EXHAUSTED BY FIVE years in power, at the end of 1922 Churchill followed the advice given to him by one of his former advisers at the Colonial Office, Colonel T. E. Lawrence: ‘Rest a little – six months perhaps. There is that book of memoirs*1 to be made not merely worth £30,000, but of permanent value.’1 Making plans for a spell in the south of France with Clementine, he arranged an extra £2,000 of overdraft to pay their staff while they were away, let Sussex Square and rented a car and a villa near Cannes.2
To help fund the visit Churchill took out a large ‘bear’ position against the French franc, betting that it would weaken over the months they were there. Jack tried to explain the risks, but Churchill was confident of his analysis: in contrast to Britain’s much heavier use of taxation, France had financed its war effort almost entirely through borrowing, so was now saddled with a public debt almost twice the size of its gross national product. In addition, hopes were fading of substantial German reparation payments.
Churchill made three short visits home to deal with building works at Chartwell. Within a fortnight of buying the house (and disregarding more experienced candidates) he had appointed the thirty-four-year-old Philip Tilden as his architect, a decision made in haste and repented at leisure. Tilden belonged to a set of fashionable young artists and writers in London, but had spent the war on a Dartmoor farm, where he met the daughter of the wealthy art historian Sir Martin Conway. Sir Martin asked Tilden to oversee the restoration of his family seat,*2 before introducing him to Sir Louis Mallet, Britain’s wartime ambassador in Constantinople. Sir Louis taught Tilden the use of tempera paint for interior decoration and in turn introduced Sir Philip Sassoon, who gave Tilden the task of completing Port Lympne, the grandiose home on the Romney marshes that he had started before the war. Tilden installed a Moorish courtyard at Port Lympne, complete with green marble floor and white marble pillars, a domed octagonal library and a staircase flanked by columns of blue and mauve, all of which clearly appealed to Churchill, a frequent visitor, although an appalled Lady Honor Guinness described it as resembling a Spanish brothel.3
Tilden’s other notable credential was that he had just built a home for Lloyd George in Surrey, reputedly funded by Lloyd George’s and Churchill’s mutual friend, George Riddell, owner of the News of the World.4 Whatever the route to his appointment, Tilden relished the challenge of Chartwell, which he described in his memoirs as:
A dreary house perched on the edge of the hillside, very close to the road, but banked on its western side by a cascade of full-grown rhododendrons... So embowering were the giant trees, so encroaching was the verdure that the red bricks of the house were slimed with green... only the kernel of the old manor, floored and raftered with solid oak, had withstood the ravages of wet; the rest was weary of its own ugliness so that the walls ran with moisture, and creeping fungus tracked down the cracks and crevices.5
Tilden soon discovered that Churchill wanted to be much more closely involved in the project than Lloyd George had been. Accepting the normal architects’ fee scale,*3 Churchill explained that he and his wife wished to have larger bedrooms, new bathrooms and kitchen, a library, a large study and a room for entertaining. However, they had not agreed any detailed plan or estimate of costs before Tilden pressed for an early decision on the addition of a south-facing wing, which would not only provide the extra rooms but create the effect of turning the main frontage of the house away from the road towards its majestic views of the Kentish Weald below.6
Architect and client began to set a pattern of piecemeal arrangements without any master scheme: Tilden engaged brothers Alec and Harold Brown as principal builders, while Churchill engaged his own local joiner, William Wallace, whom he directed himself on smaller jobs in order to save money. Proper plans only arrived just before the Churchills left for France: the new wing was to be ready by the end of March 1923, the rest of the house by August. Tilden expected to exceed Churchill’s target cost of £8,000 by only £500.
