by David Lough
Henry Laughlin kept up his record by winning Churchill’s fifth volume of The Second World War selection by the Book of the Month Club in America, just as he had for each of its predecessors. This time, however, the Club insisted on a November launch. While both men watched Colonist II run at Ascot in June, Laughlin gave Churchill a deadline to finish the book by 13 September. The Book Club had to be humoured, he explained, because it accounted for 80 per cent of American sales.14 As soon as Parliament rose for the summer, Churchill ‘plunged’ into polishing his text, telling Clementine: ‘You may imagine that I have little time for my other cares – the fish, indoors, and out-of-doors, the farm, the robin (who has absconded).’15
Longwell promised LIFE’s partners that Churchill’s summer holiday at Annecy in France would be the last they paid for. This time, however, the only syndicate member able to travel was Charles Wood, the proofreader. Heavy rain limited Churchill’s painting time, so he moved to Venice, from where the final chapters of Closing the Ring reached America only five days after Laughlin’s deadline.
Looking back on these vacations for TIME-LIFE, Longwell felt that they had helped the company’s cause: ‘However, and this we must keep private, they were very lavish trips. Always some of the family went along to get their holiday. He had his cronies with him; he sent for various people from England. He had the best in food and hotels. We paid for his sort of state dinner to noteworthy folk, and the expedition to Marrakech presented an expense account I wouldn’t want anyone to peer into too far.’16 Briefing his successor a year later, Longwell was more positive: ‘I find that the total amount we have spent on these vacations comes to $56,572.23. The Times paid 34.78 % of this amount, and we footed about $35,000 of the bills. I think it was a good investment... I have seen other great projects like this go to pieces.’17
Soon after Churchill returned to Britain in September, Prime Minister Attlee announced a general election. Churchill was alert to the tax advantages of ‘retiring’ as an author on taking political office, so he told the syndicate that he wanted ‘a provisional version’ of the final volume ready ‘on or soon after 26 October’, the day after the general election was to be held.18 His writing staff worked flat out, but on 19 October Churchill countermanded the order, when it was obvious the book could not be completed in time.
A week later, a large crowd watching the general election results on a board outside the City’s Royal Exchange building cheered as the Conservative Party reached 321 seats – sixteen more than the Labour and Liberal parties combined.
Churchill became prime minister again on 26 October 1951. He returned to 10 Downing Street with his finances in much better shape than they had been in May 1940: he had almost £50,000 in reserve, either at his bank or invested in government bonds. However, his spending had been running at close to £5,000 a month during 1951,19 so he would clearly need to cut his costs or supplement his official salary.
A young British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, had travelled down to Chartwell with Emery Reves a year earlier, noting in his diary:
Churchill has this characteristic 18th-century nobleman’s attitude that he should have a Jew to look after his financial affairs and in this case there is no question but that the choice has turned out well... [Reves] said that Churchill had an insatiable need for money… His family costs him a lot, and though he doesn’t live luxuriously, he lives amply and travels with a great suite, which is very expensive.20
On entering office at a time of difficulty for the British economy, Churchill asked his ministers to take a symbolic pay cut. As a result the prime minister’s salary fell from £10,000 to £7,000 a year, although the impact on Churchill was cushioned by an agreement that he could treat £4,000 as a tax-free reimbursement of his expenses. (Churchill would pay tax of £1,425 a year on the £3,000 of taxable salary, equivalent to a rate of only 20 per cent tax on the full salary.)21
The main source of the extra earnings Churchill required was due to be the final volume of The Second World War, for which he signed a supplemental contract with The Daily Telegraph on 7 November, two weeks after taking office. The contract allowed him to choose how he wished to spread the £60,000 fee over the following three years, in whatever proportions best suited his tax position.22 This flexibility became particularly valuable when Sir Norman Brook, still cabinet secretary, warned Churchill a fortnight later against trying to complete the book while he was prime minister; instead, he should announce that it had been ‘submitted to the appropriate authority for scrutiny on behalf of the Government’ and would require ‘some revision’ before publication.23 At the time, Churchill only expected to stay as prime minister for a year or so, he told Jock Colville (who had returned as his private secretary).
