No More Champagne
Page 33
The battle to liberate Paris was in full swing and Churchill was visiting the Italian frontline, when the Harraps made another attempt to settle in the fourth week of August: they would accept an informal letter giving them ‘first refusal of any book on the War if such a book should be written by Mr Churchill, he being under no obligation to write any book and free if he did so to fix his own terms’.37 Henderson and Nicholl urged Churchill to accept the Harrap offer before dealing with Sir Newman Flower by a small ‘nuisance payment’.38
In the aftermath of the German surrender in Paris, Churchill was on the point of doing so when he changed his mind. He refused to give the Harraps
any special consideration in respect of any book that I may write after the War is over about the War period. This is what they have been after all along, and they have been using this contract all this time as a blackmailing lever. The conduct of this firm, and particularly of Mr George Harrap, has been in my opinion so at variance with the usual conditions prevailing between author and publisher, that I do not wish to have any further dealings of any kind with them.39
There was a slight softening of this line when Bracken met the Harraps for informal talks on 4 September. As the Allied troops marched into Brussels, Churchill allowed him to discuss giving Harrap first refusal on a book ‘exclusively, repeat exclusively, about the pre-War period’. Bracken returned with tentative agreement on ‘say a biography of Napoleon or Hitler’, but it was not enough for Churchill. Through Kathleen Hill, he relayed the fact that he had meant ‘a book exclusively about the pre-War period, that is to say the period between the last war and this war’.40 By the time the two parties met again that evening, Churchill’s advisers had understood their master’s intent and the meeting broke up without agreement despite another concession by the Harrap brothers.
Three days later, as V-2 rockets started to fall on London, a letter arrived at Downing Street from the younger Walter Harrap.
We feel that a misunderstanding has crept into this matter in a way that is very regrettable, and to end all further discussion are willing that the Agreement shall be terminated forthwith... We are taking this course also because we greatly appreciate what you have done for us all through your courageous leadership in the world’s greatest emergency, and it is distasteful to us, whether we are right or wrong, that we should be compelled to litigate the matter with a man to whom every one of us is indebted.41
As Churchill left to attend a second conference in Quebec, he dictated a magnanimous reply, declaring all misunderstandings overcome. A ‘top secret’ cable from Bracken pursued him, explaining that the letter could not be sent until the arbitration process had run its course, although it was a mere formality.42
Sir Alexander Korda was anxious for film negotiations to resume, but first a deal with Cassell had to be struck. On Churchill’s return from Moscow, where he had travelled from Quebec for discussions with Stalin about the future of Poland and the Balkans, he set out the changed background for his emissary, Lord Camrose:
Let me point out within what very small dimensions these difficulties have been confined. At the outside, Harraps could have claimed that one chapter out of the inter-wars book should deal with the opening of the present war. I am now entirely free from even this small tie... The way is therefore open for me to write a letter for you to give to Sir Newman Flower, as you so kindly offered to do, in which I will promise to give him the first refusal of any book I may write about this War, at a price to be mutually agreed. Failing agreement, I should be free to look elsewhere, or return to him in case such quest failed.43
Camrose provided a first draft of the letter for Sir Newman, which Churchill amended before expressing the hope that it could be dispatched straightaway. In fact, it was to take another seven drafts and the lengthy involvement of Camrose, Henderson, Nicholl, Mason and Kathleen Hill – not to mention Churchill himself – before two separate letters left, four weeks later. The main stumbling block was how to engineer Cassell’s option so that Churchill was not disadvantaged on the price. Churchill and Camrose discussed the problem together on 8 November, as recorded by Camrose:
Had another discussion with W.S.C. about his book. He was anxious to get it settled so that he could sign the agreement for the film rights of the English-Speaking Peoples. With money from these, the £20,000 left to him by Strakosch and the sales of royalties of his other books, he would be quite independent and would be able to leave to his family a sum which he considered was quite adequate for them.44
They met again two days later, but questions remained in Churchill’s mind. He wrote them down in a letter to Lord Camrose, while travelling to Paris for an Armistice Day visit:
Is no offer to come from Sir Newman Flower? Am I to state my price and, if he thinks it too high, is that to be the end of the transaction with him? Am I to be entitled to go elsewhere and take a lower price if I cannot get my own figure, or am I thereafter to be inhibited from writing any book on the subject except at the original price asked for by me and the highest price which Sir Newman Flower is prepared to offer? This would seem to give him the entire power to fix the price.45
Lord Camrose produced a new formula, but Henderson and Nicholl found it fell short of the necessary legal detail. They drafted their own fifth version, but both Kathleen Hill and Churchill thought it too legalistic in tone. Churchill produced a sixth version, which the lawyers rejected. ‘Mr Churchill may feel that we are being too pernickety,’ Nicholl admitted to Kathleen Hill, ‘but we really cannot advise him to write the letter in the form of the draft that you sent me this morning.’46
On the evening of 22 November, as French troops entered Strasbourg, Lord Camrose sat down with Churchill to hammer out a final version without lawyers present. After he had successfully warded off most of Churchill’s last-minute changes, the two letters left Downing Street on 24 November.47 ‘I shall be very pleased to give your firm a first refusal, at the lowest price I am prepared to accept, in any work I might write on the present War once it is over,’ Churchill’s first letter read, detailing this option’s mechanics over three pages.48 The second, much briefer letter recorded their understandings of 1940 about finishing A History of the English-Speaking Peoples; in place of extra chapters, Churchill was to write a 10,000-word epilogue within six months of leaving office.
