by David Lough
Willing to contribute £15,000 himself, Lord Camrose called the governor of the Bank of England, Lord Catto, who was in the middle of delicate negotiations with the Labour government over the central bank’s nationalization.16 Lord Catto offered £5,000, then persuaded Lord Bicester, the chairman of the merchant bankers Morgan Grenfell, to offer a similar sum. Emboldened by these early successes, Lord Camrose opened a ‘Chartwell Account’ at the Westminster Bank17 and when the fund had reached £55,000 in November 1945 he gave his lawyers the go-ahead to start preparing documents.
Nicholl broached the scheme to a delighted Churchill over Christmas, but it was to take another eight months before agreement was reached on a price for the Churchills of £50,000 – twice the amount that they had unsuccessfully sought for the property in 1938 – together with an endowment of a further £35,000 to help the National Trust look after the property. Churchill was to pay the trust a rent of £350 a year and keep responsibility for the house’s insurance, rates, gardens and internal repairs or decoration, while the National Trust took over the roof, walls, timbers, drains and outside decoration.18
Before he learned about the Chartwell windfall, Churchill had worried that his large coterie of tax advisers was showing worrying signs of going soft on the subject. The Labour government’s budget of October 1945 had reduced the very top rate of income tax to 92½ per cent,19 but Churchill was concerned at some signs that his advisers might be ready to re-submit to the Inland Revenue some of the points that he had considered settled in his favour during the war.
In ‘A Note’ dispatched to each of his advisers in October, Churchill made it clear that they were to concede no ground over the general commissioners’ decision in 1942 that his newspaper articles and the annual compilations of his speeches could be treated as capital receipts by a retired author. ‘The mere annual repetition of these publications... in consequence of the duration of the War in no way affects the facts of no marketable assets, no emergence from retirement, and no physical or mental act on my part,’ he told them.
The fact that the authorities had agreed to treat My Early Life’s film rights as a capital asset, he maintained, should also be good enough to cover the larger, more recent film sales, which had raised £100,000. A fourth sale was now also in prospect, because Sir Alexander Korda had shown interest in the film rights to one of his earliest books, about the Sudan campaign of 1898. ‘The first decision of principle covers the other two,’ Churchill asserted, ‘and would equally cover a further sale of film rights of, say, The River War.’20 His retirement, Churchill insisted, had been ‘most strictly maintained, even in the face of dazzling offers’.21
A more immediate threat to Churchill’s status as a retired author was his commitment with Cassell & Co. to complete A History of the English-Speaking Peoples within six months of leaving office, in other words by January 1946. Churchill asked Lord Camrose to help by arranging a lunch with the chairman of Cassel, Sir Newman Flower, whom he felt he did not know well. In October Churchill explained to Sir Newman at the lunch that he wanted his History to end no later than the year of his birth, 1874; he wondered whether they should split the book into several volumes to ‘afford both literary and financial prospects’; there was the sensitive question – for both his literary reputation and tax status – of a Cambridge professor’s recommendation that the sections dealing with the Georgians, the American Revolution and Napoleon ‘would benefit from further polishing’; and finally there was the printing bill, which he had paid during the war and still hoped that Cassell would reimburse.22
The lunch was a great success. The printing bill was paid the following day and Sir Newman agreed that the book should end at Churchill’s birth. Better still, post-war paper shortages meant that Cassell would not be able to publish the book before December 1946, which removed the immediate threat to Churchill’s ‘retirement’.
