RUMOURS OF A general election in Britain reached the island of Madeira, where Churchill’s ship had stopped on her way home from Cape Town. Within a week of his return to London in July 1900, Churchill was adopted as a Conservative candidate for Oldham. He was naturally pleased, but a pressing personal matter briefly diverted his attention from politics: his mother had accepted a renewed marriage proposal from George Cornwallis-West. The Churchills turned out for the occasion ‘in a solid phalanx’ of support, but Winston’s hopes that the marriage might lead to a regular allowance quickly evaporated when George’s family boycotted the ceremony and George was drummed out of his regiment. George took a pile of his new wife’s unpaid bills on their protracted honeymoon, but he ‘found it a bit thick when expected to pay for Lord Randolph Churchill’s barouche purchased in the [eighteen] eighties’.1
Churchill was not too despondent about his own position. After all, he had already saved almost £4,000 of his earnings from books and journalism.2 ‘With judicious economy, I shall hope to make that carry me through the lean years,’ he told his brother Jack. ‘In November I am going to lecture in England, and I hope to make the best part of £2,000. December, January and February I shall be in the States, March, I shall be back in England and hope to have made £5,000 or £6,000 and be able to write MP after my name.’3
He spent part of August and most of September campaigning in Oldham, the rest working on a second book of his Boer War dispatches, to be called Ian Hamilton’s March. Longman again refused any advance on the book, citing London to Ladysmith’s disappointing sales and a general cooling of interest in the war. The publisher’s judgement was vindicated: Ian Hamilton’s March sold only half the number of London to Ladysmith’s copies and earned its author less than £400.4
On 1 October, after a close-fought contest, the voters of Oldham elected Churchill as their member of Parliament. He won by a margin of 222 votes and the next stage of his career plan fell into place.5 Helpfully, the duke of Marlborough promised to pay a third of Churchill’s election expenses.6 The duke also solved the problem of accommodation in London by offering Churchill the last two years’ lease of his bachelor rooms at 105 Mount Street (off Park Lane), which the duke no longer needed now that he was to marry a wealthy American heiress, Consuelo Vanderbilt. Churchill asked his aunt Leonie to help furnish the rooms as Jennie was still away on a prolonged honeymoon with her young husband: ‘You cannot imagine how that kind of material arrangement irritates me,’ he told his aunt. ‘So long as my table is clear and there is plenty of paper, I do not worry about the rest.’7
Parliament was not due to sit for four months, giving its new member an ideal window for his lecture tours of Britain and the United States entitled ‘The War as I Saw It’. Churchill began with a dry run at Harrow, his old school, where he covered just a quarter of his notes during ninety minutes.
The British lecture tour was organized by Gerald Christie’s Lecture Agency. It attracted ticket sales of almost £4,000, but required Churchill to speak at thirty venues within a period of just over a month.8 Before his appearance in Liverpool on 22 November Churchill sat down to list his assets and liabilities. Adopting the optimistic outlook that came to characterize his financial arithmetic, Churchill calculated that his assets had now reached £8,000.9 However, the liabilities column contained his loan of £3,500 and unpaid bills of £640, one of which had reached the hands of solicitors.10 Churchill’s constituents in Oldham were also pressing him to make the expected financial contributions in support of causes as diverse as the Oldham Deaf and Dumb Society, the Oldham branch of the Boys’ Brigade and the Oldham & District Ornithological Society.11 Nevertheless, Churchill felt confident enough about his finances at the end of the tour to join a series of exclusive London clubs, including the Carlton Club, a bastion of the Conservative Party.
