No More Champagne

by David Lough

  Lord Roberts finally gave way to Churchill’s pleas to be allowed to move to Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State. He instructed his young military secretary, Neville Chamberlain, to hand on the pass with the message that it had been awarded only ‘for your father’s sake’.36

  Churchill spent April switching between columns, observing the attempts of elderly commanders to adjust a ponderous British army to the Boers’ light-footed, guerrilla tactics.

  When Lord Roberts was finally ready to advance early in May, he dropped one of the dukes from his staff, giving Churchill the opportunity to persuade his cousin the duke of Marlborough to move fifty miles eastwards with him to join forces commanded by another friend from India, General Ian Hamilton.*6 ‘We had an ox-wagon with four oxen and two good horses (the kind of animal that cost two hundred pounds),’ Churchill told his doctor years later. ‘The whole outfit cost The Morning Post a thousand pounds. The wagon was full of Fortnum and Mason groceries and of course liquor.’37

  Back home Longman had taken advantage of Churchill’s hour in the spotlight to publish Savrola. When it sold over 8,000 copies,38 they pressed Churchill to write a quick foreword to his book about the current campaign, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, so that its publication could be accelerated. Wisely, the editors cut this section: ‘I had always designed to publish the letters in a book form at the end of the military operations; but I am shrewdly advised to seize the hour while the attention of the world is fixed on South Africa.’39

  No one at home followed Churchill’s exploits more closely than did his agent A. P. Watt, who heard on the literary grapevine that Churchill had dispensed with his services to deal with Longman directly. Watt decided to test the young author’s mettle and passed on the news that he had a well-known London publisher willing to pay an advance of £1,000 for British rights to London to Ladysmith and that he expected to raise a similar sum in America.40 Ruing his hasty deal with Longman, which contained no advance at all, Churchill instructed his mother to tackle the publisher as soon as she could: ‘The book must be made worth at least £2,000 to me,’ he told her.41

  Soon afterwards he informed Jennie of another offer: a lecture tour of Britain that could earn him as much as £3,000. ‘I do not relish lecturing in England,’ he told her, ‘but you must remember how much money means to me, and how much I need it for political expense and other purposes... I do hope you will realize the importance of making the very best terms you can for me, both as writer and lecturer. The sinews of war are what I lack.’42 Three weeks later, he asked her to investigate a similar offer from Major J. B. Pond’s Lyceum Lecture Bureau in America. ‘I would not go to the United States unless guaranteed at least a thousand pounds a month for three months and I should expect a great deal more,’ he told her. ‘£5,000 is not too much for such a labour... I have so much need of the money and we cannot afford to throw away a single shilling.’43

  Although Jennie had her own problems (her latest venture, the Nimrod Club, had ‘gone smash’ and she was ‘trying to settle lots of bills and horrors’), she dutifully obliged her son.44 Longman sweetened the book’s royalty rates slightly, so that Churchill would achieve his £2,000 target if he sold 25,000 copies, a level that the publisher declared ‘pretty certain’, while adding ominously that ‘war books are not selling well’.45 (This warning proved prophetic: London to Ladysmith via Pretoria sold only 14,000 copies in its first year.)46

  Churchill left for home as soon as Pretoria was captured early in June. The war was far from over, but ‘politics, Pamela, finances and books all need my attention’, he told his mother. He planned to lecture in Britain in the autumn, then move to America for three months in December.47 Years later, Churchill summed up the impact of the Boer War on his finances and future career: ‘If I had not been caught, I could not have escaped, and my emprisonment and escape provided me with enough materials for lectures and a book which brought me in enough money to get into parliament in 1900.’48

  *1 Susan Stewart-Mackenzie (1845–1931), married Francis Jeune QC, judge advocate-general, later Baron St Helier; Lady St Helier hosted the dinner party at which Churchill met his future wife in 1908.

  *2 Churchill owed over £600 to E. Tautz & Sons (military tailors), A. F. Bernau (tailors) and Palmer & Co. (bootmakers). They waited until 1901 before they were paid.

  *3 The dowager duchess, Frances, grandmother of both Churchill and the duke.

