by David Lough
‘I am sorry that stupid Cox refused my cheque,’ Churchill eventually replied, unabashed, but enclosing a cheque for £30. He asked his mother to forgive the balance until he next came home to take a more serious look at his finances: ‘There are several bills in London unpaid that really will have to be paid soon,’ he conceded. ‘I shall have to borrow a certain sum on my life or effect a loan in some way or other.’13 Already keen for a break from Bangalore, which he described as ‘a third rate watering place, out of season & without the sea’, he planned to be home for the Derby2 in June.
He asked the family solicitor to arrange a loan for £3,000, secured against his future inheritance, but Lumley & Lumley could only persuade the Norwich Union insurance company to lend £2,300, of which £300 was to cover Lumley’s fee (a charge that rankled with Churchill for years). The loan was still incomplete when Churchill met one of his father’s Indian army friends, General Sir Bindon Blood, while staying for the weekend with Duchess Lily and her new husband Lord William Beresford. Encouraged by Beresford, the general promised to take the young subaltern on to his staff should he be given command of an Indian frontier expeditionary force.
A month later, at the Goodwood races, Churchill heard that Sir Bindon had taken charge of three brigades to quash a Pathian rebellion in the Swat Valley on the North West Frontier. Pausing only to cable the general and remind him of his promise, Churchill immediately set off for India. On reaching Bangalore in mid-August, he asked his mother to sign the loan documents for him: ‘I am counting on the money and have already written several cheques to pay the bills here,’ he told her. ‘Hustle Lumley & wire if there is a hitch.’14
There was no reply from Sir Bindon in Aden or on arrival at Bangalore, but a letter reached Churchill at the end of August: although the general’s headquarters staff was full, Churchill would be fitted in ‘on the first opportunity’15 and could start as a war correspondent. Putting down the novel Savrola which he had started writing (he had reached the fifth chapter), Churchill set off on the five-day rail journey north, instructing his mother to arrange an urgent newspaper contract. She found that The Times had already made its appointment, but agreed terms with The Daily Telegraph: Churchill wanted ‘not less than £10 per letter’, published under his own name,16 but Jennie settled for £5 and the by-line ‘A Young Officer’.17
Churchill dispatched twelve letters to the newspaper over five weeks of daily skirmishes, during which he deliberately courted danger so that no onlooker could doubt his courage. Halfway through the fighting he was furious to find out his mother had agreed to the rate of £5: ‘I mean to solace myself financially. I will not accept less than £10 a letter and I shall return any cheque for a less [sic] sum,’ he told her. ‘The £75 which the D.T. propose to give me will hardly pay my ticket for self & horses... As Dr Johnson says, “No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”’18
Churchill remained distracted by his finances while the fighting continued. ‘I am perplexed and worried by a telegram wh. arrived from England and reached me two days ago saying “NO”. Does this apply to the loan?’ he asked Jennie. ‘If so – I am indeed in a serious position. I have written £500 of cheques in settlement of debts and if they are dishonoured, I really do not know – or care to guess – what the consequences might be.’19
Jennie was equally in the dark: ‘I wonder if you have heard from Lumley yet?... He is a very tiresome man. My own affairs are in a dreadful state – & I hope to get him to put them right. How it is to be done Heaven knows.’20 She tried to atone for The Daily Telegraph disappointment by suggesting that Churchill publish his letters in book form, an idea that he immediately took up, dropping his novel again and asking her to find a publisher. He was bored by life in Bangalore, even polo, but at least ‘financially my frontier affair has been good business as with my press money I have spent nothing for two months’.21
It took only a month before it became obvious that the Norwich Union loan had not solved the difficulty of Churchill’s unpaid London bills. ‘I find that my original estimate of my liabilities was considerably below the actual amount,’ he wrote home in November 1897. ‘All borrowed money and a good number of the most pressing bills have been paid – but nearly £500 – to people like Bernau, Tautz, Sowter etc will remain.’22 Jennie was no better off. ‘Personally I am going through a very serious crisis,’ she told him. ‘I will write to you the particulars once I have come to some tangible plan. Lumley is trying to devise something.’23