Mark Twain was on hand to introduce Churchill at his first packed lecture in New York early in December, but as the tour progressed it became clear that the organizer J. B. Pond had greatly overestimated Churchill’s drawing power. Churchill averaged only £50 a lecture, half the amount in Britain, despite travelling much greater distances each day.12 Worse was to come in Toronto, Canada, where attendances were higher but (much to Churchill’s outrage) Pond sub-contracted the events for a fixed fee, so Churchill received only 15 per cent of the takings.13
Christmas at the governor-general’s house in Ottawa, with Pamela Plowden as a fellow guest, did not go well. Churchill refused to resume the lecture tour until Pond travelled to Canada and persuaded him to soldier on throughout January without a change of his terms. He was cheered instead by an investment success which he shared with his mother: ‘Cassel made a speculation for me the other day which resulted in a profit of £187.10. He is v[er]y kind and his judgement is marvellously accurate. I hope, my dearest Mama, to be able to provide for myself in the future – at any rate until things are better for you.’ The one bone of contention between them remained the loan that Churchill had taken out from Norwich Union to pay his own allowance – and Jack’s. He wrote to Jennie:
If you can arrange to relieve me of this loan, with the interest of which I am heavily burdened – £300 per annum – I will not ask for any allowance whatever from you, until old Papa Wests decides to give you and George more to live on. Jack in a few years should be self-supporting too. But what a lucky thing it is that I did not remain in the army, for I could not have retained my commission under the circumstances. I am very proud that there is not one person in a million who at my age could have earned £10,000 without any capital in less than two years. But it is sometimes v[er]y unpleasant work. For instance, last week I arrived to lecture in an American town & found Pond had not arranged any public lecture but that I was hired out for £40 to perform at an evening party in a private house – like a conjurer. Several times I have harangued in local theatres to almost empty benches.14
Churchill headed home on the day after Queen Victoria’s funeral. He was $6,000 better off, but exhausted, as he recalled in My Early Life:
For more than five months I had spoken for an hour or more almost every night except Sundays, and often twice a day, and had travelled without ceasing, usually by night, rarely sleeping twice in the same bed. But the results were substantial. I had in my possession nearly £10,000. I was entirely independent and had no need to worry about the future, or for many years to work at anything but politics. I sent my £10,000 to my Father’s old friend, Sir Ernest Cassel, with the instruction ‘Feed my sheep’. He fed the sheep with great prudence. They did not multiply fast, but they fattened steadily, and none of them ever died. Indeed from year to year they had a few lambs; but these were not numerous enough for me to live upon. I had every year to eat a sheep or two as well, so gradually my flock grew smaller, until in a few years it was almost entirely devoured.15
Not all of the cash was handed over to Sir Ernest. While still feeling flush, Churchill paid off a clutch of old bills from tailors, saddlers and stables, some of them dating back to 1895.16 He also sent his mother a cheque for £300 on the day that he took his seat in the House of Commons. ‘In a certain sense, it belongs to you,’ he explained, ‘for I could never have earned it had you not transmitted to me the wit and energy which are necessary.’17
The young bachelor MP’s expenditure began to assume a pattern, dominated by fine clothing, footwear, books, wine, cigars, hotel meals and horses, for hunting and polo. A generation later, in Edwardian Hey-Days (1930), Jennie’s second husband George Cornwallis-West claimed that ‘a bachelor in London with a thousand a year was comparatively well-off’:
He could get a very good flat in Mayfair, to hold himself and his servant, for a hundred and fifty pounds per annum. Dinner at his club cost him about four shillings, and any good restaurant would have been prepared to provide an excellent dinner, if he chose to give one to his friends, at ten and sixpence a head. The best tailor in Savile Row would make a suit of evening clothes for eleven guineas, and a morning suit for about eight guineas; dress shirts could be bought for ten and sixpence.18
Churchill, on the other hand, spent nearer to £1,400 a year during his bachelor years, as we know from his secretary’s analysis of his outlays during 1905.19 Like his mother, Churchill patronized only the best suppliers: boots and shoes came from Palmer & Co., inventor of the waterproof boot; hats from Scotts Hatters, while J. W. Allen provided solid leather cases for them, lined with brown satin.20 Frank Smythson added the suffix ‘MP’ to Churchill’s calling cards,21 while membership of the Bicester Hunt and the Ranelagh Club for polo set him back forty guineas a year between them, before stabling and equipment consumed a similar sum.22 Weekends were spent moving between country houses and polo grounds, driven by his chauffeur-cum-servant Émile Violon, who was equipped for the purpose with a uniform of a blue serge jacket, ‘vest’ and trousers.