  *4 Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922), freelance reporter 1870; founded a magazine business, later Amalgamated Press (with his brother Harold) 1887; purchased Evening News 1894; founded Daily Mail 1896; purchased Observer 1905 (sold 1912), The Times 1908; knighted 1904; Baron Northcliffe 1905; viscount 1917.

  *5 It was eventually called London to Ladysmith via Pretoria.

  *6 Ian Hamilton (1853–1947); army officer; served in India, Egypt, southern Africa, Burma 1871–1902; attached to the Japanese army 1904; general 1907; commanding officer, Allied Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Dardanelles campaign March–October 1915; lieutenant of the Tower of London 1918–20.

  5

  ‘Needlessly extravagant’

  Bachelor, Author, MP, 1900–5

  Exchange rate $5 = £1

  Inflation multiples: US x 30; UK x 100

  RUMOURS OF A general election in Britain reached the island of Madeira, where Churchill’s ship had stopped on her way home from Cape Town. Within a week of his return to London in July 1900, Churchill was adopted as a Conservative candidate for Oldham. He was naturally pleased, but a pressing personal matter briefly diverted his attention from politics: his mother had accepted a renewed marriage proposal from George Cornwallis-West. The Churchills turned out for the occasion ‘in a solid phalanx’ of support, but Winston’s hopes that the marriage might lead to a regular allowance quickly evaporated when George’s family boycotted the ceremony and George was drummed out of his regiment. George took a pile of his new wife’s unpaid bills on their protracted honeymoon, but he ‘found it a bit thick when expected to pay for Lord Randolph Churchill’s barouche purchased in the [eighteen] eighties’.1

  Churchill was not too despondent about his own position. After all, he had already saved almost £4,000 of his earnings from books and journalism.2 ‘With judicious economy, I shall hope to make that carry me through the lean years,’ he told his brother Jack. ‘In November I am going to lecture in England, and I hope to make the best part of £2,000. December, January and February I shall be in the States, March, I shall be back in England and hope to have made £5,000 or £6,000 and be able to write MP after my name.’3

  He spent part of August and most of September campaigning in Oldham, the rest working on a second book of his Boer War dispatches, to be called Ian Hamilton’s March. Longman again refused any advance on the book, citing London to Ladysmith’s disappointing sales and a general cooling of interest in the war. The publisher’s judgement was vindicated: Ian Hamilton’s March sold only half the number of London to Ladysmith’s copies and earned its author less than £400.4

  On 1 October, after a close-fought contest, the voters of Oldham elected Churchill as their member of Parliament. He won by a margin of 222 votes and the next stage of his career plan fell into place.5 Helpfully, the duke of Marlborough promised to pay a third of Churchill’s election expenses.6 The duke also solved the problem of accommodation in London by offering Churchill the last two years’ lease of his bachelor rooms at 105 Mount Street (off Park Lane), which the duke no longer needed now that he was to marry a wealthy American heiress, Consuelo Vanderbilt. Churchill asked his aunt Leonie to help furnish the rooms as Jennie was still away on a prolonged honeymoon with her young husband: ‘You cannot imagine how that kind of material arrangement irritates me,’ he told his aunt. ‘So long as my table is clear and there is plenty of paper, I do not worry about the rest.’7

  Parliament was not due to sit for four months, giving its new member an ideal window for his lecture tours of Britain and the United States entitled ‘T
he War as I Saw It’. Churchill began with a dry run at Harrow, his old school, where he covered just a quarter of his notes during ninety minutes.

  The British lecture tour was organized by Gerald Christie’s Lecture Agency. It attracted ticket sales of almost £4,000, but required Churchill to speak at thirty venues within a period of just over a month.8 Before his appearance in Liverpool on 22 November Churchill sat down to list his assets and liabilities. Adopting the optimistic outlook that came to characterize his financial arithmetic, Churchill calculated that his assets had now reached £8,000.9 However, the liabilities column contained his loan of £3,500 and unpaid bills of £640, one of which had reached the hands of solicitors.10 Churchill’s constituents in Oldham were also pressing him to make the expected financial contributions in support of causes as diverse as the Oldham Deaf and Dumb Society, the Oldham branch of the Boys’ Brigade and the Oldham & District Ornithological Society.11 Nevertheless, Churchill felt confident enough about his finances at the end of the tour to join a series of exclusive London clubs, including the Carlton Club, a bastion of the Conservative Party.