In France Churchill concentrated on finishing the first two volumes of The World Crisis and on his investments by day, the casino by night. His publisher had become impatient at the manuscript’s delays. He had bid aggressively back in 1920, Thornton Butterworth explained, because he had been trying to win his publishing spurs at the time: ‘The éclat of publishing such a book as yours was then of such moment to me that I was willing to offer terms which could, in the most favourable circumstances, only cover my outlay, but short of this, would inevitably entail a loss.’7
Churchill, however, was more concerned by Curtis Brown’s failure to sell the American newspaper rights at all, let alone for the price he had forecast to his bankers: ‘We have been hoping to make two or three thousand from this source,’ he reported back to Clementine late in January from his temporary London base, The Ritz Hotel.8
Extracts from The World Crisis did start to appear in The Times in February 1923, but Churchill found himself forced on the defensive when they led to questions in Parliament and the Tory home secretary William Bridgeman referred in a speech to politicians enriching themselves using information gained through their public duties. In a long letter to the new prime minister Bonar Law, Churchill argued that many other politicians and soldiers had already published quotations from official documents, and it was unfair to expect a minister who held responsibility for such matters to be the only person prevented from doing so. He added in a postscript:
The contracts on which my book is based were made before a word of it was written and leave me entirely free as to what is published. There is no obligation on me to publish any official document, and I derive no financial advantage from doing so. Whether the book succeeds or fails and whatever its contents, I am equally secured.9
No longer a minister and freed from any concerns about conflicts of interest, Churchill relished his return to the daily excitement of the world’s stock markets. ‘I am wondering whether you have got rid of the London & Rhod[esian],’ he wrote to his brother Jack. ‘There seems to be a good many transactions in them at 5/10½. Do exactly what you think fit. 6/- is better than 5/10... Why has Rezende jumped so much? A whole pound in a month? What about Courtaulds. I thought perhaps you could have nipped out at 66/-.’ He pointed out that the French franc had weakened from 63 to 77 against sterling over the six weeks since he had laid his bet:
Here again I leave it entirely to you. If there is a steady gradual fall I should hold on. If there is a sudden drop of four or five points it might be well to get out and come back in again for the recovery... If there is a slow recovery, I should hope you could get at not worse than 68. I am strongly of the opinion that the Rühr business*4 will turn out ill for France.10
Success with speculation against the French franc made it tempting to try the Deutschmark: ‘What about selling a bear in marks?’ he asked Jack. ‘France has got them by the balls. Write me a proposition; or if it is urgent sell £2,000 for the end of April. Act as you think fit.’11 He spent time at Jack’s office on a visit at the end of January, ‘settling up a lot of business here and reconsidering most of my investments’, then returned to France, where he started giving the trading orders himself: ‘I should like you to sell the Coats and buy me another 1,000 City Lights. For this purpose you might take the balance from the February franc money wh[ich] perhaps you can discount for me, as Vickers suggested... Wd you advise my getting another 500 Mexican Eagles? If so sell enough of the Imps*5 (there is a good profit on them) to cover the purchase.’12
Days later he was disconcerted to read in The Times of Cox & Co.’s sudden collapse and rescue by Lloyds Bank. ‘It makes me shiver to think what we may have escaped,’ he wrote immediately to Jack. ‘Fancy if they had impounded or embezzled my overdraft! It is disconcerting to see how uncertain the ground is under one’s feet.’13 He might have been even more concerned had he known that a report commissioned by Lloyds revealed errors in almost a quarter of Cox & Co.’s investment accounts, including three of Churchill’s holdings.14
Weakened by its clients’ financial difficulties during the war, Cox & Co. had compounded its problem by expensively rebuilding its offices in Pall Mall and Gracechurch Street. When rumours of its difficulties surfaced during the summer of 1918, the bank had drawn on its strong political connections to ward off the Bank of England’s inquiries.15 The sale of its French arm in 1921 and a review of its Indian activities in 1922 signalled continuing problems. The end came suddenly in February 1923 when the Bank of England engineered an emergency rescue by Lloyds Bank, whose general manager insisted, for the record, that Lloyds acted only ‘through a sense of public duty, and with marked lack of enthusiasm’.16
Churchill sympathized with his bank manager, but William Bernau made light of the change: ‘As far as our customers are concerned, the only difference there will be is the further security of Lloyds’ enormous funds. The same men will attend to them and the same facilities will be given to them. You can always write to me and look to me to carry on exactly as in the past.’17
Churchill’s night-time activities in France centred on the Casino de Cannes and proved to be expensive. On 4 January he was up 25,000 francs, thanks to ‘playing quite low’, as he told Jack. The next day he still claimed to be ahead. Victor Cazalet recorded: ‘Winston has taken to gambling with great earnestness. He plays twice daily and is now 20,000 up after a month’s play. He does not play very high.’18 Churchill’s bank account records twenty-nine cash withdrawals at the casino during his stay, starting at 5,000 francs each, but mounting to 10,000 francs and finally to 20,000 francs by the time he left; in all, he withdrew 164,000 francs, the equivalent of £2,350.19 Churchill made only one withdrawal of £300 elsewhere,*6 so perhaps the casino was the most convenient place to draw cash for everyday expenses. However, his own records of his spending in Cannes show an average of £75 a week, implying approximately £1,000 for his stay of three months; this leaves his casino losses at more than £1,500.20
Churchill’s gambling was ‘a source of deep anxiety’ to Clementine. As their daughter Mary recalled: ‘To her it was a senseless, almost wicked waste of money, and yet it was her fate in life to be surrounded by those who were drawn to it: her mother, her brother, her sister and, now, her husband were all, to varying degrees, gamblers.’21
The Churchills returned to London in time for the launch of the first volume of The World Crisis. Beforehand, Butterworth tried to reduce the author’s advance, because the book had overrun in length. ‘Let me put it this way,’ he explained. ‘If you placed a contract for twelve 20” guns for a battleship and subsequently decided to have 25” guns, you would not expect the original contract to stand.’ Churchill batted away the suggestion and pointed to Butterworth’s own strong sales predictions: 30,000–40,000 in Britain and 15,000 in America.