As prime minister, Churchill aimed to re-establish a closer relationship with the United States and to reduce the tensions of the Cold War, while he pruned government spending at home and rid the economy of its post-war restrictions: ‘houses and meat, without being scuppered’, as he put it to Colville.24 He had only been back in the post for three months when George VI died in February 1952 from a coronary thrombosis, which followed lung cancer. Shortly afterwards Churchill experienced an arterial spasm. It prompted the seventy-seven-year-old to look again at his will, this time with Anthony Moir, Charles Nicholl having died in 1951.
Nicholl’s 1947 version of Churchill’s will had left almost everything to Clementine, so that she could decide the split between family members. However, Moir pointed out how expensive this could prove if Clementine were to die soon after him while death duty rates were so high. Instead, Moir suggested that Churchill should leave his wife a cash legacy of £25,000, but put everything else into a trust, from which she could draw the income for the rest of her life or be given more capital if she ever felt short of money; then, on her death, the remainder would pass to their children. This became the basic architecture of Churchill’s will and it remained in force at his death.
At the same time, Churchill had to decide whether he could afford to continue paying his monthly family allowances or should shift responsibility for paying them on to his Literary Trust. It was a question closely linked to the choice of how much of his extra fee for the last volume of The Second World War he should draw in May 1952: the less he drew, the lower his tax rate for the year ahead, yet he had to avoid running out of funds. His accountant James Wood completed pages of calculations on the different permutations, before Churchill chose to draw only £15,000 for the book and the Literary Trust took over responsibility for the family allowances. The fee matched the amount The Daily Telegraph had been lending Churchill, interest-free, since 1947, but Lord Camrose had decided not to ask for its return until after Churchill’s death.25
The American publishers were not so indulgent. Closing the Ring was already out in America*1 and they wanted a date for publication of the sixth and final volume, Triumph and Tragedy. While his government tried to counter Egypt’s attempts to wrest control of the Suez Canal during Parliament’s Easter holiday, Churchill polished the draft of the book sufficiently to win his May payment, but he then asked Lord Camrose to keep the manuscript under lock and key until after the American presidential elections in November.26
At LIFE Longwell despaired on hearing the news. ‘The public gets further and further away from these events,’ he told Graebner. ‘Thus the project goes down in value all the time.’27 Graebner raised the possibility of a final summer holiday paid for by LIFE to try to accelerate publication, but the idea did not survive scrutiny in New York or Downing Street.
Although Churchill was now living in official residences as prime minister, he was still spending at a rate of almost £40,000 a year during the summer of 1952, much of it on personal staff.28 ‘His ménage consists now of four Swiss maids and two Swiss men “all carefully vetted by M.I.5”,’ Lord Camrose noted after a private dinner in September 1952. He also found the premier ‘at times a little bored with his present position and its too frequent frustration
s’.29 By September, there was nothing left in Churchill’s bank account30 and he was regretting not having drawn more of his fee for the book earlier in the year. He asked Lord Camrose if The Daily Telegraph would ‘lend’ him an extra £15,000, taking his borrowing from the newspaper up to £30,000. Lord Camrose obliged.31
Churchill spent his late summer holiday as the guest of Max Beaverbrook at his home in the south of France, where he gently polished the text of Triumph and Tragedy. Having practically completed the book before his return, he brought to an end the employment of the syndicate of helpers to whom he was still paying combined salaries of more than £5,000 a year. There was nothing more to do until just before publication, he told them, and ‘I cannot at this stage say... whether indeed it will be published while I am in office.’32