Oppressed by the weight of bills, invitations and correspondence, Churchill again turned to his mother for help: ‘It is quite clear to me that unless I get a Secretary, I shall be pressed into my grave with all sorts of ridiculous things – which I have no need whatever to do.’23 She lent him the part-time use of Annette Anning, her own secretary, but soon lost her completely to Churchill, who had embarked on a way of life that was to last another fifty years: a combination of politics and writing.
Pamela Plowden, to whom he had not written for eight weeks, felt seriously neglected and, when Churchill proposed to her at Warwick Castle during the summer of 1901, she declined. Jack learned that at least three other men considered themselves to be informally engaged to Pamela and soon afterwards she chose the earl of Lytton. ‘I think Winston is quite right to have put off with dear little Pamela,’ his military mentor Colonel Brabazon reassured Churchill’s aunt. ‘She ought to be a rich man’s wife.’24
There was still no sign of Jennie repaying the loan that Churchill had taken on for the last three years to fund his allowance, despite the death of the dowager duchess in 1899, which had added the residuary estate of the 7th duke of Marlborough to Lord Randolph’s will trust. Indeed, by the end of 1901 his mother’s financial problems were once again coming to a head: Jennie had bowed to the inevitable and closed her society magazine, The Anglo-Saxon Review, which was still making losses after ten issues.*1 Her husband George, a stranger to the idea of earning a living, had continued with his life’s main interests, which might be deduced from the chapter headings of his book Edwardian Hey-Days: Hunting, Racing, Deer-Stalking, Fishing, Golf, Cricket, Motoring and (not untruthfully) Unsuccessful Enterprises – that is, until Sir Ernest Cassel found him a directorship of an electrical company in far-off Glasgow. His modest salary might have mattered less if his wife’s spending had been less extravagant. ‘[Jennie] dressed beautifully, and her taste, not only in clothes, but in everything, was of the best,’ George observed ruefully. ‘In money matters she was without any sense of proportion.’25
Aware of the tensions caused by Churchill’s loan within the family, the duke of Marlborough chided Churchill for his ‘needlessly extravagant’ expenditure before meeting him to discuss the matter with their family solicitor at the end of 1901.26 The duke left straight afterwards to winter in South Africa without giving any inkling of his intentions to Churchill, but he instructed Theodore Lumley to find a way that he could help his cousin as head of the family.27 The solicitor ‘considered’ the problem in January 1902, then held a ‘long meeting’ with Churchill in February, followed by a ‘long and private interview’ in March with the duke, who finally decided to lend Churchill £3,500 interest-free to repay the Norwich Union loan.28
Unfortunately, the duke had forgotten this arrangement by the time the insurance company’s six months’ notice period had expired; Lumley’s diplomatic reminders went unanswered, so Churchill himself visited the duke at Blenheim. They reached an agreement: the Churchill brothers’ loan would remain interest-free until their mother’s death, but they would provide security for its eventual repayment from what remained of their future inheritance.
At last, during the summer of 1902, his father’s literary executors (Ernest Beckett, a banker, and Earl Howe, the husband of one of Lord Randolph’s sisters) gave Churchill access to the papers and letters at Blenheim, so that he could begin work on a biography. ‘There emerges from these dusty records a great and vivid drama,’ he told his mother as he began sifting through them.29
He was soon distracted by an invitation to witness the opening of the Aswan dam in Egypt. It came from Sir Ernest Cassel, who had arranged the dam’s financing after his rivals the Rothschilds turned down the opportunity. While he was away, Churchill ordered his newsagent to forward the usual six daily newspapers, as well as The Spectator and Punch. He also took with him the extra reading required for the political campaigns he was planning, one for reform of the army and another against ‘tariff reform’, the political issue which was to define Churchill’s separation from the Conservative Party’s mainstream.