Publisher and author were to be disappointed. After four months, British sales of The World Crisis barely topped 10,000 copies.22 Fortunately, Churchill had already persuaded his publishers to pay for a third volume, albeit on reduced terms.
Churchill had asked The Times for another £2,500 for the serialization rights, but the newspaper was not convinced. ‘You will forgive me... in being quite frank in expressing the view that the sum of £2,500 you mention seems rather high in the face of what we have already paid, considering that when the negotiations were opened we thought we were to get the whole of your War memoirs,’ came the reply, suggesting a reduced fee of £2,000.23 As usual, Churchill suggested they split the difference.
The extra £250 counted because the bills for building work at Chartwell had started to arrive. Alarm bells ought to have begun ringing when Tilden’s January account used a final cost of £12,000, not the £8,500 expected, to calculate his fee, but Churchill kept paying promptly until March, when the kitchen ceiling was found to be only nine feet high. ‘Some other plans will have to be made or the cook will be unable to carry on under such conditions,’ Churchill insisted in his first serious quarrel with the architect.24 By July he had already paid £8,000, but Tilden had still to produce an estimate for the new south wing on which work had not yet started. ‘I was hoping... that a sum of £1,500 would have completed the new wing, but my not very satisfactory interview with the builders yesterday... has disappointed me in this,’25 Tilden confessed in August. Churchill used a figure of £2,000 for the wing in hurried calculations on the back of Tilden’s letter to see whether he could afford to go ahead. Reluctantly he did so, calculating that the final cost had now risen to £11,700, excluding Tilden’s fees. A week later, when the solution to the problem of the kitchen ceiling turned out to be another extra wing, it had risen to almost £13,000.26
In July 1923 Churchill suffered the indignity of having his finances publicly aired in court. Lord Alfred Douglas, the notorious son of the marquess of Queensbury and erstwhile lover of Oscar Wilde, had brought a libel suit against The Morning Post, which had accused Douglas of ‘vile insults against the Jews’ in his anti-Semitic magazine Plain English. Douglas claimed that Churchill and a ‘clique of rich Jews’ had conspired to enrich themselves after the Battle of Jutland in 1916. He maintained that these Jewish financiers (among them the late Sir Ernest Cassel, who had died in 1921) had bought shares heavily after sharp price falls in New York, when the press initially presented the battle as a serious British defeat. Douglas claimed that they had then sold these shares when prices rose sharply after Churchill, having been briefed by the Admiralty, drafted a public statement giving a more favourable outcome of the battle.
At the trial in July The Morning Post’s barrister put it to Douglas that he had written in relation to Churchill:
It is true that by most subtle means and by never allowing him more than a pony ahead, this ambitious and brilliant man, short of money and eager for power, was trapped by the Jews. After the Jutland business his house was furnished for him by Sir Ernest Cassel.
He asked whether Douglas had meant to imply that Churchill was financially indebted to the Jews?
‘Yes, certainly,’ Douglas replied.
‘Who were the Jews in whose clutches he was?’
‘Chiefly Cassel.’
Asked for his evidence, Douglas quoted a London surgeon Sir Alfred Fripp, who had told him that ‘Cassel had given Mr Churchill £40,000 in one cheque’. However, Sir Ernest Cassel’s former private secretary W. D. Geddes refuted the claim, testifying that Sir Ernest had neither bought nor sold any shares for months either side of the battle.27
The jury found that The Morning Post had technically committed a libel but awarded Douglas token damages of a farthing. After instructing a barrister to keep a watching brief on his behalf, Churchill was landed with a legal bill of £182.28
It was not the end of the saga. Angry that his barrister had not cross-examined Churchill, Douglas went on to repeat the libel deliberately in public and was arrested. Churchill was spared a much larger bill at the second trial when the attorney general ruled that the government should pay his legal costs (£650), as he had been carrying out work for the government at the time.