  Mark Twain was on hand to introduce Churchill at his first packed lecture in New York early in December, but as the tour progressed it became clear that the organizer J. B. Pond had greatly overestimated Churchill’s drawing power. Churchill averaged only £50 a lecture, half the amount in Britain, despite travelling much greater distances each day.12 Worse was to come in Toronto, Canada, where attendances were higher but (much to Churchill’s outrage) Pond sub-contracted the events for a fixed fee, so Churchill received only 15 per cent of the takings.13

  Christmas at the governor-general’s house in Ottawa, with Pamela Plowden as a fellow guest, did not go well. Churchill refused to resume the lecture tour until Pond travelled to Canada and persuaded him to soldier on throughout January without a change of his terms. He was cheered instead by an investment success which he shared with his mother: ‘Cassel made a speculation for me the other day which resulted in a profit of £187.10. He is v[er]y kind and his judgement is marvellously accurate. I hope, my dearest Mama, to be able to provide for myself in the future – at any rate until things are better for you.’ The one bone of contention between them remained the loan that Churchill had taken out from Norwich Union to pay his own allowance – and Jack’s. He wrote to Jennie:

  If you can arrange to relieve me of this loan, with the interest of which I am heavily burdened – £300 per annum – I will not ask for any allowance whatever from you, until old Papa Wests decides to give you and George more to live on. Jack in a few years should be self-supporting too. But what a lucky thing it is that I did not remain in the army, for I could not have retained my commission under the circumstances. I am very proud that there is not one person in a million who at my age could have earned £10,000 without any capital in less than two years. But it is sometimes v[er]y unpleasant work. For instance, last week I arrived to lecture in an American town & found Pond had not arranged any public lecture but that I was hired out for £40 to perform at an evening party in a private house – like a conjurer. Several times I have harangued in local theatres to almost empty benches.14

  Churchill headed home on the day after Queen Victoria’s funeral. He was $6,000 better off, but exhausted, as he recalled in My Early Life:

  For more than five months I had spoken for an hour or more almost every night except Sundays, and often twice a day, and had travelled without ceasing, usually by night, rarely sleeping twice in the same bed. But the results were substantial. I had in my possession nearly £10,000. I was entirely independent and had no need to worry about the future, or for many years to work at anything but politics. I sent my £10,000 to my Father’s old friend, Sir Ernest Cassel, with the instruction ‘Feed my sheep’. He fed the sheep with great prudence. They did not multiply fast, but they fattened steadily, and none of them ever died. Indeed from year to year they had a few lambs; but these were not numerous enough for me to live upon. I had every year to eat a sheep or two as well, so gradually my flock grew smaller, until in a few years it was almost entirely devoured.15

  Not all of the cash was handed over to Sir Ernest. While still feeling flush, Churchill paid off a clutch of old bills from tailors, saddlers and stables, some of them dating back to 1895.16 He also sent his mother a cheque for £300 on the day that he took his seat in the House of Commons. ‘In a certain sense, it belongs to you,’ he explained, ‘for I could never have earned it had you not transmitted to me the wit and energy which are necessary.’17

  The young bachelor MP’s expenditure began to assume a pattern, dominated by fine clothing, footwear, books, wine, cigars, hotel meals and horses, for hunting and polo. A generation later, in Edwardian Hey-Days (1930), Jennie’s second husband George Cornwallis-West claimed that ‘a bachelor in London with a thousand a year was comparatively well-off’:

  He could get a very good flat in Mayfair, to hold himself and his servant, for a hundred and fifty pounds per annum. Dinner at his club cost him about four shillings, and any good restaurant would have been prepared to provide an excellent dinner, if he chose to give one to his friends, at ten and sixpence a head. The best tailor in Savile Row would make a suit of evening clothes for eleven guineas, and a morning suit for about eight guineas; dress shirts could be bought for ten and sixpence.18

  Churchill, on the other hand, spent nearer to £1,400 a year during his bachelor years, as we know from his secretary’s analysis of his outlays during 1905.19 Like his mother, Churchill patronized only the best suppliers: boots and shoes came from Palmer & Co., inventor of the waterproof boot; hats from Scotts Hatters, while J. W. Allen provided solid leather cases for them, lined with brown satin.20 Frank Smythson added the suffix ‘MP’ to Churchill’s calling cards,21 while membership of the Bicester Hunt and the Ranelagh Club for polo set him back forty guineas a year between them, before stabling and equipment consumed a similar sum.22 Weekends were spent moving between country houses and polo grounds, driven by his chauffeur-cum-servant Émile Violon, who was equipped for the purpose with a uniform of a blue serge jacket, ‘vest’ and trousers.

