THE NEW UNDER-SECRETARY for the colonies paid £5.10s. for his first red Moroccan-leather dispatch box.1 Churchill’s in-tray in December 1905 was dominated by southern Africa’s continuing problems, particularly the need to devise a self-governing constitution for the Transvaal. In addition the Liberal Party’s election manifesto had promised to bring to an end the local administration’s controversial use of 50,000 Chinese labourers in the mines.
Despite these tasks, the new minister still found time to play polo, which Edward Marsh,*1 his new private secretary at the Colonial Office, charitably entered as ‘equitation’ in the ministerial diary. Marsh had been private secretary for Joseph Chamberlain, but he came personally recommended by the new Countess Lytton (formerly Pamela Plowden) and by Churchill’s own aunt Leonie.
Public office failed to restrain Churchill’s private spending, which reached £1,700 in 1906, well ahead of a junior minister’s salary of £1,500 a year.2 In order to secure an expanding overdraft at the bank, Cox & Co. required Churchill to transfer some of his investments for registration under its name. On the way to observe German army summer manoeuvres, Churchill and his cousin Ivor Guest visited the Deauville casino, where his early successes might have helped reduce Churchill’s debts; but his fortunes changed as they gambled every night until five in the morning. ‘I have made a little money – had made a lot,’ he told Marsh.3 The eventual profit from his visits (£260) disappeared on a diversion to Paris, where it was split between four hundredweight of books bought for his new library and what Churchill coyly described to his brother Jack as ‘other directions’.4
Left to hold the fort at home, Marsh asked innocently whether he should pay any of the minister’s overdue private bills. Churchill explained his philosophy: ‘They may as well wait a little longer, having already waited so long.’ However, he did ask his brother to keep an eye on a couple of bills. ‘I do not want to pay them now unless I am forced, in wh[ich] case I can find the money,’ he told Jack. ‘But I do not want them to take legal proceedings and I hope you will let me know before the matter becomes urgent.’5
The truth was that Churchill could only pay by increasing an overdraft limit that he had already raised once, or by selling more investments at what he considered a bad time. One of his stockbroking friends, Cecil Grenfell, had recommended ‘Unions’ shares to him earlier in the summer, but Churchill had missed an opportunity by selling them much too soon. He admitted to Jack (who was now a member of the stockbroking fraternity at Nelke Phillips & Co.) that Sir Ernest Cassel and Grenfell had criticized his habit of darting in and out of the market.6
Churchill’s bank was no happier: Churchill had breached an increased overdraft limit and it now insisted that part of the arrangement was converted into a formal loan. ‘It seems pre-destined that money is to avoid me,’ Churchill complained to his mother, ‘except in such driblets that it cannot be enjoyed without feelings of uncertainty & anxiety.’7
Mr and Mrs Cornwallis-West were not without their own difficulties. With a little help from Lord Rothschild, George had two years earlier formed a new City partnership, Wheater, Cornwallis-West & Co. The two principals hardly knew each other, but the north countryman Wheater was supposed to provide the brains, and George the London introductions. ‘In the first year, merely operating in large lines of the shares in north-country steel and iron works controlled by the late Lord Furness, we made over twenty-three thousand pounds,’ George recalled in his memoirs. However, the firm started to struggle when Wheater, ‘a born gambler’, reinvested their gains in a Spanish copper mine and an Australian cultured pearls project,8 before a solicitor defrauded the business in the summer of 1906.
Left to find £8,000 in a hurry, George hid the difficulty from Jennie, but not from Churchill, who was one of those he approached to produce the balance that the bank would not lend. Churchill was in Vienna when a letter with a cheque for £3,000 arrived from Nairobi, sent by the duke of Westminster.9 Bendor (as the duke was known to friends) was George’s brother-in-law and, although his own marriage was in trouble, he made it clear that Churchill should use the cheque, rather than his own money, if George genuinely needed to be rescued. The duke’s only condition was that George should not be able to trace its source.
Fittingly, George was stalking deer in Scotland when Churchill’s letter reached Jennie, asking for private information on George’s affairs. Things were a little slack in the City, she thought, but Wheater, Cornwallis-West & Co. had earned at least £12,000 over the previous three months, as far as she knew.10 In fact, as she wrote, the Bank of England was pushing through two bank rate rises within ten days to try to stop gold draining away from London to New York.*2 Handing over the duke’s money to George, Churchill hinted heavily that it had come from Sir Ernest Cassel, with whom he had just stayed in Switzerland. He explained to Bendor that he could not pretend that he had supplied the money himself, because George would never have believed him.
Churchill then had to put aside the Cornwallis-West’s difficulties and turn to another branch of the family: his Londonderry cousins in Ireland. His great-grandmother Frances Vane, marchioness of Londonderry, had died forty-two years ago, leaving her money and land in Co. Antrim to her younger children, because her eldest son was to inherit the main Londonderry estate. To prevent her Garron Tower estate from being broken up, the marchioness’s will established a strict order of precedence among her inheritors: first, her second son Lord Herbert Vane-Tempest and his heirs; failing whom, her third son Lord Henry Vane-Tempest; failing whom Lord Randolph Churchill, the son of her daughter Frances and the 7th duke of Marlborough. When Lord Herbert inherited the Garron Tower estate in 1864, its land, loans and investments had been valued at £72,874, even without one of its most attractive components, the marchioness’s jewellery.11
The chances of Lord Randolph’s heirs ever succeeding must at first have seemed remote, but now a letter had arrived from the Londonderry family’s solicitors announcing that Churchill was the next in line: Lord Henry had just died childless in 1906, while Lord Herbert remained unmarried at the age of forty-four.
Worried at the increasing risk that the estate would eventually pass to the English branch of the family, the Londonderrys wished to buy their mother’s jewellery out of the estate and now required Churchill’s formal approval as the next in line. Churchill’s solicitor suggested that the jewels should be independently valued (the Londonderrys’ adviser had suggested a price of £4,420) and that Churchill should reserve the right to buy back the jewels later, a move unsurprisingly resisted by the Londonderrys, as it would have defeated the whole object of the exercise.12
Family harmony was tested again in the autumn when the duke of Marlborough asked for Churchill’s help in bringing his six-year marriage to an end. Personally sympathetic towards Consuelo Vanderbilt (who had not only produced the necessary heir but also used a considerable slice of the Vanderbilt fortune to help modernize Blenheim), Churchill was exasperated by his cousin’s obstinacy, which defied his attempts to broker an amicable separation.
Churchill’s family relations survived this test, but there was a growing political estrangement. The Liberal government of which Churchill was a member had begun to put into practice its philosophy that the state should play a greater role in combating poverty among children, the sick and the elderly. On his holiday during the summer of 1906 Churchill read H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), in whose parallel world the state owned all land and subsidized motherhood.13 Churchill publicly declared his support for a radical programme in a speech at Glasgow soon after his holiday. ‘The cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions,’ he declared, adding: ‘I should like to see the state embark on various novel and interesting experiments.’14
Churchill overcame his immediate ministerial challenges in southern Africa and, after helping to host a Colonies’ Conference in London during April 1907, he decided to make a trip to eastern Africa. The plan, partly to inspect territories for which he was responsible and partly to travel for private pleasure, was approved by Lord Elgin, the secretary of state, who hoped that the absence of his hyperactive young minister might lead to a quieter Scottish summer. In order to forestall any possible suggestion of impropriety, Churchill offered to pay his own travel expenses and asked his former agent A. P. Watt to arrange a series of five articles with The Strand Magazine at £150 each to offset part of the cost.15 For additional contributions Churchill asked his mother to let his house and find alternative employment for his secretary: ‘I do rely upon you dear Mamma to help me in arranging these affairs; for wh[ich] I am not at all suited by disposition or temperament.’16 Jennie could not understand why he had offered to pay his way: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre,’ she told him. ‘And no one will thank you for it.’17
At Malta Churchill met his travelling party: his uncle by marriage, Colonel Gordon Wilson, his private secretary Edward Marsh and his manservant Scriving. They embarked on HMS Venus, a light cruiser detailed to carry them in style through the Suez Canal to Aden and then on to Mombasa in the British East Africa Protectorate. Jennie had failed to let the Mount Street home, but Jack reported success soon after taking over the task. ‘Who do you think?’ he asked. ‘Mr Bob Scrivier!’18 Seldom out of the newspapers, Scrivier was one of the racing world’s rogues, recently banned from the sport for a spell. Churchill cabled home twice, protesting at the risk to his reputation,19 but Jack held his ground, accusing his brother of double standards:
You have made great friends with Frank Harris whose reputation in the City, where they have some experience and are fairly good judges – is only equalled by Scrivier’s renown on the turf... You are always having fits of economical fervour but it all evaporates the moment there is any sign of any retrenchment, or of any of your luxuries being curtailed.20
As HMS Venus sailed down the east African coast, Jack sounded a note of triumphalism about a sudden crisis in New York’s financial markets:
It has been raging for three days and is not over. A year ago all the New York millionaires were telling us that they were the only people on the earth and that New York was the centre of the financial world. Well most of them are ruined today and money is 100% in New York while it remains 4½% here. I think the slow and sure system of Threadneedle Street has survived their jeers... Our finances are not looking their best. I fear we shall have to borrow when you come back.21
Churchill disembarked at Mombasa and proceeded in style up the new railway line to Nairobi: ‘Everything moves on the smoothest of wheels for me – a special train with dining and sleeping cars was at my disposal all the way; wherever I wished to stop, it stopped,’ he told his mother. ‘We sat in front of the engine with our rifles & as soon as we saw anything to shoot at – a wave of the hand brought the train to a standstill.’22
A good deal of business had been transacted ‘in the intervals of these field sports’,23 Churchill claimed, but it proved a challenge to apportion the unexpectedly high expenses for the trip between various governments and Churchill’s private purse. The protectorate’s bill for half the visitors’ costs in Nairobi remained unpaid for six months; it was only cancelled when Marsh brokered a deal that Churchill would pay thirty shillings a day, while the other members of his party were treated as officials.24 ‘The Tour... originally was intended to be a pure sporting and private expedition,’ Lord Elgin mused to his successor the following year, ‘& I really don’t know how it drifted into an official progress.’25
The governor and his staff joined Churchill for the onward journey along the new railway line to Kisumu on Lake Victoria, from which the visitors crossed Uganda on a luxury steamer. While Churchill was there, a letter from Jack broke the news of his romance with Lady Gwendoline, the daughter of Lord and Lady Abingdon. The couple had decided six months earlier that marriage was impossible because of the Churchill family’s shortage of money, but Goonie (as she was universally known) had changed her mind: ‘She said that she would sacrifice anything for her love,’ Jack wrote excitedly, ‘that her ambition for riches and everything else had vanished and that she would wait for me until I could come and fetch her.’ Jack had no savings of his own, but was going to try to arrange for a guarantee of £1,000 a year from his firm, Nelke Phillips, where he had just been made a partner. ‘In moderate times I ought to get 2 thousand and in good times 3, 4 or even 5 thousand,’ he explained to Churchill. ‘It is just my luck that this should happen in a year which for financial disasters is a record in any living memory.’
He went on to share an unwelcome discovery that he had made during the course of researching his marriage prospects: it concerned their father’s will. ‘I am rather disturbed to hear that the American property*3 and the English “Will”*4 are settled on our children and we have only a life interest in these things. The only thing which we absolutely have for our own are the “settlements”*5 amounting in all to about £13,000.’26
Churchill did not react to this news, but encouraged Jack to tackle Goonie’s father head-on and hold out the likelihood that he would earn more than his minimum of £1,000 a year: ‘£1,400 a year is quite enough for two sensible people who care about one another. Of course to go the London pace it is a wisp of straw.’27
Returning to England in mid-January 1908 Churchill found his mother’s finances once again vying for attention next to a pile of ministerial papers. The family solicitors, Lumley & Lumley, had proved poor administrators of his father’s will trust – unable to police Jennie’s spending or to produce proper accounts for the trustees. Before Churchill left for Africa, George Curzon had tried to retire as a trustee, arguing that the two Churchill brothers were now old enough to act themselves, alongside their mother; but as a co-trustee, the duke of Marlborough wanted reassurance from an independent firm of solicitors that all was well before any change of trustees took place.
The solicitors employed for the purpose, Nicholl, Manisty & Co., advised that the Churchills should not take over as trustees until proper accounts had been prepared. The consequent delay prompted Curzon to refuse to sanction any further transactions, including the sale of the trust’s main asset, the freehold of 12 St James’s Square, which had fallen into the trust from the estate of the 7th duke of Marlborough after the dowager duchess’s death. The property was let for £1,500 a year to a Mr Long, who had offered to buy the freehold for £37,500, comfortably above its professional valuation; but the sale had to wait while Nicholl Manisty prepared new accounts.
These accounts greeted Churchill on his return. Their contents were serious enough for the trust’s lender, Norwich Union, to insist on the formal appointment of Edward Manisty as Receiver to the trust, charged with keeping future accounts and approving any movements of money from it. On these conditions, it approved the appointment of the Churchill brothers as trustees alongside their mother.28
Churchill rapidly made his presence felt, insisting that he would agree a price of nothing less than £45,000 for 12 St James’s Square. A furious Mr Long took six weeks to raise his offer grudgingly to £39,500, but Churchill stood out for £42,000, offering to draft the lawyer’s letter for them when they proved reluctant to accept his instruction; three weeks later Mr Long paid £41,000.29 Churchill then caused further waves by rejecting Wheater, Cornwallis-West’s ideas as to how best to invest the money; instead he awarded the business to his brother Jack’s stockbroking firm Nelke Phillips.30
During Churchill’s absence, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s health had deteriorated to the point where he had temporarily given up his duties as prime minister. An attempt to return to work in February 1908 proved unsuccessful and Edward VII asked Herbert Asquith to start planning to take over in March, although Sir Henry did not resign until April. Churchill was offered promotion to the cabinet at either the Admiralty or the Local Government Board; he chose the latter, for he was reluctant to displace his uncle, Lord Tweedmouth, at the Admiralty. However, at the last minute Asquith made Churchill the president of the Board of Trade. It was a full cabinet position at the heart of his Liberal government’s legislative programme, but the post held one distinct disadvantage for Churchill: for historical reasons, it paid only half of a secretary of state’s £5,000 salary. Asquith promised to ask Parliament to address the anomaly, but it emerged that the present post-holder could not benefit from any change.
Churchill’s appointment was announced on the same April weekend that he had asked his mother to invite to Salisbury Hall the twenty-three-year-old Miss Clementine Hozier. Clementine was the second of four children of the divorced Sir Henry Hozier and Lady Blanche Ogilvy, the eldest daughter of the earl of Airlie. After army service, Sir Henry had become secretary of Lloyd’s Corporation in London, but he was not a rich man; and, although a grand Scottish family, the Airlies were not rich either.
The Hoziers’ marriage had been unhappy since the start. Their first child, Kitty, had arrived after five years, followed by Clementine in 1885 and the twins Nellie and Bill in 1888. Lady Blanche was considered promiscuous by the standards of the day and it is generally accepted that Sir Henry was not the father of the twins, or probably Clementine, or possibly Kitty.*6
Clementine’s parents separated when she was seven and her mother took the children to live in a series of rented lodgings and eventually across the Channel to Dieppe, after Sir Henry began to default on the small allowance he was supposed to pay and threatened to claim custody of the elder children. Following Kitty’s death from typhoid, they returned to live in Hertfordshire, where Clementine attended Berkhamsted High School for Girls, unsurprisingly winning the school French prize and supplementing her small allowance by giving language lessons for 2s.6d. an hour.
Churchill had first met Clementine at a London ball four years earlier. He had asked to be introduced, but then is supposed to have stared at her, struck speechless, without asking for a dance. Clementine had been engaged three times since then, twice secretly to Viscount Peel’s third son Sidney, and once officially to Lionel Earle, a civil servant almost twice her age. Her sister Nellie had suggested that a file of ‘Proposals to Clementine’ should be kept, with subdivisions: ‘Discussed’, ‘Answered’ and ‘Pending a decision’.31
Clementine met Churchill again two months after his return from Africa, at a dinner party organized by Lady St Helier, her great-aunt, who had invited her to make up the numbers at the last minute. Churchill arrived late to fill the gap next to Clementine only because his private secretary Eddie Marsh had persuaded him to honour an obligation to Lady St Helier, who had helped arrange Churchill’s posting to the Sudan a decade earlier.
This time the conversation had flowed freely enough for Churchill to ask his mother to issue the weekend invitation to Salisbury Hall, before Clementine left for six weeks abroad with her mother. The couple met several times at social occasions, always with others present, during June and July, but agreed to meet more privately early in August.
A few days beforehand, Churchill was staying in a Rutland house rented by the Guest family when a fire broke out. It destroyed a whole wing early in the morning, but he escaped unharmed, earning a telegram of relief from Clementine who had read about the incident in the newspapers. Given the signal he needed, Churchill moved their planned meeting to Blenheim, ostensibly on the grounds that it was closer to Jack’s wedding celebrations the next weekend.
Jennie had forecast that Churchill would ‘pop off’ in the wake of his brother’s marriage and she was correct: just three days after Jack’s wedding Churchill proposed to Clementine in the gardens at Blenheim. She accepted. He planned to carry on working at Blenheim the next day, sending Clementine to London with a letter from him to obtain her mother’s blessing, but he changed his mind at the last minute and decided to go with Clementine.
‘I am not rich nor powerfully established,’ his letter read.32 In 1900 Churchill had calculated his own net worth (the value of his assets less the amounts owed to the bank and tradesmen) at £4,000 and it remained of the same order in 1908, with the important difference that £2,000 was now sunk into the Bolton Street house’s lease and fittings, reducing his ‘free’ assets (his net bank and investment balances) to the other £2,000.33
His future mother-in-law’s blessing nonetheless obtained, Churchill visited the London offices in the Strand of the solicitors Nicholl, Manisty & Co., where he had three weeks earlier signed documents as a trustee of his brother’s marriage settlement. This time it was to arrange his own. Marriage settlements were designed to provide wives and children with greater financial security in an era of limited life expectancy. Traditionally, they drew contributions from the parents of both the bride and the groom, but Churchill knew that his mother’s situation meant that he was on his own. At least the Hoziers were not expected to set the bar too high: Clementine may have attracted other suitors, but emphatically she was not his aunt Cornelia’s hoped-for rich heiress. ‘Never talk rich, never talk poor; never talk money,’ had been Lady Blanche’s sound advice under the circumstances.34
Churchill accepted Nicholl, Manisty & Co.’s plan to leave the Garron Tower estate out of the equation, basing his contribution instead (as Jack had done) on the future inheritance of his mother’s American settlement.35 That, however, left a gap should he die before Jennie, who was still only in her early fifties. The solution (as in Jack’s case) was for Churchill to pay for a life insurance policy, to be held in the settlement, which would pay out £10,000 on his death. Appointing his brother and cousin, the duke of Marlborough, as trustees, Churchill set a ‘pin money’ allowance for Clementine of £300 a year (for her personal spending) and instructed his lawyers to send their draft to Lady Blanche’s solicitor Mr Humbert of Taylor & Humbert:
This gentleman – a Mr Humbert – is now in Scotland on his holidays, but I have telephoned to him this evening to ask him to London so as to be able to meet you in conference with me here at the Board of Trade on Saturday next at noon.36
Mr Humbert proved understandably reluctant to break off his Scottish holiday. After a meeting at a more junior level, Churchill’s solicitors reported the not unexpected news that Clementine would arrive at the altar ‘absolutely entitled’ only to a sum of £2,000 plus a further £20,000 on her mother’s death.37 Nevertheless, Churchill’s own offer had to be improved when Humbert returned from Scotland: he asked for Churchill’s life assurance policy to be trebled to more than £35,000, so that his widow could enjoy ‘a clear income of £1,000’ if he died first. It was left to Nicholl Manisty’s senior partner to pay a visit to Mr Humbert to explain that £35,000 was ‘out of the question’.38
Five days before the wedding, on 12 September, all parties agreed that the main life insurance policy would stay at £10,000, but that Churchill would arrange for a ‘reverse annuity’ policy; this would pay Clementine an extra £300 a year if Churchill died before his mother. On her death, Clementine would inherit at least this sum, and probably more, from Lord Randolph’s will trust.39
Mr Humbert’s bill of more than £350 for his fees and stamp duty came as an unwelcome surprise to the groom, but Nicholl, Manisty explained that it was quite usual for ‘the Husband to pay the Lady’s legal charges’.40 The £50 fee for the marriage service at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, seems like good value by comparison. ‘The bride was pale, as was the bridegroom,’ Wilfrid Scawen Blunt noted in his diary. ‘Winston’s responses were clearly made in a pleasant voice, Clementine’s inaudible.’41 Beatrice Webb’s assessment was more practical: Clementine was ‘a charming lady, well bred and pretty and earnest withal – but not rich, by no means a good match, which is to Winston’s credit’.42
The groom gave the bride a pair of Burmese rubies and a gold wedding ring, for which he finished paying three years later.43 Their wedding presents included thirty items of jewellery and more than two hundred of silver, sixty of them duplicates, for which silversmiths offered a credit to be put towards a silver plate service to be engraved with the Marlborough crest. The same crest featured on the tip of the gold-capped Malacca cane presented by Edward VII. Sir Ernest Cassel gave them a more practical £500 in cash.
*1 Edward Marsh (1872–1953), classical scholar; private secretary to Churchill in each of his ministerial posts 1905–29; knighted 1937. Marsh collected the paintings of British watercolourists and published the works of young poets in his Georgian Poetry anthologies.
*2 From 4 to 5 per cent on 11 October 1906 and to 6 per cent on 19 October.
*3 The Jerome family’s contribution to Lord and Lady Randolph’s marriage settlement.
*4 Lord Randolph Churchill’s will trust, now supplemented by the 7th duke of Marlborough’s personal estate after the death of his widow.
*5 The Marlborough family’s contribution to their parents’ marriage settlement.
*6 The alternative candidates were Bay Middleton, a dashing army officer killed in a riding accident in 1892 or Lady Blanche’s brother-in-law Bertie Mitford, later Lord Redesdale. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a friend of Lady Blanche, recorded in his diary on 22 June 1892 that she had told him both Clementine and Kitty were Bay Middleton’s children – see Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1971), p. 271.