Examining him first for the Crown, Sir Douglas Hogg led Churchill through a series of pre-emptive disclosures: he admitted to a close friendship with Sir Ernest Cassel, a friend of his parents; to the fact that Sir Ernest had not charged him for looking after his investments; that he had often been a guest at Sir Ernest’s Swiss villa; and that he had received £500 cash from Sir Ernest as a wedding present.
‘Did Sir Ernest Cassel give you any furniture?’ Sir Douglas asked.
‘The foundation for that was that in 1905 I took a small house in South Bolton Street and Sir Ernest asked Lady Randolph whether he could furnish a library for me,’ Churchill replied. ‘She consented.’29
By the time Douglas’s less-experienced counsel started his own cross-examination, there was little to come out: Churchill happily agreed with counsel’s suggestion that The World Crisis had earned him £15,000 and managed to avoid any reference to Sir Ernest Cassel coming to his rescue in 1921, when he stepped in to buy Lord Gerald Wellesley’s lease in Hyde Park.30
While Churchill’s finances were being discussed in court, two British oil companies approached him with a business opportunity. Shell Transport & Trading and Burmah Oil wanted him to lobby ministers to allow them to purchase the government’s controlling stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Anglo-Persian had been acquired during Churchill’s watch at the Admiralty in order to secure fuel supplies for a fleet that was increasingly powered by oil rather than coal. The oil companies suggested a fee for Churchill of £5,000. Steeped in the Gladstonian notion that a politician ought to be ‘disinterested’ in making a personal gain from his public duty, Churchill sought clearance from Stanley Baldwin, the new Conservative prime minister, before accepting. Baldwin indicated general support for the plan, but Churchill did not tell him ‘at this preliminary & non-committal stage’ of his own possible employment by the oil companies. ‘It is a question of how to arrange it so as to leave no just ground of criticism,’ Churchill told Clementine in a letter marked ‘secret’.31
Churchill had already begun to make a contribution to the project by the time he left a fortnight later to spend time in the southwest of France on the duke of Westminster’s four-masted yacht, The Flying Cloud, which had a crew of forty. Afterwards, he warned the duke that he might not be able to return as planned for a second visit, this time to the duke’s hunting lodge nearby at Mimizan, on account of ‘important business (oleaginous)’.32 In the event he did make the return trip at the beginning of October, just as the oil companies sent their cheque for £5,000 to his brother Jack’s address.33
The money went straight into Churchill’s account at Vickers da Costa, rather than his bank. It was used to back Churchill’s underwriting, for a fee of 2 per cent, of £50,000 of a new bond issued by The Daily Mail and General Trust, in which the sponsors*7 had been asked to reserve him space.
The duke’s lodge lay within reach of the Mons Detrimont Casino at Biarritz, to which Churchill made a return visit for a celebration of his fee. He was less successful than on the first holiday with the duke in September, when he had won almost 30,000 francs (and the duke more than half a million).34 This time he withdrew 85,000 francs in cash at the casino window, but deposited only 6,224 francs at his bank on return to London. The loss took the cumulative cost of Churchill’s forays into gambling during 1923 well above £2,000 – more than the price quoted for Chartwell’s new wing.35
As a result, Clementine began to question her husband’s stewardship of his inheritance, which had been supposed to banish their money worries for ever. Passing over his losses, Churchill bridled at her suggestion that it was being frittered away: ‘The estate at the moment is at least as large as it was when I succeeded, but part is invested in Chartwell instead of in shares.’ It was an ‘economically self-contained’ home that they could keep for many years before handing it on to Randolph: ‘It will have cost us £20,000 and will be worth at least £15,000 apart from a fancy price [i.e. unless someone was so keen on the house they paid a special premium price].’
