WHEN HIS FATHER died Winston Churchill immediately transferred from the infantry to a cavalry regiment commanded by a family friend, Colonel John Brabazon. Subalterns in the 4th Hussars earned ten pounds a month,1 but they were expected to equip themselves for hunting and polo. Duchess Lily helped by providing Winston with a ‘charger’ and his mother agreed to come up with the £500 a year allowance that Churchill told her he would need to ‘maintain his position’.2
Widowed at the age of forty-one, Jennie had been left with almost £5,000 a year from the various Churchill and Jerome trusts;3 it was a level of income enjoyed by only a few thousand people in Britain at the time.4 However, Jennie was not supposed to touch the trusts’ capital and had none of her own. The distinction between capital and income appeared to escape her anyway: she left for Paris, accompanied by her late husband’s butler and her maid, establishing herself in an apartment near the Champs-Elysées, which was swiftly redecorated.
Jennie enjoyed friendships (or more) with the millionaire American lawyer Bourke Cockran, Hugh Warrender, William Waldorf Astor (the couple were briefly rumoured to be engaged) and the prince of Wales, who invited her aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia. Back in London for the autumn she bought a lease on a seven-storey house near Marble Arch, which she also redecorated ‘from top to toe’, installing electric light and hot water. Jennie remained a popular guest at country house weekends and stayed close to her husband’s financial friends Ernest Cassel and Alfred and Natty Rothschild. Her children would benefit from her social network, but it came at a great cost in lavish spending on clothes and entertaining.
Winston Churchill’s leisurely military year was divided into seven months of summer ‘training’ and five of winter ‘social activities’, during which officers were expected to take at least ten weeks of ‘uninterrupted repose’.5 Unable to afford his fellow officers’ lifestyle of daily hunts, Churchill sought out a foreign adventure. His attention turned to the long drawn-out guerrilla campaign between Spanish occupiers and local rebels in Cuba and Sir Henry Wolff, an old political colleague of his late father’s and now Britain’s ambassador in Madrid, secured permission for a visit.
Churchill funded the expedition by badgering his mother into buying a transatlantic ticket for him and she also arranged for him to write a series of dispatches at five guineas each for the Daily Graphic, owned by one of her friends. With a colleague, Churchill sailed to New York, where another of his mother’s friends, Bourke Cockran, introduced the pair to a world of luxury, cigars and top-level contacts at his Fifth Avenue apartment, before sending them on their way to Miami by private railway car. From Cuba Churchill described the experience of coming under fire for the first time. His report was vivid enough for T. Heath Joyce, the Daily Graphic’s editor, to compliment him handsomely, while enclosing a cheque for twenty-five guineas.
Churchill rejoined the 4th Hussars in the spring of 1896, six months before the regiment began a posting to Bangalore which was expected to last twelve years. Officers took the summer off to arrange their affairs, but Churchill concentrated on his polo, pressing his mother to lend him £200 to buy a ‘really first class animal’ to complement his ‘five quite good ponies’. If she could not, he would borrow from his bankers at Cox & Co. with the help of her guarantee. ‘It is not a question of spending the money,’ he argued, ‘but of putting it into stock – an investment in fact – which though not profitable would produce much pleasure. Our finance is indeed involved!! If I had not been so foolish as to pay a lot of bills I should have the money now.’6
As the summer wore on, the idea of moving to India palled. Casting around for an alternative, Churchill tried to persuade the Daily Chronicle to appoint him as its special correspondent in Crete. Next he begged his mother to engineer a transfer within the army. ‘A few months in South Africa would earn me the S.A. Medal and in all probability the [British South Africa] company’s Star,’ he suggested. ‘Thence hot foot it to Egypt – to return with two more decorations in a year or two – and beat my sword into an iron despatch box.’7
Lady Randolph’s lobbying proved fruitless: her son sailed to India, where his time was soon occupied by polo, reading and Miss Pamela Plowden,1 the daughter of the British resident in Hyderabad. In My Early Life (1930) Churchill described the financial pressures on a young cavalry subaltern in India:
It was... better in a cavalry regiment in those days to supplement the generous rewards of the Queen-Empress by an allowance from home three or four times as great. Altogether we received for our services about fourteen shillings a day, with about £3 a month on which to keep two horses. This, together with £500 a year paid quarterly [Churchill’s allowance from his mother] was my sole means of support: all the rest had to be borrowed at usurious rates of interest from the all-too-accommodating native bankers. Every officer was warned against these gentlemen: I always found them most agreeable: very fat, very urbane, quite honest and mercilessly rapacious.8
Churchill and his mother wrote to each other weekly, but letters took at least a fortnight to arrive, confusing the correspondence. Lady Randolph meant to mark her son’s twenty-second birthday in November with a cheque for £50: ‘I know you are hard up, but so am I – lost cheque book – will follow.’9 Half followed a week later and the rest just before Christmas, by which time she was also cheerfully paying off some of Churchill’s outstanding London bills. ‘I have communicated with Mr Richmond of Crouch Hill and it will be all right,’ she reassured him. ‘I also am paying the rest of the outfit bills, also a bill of yrs at R. Paynes [wine merchant] & one at Leaders.’10 She was less pleased to be summoned to the bank in February to guarantee a cheque that her son had written on an empty account:
It is with unusual feelings that I sit down to write to you my weekly letter. …I went to Cox’s this morning & find out not only have you anticipated the whole of yr quarter’s allowance due this month but £45 besides – & now this cheque for £50 – & that you knew you had nothing at the bank. …I must say I think it is too bad of you – indeed it is hardly honourable knowing as you do that you are dependent on me & that I give you the biggest allowances I possibly can and more than I can afford. I am very hard up... I have told them at Cox’s not to apply to me in future as you must manage yr own affairs. I am not responsible. If you cannot live on yr allowance from me & yr pay you will have to leave the Fourth Hussar. I cannot increase your allowance.11
She took up cudgels again the following week, before Churchill could reply:
What an extraordinary boy you are as regards your business affairs. Dearest this is the only subject on which we ever fall out. Out of £2,700 a year, £800 goes to you two boys, £410 for house rent and stables, which leaves me about £1,500 for everything – taxes, servants, stables, food, dress, travelling – & I now have to pay interest on money borrowed. I really fear for the future... I make out that you get about £200 pay, which makes yr income for the present £700 a year. Of course it is not much & I can quite understand that you will have to deny yourself many things if you mean to try & live within it. But the fact is that you have got to do more than try.12
‘I am sorry that stupid Cox refused my cheque,’ Churchill eventually replied, unabashed, but enclosing a cheque for £30. He asked his mother to forgive the balance until he next came home to take a more serious look at his finances: ‘There are several bills in London unpaid that really will have to be paid soon,’ he conceded. ‘I shall have to borrow a certain sum on my life or effect a loan in some way or other.’13 Already keen for a break from Bangalore, which he described as ‘a third rate watering place, out of season & without the sea’, he planned to be home for the Derby2 in June.
He asked the family solicitor to arrange a loan for £3,000, secured against his future inheritance, but Lumley & Lumley could only persuade the Norwich Union insurance company to lend £2,300, of which £300 was to cover Lumley’s fee (a charge that rankled with Churchill for years). The loan was still incomplete when Churchill met one of his father’s Indian army friends, General Sir Bindon Blood, while staying for the weekend with Duchess Lily and her new husband Lord William Beresford. Encouraged by Beresford, the general promised to take the young subaltern on to his staff should he be given command of an Indian frontier expeditionary force.
A month later, at the Goodwood races, Churchill heard that Sir Bindon had taken charge of three brigades to quash a Pathian rebellion in the Swat Valley on the North West Frontier. Pausing only to cable the general and remind him of his promise, Churchill immediately set off for India. On reaching Bangalore in mid-August, he asked his mother to sign the loan documents for him: ‘I am counting on the money and have already written several cheques to pay the bills here,’ he told her. ‘Hustle Lumley & wire if there is a hitch.’14
There was no reply from Sir Bindon in Aden or on arrival at Bangalore, but a letter reached Churchill at the end of August: although the general’s headquarters staff was full, Churchill would be fitted in ‘on the first opportunity’15 and could start as a war correspondent. Putting down the novel Savrola which he had started writing (he had reached the fifth chapter), Churchill set off on the five-day rail journey north, instructing his mother to arrange an urgent newspaper contract. She found that The Times had already made its appointment, but agreed terms with The Daily Telegraph: Churchill wanted ‘not less than £10 per letter’, published under his own name,16 but Jennie settled for £5 and the by-line ‘A Young Officer’.17
Churchill dispatched twelve letters to the newspaper over five weeks of daily skirmishes, during which he deliberately courted danger so that no onlooker could doubt his courage. Halfway through the fighting he was furious to find out his mother had agreed to the rate of £5: ‘I mean to solace myself financially. I will not accept less than £10 a letter and I shall return any cheque for a less [sic] sum,’ he told her. ‘The £75 which the D.T. propose to give me will hardly pay my ticket for self & horses... As Dr Johnson says, “No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”’18
Churchill remained distracted by his finances while the fighting continued. ‘I am perplexed and worried by a telegram wh. arrived from England and reached me two days ago saying “NO”. Does this apply to the loan?’ he asked Jennie. ‘If so – I am indeed in a serious position. I have written £500 of cheques in settlement of debts and if they are dishonoured, I really do not know – or care to guess – what the consequences might be.’19
Jennie was equally in the dark: ‘I wonder if you have heard from Lumley yet?... He is a very tiresome man. My own affairs are in a dreadful state – & I hope to get him to put them right. How it is to be done Heaven knows.’20 She tried to atone for The Daily Telegraph disappointment by suggesting that Churchill publish his letters in book form, an idea that he immediately took up, dropping his novel again and asking her to find a publisher. He was bored by life in Bangalore, even polo, but at least ‘financially my frontier affair has been good business as with my press money I have spent nothing for two months’.21
