by David Lough
While his memoirs were being sold, Churchill returned his attention to the world’s stock markets. An economic recovery that had followed the war was making these more rewarding for investors than they had been during the Depression. On his own initiative, Churchill had sold all his bond holdings at a profit in April 1946 and asked his manager at Lloyds Bank to suggest shares to take their place. Without any advice on individual companies and their shares available inside the bank, Harris consulted a personal friend who made two suggestions: the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and Imperial Continental Gas. By the time Churchill asked him for more information, Harris’s friend had disappeared to a remote part of Yorkshire and could not be contacted. Lloyds Bank’s role as a stock market adviser to Churchill came to an end.
Churchill turned instead to his brother. Although Jack had retired from Vickers da Costa at the start of the war, he nevertheless helped Churchill to spend £65,000 on buying eighteen new shareholdings through Vickers before the end of May.27 There were faint echoes of the 1930s as contract notes from Vickers kept arriving in the post and the staff at Chartwell were once again tracking daily share prices; the big difference was that Churchill finished 1946 with modest profits of £1,350.28
By then, Lord Camrose’s second syndicate of bankers and business friends had paid Churchill the agreed price of £50,000 to buy Chartwell on behalf of the National Trust. Churchill used the extra money to revive his farming ambitions, although Clementine was against the idea. ‘He wants to have land girls and chickens & cows here,’29 she had complained to their daughter Mary after the war, when to her relief Kent’s chief agricultural officer Percy Cox had not been able to find any suitable land or cattle near Chartwell. Now, however, their neighbour offered first refusal on the 157 acres of Chartwell Farm. With the Camrose syndicate’s money to hand, Churchill decided not to miss out. Knight Frank & Rutley helped Cox negotiate a price of £25,000 for the farmhouse and cottages, plus a year’s use of the departing Major Marnham’s dairy herd.30 Two months later, Churchill spent £10,250 adding another 116 acres, ‘practically adjoining Chartwell’, at Parkside Farm, including heated greenhouses and a cold fruit store.31 A proud Churchill instructed his bank, which had lent him £21,500 towards the purchases, to open a new Chartwell Farm account, through which he would channel ‘the whole farming capacity of the 340 acre Chartwell estate’.32
Clementine’s main concern was that there was nobody to run the farms. This problem was solved, however, when Mary’s new husband Christopher Soames had a duodenal ulcer burst during their honeymoon. He had to leave the army and was engaged to look after the farms on a salary of £400 a year, living free in the farmhouse. ‘My knowledge of farming is, to say the least, negligible,’ Soames warned.33 Two months later Churchill snapped up 94 more acres at Bardogs Farm for £8,700.34 The estate had now grown to 450 acres, although it was to prove still too small for the wide range of arable, dairy, pigs, poultry and market gardening undertaken by Chartwell Farms.
Jack died from a heart attack in April 1947, as negotiation surrounding the contracts for Churchill’s memoirs dragged on throughout the spring. The interests of book publishers and newspaper editors often clashed and, as extra jurisdictions entered the frame, copyright complications multiplied. Daniel Longwell at LIFE was keen to protect his company against the risk of Churchill producing extra volumes. ‘I insisted on a clause in there that no matter what the length of the book was – five volumes or six – we paid one single price,’ he recorded.35
His chairman Henry Luce was more worried that politics or ill health would dog their seventy-two-year-old author or that he might write for rival publications. Many at LIFE wanted Churchill bound by contract not to write elsewhere, but Walter Graebner argued that they should treat Churchill as a man of Edwardian manners. Now a regular at Chartwell, Graebner showed his host a copy of the cable that he planned to send to New York. It read: ‘“Gentlemen’s agreement, yes” [Churchill] said, “But binding contract no.”’ Churchill amended it to read: ‘Moneywise, there would be no point in writing articles because all the proceeds would disappear in taxes.’36
This ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ was put to the test at the end of March when Churchill proposed to write an article on President Truman’s ‘momentous’ speech setting out a new foreign policy to contain expansion of the Soviet Union. The consortium agreed to treat the article as a ‘dry run’ and shared the cost, The New York Times picking up 34.78 per cent of Churchill’s $25,000 fee, the same proportion of the American payments that it would shoulder for the memoirs.37
By April Lord Camrose called all the parties to London to settle a few outstanding points. LIFE was always to publish first, the newspapers to serialize up to 40 per cent of each volume, and the books to appear a week after the newspaper extracts had ended.38 ‘99 per cent set’, Graebner cabled to New York at the end of the second day’s talks.39 All agreed that the deal should be announced on 15 May, the day after Lord Camrose signed the Houghton Mifflin contract.