Unaware of these letters, Albert Curtis Brown forwarded to Churchill the latest offer he had received for the memoirs, worth £250,000, to be added to the ‘dossier’: ‘It is a letter of such importance that perhaps the Prime Minister would like to see it,’ he told Kathleen Hill.49 Alive to the sensitivity of the sum, however, Churchill wanted the correspondence brought to an immediate end. ‘I do not want you to be under any misapprehension. The “dossier” to which you repeatedly refer has no existence,’ his amended draft for Mrs Hill read. ‘Would you please be good enough to let this correspondence end with the assurance that if Mr Churchill has need of your services at any time, he will not hesitate to ask you for them.’50
Once resumed, History’s film negotiations with MGM and Sir Alexander Korda proved more protracted than expected. MGM wanted control over radio and television rights as well as film and insisted that Churchill should share the cost of any US taxes. ‘Offer Sir A entire film rights. No limit to number, and, if necessary, ½ American tax,’ an emollient Churchill instructed his team. Nevertheless, there was still no detailed agreement in March 1945, when Churchill asked Bracken to ‘get the matter settled’.51 The following day, Sir Alexander called off his lawyers and substituted his own company in place of MGM as Churchill’s paymaster. Kathleen Hill asked Lloyds Bank to put its receipt for the £50,000 cheque in a sealed envelope for delivery to her personally.52 Churchill had begun the war with a large hole in his finances; as it drew to a close, his bank balance stood above £100,000.53
*1 Leslie Charles Graham-Dixon is referred to as Leslie throughout Martin Gilbert’s biography, Winston Spencer Churchill; however, his grandson assures the au
thor that family, friends and colleagues called him Charles.
*2 Churchill initially chose the title Onwards to Victory from a list supplied by Charles Eade, but opted a few days later for the more prudent The End of the Beginning.
*3 Churchill had signed three separate contracts: one with Harrap & Co., another with the British ‘parts’ publisher George Newnes, and a third with US publishers Harcourt Brace, under American law.
*4 Provided by a young barrister, Kenneth Diplock (1907–85), who later became a distinguished law lord.
*5 Camrose and his brother acquired Cassell & Co. as part of Amalgamated Press in 1927, but sold Cassell’s books business to its managing director, Newman Flower, to help pay for their purchase.
*6 Camrose exercised this ‘priority’ through another of his newspapers, The Daily Telegraph, in 1946.
22
‘A most profitable purdah’
Minting the Memoirs, 1945–6
Exchange rate: $4 = £1
Inflation multiples: US x 12.5; UK x 40
AS THE EUROPEAN war ended, the Labour Party’s national executive opted for a summer general election, rather than extend the Coalition government’s life until after the anticipated victory over Japan. Churchill resigned the office of prime minister on 23 May 1945, but stayed on at the head of a caretaker ministry formed of Conservative ministers. Although the general election was held on 5 July, the result was not announced until three weeks later after every soldier’s vote was counted.
Churchill misread the public appetite for social reform during the campaign. While the Conservatives led on issues of international security, Clement Attlee and the Labour Party promised a new housing policy, nationalized healthcare, expanded state funding of education and national insurance. In a broadcast early in the campaign Churchill made the mistake of claiming that it would require ‘some form of a Gestapo’ to impose what he described as a form of socialism in Britain. The result was that the Labour Party’s share of the vote increased by more than 11 per cent and it won an extra 239 seats in Parliament. The Conservative Party lost 190 seats, although Churchill’s personal popularity remained high.
Clement Attlee became prime minister at the head of a new Labour government. Although bewildered by the outcome, Churchill declined the knighthood which was offered to him and chose to continue in public life as leader of the Opposition. The post carried a salary of £2,000 a year, the same sum as the pension of a former prime minister which he could have claimed for the rest of his life if he had decided to retire.1
The Churchills could no longer live in Downing Street, but neither Chartwell nor the home at 28 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington that they had bought earlier in the year for £24,000 was ready to occupy.2 They temporarily took a penthouse suite at Claridge’s hotel.
Churchill’s gloom following his shock defeat deepened as he thought about his post-war finances. For all his large deposit at the bank, it would last only for some five years if he returned to his pre-war level of spending, while tax rates of more than 90 per cent meant that he would keep very little of any future earnings if he resumed his writing.
Offers for his war memoirs started to flood in – the first (from an American newspaper syndicate, King Features) arriving at 6:36 p.m. on the day of his resignation. However, Churchill was in no mood to consider them unless his advisers could find a way around the tax problem. For the time being, their advice was to do nothing that might risk losing his tax status as a ‘retired author’, which at least meant that earnings from his past work escaped any tax.
