CHURCHILL TOOK OFFICE as prime minister on 10 May 1940, the same day that German forces invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Within a week his French counterpart Paul Reynaud told him that France’s battle was lost, while Britain’s professional army faced encirclement on the country’s northeast coast. Shuttling back and forth across the Channel in an attempt to persuade the French to fight on, Churchill had to confront another unpleasant truth closer to home: he was running out of money to pay his household bills or his tax or the interest on his large overdraft, which was due at the end of the month.
He asked Lloyds Bank for a special statement of his account and gave it to the young magazine publisher Brendan Bracken, asking his fixer to arrange a rescue as discreet as the one he had managed two years earlier, just as Hitler had launched his Anschluss against Austria. Bracken took it to the same man who had helped then, the Austrian-born banker and businessman Sir Henry Strakosch, who had asked for nothing in return and had kept the secret. On 18 June, the day after 4,000 British troops lost their lives when their ship sank off the French coast in the worst maritime loss in British history, Sir Henry wrote out a cheque for £5,000 (equivalent to £250,000 today). He disguised the trail by entering Brendan Bracken’s name as the payee, but Bracken endorsed it on to Britain’s embattled prime minister.
The amount reached Churchill’s account on 21 June. Thus fortified, he paid a clutch of overdue bills from shirt-makers, watch-repairers and wine merchants before he turned his attention back to the war.