Royalties from The World Crisis would pay enough to finish it, he argued, and would keep them going for another six or seven months:36 ‘I have already planned out the third volume & anticipate no difficulty in completing it by April. It is really quite reasonable to count on £6,000 from this – perhaps £8,000.’37 They would need £10,000 a year to meet their living costs, he calculated. This was no mean sum: in the mid 1920s only 1,300 people in Britain enjoyed an after-tax income of more than £10,000 a year. For each of the first three years of the 1920s, Churchill himself had declared a pre-tax income of just under £10,000 to the Inland Revenue, and had been left with an average of £6,500 after tax.38 He did his best to reassure Clementine:
Add to this my darling yr courage & goodwill and I am certain that we can make ourselves a good, permanent resting place, so far as the money side of this uncertain & transitory world is concerned. But if you set yourself against Chartwell, or lose heart, or bite your bread & butter & yr pig then it only means further instability, recasting of plans & further expense & worry.39
Back in Britain, during the second half of October 1923, Churchill resumed work on the oil merger, convinced it would strengthen the security of the British fleet’s oil supplies. However, he swiftly distanced himself from the deal shortly afterwards when Stanley Baldwin surprised him (and everyone else) by calling a general election at the end of November. Carefully filing his version of events in case he should face accusations of impropriety later, Churchill transferred £4,000 of his fee from his stockbrokers40 back to his bank and resumed campaigning.
Baldwin pledged to reintroduce tariffs to fight high levels of unemployment, but this put strains on the unity of the Conservatives while at the same time providing common cause in opposition to both wings of the Liberal Party and to Labour. Still unable to embrace the idea of introducing tariffs, Churchill stood for the last time as a Liberal candidate, but signalled his rapprochement with the right on other matters of policy by choosing to fight in Leicester West, a Labour stronghold where he hoped that the Conservatives might allow him a free run.
It proved the most uncomfortable election of his career, as he told Brendan Bracken,*8 his new, twenty-three-year-old aide. Bracken recorded ‘a travelling crowd of socialist rowdies’ that disrupted his meetings, ‘howling a series of monotonous chants such as “What about the Dardan-eels?” “What about Gally-Polly?” “What about the fifty thousand quid Cassel gave you?”’41
Just before polling day, Churchill bet Lord Beaverbrook that Asquith, the Liberal leader, would return as prime minister and that the Labour Party would not form a government. He was wrong on both counts: the Tories remained the largest party with 258 seats nationally, but failed to secure a Commons majority; Labour gained 191 seats and the Liberal Party trailed in third position with only 157. It was a hung parliament.
Churchill was comfortably beaten by the Labour Party candidate in Leicester and could only look on as Labour’s leader Ramsay MacDonald formed a minority government. For the second time in his life Churchill began to prepare for a switch of allegiance. Twenty years earlier, when he had no land and little money, he had left the Tories, the party of the landed gentry, to join the Liberals, the party of enterprise and new money. Now with some modest land and much more money he prepared for a return journey back to the Tories.
Meanwhile, the Chartwell building project remained fraught with difficulties. Early in 1924 an account from the architect Philip Tilden showed that its costs had reached almost £18,000,42 but the work was far from finished. Churchill decided not to share the news with Clementine that Knight Frank & Rutley had just valued the property at only £12,000 on completion.43
‘Yesterday we motored to Biarritz & raided the Casino,’ he told her instead from Mimizan, where he had returned for the New Year. ‘Play was meagre, but after some vicissitudes I collected five milles [5,000 francs] & levanted with them.’44 17,000 francs was deposited in Churchill’s bank account.
Once home, he concentrated on churning out newspaper articles to repair his finances. In February the Tory leader Stanley Baldwin announced that he would drop his support for tariff reform, which eased Churchill’s passage towards the Tories. Invited by the Liberals to fight a by-election in Bristol, Churchill declined. Instead he stood as an ‘anti-socialist independent’ at another by-election in the Abbey division of Westminster but his hopes of remaining unopposed by an official Conservative candidate were dashed. He was encouraged by Baldwin’s tacit encouragement and by the support of both the Rothermere and Beaverbrook newspapers, although the official Conservative candidate narrowly won. Churchill described the experience as ‘incomparably the most exciting, stirring, sensational election I have ever fought’.45
This burst of political activity put paid to any chance of the final volume of The World Crisis appearing that October. Having first secured the agreement of The Times, Churchill told his publisher that the book would have to be postponed until March 1925. Butterworth allowed Churchill to hold on to the first advance which had been paid on signature of his contract, but the postponement of the second advance which was due on publication left an awkward gap in his cash flow. Churchill’s agent Curtis Brown suggested that he could plug this gap with a volume of autobiography which he could conjure up by assembling some of his old articles. ‘Butterworth doesn’t like the idea of this book coming out ahead of the third volume, but my surmise is that Mr Churchill may insist upon it for the sake of quick cash,’46 Curtis Brown confided to the American publisher Charles Scribner. However, Churchill kept this idea in reserve for another day.