It took only a month before it became obvious that the Norwich Union loan had not solved the difficulty of Churchill’s unpaid London bills. ‘I find that my original estimate of my liabilities was considerably below the actual amount,’ he wrote home in November 1897. ‘All borrowed money and a good number of the most pressing bills have been paid – but nearly £500 – to people like Bernau, Tautz, Sowter etc will remain.’22 Jennie was no better off. ‘Personally I am going through a very serious crisis,’ she told him. ‘I will write to you the particulars once I have come to some tangible plan. Lumley is trying to devise something.’23
Churchill wrote for six hours a day, racing to beat The Times’s war correspondent in order to be the first to publish a book about the Malakand field force. He was so busy he missed the significance of his mother’s mention of a possible financial scheme to reorganize her finances. Dispatching the book’s manuscript to her on the last day of 1897, as he was about to set off for Calcutta to stay with the Viceroy Lord Elgin, he emphasized its urgency to his mother. ‘Do not I beg you – lose one single day – in taking the MS to some publisher,’ he implored her. ‘As to price, I have no idea what the book is worth but do not throw it away. I don’t think I ought to get less than £300 for the first edition with some royalty on each copy – but if the book hit the mark I might get much more.’24
Jennie’s search led to Arthur Balfour’s publishing ‘broker’ A. P. Watt,3 who sold it within a fortnight to Longman Green.25 Posting her son a copy of the contract, Jennie explained that Thomas Longman usually only published at the author’s expense, but would be advancing him £50 and that his royalty would increase from 15 to 20 per cent after the sale of 3,000 copies.26 ‘If the book is a success – and I am sure it will be – you can command yr own price next time,’ she suggested.27
Churchill realized that he could not dictate terms from so far away. ‘All financial arrangements in connexion with it – I shall leave entirely in your hands, but please have no false scruples or modesty about bargaining,’ he told her, five days after she had already settled. ‘The publication of the book will certainly be the most noteworthy act of my life – up to date (of course). By its reception I shall measure the chances of my success in the world.’28
A proof copy of The Story of the Malakand Field Force did not reach Churchill in Bangalore until a week after the book’s publication in London on 14 March 1898. It was too late to do anything about the many typesetting errors he found, so Churchill could only ‘writhe’ from a distance while the book sold 1,473 copies during its first three months on the market, followed by another 1,198 copies over the next year. Early in 1899 Churchill received his first literary royalty: the cheque for £46 (on top of his £50 advance) fell well short of his earlier expectations.29
Before the book’s publication, Churchill had already turned his attention to his mother’s efforts to secure him a transfer to the campaign in Egypt: ‘Now do stir up your influence,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t be afraid of every line of attack. So far I have done it all myself. You have so much more power.’30 Jennie replied that no military advance was likely until the summer of 1898; she was considering her own trip to Egypt to work on the army commander General Kitchener ‘at nearer quarters with more chance of success’.31
Meanwhile the family solicitor Theodore Lumley was about to share with Jennie his long-awaited scheme to reorganize her finances. ‘He takes such a time to do anything,’ she complained to her son. ‘In time you will receive all the documents. If the arrangement I contemplate comes off I think it will be possible to find a few hundreds to settle those bills of yours. I will explain all to you later when the papers are ready.’32
Jennie had been staying at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and returned to London to hear the details of Lumley’s plan early in January 1899. However, when she reached London she realized that Lumley had already sent the legal documents to Churchill in India, without any proper explanation of a scheme that required her son’s written approval, because it affected his inheritance. Grasping something of the sensitivities involved, she dashed off a note to Churchill intending to catch the same mail as Lumley’s package:
This £14,000 is in order to buy up all the loans I have made in different Insurance offices – with a margin enough to pay the interest for a couple of years & I think give you the few hundreds you require. Of course in helping you to do this you understand that you reduce yr portion after my death... Anyhow it is Hobson’s choice. I can’t give you an allowance or have anything to live on until this is done. So sign the papers & send them back by return. I will explain in next, post off.33
But Jennie missed the post. Lumley’s legal papers reached Bangalore late in January 1897. The difficulty facing the solicitor was that Jennie had no capital of her own – only the income flowing from capital theoretically ring-fenced inside family trusts. Leonard Jerome had deliberately prevented the American settlement’s future income from being pledged to secure any loans, but neither the English Settlement nor her husband’s will trust (both drawn up by Lumley) had taken the same precaution. The solicitor had therefore persuaded the Norwich Union to lend £17,0004 against their future flow of income, so long as her son consented, on behalf of both himself and his under-age brother, to put his future inheritance at risk in this way. If any part of Jennie’s loan was still outstanding when she died (which seemed practically inevitable), Churchill would have to forego that portion of his inheritance.