Churchill wrote for six hours a day, racing to beat The Times’s war correspondent in order to be the first to publish a book about the Malakand field force. He was so busy he missed the significance of his mother’s mention of a possible financial scheme to reorganize her finances. Dispatching the book’s manuscript to her on the last day of 1897, as he was about to set off for Calcutta to stay with the Viceroy Lord Elgin, he emphasized its urgency to his mother. ‘Do not I beg you – lose one single day – in taking the MS to some publisher,’ he implored her. ‘As to price, I have no idea what the book is worth but do not throw it away. I don’t think I ought to get less than £300 for the first edition with some royalty on each copy – but if the book hit the mark I might get much more.’24
Jennie’s search led to Arthur Balfour’s publishing ‘broker’ A. P. Watt,3 who sold it within a fortnight to Longman Green.25 Posting her son a copy of the contract, Jennie explained that Thomas Longman usually only published at the author’s expense, but would be advancing him £50 and that his royalty would increase from 15 to 20 per cent after the sale of 3,000 copies.26 ‘If the book is a success – and I am sure it will be – you can command yr own price next time,’ she suggested.27
Churchill realized that he could not dictate terms from so far away. ‘All financial arrangements in connexion with it – I shall leave entirely in your hands, but please have no false scruples or modesty about bargaining,’ he told her, five days after she had already settled. ‘The publication of the book will certainly be the most noteworthy act of my life – up to date (of course). By its reception I shall measure the chances of my success in the world.’28
A proof copy of The Story of the Malakand Field Force did not reach Churchill in Bangalore until a week after the book’s publication in London on 14 March 1898. It was too late to do anything about the many typesetting errors he found, so Churchill could only ‘writhe’ from a distance while the book sold 1,473 copies during its first three months on the market, followed by another 1,198 copies over the next year. Early in 1899 Churchill received his first literary royalty: the cheque for £46 (on top of his £50 advance) fell well short of his earlier expectations.29
Before the book’s publication, Churchill had already turned his attention to his mother’s efforts to secure him a transfer to the campaign in Egypt: ‘Now do stir up your influence,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t be afraid of every line of attack. So far I have done it all myself. You have so much more power.’30 Jennie replied that no military advance was likely until the summer of 1898; she was considering her own trip to Egypt to work on the army commander General Kitchener ‘at nearer quarters with more chance of success’.31
Meanwhile the family solicitor Theodore Lumley was about to share with Jennie his long-awaited scheme to reorganize her finances. ‘He takes such a time to do anything,’ she complained to her son. ‘In time you will receive all the documents. If the arrangement I contemplate comes off I think it will be possible to find a few hundreds to settle those bills of yours. I will explain all to you later when the papers are ready.’32
Jennie had been staying at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and returned to London to hear the details of Lumley’s plan early in January 1899. However, when she reached London she realized that Lumley had already sent the legal documents to Churchill in India, without any proper explanation of a scheme that required her son’s written approval, because it affected his inheritance. Grasping something of the sensitivities involved, she dashed off a note to Chu
rchill intending to catch the same mail as Lumley’s package:
This £14,000 is in order to buy up all the loans I have made in different Insurance offices – with a margin enough to pay the interest for a couple of years & I think give you the few hundreds you require. Of course in helping you to do this you understand that you reduce yr portion after my death... Anyhow it is Hobson’s choice. I can’t give you an allowance or have anything to live on until this is done. So sign the papers & send them back by return. I will explain in next, post off.33
But Jennie missed the post. Lumley’s legal papers reached Bangalore late in January 1897. The difficulty facing the solicitor was that Jennie had no capital of her own – only the income flowing from capital theoretically ring-fenced inside family trusts. Leonard Jerome had deliberately prevented the American settlement’s future income from being pledged to secure any loans, but neither the English Settlement nor her husband’s will trust (both drawn up by Lumley) had taken the same precaution. The solicitor had therefore persuaded the Norwich Union to lend £17,0004 against their future flow of income, so long as her son consented, on behalf of both himself and his under-age brother, to put his future inheritance at risk in this way. If any part of Jennie’s loan was still outstanding when she died (which seemed practically inevitable), Churchill would have to forego that portion of his inheritance.
