fortunes,’ he explained. ‘I have no political mission and no axe to grind.’7 Baruch sketched out possible candidates on the margin of Churchill’s letter: Van Antwerp*4 in San Francisco, Hearst in Los Angeles, Mellon*5 in Pittsburgh and McClure*6 in Chicago.8
Churchill asked his cousin Freddie Guest to try his steel industry contacts for a free railcar carriage back to the East Coast, but this plan made little progress. Churchill then remembered Charles Schwab, the chairman of Bethlehem Steel. In 1914 Schwab had travelled straight to see Churchill at the Admiralty after witnessing the sinking of a British warship HMS Audacious while en route to London and he had promised his factories’ help in building submarines for the British.*7 ‘We got on very well and settled everything on the dead level quite easily in an hour or two,’ Churchill told Baruch, as he sent a late request for help to Schwab.9 Baruch promised to stand by to help: ‘Tell me what you want done and it will be done at once,’ he insisted. ‘If you have a private [rail]car OK, if not I will get you one.’10
Before leaving, Churchill realized that he needed to bolster his finances. The income that he had so confidently forecast six weeks before was taking longer than expected to arrive. Meanwhile, deferred tax bills on his earnings from The World Crisis (which he had long ago spent) now loomed large. In response to feelers, Lord Inchcape offered to appoint Churchill as a director of two of his private companies, paying fees of £500 a year each without any risk of publicity, but Churchill filed the letter until his return in a box marked ‘Private’; he realized that he could not take on the directorships shortly before spending three months abroad.
More than £5,000 tax was due within a year, of which £872 was already overdue. How did he propose to pay it? his tax adviser at Lloyds Bank asked. It was a good question: Churchill’s current account was nearly £8,000 overdrawn.11 He could have used his Marlborough signing fees (due in July), but he had mentally earmarked these for a return to the world’s booming stock markets, from which he had taken temporary leave of absence while serving as chancellor. A short burst of trading before Churchill sailed, funded by instructing both Harrap and Scribner to send their Marlborough cheques to his stockbroker rather than to his bank, produced a profit of £1,000. Churchill used it to meet the overdue tax.12
Flushed with his success on the markets, Churchill decided to leave the Marlborough advances with Vickers da Costa, ready to fund more trading once he reached North America. He asked his bank manager Bernau to increase his overdraft and to extend it until his return to Britain in November, while professing confidence that another £6,000 of income would reach his account while he was away. ‘I have accepted a contract to write ten articles on my impressions of the United States at £250 each, for British and American rights; other Continental rights being estimated at £50–100 each, but say, £3,000, less commission, £2,700,’ he explained.13 It was as well that Bernau did not make further enquiries, because Curtis Brown had just reported that negotiations were not going well: Hearst and The New York Times had both turned down Churchill, while the Canadian papers had contrasted the $200 demanded for each Churchill column with the $20 that they paid Lloyd George and Mussolini.14
In the end Clementine had to stay in Britain after a minor operation, so the ‘troupe’ of two fathers and their sons left Southampton early in August. They boarded The Empress of Australia, a Canadian Pacific ship whose owners had offered Churchill a free Atlantic passage and a private railway carriage across Canada in return for four speeches along the route. The brothers sailed in a relaxed frame of mind: in the absence of any reply from Charles Schwab, the only gap left in their arrangements was rail transport back from America’s
West Coast, Churchill told Clementine:
It is a wonderful thing to have all these contracts satisfactorily settled, and to feel that two or three years’ agreeable work is mapped out and, if completed, will certainly be rewarded... I have written an article on John Morley... When it is paid for everything will be provided satisfactorily up to the end of October, when the big payments for The Aftermath come in.15
Regular stock market bulletins from Jack’s partner Cecil Vickers*8 reached The Empress of Australia’s new wireless. ‘His news has so far been entirely satisfactory,’ Churchill reassured Clementine before arrival in Quebec, where Charles Schwab’s personal assistant unexpectedly greeted the party.16 ‘Mr Schwab places his [rail]car at our disposal during the whole of our tour in the United States! This solves all problems,’ Churchill wrote home excitedly. ‘We timidly suggested paying the haulage, but this was brushed aside with pained looks.’ Even better, Canadian Pacific had agreed to supply a shorthand typist for their private railcar, Mont Royal, over which he enthused:
The car is a wonderful habitation. Jack and I have large cabins with big double beds and private bathrooms. Randolph and Johnnie have something like an ordinary sleeping car compartment. There is a fine parlour with an observation room at the end and a large dining room which I use as the office... The car has a splendid wireless installation, refrigerators, fans, etc.17
There was soon another reason to be cheerful: after failing to sell any articles before Churchill arrived in Canada, Curtis Brown reported offers from two newspaper chains within a week, one from Britain’s Daily Telegraph and the other from America’s Bell Syndicate, which fed the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and New York’s The World.18 Better still, Churchill found that he could sell plenty of copies of The World Crisis to the crowds that flocked to his speeches. ‘Montreal bought 600 copies of my W/C and with my rights I get pd cash,’ he told Clementine excitedly. ‘If this keeps up we shall make an unexpected profit.’19