Churchill’s vision of imperialism was founded on the mutual progress towards liberalism and democracy of members of the empire, not on a shared economic self-interest. Although he was born into the landed class, which almost always identified with the Tory Party, Churchill had never owned an acre of land. His experience of having to earn his own living through personal enterprise led him to identify just as closely at this stage of his life with the new breed of ‘plutocrats’, many of whom were friends or friends of his parents: the bankers Nathaniel and Alfred Rothschild and Sir Ernest Cassel; the newspaper owners Alfred Harmsworth and Oliver Borthwick; the mining financier Abe Bailey.*2 Although keen to acquire many of the trappings of the aristocracy – a country home, a shoot, a stretch of river – many ‘plutocrats’ identified politically with the values of reform, enterprise and free trade, as championed by the Liberal Party.
Churchill was associated with a small group of Tories known as the ‘Hooligans’*3 who nursed hopes of a realignment at the centre of British politics and kept in touch with leading Liberal Party figures. Many fellow politicians suspected the motives of the ‘Hooligans’ to owe more to ambition than to principle; however the issue of ‘free trade’ provided members of the group with the cover of principle. Within a month of the leading Conservative Joseph Chamberlain announcing in May 1903 his conversion to a policy of trade tariffs loaded in favour of imports from Britain’s colonies, Churchill signalled his opposition was sufficiently deep-seated to cause a break with the Tories and a move towards the Liberal Party.
By the middle of 1903 Churchill was so exhausted by his twin careers of writing and politics that he underwent a course of twenty-three ‘Galvanic Medical Treatments’,30 a harbinger of growing medical expenditure during his late bachelor years. At least he had little tax to pay: the combined rate of direct and indirect taxes was still around 20 per cent for those on the highest or lowest incomes,31 but Churchill was told that he should not have to pay more than £50 for either the 1902/3 or 1903/4 tax years*4 – he was still unpaid as an MP, and was allowed to spread his literary earnings over three successive years and to deduct all his bank interest and insurance payments.32
City markets had remained so depressed since the end of the Boer War – one commentator reported stockbrokers picking up cigarette ends in the street33 – that two years of comparative peace on his mother’s finances came to an end late in 1904, when Norwich Union took fright at the dwindling value of investments backing its £17,000 loan to the family trusts. Preoccupied at this time by politics as he prepared the ground for crossing the floor of the House from the Tory to the Liberal benches, Churchill asked his brother Jack to deal with the insurers. At the same time he reassured Jennie that Cornwallis-West family money would eventually come to their rescue: ‘I have no doubt that when Papa G.*5 is at length gathered to Abraham, you will be able to renew your youth like the eagle.’34 The duke chastised Churchill for not taking a closer personal interest in his mother’s affairs, prompting him to set aside two days for what he called a ‘Grand Inquisition’. Jennie welcomed the gesture. ‘I am sure it will save you & Jack a lot of bother later on,’ she wrote to him; ‘it is really such a heavy, difficult estate to understand.’35
Churchill’s ‘Inquisition’ failed to live up to the rigorous standards of its Spanish namesake; too many of his energies were bent on establishing a new political identity. His biography of Lord Randolph had also made little progress, but he gave it more of his attention during August when he stayed at Sir Ernest Cassel’s mountain-top retreat above the Swiss village of Mörel. ‘I divide [the days] into three parts,’ he told his mother. ‘The morning when I read and write: the afternoons when I walk – real long walks and climbs about these hills or across the glacier: the evenings, of course 4 rubbers of bridge – then bed.’36
Whenever he could during the autumn, Churchill continued writing, whether at a moated house near St Albans rented by the Cornwallis-Wests, at Blenheim Palace or in London, the location where politics and Jennie’s finances proved most distracting. By March 1905 Churchill felt sufficiently confident about his biography to discuss terms with the publisher of his first five books. However, Thomas Longman’s offer of a £4,000 advance fell so far short of the £8,000 or £10,000 that he had been told to expect that Churchill decided to look elsewhere once the book was more complete.37