All this took time to sink in. His first reaction, sent on the same day that Lumley’s package arrived, was relatively muted and complained only that Lumley’s letter had been full of legal jargon:
£17,000 is a great deal of money, about a quarter indeed of all we shall ever have in the world – under American settlement – Duke’s will & Papa’s property... I do not quite understand how the signing of these documents will affect my prospects... What I want to know – and that Lumley – if not a verbose fool – might easily have explained is – how much difference it will make... Speaking quite frankly on the subject – there is no doubt that we are both you & I equally thoughtless – spendthrift and extravagant. We both know what is good – and we like to have it. Arrangements for paying are left to the future... We shall very soon come to the end of our tether – unless a considerable change comes over our fortunes and dispositions. As long as I am dead sure & certain of an ultimate £1,000 a year5 – I do not much care – as I could always make money on the press – and might marry... I sympathize with all your extravagances – even more than you do with mine – it seems just as suicidal to me when you spend £200 on a ball dress as it does to you when I purchase a new polo pony for £100. And yet I feel that you ought to have the dress & I the polo pony. The pinch of the whole matter is that we are damned poor.34
By the time Jennie’s hurried note reached him forty-eight hours later, Churchill’s reaction had hardened. Convinced now that he was being asked to sign away almost half his inheritance35 – enough to damage his marriage prospects – he also suspected (rightly as it turned out) that the cost of the scheme (nearly £1,400 a year in interest and life insurance charges)36 would soon prevent Jennie from keeping up the payment of his and Jack’s allowances. The only bait for him was a single contribution of £700 towards his unpaid bills.
Churchill sent his mother a letter that would haunt him for weeks:
I have read all the papers very carefully and I understand that by signing, as you ask me to do, I deprive myself for ever of an income equal to the sum of Interest and premium necessary to borrow £14,000 or perhaps £17,000 upon an Insurance policy. Neither you – nor Lumley, in whom it is inexcusable – have informed me what this amount will be. Assuming that the rate is 5% (a moderate estimate) and that £14,000 is the sum borrowed (the minimum stated) – I learn that by signing I ultimately forego £700 per annum. As I understand it that if Jack lives I shall only have £1,800 a year – you will recognize that this is a very serious matter for me. Nor do I think that it should have been put before me in so sketchy and offhand a manner – as if it were a thing of no importance. I have written to Lumley on the subject.
I have thought the whole matter over and have considered all the different influences... I do not intend to profit by this loan you are raising – or to confuse the matter by allowing you to think that I consent to deprive myself of half my property – for the sake of such a ‘mess of pottage’ as a few hundreds of pounds to pay my bills.
I sign these papers – purely & solely out of affection for you. I write plainly that no other consideration would have induced me to sign them. As it is I sign them upon two conditions – which justice & prudence alike demand.
Churchill stipulated that his mother must switch his informal allowance into a binding legal commitment and that Jack must share the burden once he turned eighteen years old:
I need not say how painful it is to me to have to write in so formal a strain – or to take such precautions. But I am bound to protect myself in the future – as I do not wish to be left – should I survive you – in poverty. In three years from my father’s death you have spent a quarter of our entire fortune in the world. I have also been extravagant: but my extravagances are a very small matter besides yours... If this letter does not please you – you must balance your annoyance against my reluctance to be £700 a year poorer and then I think you will admit that my side of the account is the heavier.37
He wrote to Jack on the same day, asking him to promise to share the charge when he came of age: ‘I am sure that you would not wish that in any way we should depart from our old principle – which Papa laid down in his will – that we should share all money we inherited equally.’38
*1 Pamela Plowden (1874–1971), married the earl of Lytton, 1902 (later under-secretary of state for India 1920–2, governor of Bengal 1922–7).