‘Now that we have plenty of time you may rely upon me to bring the book to a suitable conclusion by adding the ten years from 1864 to 1874 and by a general valedictory epilogue,’ Churchill told Sir Newman, in a new spirit of cordiality.23 Nevertheless, he was sufficiently worried by the task of rewriting to want to clear it first with the tax authorities. He carefully drafted the letter which he wanted Geoffrey Mason of Lloyds Bank to send to the Inland Revenue on his behalf. ‘Mr Churchill delivered to Messrs Cassell & Company the manuscript of his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples which he had completed at the beginning of the War,’ it began carefully, skirting around the fact that work had continued for another six months. The crucial paragraph of the letter was saved until its end:
Some portions suffered from the hurry caused by the approach of War and the rapid winding-up of Mr Churchill’s affairs. He has done no work of any kind on it since his retirement. However on reading it through again, he sees it could be greatly improved in various ways. He has his past reputation as a man of letters to consider, and he would like to correct the proofs and recast certain portions of the work. He is under no obligation to do this, as the transaction is in every way completed. Any work he might do upon its proofs would be solely for his own personal satisfaction and without further payment of any kind or any consideration, direct or indirect, from Messrs. Cassell. The opinion which Mr Churchill wishes to ask is the following: Provided he receives no remuneration of any kind, would he be at liberty to correct the proofs and improve the text?24
The reply from the Inland Revenue was positive: Churchill was allowed to to tidy up a book already written without a loss of status as a retired author. However, it would require much greater ingenuity to avoid tax on the income received for writing a new set of memoirs, such as Churchill was contemplating to cover the events of the war. The seasoned lawyers Charles Nicholl and Charles Henderson had looked after Churchill’s general affairs during the war; but for this more specialist challenge he chose younger men with a particular interest in the law of taxation: Anthony Moir and the barrister on whom he often called, Charles Graham-Dixon.
Offers to publish the memoirs had continued to flood in from as far afield as Greece, Palestine and Scandinavia.25 However, it was an offer from the Eton-educated American newspaperman Marshall Field III*1 that gave Churchill’s advisers the kernel of the idea which they eventually used to avoid a large measure of tax. While offering Churchill a five-year deal worth $1.25 million for newspaper articles, Field mentioned that his Chicago Sun would also be part of a consortium bidding at least $1 million for the memoirs. He then suggested that, before writing anything, Churchill should gift his personal papers to a trust for his children and grandchildren. The trust could then sell the book rights before employing him for a much lower sum to ‘edit’ the text – only this last link in the chain would attract tax.26
‘They certainly disclose an interesting situation in America, if only it were possible for us to take advantage of it,’ Churchill confided to Lord Camrose.27 It was only a month since their gloomy conversation about Chartwell, yet Churchill was already feeling more confident about his finances. He had even summoned his bank manager, T. E. B. Harris, to discuss investing two-thirds of his money in longer-term instruments. Reluctant to admit that investment advice was not part of Lloyds’ stock-in-trade, Harris consulted a friend,*2 who recommended investing £40,000 in government bonds and a much smaller sum in shares.28
Another opportunity to make money presented itself in November when Clement Attlee told Churchill that the government was minded to lift the ban on publishing speeches made to the House of Commons during its wartime ‘secret sessions’. The wartime broadcasts of Churchill’s public speeches had made a powerful impact across the world, but this set of six speeches had never been heard in public. Two days before the government was due to announce the lifting of the ban, Churchill summoned Walter Graebner from LIFE to his bedroom at Chartwell and, after melodramatically swearing his visitor to secrecy, read excerpts from his own speeches for an hour, asking at the end whether LIFE would like to publish them in Am
erica.29
Graebner cabled Churchill’s asking price to his chairman. ‘In my opinion $75,000 is Churchillian highbinding,’ Henry Luce replied. ‘I would offer $50,000 and mean it.’30 Churchill tried splitting the difference, but Luce declined before Graebner sealed the deal with champagne and brandy over a convivial New Year’s lunch at Chartwell.31
A long holiday in Florida was planned, before Churchill delivered a speech in early March 1946 at Fulton, Missouri, the home state of President Truman who taken office after the death of President Roosevelt in April 1945.