Meanwhile his former colleagues in the Conservative Party were not making the task of finishing the book any easier. They forced his resignation from the Carlton Club and blackballed his application to the polo club at Hurlingham.38 When Churchill dried up during a House of Commons speech in May, sympathy flowed from many quarters, but no one was as practical as his aunt Cornelia, who sent money. ‘Now I know elections and Parliament in general all means a great deal of expense & so we want to enjoy the prerogative of standing in the relation of uncles and aunts to send a little present which we feel may be useful at any rate at the present time,’ she wrote, unable to resist adding: ‘When the heiress*6 is found, I think the good fortune will not only be on your side.’39
Despite the blackball at the Hurlingham, polo weighed heavily on Churchill’s time and finances during the summer of 1905. He had sold two ponies for ten guineas each earlier in the year,40 replacing them with four of a much higher pedigree, each costing at least £100.41 Although Wembley Park Polo Club allowed MPs to play in the mornings for a reduced membership fee, housing each pony cost three shillings a day and moving them cost a minimum of nineteen shillings whenever he played elsewhere.
Lord Randolph’s biography languished until Churchill spent another three weeks at Sir Ernest Cassel’s Swiss villa in August, after which he reopened publishing negotiations. He had a new agent, Frank Harris, an author himself and former editor of the Evening News, Fortnightly Review and Vanity Fair.*7 Harris would earn commission only on any improvement he achieved on Longman’s offer of £4,000. He sent details of Lord Randolph Churchill to several publishers, telling Churchill: ‘Properly worked this book should bring you in £10,000 or I’m a Dutchman!’42 Harris provided Churchill with a blow-by-blow account of negotiations: Heinemann was the first to decline; Methuen talked well, but ‘is not rich enough to risk a sum like eight or ten thousand’; Cassell was the richest publisher, he thought, and ought to emerge victorious; but in the end it was Frederick Macmillan, one of the doyens of British publishing, who made the highest offer of £8,000 for combined British and American rights.43
Churchill immediately met Macmillan to make some final demands: he wanted £1,000 on signing, another £1,000 on delivery of the proofs and the remaining £6,000 on publication. Forty-eight hours later, impressed by Churchill’s self-assurance, Macmillan acquiesced: ‘My partners and I have discussed the proposals you made to us on Saturday and I now write to confirm that we shall be glad to publish your Lord Randolph Churchill on the terms suggested by you.’44
There was no contract. ‘The terms contained in your letter of this day are perfectly satisfactory to me,’ Churchill simply wrote on Macmillan’s office notepaper the same day,45 before passing on details to his mother and his former publisher. Longman congratulated him on the ‘splendid price’, but told Macmillan privately that he had paid too much.46
This earned Churchill a stern rebuke from Macmillan: ‘By the way, we do not propose to tell the world at large what our arrangement with you is. It always seems to me that gossip of this kind serves no good end and is a little bit undignified.’47 Churchill claimed only to have told ‘some of my relations and a few intimate friends’,48 but his generous advance soon became common knowledge in the book world. ‘Winston Churchill is a bright young man and will make the most of his material but there is not much of vital interest in the subject,’ was the lukewarm verdict of the London office of Charles Scribner’s Sons.49
Manuscripts and proofs travelled between Churchill and his new publisher almost daily in November, although the cordial mood soured slightly when Churchill decided that Macmillan’s proofreader was not up to the task and insisted that his agent Harris should act instead at his publisher’s expense.50 Meanwhile, Churchill prepared the ground among his newspaper friends: Sir Alfred Harmsworth ‘has most kindly promised me to push the book by every means in his power’, as long as he was sent five copies ten days in advance, he told his publisher.51
The publication date of the biography was set for January 1906 until Prime Minister Arthur Balfour resigned in the preceding December, having failed to resolve Tory differences over tariff reform. Although he did not ask the king to dissolve Parliament in case the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was unable to form a government, the prospect of power rapidly united Sir Henry’s colleagues. Among those Sir Henry contacted about an appointment was Churchill himself, to whom he offered the choice of financial secretary at the Treasury (under Herbert Asquith as chancellor) or under-secretary for the colonies (under Lord Elgin, a former viceroy whom he had met in India). Churchill preferred the latter’s scope to shine in the House of Commons.