Churchill asked Kathleen Hill to ignore the offers arriving from all over the world or to reply that he was ‘not making any plans for writing books or articles at present’.3 Emery Reves, who had recreated his press agency as Cooperation Publishing on reaching New York in 1941, was one of many who were ignored in July and August when he passed on book and magazine bids from all over the American continent. One was from LIFE magazine; another, from Reader’s Digest, Reves deemed ‘too sensitive to commit to paper’.4
Churchill took Lord Camrose into his confidence about his plans over a private lunch at The Daily Telegraph’s offices early in August 1945. ‘At the moment he has decided that he will not publish his account of the war direction in his lifetime,’ Camrose noted. ‘He has voluminous detail inasmuch as every month his own telegrams, decisions and instructions have been put into type by the Government printers, and he reckons that each month’s printing is equal to, say, two issues of a weekly review like The Spectator.’5
Although Churchill had kept all his papers – and carefully removed them to Chartwell after the war was over – he would need the new government’s blessing to use them in any memoirs and he had advance knowledge this would be no mere formality. Before hostilities ended, a new cabinet secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, had advised him as prime minister that the rules on ministers and their official papers needed tightening up. Churchill had nevertheless insisted that the paper tabled to the cabinet a week before the Coalition came to an end should enshrine his three long-held tenets: (1) that ministers should be free to take with them copies of cabinet papers they themselves had authored; (2) that they should have access to all other cabinet documents of their time in office; but that (3) they must clear any proposed uses with the government of the day. That task still lay ahead, provided Churchill could find his way through the tax problem and summon the energy to write.
Churchill’s early books had been left without an agency publisher since Macmillan had given up its role in February 1945. Brendan Bracken had asked the firm to reconsider in April, hinting that there might still be some role to play in connection with the memoirs, but the matter had simply become submerged under the fast-moving pace of events leading up to the end of the war, not least Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker and Germany’s surrender.
Now, in August, a morose Churchill could not understand why Macmillan would not help him. Harold Macmillan was back in the family business after ministerial service during the war, and it was left to him to explain to his old chief that some 300 Macmillan titles were out of print due to paper shortages, and the firm could not give priority to Churchill. Churchill invited Macmillan to a ‘man-to-man conversation’, and warned him that there would be no role in the memoirs for his company and that the copyrights would soon be sold elsewhere. They were sold six weeks later, without film rights, to the persistent Lord Southwood’s Odhams Press for £25,000.6
Casting around for other ways of earning money while he was forbidden to write, Churchill summoned the London representative of TIME-LIFE to his hotel suite.7 A friend of Randolph’s, Walter Graebner had been given one main task by his employers: to recruit Churchill as a contributor to LIFE, something that the magazine’s managing editor, Daniel Longwell, had failed to achieve during the 1930s. As soon as the war was over, the magazine had offered Churchill $75,000 for three articles, but received no response. Now, ushered into the hotel suite before his host appeared, Graebner found Churchill’s own paintings propped up on each chair. He recalled in his memoir how Churchill had finally entered and explained that he had found LIFE’s offer highly attractive, before adding:
I am not in a position to write anything now... perhaps later... but not now. I have gone into the whole thing very carefully with my advisers and they tell me that if I come out of retirement... and write anything now I would have to pay taxes of nineteen and six in the pound, so what’s the use? Then, gesturing toward the paintings, he concluded:
But these are something else again. Do you think your people would like to publish them – that is, to take them in place of one of the articles? I would like such an arrangement better for the time being, as the income, I am advised, would be considered as capital gain and therefore nontaxable.8
Graebner settled a price of $20,000 with Randolph9 after Churchill left for a painting holiday in Italy, ignoring warnings that the tax authorities might categorise him as ‘carrying on the vocation of an artist’.10
Returning home via Monte Carlo, where he successfully avoided the ‘very empty and dead-looking’ but ‘unsinkable’ casino,11 Churchill had a gloomy conversation about his finances late in September with Lord Camrose. During the war his personal spending had remained steady at £5,000 a year (wines, spirits and cigars accounting for a third),12 but Churchill considered £12,000 each year a more realistic figure now that he was a private citizen again.13
Traditionally, generals and admirals had been handsomely rewarded financially for their famous military victories (Parliament had awarded £100,000 to the the army commander-in-chief Earl Haig at the end of the First World War). Although modern telecommunications now made the role of prime minister much more important to the success or otherwise of a military campaign, nobody in Parliament suggested the system be changed and Churchill be rewarded. Instead the House of Commons limited itself to considering whether the traditional prize money earned by sailors for seizing enemy merchant ships and cargo should now be shared with members of the Royal Air Force.14
Churchill’s state of mind was such that he worried aloud to Lord Camrose about whether his finances might force him at some point to move out of Chartwell. Lord Camrose decided to talk privately to Churchill’s solicitor, Charles Nicholl, with whom he hatched a scheme that would allow a group of Lord Camrose’s business friends to buy Chartwell from Churchill. They would then donate it to the National Trust, on the understanding that the trust would rent the house back to the Churchills during their lifetime, before looking after it permanently.15