‘CHURCHILL MEMOIRS BRING A DOLLAR A WORD’ ran The New York Times’s front-page headline, over a picture showing the author at work in his study.40 Not shown was the supporting ‘syndicate’ that Churchill had already assembled: Bill Deakin, his pre-war literary assistant; General ‘Pug’ Ismay, his former chief of staff; General Sir Henry Pownall, who had experience of pre-war rearmament, the fall of France, Singapore’s surrender and the secret ‘Ultra’ material which Britain had obtained by breaking German military codes (although this could not be mentioned in the memoirs); and Commodore Gordon Allen, a former naval officer, who had worked at Combined Operations HQ. The four were later joined by Denis Kelly, an Oxford history graduate and under-employed barrister.
By July 1947 the first volume of Churchill’s memoirs was sufficiently presentable for Longwell at LIFE to spend a month in England working on the magazine’s layout and illustrations. He was given access to the family scrapbook at Chartwell, where Churchill also posed for new colour photographs. Then Longwell did what Lord Camrose warned him no one in England would dare to do: he suggested changes to the text of the memoir, many of which Churchill accepted. Longwell was at first irritated by the way Lord Camrose kept referring to him in front of Churchill as a photographer; however, fences were mended when LIFE decided to share its pictures with other consortium members. Lord Camrose began addressing his letters ‘My dear Longwell’.41
Meanwhile, Churchill was busy trying to establish some style rules with his veteran proofreader Eddie Marsh:
1. I am still balancing between ‘Goering’ and ‘Göring’ and ‘Fuehrer’ and ‘Führer’ etc. Curiously I like some some one way and some t’other. 2. On the whole I am against commas... On the other hand I am very much in favour of the semi-colon; and think that blighter should have a good run for his money in the text. 3. We are both agreed that capitals should be reduced as much as possible. Will you think out the principle of capitals and talk to me about them. For instance, must the ‘A’ in ‘Ally’ always be cap?42
Political demands on the leader of the Opposition’s time remained relatively modest while the Labour government enjoyed such a strong parliamentary majority. However, the rhythm of writing could still be disturbed by the lure of painting or the stock market. Churchill added £23,000 of government bonds to balance the shares in his portfolio in July,43 but shortly afterwards the government’s decision to restore the pound’s free convertibility into the dollar*3 led to a run on the currency, causing bond prices to fall by 2 per cent and leading shares to fall by 10 per cent within a fortnight.
Alarmed, Churchill asked the newly ennobled Lord Bracken how he could invest more safely, yet still earn his rewards in the untaxed form of capital appreciation. Bracken directed him to the shares of Argentinian railways, which were quoted in London but had fallen sharply while they awaited the Argentinian government’s nationalization terms; they were expected to rise almost 15 per cent before compensation was paid a year or two later, Bracken advised.
44 Within weeks, Churchill spent £65,000 buying shares in the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway, Buenos Aires Western Railway and Central Argentine Railway.45
For its 1947 Summer Exhibition, which was open to the public, the Royal Academy of Arts had selected two paintings by Churchill (Winter Sunshine and Loup River) that he had submitted anonymously. To handle the public demand for their reproduction Churchill appointed advertising agents Walter Judd, who sent him a first cheque for £20 in September. Its arrival prompted Churchill to ask his local Inland Revenue officer, known as an inspector, for an assurance that he would not be branded as a professional artist and subjected to income tax as a result.46 The answer was not encouraging. The tax inspector not only refused to give such an assurance but threatened to reopen the file on Churchill’s past earnings from his pictures. He settled for a limited barter arrangement with the Soho Gallery: the gallery arranged a free supply of Christmas cards using images of several of Churchill’s paintings, in return for the right to reuse the images six months later on its own greetings cards.