*2 A valuable horse race held on the first Tuesday of June, traditionally marking the beginning of London’s summer season.
*3 A. P. Watt (1834–1914), bookseller and advertising agent, Edinburgh 1870s; first person to be called ‘literary agent’, 1881, representing Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling.
*4 The loan was to be set at £17,000, but Jennie was only to benefit from £14,000; the balance of £3,000 was to repay Churchill’s £2,300 Norwich Union loan and to leave him £700 to pay overdue bills.
*5 Churchill’s reference is to a private income of £1,000 per annum, requiring capital of £20,000, according to the rule of thumb at the time.
4
‘Fine sentiments and empty stomachs do not accord’
The World’s Highest-Paid War Correspondent, 1899–1900
Exchange rate: $5 = £1
Inflation multiples: US x 30; UK x 100
CHURCHILL FELT GLOOMY about his financial prospects at the start of 1898. ‘The only thing that worries me in life is – money,’ he told Jack. ‘Extravagant tastes, an expensive style of living – small and diminished resources – these are fertile sources of trouble.’1 This despondent mood followed him to Camp Peshawar on India’s northern border, where he found himself unexpectedly posted to the staff of Sir William Lockhart, a general commanding yet another border force. Jennie’s allowance had failed to reach his London bank; he owed his Indian bankers more than £200; London tradesmen were pursuing him for bills totalling more than £500 and no bank in Peshawar would honour Cox & Co.’s cheques. ‘These filthy money matters are the curse of my life and my only worry,’ he complained to his mother. ‘I shudder sometimes when I contemplate the abyss into which we are sinking. Personally I live simply – uncomfortably – squalidly. I eat bad food – I spend nothing on my clothes. There is no dissipation. We shall finish up stone broke.’2
Ten days later, when he was still unable to draw money and there was no word from his mother, he suspected his letter about her scheme was the reason:
I feel that you have probably taken amiss what I then wrote. I think you will be wrong and unkind to do this. You must remember that you never put the case before me in any clear way... I have also to reckon on the possibility of your
marrying again – perhaps some man I did not like – or did not get on with – and troubles springing up – which might lessen your affection for me... I did not write without thinking and, much as I hated it at the time, much as I have hated it since, I do not desire to alter it.3
Jennie had in fact written, but from Aswan in Egypt. Her letter reached Churchill as he left Peshawar and it simply asked him never to mention money matters again. He feared a permanent rift, but his mother had travelled to Egypt ostensibly to lobby for his transfer to the Sudan. A rumour that she had been found at a Cairo hotel in bed with one of her army lovers, Caryl Ramsden, suggested a broader agenda, but her friend Lady St Helier*1 proved a more effective advocate of Churchill’s cause. ‘Soudan all right – writing,’ she cabled after tackling her powerful friend, the adjutant general Sir Evelyn Wood.4 Impatient to set off straight away, Churchill had to wait in Bangalore when it became clear that no action on the Nile was expected until August.
Only one letter from his mother arrived over the next five weeks. Churchill assumed that their quarrel over her scheme remained the reason, but she had written three times and sent them all to Peshawar, where they languished in a field post office. Her most recent catalogued her own financial difficulties, claiming that she now had only £900 a year of her own to spend freely. ‘The situation as described in your letter is appalling. As you say, it is of course impossible to live in London on such a pittance,’ Churchill at once replied, dropping his insistence on a legally binding allowance. ‘I hate the idea of your marrying – but that of course would be a solution.’ For himself, he was becoming more confident of earning an independent living as a writer. ‘This literary sphere of action may enable me in a few years to largely supplement my income,’ he explained. He would finish his novel, write a life of Garibaldi or a history of the American Civil War and stay in the army until sure of a seat in Parliament.5