All this took time to sink in. His first reaction, sent on the same day that Lumley’s package arrived, was relatively muted and complained only that Lumley’s letter had been full of legal jargon:
£17,000 is a great deal of money, about a quarter indeed of all we shall ever have in the world – under American settlement – Duke’s will & Papa’s property... I do not quite understand how the signing of these documents will affect my prospects... What I want to know – and that Lumley – if not a verbose fool – might easily have explained is – how much difference it will make... Speaking quite frankly on the subject – there is no doubt that we are both you & I equally thoughtless – spendthrift and extravagant. We both know what is good – and we like to have it. Arrangements for paying are left to the future... We shall very soon come to the end of our tether – unless a considerable change comes over our fortunes and dispositions. As long as I am dead sure & certain of an ultimate £1,000 a year5 – I do not much care – as I could always make money on the press – and might marry... I sympathize with all your extravagances – even more than you do with mine – it seems just as suicidal to me when you spend £200 on a ball dress as it does to you when I purchase a new polo pony for £100. And yet I feel that you ought to have the dress & I the polo pony. The pinch of the whole matter is that we are damned poor.34
By the time Jennie’s hurried note reached him forty-eight hours later, Churchill’s reaction had hardened. Convinced now that he was being asked to sign away almost half his inheritance35 – enough to damage his marriage prospects – he also suspected (rightly as it turned out) that the cost of the scheme (nearly £1,400 a year in interest and life insurance charges)36 would soon prevent Jennie from keeping up the payment of his and Jack’s allowances. The only bait for him was a single contribution of £700 towards his unpaid bills.
Churchill sent his mother a letter that would haunt him for weeks:
I have read all the papers very carefully and I understand that by signing, as you ask me to do, I deprive myself for ever of an income equal to the sum of Interest and premium necessary to borrow £14,000 or perhaps £17,000 upon an Insurance policy. Neither you – nor Lumley, in whom it is inexcusable – have informed me what this amount will be. Assuming that the rate is 5% (a moderate estimate) and that £14,000 is the sum borrowed (the minimum stated) – I learn that by signing I ultimately forego £700 per annum. As I understand it that if Jack lives I shall only have £1,800 a year – you will recognize that this is a very serious matter for me. Nor do I think that it should have been put before me in so sketchy and offhand a manner – as if it were a thing of no importance. I have written to Lumley on the subject.
I have thought the whole matter over and have considered all the different influences... I do not intend to profit by this loan you are raising – or to confuse the matter by allowing you to think that I consent to deprive myself of half my property – for the sake of such a ‘mess of pottage’ as a few hundreds of pounds to pay my bills.
I sign these papers – purely & solely out of affection for you. I write plainly that no other consideration would have induced me to sign them. As it is I sign them upon two conditions – which justice & prudence alike demand.
Churchill stipulated that his mother must switch his informal allowance into a binding legal commitment and that Jack must share the burden once he turned eighteen years old:
I need not say how painful it is to me to have to write in so formal a strain – or to take such precautions. But I am bound to protect myself in the future – as I do not wish to be left – should I survive you – in poverty. In three years from my father’s death you have spent a quarter of our entire fortune in the world. I have also been extravagant: but my extravagances are a very small matter besides yours... If this letter does not please you – you must balance your annoyance against my reluctance to be £700 a year poorer and then I think you will admit that my side of the account is the heavier.37
He wrote to Jack on the same day, asking him to promise to share the charge when he came of age: ‘I am sure that you would not wish that in any way we should depart from our old principle – which Papa laid down in his will – that we should share all money we inherited equally.’38
*1 Pamela Plowden (1874–1971), married the earl of Lytton, 1902 (later under-secretary of state for India 1920–2, governor of Bengal 1922–7).
*2 A valuable horse race held on the first Tuesday of June, traditionally marking the beginning of London’s summer season.
*3 A. P. Watt (1834–1914), bookseller and advertising agent, Edinburgh 1870s; first person to be called ‘literary agent’, 1881, representing Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling.
*4 The loan was to be set at £17,000, but Jennie was only to benefit from £14,000; the balance of £3,000 was to repay Churchill’s £2,300 Norwich Union loan and to leave him £700 to pay overdue bills.
*5 Churchill’s reference is to a private income of £1,000 per annum, requiring capital of £20,000, according to the rule of thumb at the time.