Three months passed before Churchill returned to Triumph and Tragedy early in 1953, while he sailed across the Atlantic to meet America’s president-elect, Dwight Eisenhower. He toyed briefly with the idea of releasing the first half of the book as a sop to his publishers, while holding back the more politically sensitive second part about the post-war settlement. Henry Laughlin put him off the idea when they met: he wanted the whole manuscript by May, to catch the Christmas market again. ‘No hope’, Churchill told him.33
Back in England, Churchill had to decide how much income to draw from his publishers in May to keep him going for the rest of 1953. Before making up his mind, he asked his doctor Lord Moran the average life expectancy of a seventy-eight-year-old. The answer was six years. ‘I might go on for another eight years,’ he told his doctor. ‘If I do it will be very tiresome for those who manage my finances. You see, Charles, during the war I retired from business, but by the end of the war I had become notorious; and all sorts of things, such as film rights and the copyright of my books, gave me quite a bit of capital. For the first time in my life I was quite a rich man. But the income tax people take it all.’34
Churchill’s growing losses on his farms – now almost £11,000 a year – could hardly be laid at the door of the Inland Revenue.35 In fact, the ability to offset his farming losses against his other income, to reduce the amount of tax he paid, was part of what persuaded Churchill to persevere at farming for so long. Nevertheless he had to raise more cash to meet the farms’ losses in March 1953. Five months earlier he had repaid £10,000 of his loan from The Daily Telegraph and now he needed cash to last until his next literary payment was due in May. He raised £25,000 by remortgaging the farms with Alliance Assurance.36
However, Wood finally convinced Churchill to sell the farms when he explained that the tax relief on their losses would cease the moment he died. Churchill accepted the advice of Percy Cox, whom he had re-engaged to take on the farms’ management now that Christopher Soames had entered the world of politics, that they should sell the smaller farms first. Both Parkside and Bardogs farms seemed to find ready homes, until the buyer of Bardogs pulled out at the last minute and only Parkside went.37
Churchill’s farming losses halved,38 so that his spending reduced to £30,000 a year – nevertheless it was clear that his reserves would not last for more than two or three years after he received the final payment for The Second World War, due in May 1954. That calculation was struck, too, before taking into account the cost of horse racing, which, Wood reminded him, had somehow escaped the economy drive.
Christopher Soames had suggested cutting back his racing stable when Churchill became prime minister again, but five horses remained in training during the 1952 season, producing losses of £4,000.39 ‘On the present scale of Expenditure,’ Wood wrote with uncharacteristic levity, ‘the amount required from Capital will range from £7,000 to £13,000 according to the results from Racing (i.e. The faster the Horses run the less the Capital required!)’.40
Lord Camrose deflected from Churchill most of the pressure exerted by the American syndicate to publish the final volume of Triumph and Tragedy, the manuscript for which still lay in his safe. Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953 introduced a new complication: Churchill did not want to damage his relationship with the Soviet Union’s new leaders by publishing passages critical of their predecessor. On 25 March Churchill privately mentioned September to Camrose as a possible date for publication, but by the end of the month he had done nothing about clearing his use of quotations by past or present American presidents.
At a dinner of The Other Club in May, Churchill advanced his timetable: he told Camrose that June was a possibility if he had a good Whitsun – but he did not.41 Anthony Eden’s ill health forced Churchill to take over some of the duties of foreign secretary, while there was extra work to be done preparing for the young queen’s coronation and a conference of Commonwealth government leaders. It left the seventy-eight-year-old Churchill exhausted.
‘Pressure of public affairs over the Whitsun holiday weekend had prevented him from doing the amount of work that he had hoped,’ Lord Camrose noted in mid-June. Churchill felt that he needed just three or four consecutive mornings to complete the book, but six days later, at an official Downing Street dinner, he suffered a serious stroke.