  Oppressed by the weight of bills, invitations and correspondence, Churchill again turned to his mother for help: ‘It is quite clear to me that unless I get a Secretary, I shall be pressed into my grave with all sorts of ridiculous things – which I have no need whatever to do.’23 She lent him the part-time use of Annette Anning, her own secretary, but soon lost her completely to Churchill, who had embarked on a way of life that was to last another fifty years: a combination of politics and writing.

  Pamela Plowden, to whom he had not written for eight weeks, felt seriously neglected and, when Churchill proposed to her at Warwick Castle during the summer of 1901, she declined. Jack learned that at least three other men considered themselves to be informally engaged to Pamela and soon afterwards she chose the earl of Lytton. ‘I think Winston is quite right to have put off with dear little Pamela,’ his military mentor Colonel Brabazon reassured Churchill’s aunt. ‘She ought to be a rich man’s wife.’24

  There was still no sign of Jennie repaying the loan that Churchill had taken on for the last three years to fund his allowance, despite the death of the dowager duchess in 1899, which had added the residuary estate of the 7th duke of Marlborough to Lord Randolph’s will trust. Indeed, by the end of 1901 his mother’s financial problems were once again coming to a head: Jennie had bowed to the inevitable and closed her society magazine, The Anglo-Saxon Review, which was still making losses after ten issues.*1 Her husband George, a stranger to the idea of earning a living, had continued with his life’s main interests, which might be deduced from the chapter headings of his book Edwardian Hey-Days: Hunting, Racing, Deer-Stalking, Fishing, Golf, Cricket, Motoring and (not untruthfully) Unsuccessful Enterprises – that is, until Sir Ernest Cassel found him a directorship of an electrical company in far-off Glasgow. His modest salary might have mattered less if his wife’s spending had been less extravagant. ‘[J
ennie] dressed beautifully, and her taste, not only in clothes, but in everything, was of the best,’ George observed ruefully. ‘In money matters she was without any sense of proportion.’25

  Aware of the tensions caused by Churchill’s loan within the family, the duke of Marlborough chided Churchill for his ‘needlessly extravagant’ expenditure before meeting him to discuss the matter with their family solicitor at the end of 1901.26 The duke left straight afterwards to winter in South Africa without giving any inkling of his intentions to Churchill, but he instructed Theodore Lumley to find a way that he could help his cousin as head of the family.27 The solicitor ‘considered’ the problem in January 1902, then held a ‘long meeting’ with Churchill in February, followed by a ‘long and private interview’ in March with the duke, who finally decided to lend Churchill £3,500 interest-free to repay the Norwich Union loan.28

  Unfortunately, the duke had forgotten this arrangement by the time the insurance company’s six months’ notice period had expired; Lumley’s diplomatic reminders went unanswered, so Churchill himself visited the duke at Blenheim. They reached an agreement: the Churchill brothers’ loan would remain interest-free until their mother’s death, but they would provide security for its eventual repayment from what remained of their future inheritance.

  At last, during the summer of 1902, his father’s literary executors (Ernest Beckett, a banker, and Earl Howe, the husband of one of Lord Randolph’s sisters) gave Churchill access to the papers and letters at Blenheim, so that he could begin work on a biography. ‘There emerges from these dusty records a great and vivid drama,’ he told his mother as he began sifting through them.29

  He was soon distracted by an invitation to witness the opening of the Aswan dam in Egypt. It came from Sir Ernest Cassel, who had arranged the dam’s financing after his rivals the Rothschilds turned down the opportunity. While he was away, Churchill ordered his newsagent to forward the usual six daily newspapers, as well as The Spectator and Punch. He also took with him the extra reading required for the political campaigns he was planning, one for reform of the army and another against ‘tariff reform’, the political issue which was to define Churchill’s separation from the Conservative Party’s mainstream.