Emboldened by the ease with which he had formed his administration, Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman asked the king himself for a dissolution of Parliament and set the general election date for early in January, just as Lord Randolph Churchill was due to be published. Churchill wanted to delay the launch while he stood for the first time as a Liberal in northwest Manchester (and comfortably beat his Tory opponent),52 but Macmillan pressed ahead, in the hope of capitalizing on a wave of political interest.
Lord Randolph Churchill was published as the first election results were declared. British sales reached almost 5,000 in January, before slowing down sharply.53 Macmillan admitted disappointment, but felt that Churchill’s expectations had always been too high.54 The Times Book Club had just been established in an effort to restore the newspaper’s flagging sales and Macmillan sold it 1,900 copies from surplus stock; he had not realized that the newspaper would then offer the book to its Book Club members at one fifth of its bookshop price.55 ‘I am very sorry to see by a cutting which has reached me that The Times have played you a shabby trick,’ Churchill wrote to his publisher.56 Nevertheless, Churchill had his generous advance and he told his tax adviser Theodore Lumley to submit a profit on the biography of £7,250 after expenses, easily the best profit of his writing career thus far.57
Before Churchill submerged himself under the cares of office, he earmarked £6,000 of the sum for investment by Sir Ernest Cassel and the balance for the lease of a larger London home, of the class expected of a rising young minister. It was Jennie who found the four-storey home at 12 Bolton Street in Mayfair, while the duke of Marlborough agreed over Christmas at Blenheim that Churchill could leave Mount Street at short notice. With Jennie’s help, alterations were agreed over the New Year – the architect’s initial estimate of less than £250 being revised to £850 after he had met Churchill and his mother.58
Then there was the £750 cost of a library, which Churchill wanted but could not afford until Sir Ernest Cassel offered to pay for it – a fact that would emerge seventeen years later, during the libel trial of Lord Alfred Douglas. Churchill set about filling the bookshelves, spending more than £300 on hundreds of new and secondhand volumes procured from the bookshops of Charing Cross Road.59
He was discovering the cost of home ownership: Harrods’ bill alone was seven pages long, covering kitchen, bedroom and bathroom items ordered by his mother.60 There was annual rent of £250 to pay to the freeholder, plus local property income taxes, and bills for insurance and utilities.61 Two male servants, a housekeeper, cook and a housemaid looked after the new minister, although his long-established laundress Mrs Thornley still collected his washing, which she took to her emporium in Earlsfield for the not inconsiderable cost of £100 a year.62
*1 ‘It’s a guinea a number, too little by half, / For the crowned heads of Europe are all on the staff,’ ran a contemporary satirical rhyme.
*2 Abraham (‘Abe’) Bailey (1864–1940), born in southern Africa, educated in England; woolbroker 1879; goldmining in southern Africa 1881; mentored by Cecil Rhodes, stock-broking of mining shares; later owned his own mining properties; baronet 1919.
*3 Also known as the ‘Hughligans’, taking their name from a leader, Hugh Cecil MP.
*4 In Britain the tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April of the following year.
*5 George Cornwallis-West’s father.
*6 The ‘rich heiress’ was a rare but much sought-after Victorian creature: she had wealthy parents, but no brothers and as few sisters as possible.
*7 Frank Harris (1856–1931); best known for his explicit memoirs, My Life and Loves (1922–7).