Before Churchill left, Emery Reves summarized his potential earnings in America: at least $2 million over five years for the memoirs; $500,000 from radio; $250,000 or more from newspaper articles; and $100,000 from magazines. Aware of the tax problem, Reves added that he could present ‘certain suggestions as to the forms in which these transactions could be carried out over a period of years so that a large part of the yield would remain in your possession’.32
Churchill’s baggage for the sea crossing to New York included nineteen different offers for his memoirs. He also had some early advice from his lawyers, Graham-Dixon and Moir, on how best to shield the income from tax. They made a bold assumption that the British government was unlikely to bring in a lifetime tax on capital transactions, even though many Labour Party supporters were urging an annual wealth or capital gains tax to help repair the country’s finances. Graham-Dixon and Moir banked on the Inland Revenue mounting stiff resistance to any measure that would require taxpayers for the first time to volunteer information on their wealth, whereas taxes on income were now almost automatically collected through employers.33
Graham-Dixon and Moir therefore based their strategy on converting as many as possible of the payments for the memoirs into capital receipts, rather than royalties.*3 While they worked on a detailed scheme, they stressed that Churchill should do nothing to endanger his status as a ‘retired author’, which meant that his war papers still qualified as capital assets. He should wait patiently, they advised, before trying to emerge ‘from a most profitable purdah’.34
That patience was immediately put to the test as Churchill approached the American coast with Clementine and Sarah on 14 January: a radio message arrived from Henry Luce offering him $25,000 for a single broadcast, sponsored by LIFE. Churchill cabled Graham-Dixon to ask if he could accept the offer as a one-off ‘thank you’ for American hospitality, but his lawyer’s advice was simple: ‘Speak for love but not for money.’35
At a press conference on arrival in New York, Churchill stuck to the official line: he did not know whether he would write his memoirs, or whether they would be published during his lifetime if he did. In private, however, while he stayed in Miami Beach with Colonel Frank Clarke (his Canadian host at the Quebec wartime conferences), he became optimistic enough to begin their preparations.
Churchill had to be careful to rise above the cut and thrust of negotiations, but his team of Kathleen Hill and Brendan Bracken had moved on, to run Chequers and the merged Financial News and Financial Times newspapers respectively. Brendan Bracken, who now also chaired Sir Henry Strakosch’s former company, Union Corporation, suggested that Lord Camrose should step into the breach, as The Daily Telegraph was already guaranteed a role in publishing the memoirs. Churchill agreed, but he also decided to call upon the more streetwise skills of his pre-war agent Emery Reves, whom he summoned from New York.
‘Everyone wants me to write my memoirs,’ Reves recalled Churchill saying, ‘which I may do if I have time. And, if I do, I have not forgotten what you did for me before the war and I shall want you to handle it.’ Churchill then told him that ‘for private reasons and financial reasons he was going to carry out the transaction through Lord Camrose because he had to make a capital deal’.36 In the meantime, Reves was to remain silent.
Still in Miami Beach, Churchill turned to the Secret Session Speeches, which LIFE was about to publish, although it cut them down to two excerpts. It chose not to cut its fee, however: a decision noted by Churchill. ‘It was of course a pig in a poke,’ Luce told a colleague. ‘I believe that LIFE has got to buy some such pigs in order to keep a position in the meat market... Also, it can be worth the space plus the money if, in some sense, Churchill becomes “our author”.’37
British reaction was distinctly frosty when Churchill’s speeches first appeared in an American magazine. One Labour MP called in Parliament for the confiscation of half of all former ministers’ earnings from the publication of ‘official documents collected during their term of office’; a discomfited Churchill warned Nancy Pearn, who he had appointed to handle the foreign sales of his speeches against using the aggressive tactics of which he would have approved in pre-war days. ‘Do not make a great fuss to pick up a few pounds here and there,’ his revised guidance stated.38
By mid-February Charles Graham-Dixon had prepared a detailed tax scheme for Churchill’s memoirs. He had discounted the safest option, the so-called ‘tin-box’ scheme that would delay publication until after Churchill’s death, on the assumption that Churchill or his family would need the money during his lifetime. Instead, he advised, Churchill should gift his papers to a family trust before he started writing his memoirs; then the trustees should sell the copyright of the papers, for a lump sum, to a publishing group; finally that group should make its own separate arrangements with Churchill to write the memoirs for a lesser sum.