Meanwhile the LIFE team had become concerned that Churchill’s summer distractions had slowed progress on the proofs for the first volume of his memoirs, which had only advanced from ‘Provisional Semi-final’ to ‘Provisional Final’ by the time Parliament reassembled in October.47 Walter Graebner did his best to nudge Churchill towards working on the text, supplying him with new pens and dealing with other potential distractions, such as finding a replacement for Rufus the poodle, who had been run over during the Tory Party’s annual conference.48 However, Graebner took the art of chivvying to a whole new level when he suggested to his superiors in New York that TIME-LIFE should pay for Churchill and his team to take a Christmas ‘working holiday’ in the Moroccan sunshine, well away from politics.
At the time each Briton was limited to taking £35 abroad to spend in the course of a foreign holiday, one of a series of measures introduced by Britain’s post-war government to preserve its limited reserves of sterling. The sum was too small to allow Churchill to holiday in the style to which he was accustomed, so he had not enjoyed a holiday in the sun since his visit to Italy two years earlier. Walter Graebner was therefore able to report to New York an enthusiastic reception almost as soon as he was allowed to extend the invitation. ‘Mr Churchill agrees with our suggestion that it would be in the interests of LIFE (and perhaps other members of the syndicate) to go to Marrakech this winter to work. He gladly accepts our proposal to pay his expenses and is leaving their arrangements to us,’ Graebner relayed.49 A few days later, he reported on more detailed arrangements:
He plans to fly there on December 12 with his wife, Sarah, security, Greenfields and detective and stay about a month. The best procedure would be for us to deposit funds at a bank in Marrakesh. One point remains unsettled. Does our invitation include air passage to and from Marrakesh, regardless of whether it could be paid in sterling? I would like to be able to say we will pay all.50
LIFE was about to offer to pay for the flights when British Aviation Services authorized its Silver City Airways subsidiary to transport the party in both directions free of charge. So instead LIFE deposited $5,000 in Churchill’s name, in order to pay his hotel bills, at the Banque d’État du Maroc.51
Meanwhile Longwell at LIFE tried to share the expense with his fellow American syndicate members. The New York Times agreed, but Houghton Mifflin declined, even though the first volume of Churchill’s memoirs was sure to be a financial success, having just won the Book of the Month Club’s coveted selection. The Club’s 800,000 members had to choose six books a year from a monthly list of ten, but ‘Book of the Month’ selections normally guaranteed at least 200,000 orders.52
On the eve of his departure, Churchill sent the new cabinet secretary Sir Norman Brook a copy of the ‘Provisional Final’ text of the memoirs’ first volume for his approval. Sir Norman shared his predecessor’s view that Churchill’s work was the closest Britain would come to an official war history. He read three successive proofs within a few weeks and offered the advice of an informal proofreader, becoming, in the words of David Reynolds’s masterful account of the memoirs, almost ‘an additional member of the Syndicate’.53
At the Mamounia hotel in Marrakech, Churchill, his daughter Sarah, Bill Deakin, two secretaries, a valet and detective took over seven bedrooms and bathrooms, a sitting room and studio at a fixed price of 16,150 francs (or £35 a day); this included one bottle of Moroccan wine for the secretaries, valet and detective to share at each meal.54 When the first week’s hotel bill came to £300, Churchill justified the arrangement to Clementine:
When you recollect how much it means to all these publishers to get delivery of volume I by the end of February, and that they would perhaps lose many thousands of pounds and suffer immense inconvenience if I failed them, I feel fully justified in the course I have taken, which results only from the fact of our own currency regulations which prevent me from using my own money.55
However, the first week was by some margin the least expensive of the five weeks the party eventually spent at the hotel. ‘The money here arn’t arf going,’ one of the secretaries reported home about halfway through the trip.56 The second week cost £405, the third £458, and the fourth and fifth more than £600 each. The hotel had wisely excluded the cost of the drinks on Churchill’s own table from the fixed price, so the list of extras came to 203,000 francs or £400 for the stay.57
Before Graebner joined the party, along with Lord Camrose, in mid-January, Churchill had already asked him for an extra $5,000. He greeted Graebner with a request for another $1,500.58 They were still some $2,000 short when the party came to leave.59 Deakin was not sure that the American publishers had received full value for the final bill of $13,600:60 their guest had painted more than he had worked, he thought, but at least January’s last proofs were now labelled ‘Final’ – even if Churchill spoiled the effect by adding, in his own hand, ‘Subject to Full Freedom of Proof Correction’.61
*1 Camrose appears to use the wrong name as a reference to the owner of The New York Times. Its previous owner, Adolph Ochs, had died eleven years earlier. After 1935, his son-in-law Arthur Sulzberger was the newspaper’s president and his nephew Julius Adler its general manager.