The paralysis spread down Churchill’s left side the following day, a Wednesday, and his doctor, Lord Moran, doubted that he would survive the weekend. Lord Camrose was one of the few let in on the secret: ‘The Prime Minister wants me to tell you for your most private information that he is far from well and may indeed have to resign shortly,’ Colville wrote.42
Against the odds, Churchill himself telephoned Lord Camrose on the Saturday: he was being forced to rest, he said, which might turn out well for the book. Lord Camrose visited Chartwell for lunch on the Monday, when Churchill returned to the proofs with a shaky hand and forecast that they could be ready ‘in tentative form’ by mid-July.43
They were not and on 22 July Lord Camrose left Chartwell saddened by his visit. Churchill had walked in to lunch unaided and had managed a short tour of the garden before they sat on a bench until five o’clock, while Churchill reminisced, tearfully. He was unable to remember some of his favourite poems. As Lord Camrose left, Moran warned that another stroke was ‘highly probable’ and could prove ‘fatal’.44 Churchill’s staff took Camrose aside to ask for another loan: the prime minister’s current account was overdrawn, although there was more than £40,000 in his investment account.45 The Daily Telegraph discreetly lent another £12,000, taking its outstanding loans to the prime minister up to £32,000.46
Churchill defied his doctor’s predictions during August. After tinkering with the proofs of Triumph and Tragedy, he presided over a cabinet meeting towards the end of the month and, two days later, he invited Walter Graebner to a lunch that lasted until nearly 5 p.m., helped along by two bottles of champagne.47 Max Beaverbrook laid in four cases of Dom Pérignon 1929, before the Churchills and Soameses spent September at his French villa La Capponcina: ‘It is the finest champagne I have ever tasted,’ Beaverbrook observed. ‘I hope you will use it.’48
Early in October Churchill gave a long speech to the Conservative Party’s annual conference and reshuffled his cabinet, in defiance of growing calls for his retirement. A few days later he learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which, as he pointed out to Clementine, was worth £12,000 tax-free.49
The Nobel Prize was also the best possible publicity for the publication of Triumph and Tragedy. Like all the other volumes of The Second World War, it was selected by the American Book of the Month Club, this time for December publication. It sold more strongly than the fifth volume. ‘The last is the best,’ Brendan Bracken told Churchill. ‘Your children and grandchildren have every reason to bless you for undertaking this herculean labour for them. I grieve beyond all telling that no benefit from it can come to Clemmie and you.’50 In North America, the six volumes and the later abridged version of The Second World War sold nearly 2.2 million copies; in Britain and the Commonwealth, Cassell & Co. sold another two million.51
Churchill the Nobel Laureate at last turned ba
ck to the long-delayed A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. ‘I’ve been living on The Second World War,’ he told Lord Moran. ‘Now I shall live on this history. I shall lay an egg a year – a volume every twelve months should not mean much work.’52 He recognized that he must distance himself from the publishing negotiations, so asked his solicitor Anthony Moir to act on his behalf. Churchill had first settled terms with Cassell & Co. in 1933, then slightly revised them in 1945. Since then he had sold more than four million books. Now he wanted Moir to achieve a complete renegotiation of the book’s terms with Cassell and its publishing partners, and to sell newspaper serialization rights around the world. Brendan Bracken recommended the editor of History Today magazine, Alan Hodge, to supervise the rewriting.
Thanks to The Daily Telegraph’s extra loan and the Nobel Prize money, Churchill left for 1954’s New Year holiday with his combined bank balances standing at over £60,000.53 They were even higher by the middle of the year, when Lord Camrose made the third and final payment for the final volume of The Second World War without asking for his emergency loan of the previous year to be repaid; it was Lord Camrose’s final act of generosity before he died suddenly in June.54
As his eightieth birthday approached in November 1954, Churchill asked his solicitor to review his will again. Discounting any money still to come from A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill’s personal assets amounted to £158,500, but they were offset by £84,500 of loans, bills and taxes. Moir estimated that death duties of £26,000 would leave a net estate of only £48,000, almost all of which would go to Clementine, who would collect half as much again from life insurance policies.55
Neither of them knew that these figures were about to be transformed. Without consulting Churchill, Lord Moynihan, the son of a prominent Leeds doctor, and Edward Martell, the editor of The Recorder magazine had set up the ‘Winston Churchill 80th Birthday Presentation Fund’. By the middle of November, almost 100,000 members of the public had donated £150,000 to the Fund, despite some confusion over how the money would be spent. Lord Moran recorded Churchill’s reaction to the Fund:
