CHURCHILL’S MOTHER REDECORATED 12 Bolton Street in late 1908 while the couple honeymooned in Italy, with results that pleased neither her daughter-in-law’s taste nor her son’s wallet. Churchill sold £500-worth of investments, but was still unable to pay for more than a proportion of his bills: Hatchard the bookseller, for example, received just £25 of the £88 he owed. Churchill asked his solicitor whether he might be able to borrow against his possible inheritance of the Garron Tower estate, but his solicitor’s response was discouraging: ‘I have received a quotation which in my view is too high,’ he reported back.1
Nevertheless, there was still sufficient money to keep essentials such as wine and cigars flowing. Churchill calculated that he spent an average of £1,160 with the family’s wine merchants each year between 1908 and 1914; part of the appeal of Randolph Payne & Sons was that they were happy to provide long-established account-holders such as the Churchills with almost as much credit as a bank – by 1914 the amount Churchill owed the firm was regularly over £500.2 His cigar suppliers, J. Grunebaum & Sons, were almost as flexible: Churchill was smoking about a dozen cigars a day, costing more than £13 a month, but he had not paid one of Grunebaum’s bills for five years.3
Soon their first child was on the way, and the Churchills realized they would have to move out of Mount Street before it arrived in the middle of 1909. Churchill was anxious to extract a premium for the remainder of the lease – ‘It is absolutely necessary to the furnishing of another house,’ he explained to his mother4 – but by March, when Clementine was five months pregnant, no takers had emerged. Churchill had to hand over the lease to a local doctor without any payment while they stayed with Guest cousins until their new home in Pimlico was ready.
Churchill had considered buying 33 Eccleston Square for £2,000, but he decided to lease it instead after winning a rent reduction to £195 a year to help pay for bathroom improvements;5 the economics looked less sound once the cost of the work required to panelling the front room and a library and extend the dining room rose to £475.6 Clementine had to settle for reusing the Bolton Street curtains and carpets, and resorted to ‘cheap linoleum’ to finish the last servants’ rooms.7
They moved in ten weeks before their first child Diana arrived on 11 July 1909. After the birth, Clementine recuperated at a small house on Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Horsham estate, while Diana remained in London with her father and nanny. The couple were reunited for their first wedding anniversary, which they spent near Strasburg, observing German army manoeuvres.
On their return Clementine left her husband in London, taking the baby, her nanny and a maid to the Crest Hotel in Crowborough, Sussex, forty miles south. Churchill sent regular cheques and visited most weekends, but after paying bills for Diana’s delivery and the building works, he had to report at the end of October that ‘the Pug is décassé for the moment’.*1 Their cash position would improve, he assured an alarmed Clementine, once Hodder & Stoughton had paid him a £150 advance for a book of his recent speeches that it was about to publish entitled Liberalism and the Social Problem.8 Despite his cash shortage, Churchill visited the jewellers on Christmas Eve to buy Clementine a pair of pearl and diamond earrings costing £45, for which he paid three years later.9
During 1908 and 1909 Asquith’s government had set out a programme of radical policies to lay the foundations of Britain’s modern welfare state, some of which – such as the Coal Mines (Eight Hours) Bill, which improved the lot of miners – it fell to Churchill to guide through Parliament. In response to the economic setbacks of 1907–8, employers reduced wages, which led to strikes and lockouts – in January it was the shipwrights; in February the engineers; in May the shipyards on the Tyne, Merseyside and Clyde. All of which kept Churchill busy in 1909 as President of the Board of Trade.
Borrowing from Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s ideas, Churchill introduced labour exchanges and laid the foundations for compulsory unemployment insurance and old age pensions, but the measures all cost money. In January 1909, Lord Rothschild predicted a ‘predatory, certainly spiteful and very revengeful budget’ to his Paris partners,10 and when the chancellor, David Lloyd George, unveiled it at the end of April, he was quite clear that his objective was to redistribute money from the landed class toward those living in poverty and squalor. He raised tax on petrol, cars, alcohol and tobacco, while making concessions for those on modest incomes, especially married men with children. For the first time, ‘unearned’ investment income was to be taxed at a higher rate than ‘earned’ income (at 1s.2d. rather than 1s. in the pound), a new super-tax was introduced on incomes above £5,000 (at rates of up to 1s.9d. in the pound) and the top rates of death duty were almost doubled. Landowners faced a new duty on undeveloped acres, a 20 per cent charge on increases in land values and 10 per cent duty on increases in capital values at the end of leases. Lloyd George deployed all his rhetorical skills to win popular support: ‘a fully-equipped duke cost as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts,’ he claimed in a well-publicized speech at Limehouse, ‘and dukes are just as great a terror and last longer.’11
Grandson of a duke but strongly supportive of the measures, Churchill faced accusations of class treachery among his former Conservative and Unionist colleagues. Cartoons illustrated a radical cabinet minister hounding the landed class in Westminster before retiring to the luxury of Blenheim Palace for the weekend. Most people on middle-class incomes of up to £2,000 were hardly affected and then only by small changes in death duty, Churchill claimed in the House of Commons: ‘The chief burden of the increase of taxation is placed upon the main body of wealthy classes in this country... and that is a class which, in opportunities of pleasure, in all the amenities of life, and in freedom from penalties, obligations, and dangers, is more fortunate than any other equally numerous class of citizens in any age or in any country.’12
Passions ran high as the House of Lords threatened to reject the ‘People’s Budget’: Lord Revelstoke, senior partner of the merchant bank Baring, spoke for many in the City when he used the upper chamber to blame the government for an ‘unparalleled depreciation in British credit and British stocks’. Investors in British government bonds had nearly quadrupled the real purchasing power of their money during almost a century of falling prices between the end of the Napoleonic wars and 1897, he claimed, but now ‘Consols’*2 had fallen by 6 per cent and English railways by 10 per cent, ‘a steady and hopeless depreciation of the securities in which the most conservative of us have been brought up to pin our faith’.13 The House of Commons passed the measures by a comfortable majority, but they were defeated in the House of Lords. By asking the king to dissolve Parliament and test popular support at a general election in January, Asquith deprived Churchill of his usual New Year holiday.
The prospect of fresh election expenses was an unwelcome one, coming on top of bank borrowings that already stood at over £2,000 by early 1910.14 It coincided with an approach that Churchill had just received from a Dundee constituent and philanthropist, James Caird,*3 who had made a fortune in the jute business, and now asked his MP how he might make a useful financial contribution to the cause of free trade. When Churchill suggested funding a programme of lectures on the subject up and down the country, Caird sent him a personal cheque for £10,000, and followed up with further contributions of £12,000 during 1910,15 suggesting that the minister was much the better placed man to disburse the funds. Banking the funds in a separate ‘C’ account at Cox & Co., Churchill handed them out gradually during 1910, mainly through the Free Trade Union, which accounted meticulously for its expenditure until it slowed down its activity during 1911 and sent Churchill a cheque for the surplus in its accounts, taking his balance of Caird funds in his account back up to £1,500 on 1 April.16 Despite the temptations of handling funds that dwarfed his own means, there is no sign that Churchill conflated any of Caird’s money with his own at this stage and his calculations of his net worth during the period scrupulously excluded it.
Nevertheless Churchill’s private office found it difficult to disentangle his ministerial from his electoral expenses during the campaign of January 1910 as the minister rushed between London, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Dundee and the south, commandeering a special train from Dundee to Edinburgh and his own steamer from Southampton to the Isle of Wight. ‘If a cheque is sent to [Mr Eason] for £11, and one for £4 sent to the Chief Whip, the Chief Whip’s cheque for £7-8-1 can be paid into the Home Secretary’s a/c at Cox & Co., and the whole thing is finished,’ wrote one private secretary.17 Churchill broke off his return journey to London for a shooting party at Warter Priory in Yorkshire, where he found his fellow guests ‘puissant, presentable, radical in preponderance – a rare combination’.18*4 Clementine tried to encourage the habit of the Edwardian country house weekend but it was never a Churchill favourite, however hard he tried. The diary of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt describes him arriving for one that autumn, ‘dressed in a little close-fitting, fur-lined jacket, tight leggings and gaiters, and a little round hat, which with his half-mischievous face, made him look, as Miss Lawrence said, the exact figure of Puck’.19 Churchill preferred the meat of politics: ‘How much more power and great business are to me than this kind of thing, pleasant tho’ it seems by contrast to our humble modes of entertainment,’ he explained to Clementine.20
Churchill was re-elected, but with a reduced majority of fewer than 400 votes over his Labour opponent, part of a wider loss of ground by the Liberal Party, which ended with only two more seats than the Tories. Asquith remained in power with the help of Irish Nationalist and Labour votes and offered Churchill a move to the Irish Office as an alternative to staying at the Board of Trade. As tactfully as he could, Churchill declined both, suggesting either the Admiralty or the Home Office instead and slipping in a subtle reminder that for the last two years he had sacrificed the full pay of a secretary of state. Early in February, he became home secretary, paid a salary of £5,000 a year that took him for the first time into Lloyd George’s new super-tax bracket, a privilege enjoyed in the tax’s early years by only some 10,000 of the country’s top taxpayers.21
As home secretary, Churchill’s duties ranged across maintaining law and order, running the police service, prisons, courts and passing legislation on criminal justice: he was kept busy by a rash of strikes across the mining and railway industries that required careful decisions on the use of police (and potentially troops); by severe over-crowding in Britain’s prisons; and by hotly contested debate over the extensions of the vote to female property-owners. On the strength of the government’s renewed electoral mandate, the new Parliament’s upper chamber had passed the previous year’s controversial budget, but a Parliament Bill that cautiously limited its future ability to amend Commons legislation was a step too far. The new king, George V, convened a constitutional conference of the main political parties, but its failure to reach agreement in November allowed Asquith to extract a secret pledge from the king to create as many peers as the bill’s passage needed if the Liberals fought and won a fresh election. A second dissolution within a year forced Churchill to return to Dundee, but the outcome across the country was little different: the balance of power remained held by the Irish Nationalist and Labour MPs, but Asquith’s government stayed in place.
Even the doubled salary of a full secretary of state proved insufficient to meet Churchill’s personal spending, which reached £5,000 during the first year of his appointment, before either tax or election expenses.22 He sold some shares late in 1910, but preferred to borrow in 1911 to reduce the amounts owed to his wine, cigar, shirt and saddle suppliers, in each case more than £200.23 In return for the transfer of all his remaining share certificates, whether bought by Cassel, Grenfell or Nelke Phillips & Co., Cox & Co. agreed to triple his formal bank loan to £3,000, allowing him to pay Grunebaum in full for his cigars, while asking the rest to be content with half of the amounts he owed them.24
The Churchills spent another summer largely apart after the birth of their second child, Randolph, at the end of May 1911. This time, it was Churchill rather than Clementine who took himself off, first to the Oxfordshire Yeomanry’s summer camp at Blenheim, then to stay with Sir Abe Bailey and American actress Maxine Elliott.*5 By the time he returned from the prince of Wales’s investiture, Clementine had left London with the children, their nurse and nursery maid and her own personal maid for a respite on the English coast at Seaford. The summer apart continued when the German and French governments’ confrontation at Agadir*6 prevented Churchill from joining her in the Alps.
Churchill consoled himself by buying a new fifteen-horse-power, four-cylinder Napier Landaulette,25 intended to convey them both to Balmoral to stay with the new king and queen, but a misunderstanding over colours prevented the grand arrival. Churchill had ordered ‘the Marlborough hue’ without specifying its shade and it took Napier almost a week to find out. They were able to depart in style once Churchill had agreed to pay for a Napier engineer to travel from Euston to Balmoral to act as their chauffeur during a motor tour of Scotland that was designed to take in the Asquiths’ home near North Berwick. There the prime minister invited his minister to take over as First Lord of the Admiralty, a post Churchill accepted with alacrity. It brought control of the world’s most powerful military force and two coveted privileges: use of the Royal Navy’s 4,000-ton yacht HMS Enchantress and of the fine eighteenth-century Admiralty House, overlooking Horse Guards Parade in central London. The official purpose of HMS Enchantress and her crew of 196 officers and ratings was to facilitate the First Lord’s visits to inspect the fleet, but it was understood that he should be allowed to entertain personal guests as long as their out-of-pocket expenses were met: Churchill was to spend eight of the next thirty-three months aboard her, attracting the satirical attentions of Punch magazine.26
Admiralty House was a different proposition. The rent charged for some of London’s finest rooms was only £500 a year, but the First Lord was expected to meet the wages of twelve servants, seven more than the Churchills employed at Eccleston Square. Making calculations on Admiralty notepaper, Churchill decided that he could not afford the move: as a married man with two children, his monthly salary was already fully committed before even paying for staples such as wine, cigars and clothes. His judgement remained unmoved by the arrival of another £11,500 from James Caird,27 this time to encourage the cause of Home Rule for Ireland and Scotland. Caird limited himself to two early donations on this occasion, but it brought the amount that he had entrusted to Churchill’s judgement (and bank account) up to £33,500 within two years, a multiple of more than eight times Churchill’s own means at the time. For an ambitious young politician who could not match the easy means of many contemporaries, the ability to distribute largesse on this scale was extraordinary.
Churchill set up an extra account at Cox & Co., his ‘D’ account, to control the flow of Home Rule money, £6,000 of which he gave in two batches to the government’s chief whip, the Master of Elibank, who was to emerge as one of the murkier protagonists in the following year’s Marconi share scandal.28 In September 1912, Churchill still had £4,000 of the Home Rule money and £1,500 of the free trade money lodged in his accounts, a situation that Caird happily accepted when Churchill sent him the bank passbooks to inspect.29 What happened to the £5,500 left of Caird’s money thereafter becomes less transparent. During November 1912, the chief whip’s office asked for more funds in a letter marked ‘Secret’, claiming already to have spent over £8,000 (without giving details of how) although Churchill had only provided £6,000.30
All Churchill’s bank statements for the remainder of 1912 and 1913, a period of great sensitivity over the personal finances of government ministers during the Marconi scandal, are missing from his archive. However, it seems likely that the chief whip did receive his extra £2,000 (or more), because the next report of Churchill’s Caird deposits, in June 1915, put them at £3,320, exactly where one would expect if he had acceded to the chief whip’s request in 1912 and then sat on the rest of the money during the Marconi scandal.31 Between June 1915 and August 1916, the balance fell from £3,320 to just £600;32 Sir James Caird died in March 1916 and Churchill’s finances were under stress at the time because his ministerial salary had been replaced by the pay of an army colonel, but it is impossible to be precise about whether he eventually used the balance of Caird’s money because the records of his ‘C’ and ‘D’ accounts during 1915 and 1916 are simply missing. What we can say is that the money was never transferred to his or Clementine’s main bank account and that he never included it in any forecasts of his own cash flow during the war.
He had also excluded Caird’s money in 1912 when trying to work out whether he and his family could afford to move into the First Lord’s official quarters at Admiralty House. It took eighteen months, until late in 1913, before a compromise was worked out: the grander rooms were mothballed, while the Churchills moved in to the rest with seven servants, not twelve.
Over that same period, the previously intimate political relationship between Churchill and Lloyd George had begun to change. The First Lord was now a spending minister, trying to extract funds to match an expanding German naval shipbuilding programme from a sceptical chancellor; but tensions were put aside in the summer of 1912 when long-standing Tory complaints at the corruption of Liberal politicians by newly acquired wealth suddenly erupted into the Marconi scandal. The allegations of personal gain from improper dealing in Marconi shares never touched Churchill, but did involve both the chancellor and chief whip.33 Churchill came to his colleagues’ aid by urging Lord Northcliffe*7 to restrain his newspapers’ coverage of the affair and by persuading the two outstanding lawyers of the day, Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith (both Tories), to represent his fellow ministers in court.34 ‘I was so encouraged to hear from Winston that you took his view of my little worry,’ Lloyd George wrote to Clementine. ‘I am almost ill with worry over it.’35
As the scandal subsided, Churchill’s mother finally threw out her second husband. Their difficulties had become increasingly public since 1910, when they had rented a house in Cavendish Square while she put the finishing touches to a play that she was writing in a fresh attempt to earn money. Keen to secure the services of a well-known actress as the female lead, she had invited Mrs Patrick Campbell*8 for daytime visits to Cavendish Square, soon reciprocated by George’s nocturnal trysts to her ‘charming little house in Kensington Square’,36 a habit that outlasted the short run of His Borrowed Plumes’.
Churchill tried but failed to broker a financial settlement ‘before any avoidable publicity is given to your rupture’ and returned to the fray in 1911, after his mother summoned both brothers to a ‘council of war’. Asking her to stay away from her husband, Churchill summoned ‘George West’ to a business interview, warning him that both he and his wife were treading dangerously: ‘Your joint financial position must be considered in regard to the maintenance of credit, the sudden removal of which might be ruinous to both of you.’37
His mother waited another five months until September 1911 before she gave up any hope of their living together again: ‘I could – but he will always hanker after the things he wants,’ she told her son sadly. ‘Of what use to chain him to me?... Tear this letter up and don’t worry about me.’38 Divorce discussions limped along during 1912, while George fought a demand to pay Jennie £2,000 a year, complaining to Jack of her ‘ghastly and persistent extravagances’.39 Jennie found a fresh solicitor, Wodehouse,*9 who suggested a scheme to raise funds by reshuffling insurance policies, but Churchill refused to play his part by providing her with a £2,000 guarantee. He told his mother:
Although there may be advantages in simplifying the control of your insurance policies, the real effect of the transaction is to secure you about £2,500 ready money, at the cost of permanently reducing your income by £300 a year. This is certainly not a good or wise arrangement, & only means a brief flutter followed by long deprivations.40
His mother’s reply at the beginning of December was emotional:
Forgive me if I return to the ‘charge’ & ask you to reconsider yr. answer in respect to this Insurance Scheme. The risk to you is infinitesimal... My position is an untenable one, & apart from anything else I must find a guarantor instead of George... I know you would do anything for me and always have... I hate having to write all this, as I know how overworked you are, but I can’t very well help it... Bless you – Mother.41
Churchill and his mother spent Christmas and the New Year together at the duke of Westminster’s new hunting lodge near Bayonne in France, where Churchill acquiesced. Pre-occupied by cabinet battles with Lloyd George over the £3 million required to build four rather than two battleships, he decided against fighting on a second front with his mother. His change of mind unlocked the divorce negotiations: George was to keep the first £2,000 of his earnings, give her the next £1,000 and then share any more equally until he had paid her £2,000 a year. ‘I am returning to you my engagement and wedding rings. I say goodbye – a long goodbye,’ Lady Randolph wrote as her decree nisi was granted on 16 April 1914.42 The next day, her former husband married Mrs Patrick Campbell, busy playing Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
This episode finally opened the Churchill brothers’ eyes to the true size of their mother’s income over the last twenty years: she had always claimed it to be barely in four figures, but her solicitor’s schedules showed that it had exceeded £5,000 a year. The problem was that two-fifths had disappeared in paying interest on £22,500-worth of ‘official’ loans, while another fifth had gone to unofficial moneylenders. In addition, Lady Randolph estimated her unpaid bills at £5,000,43 a sum that her ex-husband claimed at his bankruptcy proceedings she had spent each year on clothes alone.
As her financial reorganization neared completion, what her solicitor called ‘a very bad hitch’ came to light. An alert lawyer acting for the Legal & General insurance company, which was due to provide her new loan, spotted the clause in Lord Randolph’s will that had given its trustees the power to divert half its income to her children if his wife remarried; if this clause was ever to be exercised, the Legal & General would find its security halved. The only way out, her solicitor suggested, was to obtain a judgement from the Chancery Court that, as it stood, the clause was iniquitous and almost certainly not what Lord Randolph had intended. Theodore Lumley broke the news to Churchill as though his firm had made the discovery, glossing over the fact that the brothers could have been receiving a formal allowance for the last fourteen years. Churchill, however, was quick to pick up the point, summoning Lumley to appear at the Admiralty that same evening:
I and my brother Mr John Churchill should surely have been informed by you at some period during the years which have passed of our rights under the Will. It appears to me extraordinary that we should have been left in ignorance of a matter of such consequence for the last 15 years.44
Nor did Jack conceal his shock from their mother:
We had always thought that Papa was very wrong not making any provision for us during your life. We thought the Will left us in the possible position of being for many years without a penny while you were in receipt of over £5,000 a year. This did in fact happen & you were unable to give us any allowance... Winston and I are now both making our own living and as long as we do so of course nothing will be claimed, although I believe that at the present moment we could each demand about £600 a year.’*10... We have begged you so often to live within your income – which is not a very severe demand. Your income is larger than mine in most years and you have nothing whatever to keep up. Unless you are able to do so and if you start running up bills again – there is nothing that can save you from a crash and bankruptcy.45
Agreeing to sell her home and buy a ‘doll’s house’ as replacement, Lady Randolph paid brief obeisance to her younger son’s home truths, while he juggled her increasingly litigious creditors. Her elder son needed money almost as badly, having finished 1913 with loans of £3,000, an overdraft of £2,740 and unpaid bills of at least £2,000. He recognized that his mother’s scheme, which still needed his approval, might provide a bargaining chip: if the disputed clause’s exact meaning could be established, it might help him to borrow more money to pay bills. ‘Strictly confidentially’, he asked Lumley in mid-February to look into the prospects of borrowing an extra £5,000 if the verdict went the right way.
The problem had become more urgent by April 1914: ‘Our finances are in a condition wh[ich] requires serious & prompt attention,’ he confessed to Clementine, promising to divert himself from ministerial duties for however long was required: ‘The expense of the 1st quarter of 1914 with our holiday trip is astonishing. Money seems to flow away.’46 Discreetly, he arranged an interview with the chairman of his bank, Reginald Cox.*11 It was a long one, he told Clementine afterwards, as a result of which he was to prepare a ‘scheme’ to pay off their debts: ‘We shall have to pull in our horns. The money simply drains away.’47
‘Scheme’ turned out to be rather a grand term for what Churchill had in mind: he asked to borrow an extra £4,000 to make a clean sweep of all his old, unpaid bills. He would provide security in the form of a charge over all his own and his wife’s future inheritances under the various family settlements, once he had established legal certainty to his entitlement. Cox declared himself ‘favourably inclined to entertain the matter’48 but the bank’s solicitors Fladgate & Co. wanted expensive extra security in the shape of life insurance: ‘My business proposals do not go smoothly, for the reason that the insurance companies try to charge excessive premiums on my life – political strain, short-lived parentage & of course flying,’ he told Clementine in June.49
Both Jennie and her sons now had an incentive to establish the precise meaning of Lord Randolph’s will. Churchill preferred the privacy of an arbitration, but accepted that a formal trial was inevitable because the decision of an arbitrator would not be binding on his children (who had an interest as the ultimate beneficiaries of Lord Randolph’s will trust). Wodehouse lodged papers in the case of Churchill v. Churchill which was heard behind the closed doors of the Chancery Division of the High Court on 18 June 1914. Helpfully for the brothers, the judge ruled that the trustees could make a lawful advance to them or their children without Lady Randolph’s consent, because she was adequately safeguarded by her position as one of the trustees.50 Churchill completed the paperwork for his new £4,000 loan the next day.
Cox & Co. lodged the money in his account ten days after Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo.51 By the end of July, he had paid fifty tradesmen in full or in part, and only £200 remained in the account. His wine merchant was one beneficiary, but the flow of Churchill’s orders continued unabated as Randolph Payne delivered twelve consignments of the familiar mix of Perrier-Jouët champagne, brandy and vermouth to his households at Admiralty House and their rented Norfolk holiday house in the five weeks that passed between the assassination and the outbreak of war.52
*1 ‘The Pug’ was Clementine’s nickname for Churchill. Décassé was his term for ‘out of funds’. 27 October 1909 WSC letter to CSC, SFT:35.
*2 In 1754 the British government refinanced all its floating-rate debt and most of its 4 per cent annuities into a single issue of 3 per cent Consolidated Stock, which is never due to be repaid. Known as ‘Consols’, these remain the oldest public bond instruments still actively traded.
*3 James Caird (1837–1916), the owner and director of Caird (Dundee) Ltd, a textile manufacturers using modern technology to weave cloth from jute; a philanthropist, Caird donated £240,000 during his lifetime to charities, many in the Dundee region; he also helped to fund Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition (1914–16); baronet, 1913.
*4 The party included Churchill’s hosts Lord and Lady Nunburnholme, the earl of Granard, Earl Cowley, Viscount Chelsea, Lord Elcho, Lord Lovat, Lord Tweedmouth and The Mackintosh of Mackintosh. Churchill’s shooting card shows that they killed 2,947 birds on the first day and 2,034 on the second.
*5 Maxine Elliott (1871–1940), born as Jessie Dermot in Rockland, Maine; took the stage name Maxine Elliott at her début in The Middleman in New York 1890; first appeared as a ‘star’ in her own right in New York 1903; London 1905; opened her own New York theatre 1908.
*6 French troops occupied Fez, the Moroccan capital, to quell a rebellion against the country’s sultan. Fearing imminent French annexation of the country, Germany despatched a gunboat to the port of Agadir. There were no hostilities, but the speed at which a serious confrontation developed caused widespread concern in Europe.
*7 Formerly Alfred Harmsworth.
*8 Beatrice Tanner (1865–1940), took her stage name from her first husband Patrick Campbell (who died in the Boer War); stage debuts in Liverpool 1888, London 1890, New York 1900; the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion.
*9 H. Wodehouse, senior partner of Messrs Wodehouse & Davidson of St James Street, London.
*10 Jack’s calculation suggests the trust’s income was £2,400 a year; using the then customary assumption of an income of 5 per cent from trust investments, this implies that the trust’s capital value stood at c. £50,000.
*11 Reginald Cox (1865–1922), senior partner, Cox & Co.; agent to the British army; baronet 1922.