He certainly needed money. He had to pay not only Chartwell’s escalating costs, but various tax bills of almost £5,000 would also fall due in the next two years.47 At least the Churchill family was finally able to move in to part of the remodelled Chartwell during April 1924, although Clementine was pointedly absent visiting her mother in Dieppe. ‘You will be pleased with the result. It is majestic,’ Churchill wrote to her. ‘Only one thing lack these banks of green – The Pussy Cat who is their Queen.’48
The following month, however, relations between Churchill and his architect reached breaking point. Churchill learned that Tilden had charged for the costs of correcting his own mistakes, ignoring the cap on fees that they had agreed. Churchill commissioned an independent investigation by John Leaning & Sons, a firm of London surveyors. To brief them, he produced a history of events covering six pages: ‘Mr Churchill pressed Mr Tilden for personal assurances that the cost would not exceed £7,000,’ it read in part, ‘and Mr Tilden freely and repeatedly gave these assurances both to Mr Churchill and in the presence of others.’
Churchill claimed Tilden had kept to this figure until May 1923, at which point he had announced that the roof alone had cost an extra £1,000; next Churchill had had to insist on an extra tower because Tilden’s original plan ‘would not be satisfactory or even presentable’. The thus revised cost of £8,700 soon emerged to be ‘illusory’: ‘The estimates were raised week after week, and it soon became certain that £11,000 or even £12,000 would not see the completion of the work,’ Churchill continued. To add insult to injury, ‘the walls of the nursery wing were found to be defective. The water poured through the roof and gable at this end of the house and defaced all the plaster work which had been done.’ He concluded that the final cost now looked more like £18,000.49
The accounts became hopelessly tangled, the more so because Churchill now insisted on paying the contractors directly rather than through Tilden, as had originally been the case. For his part Tilden refused to co-operate with Churchill’s investigating surveyors and declared that any discussion of his own fees was off-limits.50
To Churchill’s disappointment, his own surveyors largely endorsed Tilden’s version of the costs incurred to date, at £17,500 before taking into account the architect’s fees. As a result, they found that Churchill still owed the builders a final payment of £1,183. Grudgingly, he offered 1,000 guineas (equivalent to £1,050).
In all, Churchill’s bank accounts reveal that he made payments of more than £23,000 to cover the first two years of alterations to Chartwell. Adding in the purchase price, the Chartwell dream had cost him close to £30,000 – almost three-fifths of his Garron Tower inheritance. Some consolation came when Sir Howard Frank confirmed to Churchill’s lawyers that Lord Randolph’s will trust could justifiably lend £7,000 against a mortgage on Chartwell, rather than £4,000. Churchill increased his loan from the trust by the difference, while insuring the property for £20,000.51
Late in September 1924 Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government lost support in the House of Commons. Churchill inched closer to the Conservative Party, telling a meeting of its Scottish followers that no great ‘gulf of principle’ existed between Liberals and Conservatives when it was compared to the threat from socialism. Days before Parliament’s dissolution early in October, Epping’s Conservative Association adopted Churchill as its ‘Constitutionalist’ candidate.
In the general election that followed Churchill gained a large majority. Nationally, the Tories won 419 seats to Labour’s 151, while the Liberals fell to 42. The Conservatives were back in power. The new prime minister Stanley Baldwin summoned Churchill to see him in London and asked whether he would serve ‘as chancellor’.
‘Of the duchy?’ Churchill asked.
‘No, of the exchequer.’52
*1 Lawrence referred to The World Crisis, as yet unfinished.
*2 Allington Castle in Kent.
*3 This was 6 per cent on new building work, 7½ per cent on alterations.
*4 France and Belgium occupied Germany’s Rühr Valley in January 1923 in response to the Weimar Republic’s failure to continue reparation payments due as a result of the First World War.
*5 Coats (J. & P. Coats), is a British textile company; City Lights an American utility company; Mexican Eagles an American oil company; and Imps (Imperial Tobacco) a British tobacco company.
*6 At the Cannes branch of Barclays Overseas Bank.
*7 British, Foreign & Colonial Corporation Ltd. Churchill earned £1,000 from the underwriting. See CHAR 1/170/21.
*8 Brendan Bracken (1901–58), born in Ireland; introduced to Churchill by J. L. Garvin, editor of the Observer, 1923; started work at publisher Eyre & Spottiswoode 1923, relaunching its Illustrated Review as English Life 1924; launched The Banker 1926; acquired half-share of The Economist with Sir Henry Strakosch 1928; MP 1929-51; parliamentary private secretary to prime minister 1940-1; minister of information 1941-5; First Lord of the Admiralty 1945; chairman, Financial Times 1945–1958; viscount 1952.