The effect of divorcing the documents’ ownership from the memoir’s authorship, he contended, would be to leave the publisher’s money in the trustees’ hands as capital, while only Churchill’s fee as an author would attract any tax. He stressed two points: Churchill must gift the documents before writing a word; and the trustees, not Churchill, must settle the publishing contract. The prospects for success, Graham-Dixon thought, were ‘reasonable’.39
Buoyed by this plan, Churchill played poker in the presidential train with Truman on the way to Fulton, Missouri. Here, at the small Presbyterian college of Westminster, he delivered the ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, warning of the shadow cast across the world by the Soviet Union’s ‘expansive and proselytising tendencies’.40 His speech split opinion: for example, the Chicago Sun described it as ‘poisonous’, thereby damaging the owner Marshall Field’s prospects of publishing Churchill’s memoirs.
On his way home Churchill visited New York, where he met Reves four times, outlining the tax plans for the memoirs taking shape at home. Reves suggested that Cooperation Publishing could act as the main publishing contractor with the trust, controlling ‘radio, press, magazine and book publication, drama and motion picture etc.’ If chosen, Reves offered to hand over up to half of the equity to either Churchill or his trust, so that they could share in the publisher’s as well as the author’s profits. ‘I believe that through such a set-up your literary properties extended over a period of five to ten years could bring into the family trust about a million pounds.’41
Arriving back in Britain in late March, Churchill continued to claim publicly that he had not made a final decision whether to publish his memoirs. Within a week, however, he had asked Bill Deakin to help him write them and his solicitor Anthony Moir to establish the trust for his papers.42 Moir’s first draft suggested that the trust should include all papers from Churchill’s birth up to the end of the war; that Churchill should appoint the trustees; that they should be able to publish only with his permission; and that, at his death, the trust’s capital should be divided equally among his children.43 A firm believer in primogeniture, Churchill changed Randolph’s share to a half.
The Chartwell Literary Trust came into being on 31 July 1946 with Clementine, Brendan Bracken and Professor Lindemann (now Lord Cherwell) as its first trustees.44 Its official objective was to safeguard Churchill’s papers for posterity, without any mention of the tax advantages: to this end, Churchill expressed his wish that the trustees should eventually pass the papers on to Randolph or Randolph’s own son Winston, one of whom he hope
d would write his official biography. Churchill was aware that the duke of Marlborough was considering selling Blenheim in the aftermath of war, so he wanted to make sure that the papers would ‘remain intact at Chartwell and it may well be that my son or grandson will ultimately give them to the National Trust, should Chartwell itself be vested in that Body’.45
His papers safely gifted to the Chartwell Literary Trust, Churchill asked Lord Camrose to deal with Cassell’s option, which he knew that Sir Newman Flower had agreed to assign to Camrose’s The Daily Telegraph, as the larger and stronger organization with the trust to contract for the whole rights package. ‘If you will settle matters with Cassell’s,’ Churchill told Lord Camrose, ‘I am sure the trustees will be able at any time to enter into direct relations with you. This is what I desire.’46
Lord Camrose planned an autumn visit to the States to sell the all-important American rights. However, he knew as well as Churchill that they first had to obtain the British government’s permission to use Churchill’s sixty-eight bundles of war minutes and directives in the book. Churchill had already headed off another threat from the Cabinet Office that summer, when Prime Minister Attlee ordered yet another review of the rules. It was felt that Sir Robert (now Lord) Vansittart, the Foreign Office’s senior pre-war civil servant, had taken undue advantage of the ‘vindicator clause’ to quote from official documents covering from the appeasement period. The cabinet secretary Sir Edward Bridges recommended a future distinction between the use of papers by civil servants and by ministers. However, he moved on to more threatening ground for Churchill’s method of writing when he added another recommendation that ministers should only be allowed to quote from papers at length ‘in very exceptional cases; and then only when the document is in some sense personal to the writer’.47