*2 Jan Karski’s Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State 1939–1944. Reves received a commission of 2½ per cent of sales revenues on the first 50,000 copies sold to the retail trade and 20 per cent of sales to book clubs.
*3 Introduced on 15 July 1947, but abandoned by the government five weeks later on 20 August.
24
‘The unfolding of time, life and fortune’
Racing to the Finish, 1948-50
Exchange rate: $4 until August 1949; $2.80 = £1 thereafter; francs 1,250 = £1 (1948)
Inflation multiples: US x 10; UK x 30
EMERY REVES SUGGESTED The Second World War as the simple but authoritative title for Churchill’s war memoir and The Gathering Storm as the title for its opening volume. As the first extracts appeared in the newspapers early in April 1948, Soviet tanks were moving into Czechoslovakia. The repercussions of the Second World War were still being felt and Churchill had already warned his ‘Syndicate’ that a sixth volume might well be needed.1
The New York Times claimed an extra 25,000 sales a day and European newspapers saw circulation increases of between 15 and 25 per cent.2 ‘I am glad to have been proved right that your principal source of money-making would be your writing,’ Bernard Baruch wrote; investment in the markets, he added, was simply ‘too tough’.3
Churchill’s success continued when The Gathering Storm appeared in book form in America during June and July 1948, while the Soviet Union began its blockade of Berlin. Between them, Houghton Mifflin and the Book of the Month Club sold 565,000 copies, earning the Boston publisher revenues of $600,000.4
In Britain Cassell & Co. could only look on in envy: strict paper rationing, still in force three years after the end of the war, had fo
rced it to delay publication of The Gathering Storm until October. Nevertheless, the pre-publication orders were double the record for any previous non-fiction book, and when it was finally published the revenues from the first volume exceeded the amount that Cassell had paid for the entire copyright. The Spectator magazine speculated that Cassell must have earned a profit from the first volume alone of at least £100,000 – a figure that Churchill took to heart.5
Churchill’s own finances remained sensitive territory: halfway through LIFE’s serialization of the first volume, Walter Graebner had to cable New York to put a halt to a companion piece the magazine had planned to print on this subject: ‘It is most important that you omit the whole section on trusts, taxes and salary as publication of that kind would wreck our relations,’ he told Daniel Longwell.6
Churchill’s healthy bank balance at the end of the war had disappeared by the spring of 1948, because he had spent money on London properties, the Chartwell farms and new investments. But a second series of payments for his memoirs in May, followed by a batch of compensation awards for the Argentinian railway shares, restored his balance to a surplus.7
Despite the first volume’s success, Churchill was making little progress with the second. He was even wondering if he had the will to go on writing. At a low ebb in June, he asked his solicitor Anthony Moir to look into his contract and see what would happen if he gave up writing the book altogether and found someone else to finish it; meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph could pay him something for the preparation he had already done on the later volumes.
This crisis passed, however, when Walter Graebner suggested another holiday paid for by LIFE: this time it was to be summer in the south of France. ‘My own view is that it will be next to impossible for Mr Churchill to go to the south of France unless somebody makes an arrangement similar to that of last winter in Marrakesh,’ Graebner told his chairman Henry Luce, promising it would be cheaper than Churchill’s previous holiday.