THE INK HAD barely dried on Sir Henry Strakosch’s cheque, when on 24 March 1938 the Evening Standard abruptly terminated Churchill’s fortnightly column, a mainstay of his income and an important political platform. Ever since Anthony Eden had resigned as foreign secretary in February, Churchill’s columns had taken an increasingly anti-German, pro-Czechoslovakian viewpoint – and one not shared by the owner of the Evening Standard, Lord Beaverbrook.
Percy Cudlipp had given way to a new editor, Reginald Thompson,*1 whom Beaverbrook left to deliver the coup de grâce. ‘As it is my duty to be completely frank,’ Thompson explained, ‘it has been evident your views on foreign affairs and the part which this country should play are entirely opposed to those held by us.’1
Churchill’s secretary coldly informed Thompson that Churchill would write that week’s column, ‘after which he does not wish to write any further articles for the Evening Standard, and trusts that this will be convenient’.2 Churchill urgently contacted his Other Club dining companion Lord Camrose and explained that his Evening Standard contract had been crucial, because it gave him access to a long list of other newspapers around the world that carried his column:
As you will see it is a very fine platform, though as Nazi power advances, as in Vienna, planks are pulled out of it... The Evening Standard have now terminated the series so far as they are concerned, on the grounds that my views are not in accordance with the policy of the paper, and I should like to know whether the Daily Telegraph would care to carry on the series, and if so on what terms.3
Lord Camrose, who was personally closer to Chamberlain than to Churchill, would only commit to an experiment of six months, matching the Evening Standard’s fee. He did, however, agree to move quickly so that the column did not miss a beat, re-appearing on 14 April.4 ‘It may interest you to know that I could have placed the articles in three, if not four, different quarters at the same fee,’ Churchill enjoyed telling the Evening Standard’s editor.
‘Both the News Chronicle and the Sunday Pictorial were eager with offers,’ he explained to Imre Revesz at Cooperation Press Service, ‘but The Daily Telegraph is a far more powerful and suitable platform for me.’5 Revesz was not so sure, because The Daily Telegraph was readily available across much of Europe; however, seventeen newspapers took Churchill’s first Telegraph column and this rose to twenty-three, covering much of Europe and South America, by May when one article earned Churchill an extra £93.6
The Telegraph had no syndication department of its own, so Revesz took responsibility for the British dominions, shortening the gap before Churchill’s columns could be published by transmitting them over the airwaves with the help of a Dutch radio company. ‘It is a radio-telegraphic method by Morse-signs captured only by special apparatus,’ he explained to a puzzled Churchill. ‘This would give to our articles an unusual value as it will be for Australian and South African papers a sensational achievement if they could publish the articles on the same day as the London papers.’7
Churchill had finally completed the last volume of Marlborough, but there were obstacles to clear before he could turn his attention to his long-delayed A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Another film, this time about Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, briefly beckoned. Although ‘rather stunned’ by Churchill’s demand for a fee of 1,000 guineas to act as their ‘official adviser’, the film’s backers had paid their first instalment of one quarter before the venture collapsed after failing to raise production funds.8
Then another brush with gambling debts left Randolph in need of funds. Churchill suggested to George Harrap a compilation in book form of his recent foreign policy speeches, to be edited by Randolph.9 Politically sympathetic, Harrap offered an advance of £1,000 and even delayed the final Marlborough volume to make way for Arms and the Covenant. ‘I do not expect there will be much profit,’ Churchill told Randolph, ‘but you shall have half of whatever there is.’10
Harrap was also Churchill’s first port of call when he returned from France with a synopsis for his next book after A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which he was keen to parlay for a signing advance. It was to be called After Armageddon and it would tackle ‘Europe since the Russian Revolution’ over three volumes, to be completed in 1940, 1941 and 1942. By April 1938 Harrap had put together a publishing group and – with the help of George Newnes, which was to publish a ‘parts’ edition – he offered a lump sum of £14,000, to be paid in phases. Churchill talked them up to £15,500, securing an all-important cash advance on signing of £2,000.11
The prospect of two books within three years, on top of almost weekly newspaper articles, a crowded political diary and increasingly frequent parliamentary speeches, each of which needed painstaking research, proved too much for Violet Pearman, Churchill’s senior personal secretary, who succumbed to exhaustion.12 Her assistant, Grace Hamblin, took over the Churchills’ personal affairs and accounts, while Kathleen Hill assumed the main responsibility for literary matters. Both were conscious that Churchill had reserved two months in his diary for an autumn lecture tour of America.
Harold Peat had already booked most of the programme, which was to start in Chicago on 25 October and finish on 14 December in New York.13 After Louis Alber’s experience, Peat had insisted on strict cancellation penalties and Churchill had finally agreed a climbing scale that reached $3,000 on 1 August.14 With Europe in crisis and less than eighteen months left to write A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill decided during July that he could not afford the diversion of the lecture tour. After waiting until the day before the August deadline, he cabled his apologies. Peat reacted with fury:
Cancellation is entirely out of the question. Not only will I be the loser by some $25,000... but my reputation would be ruined and, unfortunately, yours would be greatly impaired in this country and probably internationally... There is a distinct possibility that there will be fifteen to twenty law-suits on our hands from coast to coast. It is a very serious thing, sir.15
Churchill double-checked his legal position before telling his new American lawyer Arthur Leve (whose colleague Louis Levy was under suspension at the time) to hold the line: ‘Peat must realize how extremely critical and dangerous the whole European situation is.’ Leve restricted Churchill’s penalty to $2,000.16
Churchill finally turned his attention to A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He dispatched a ‘first tentative and provisional instalment’ to the publisher in mid-August, but Cassell’s chairman Sir Newman Flower judged one chapter and a fragment of a second to be a slim payback for five years of advances.17 Nor did he take kindly to Churchill’s imperious request to be sent six sets of printed proofs by return. ‘I am afraid we are not prepared to put this into type until we have the whole of the MS [manuscript],’ Sir Newman wrote. ‘So far, you have only delivered 30,000 words out of 400,000, and we fail to see how you are going to complete the other 370,000 words by the 31st December 1939, on which date the agreement falls in.’18
Puzzled, Churchill sent his other publisher Harrap a copy of the letter under ‘Very Private’ cover, asking for help with alternative printing arrangements and some advice on his next move with Sir Newman Flower. ‘These are very unsatisfactory relations for an author to have with his publisher,’ Churchill explained, ‘and it is an entirely new experience for me.’19 Harrap suggested asking Sir Newman’s young son Desmond to lunch at Chartwell, following which an uneasy truce was declared. His father had not intended to be ‘disagreeable’, Desmond explained.
Churchill kept up a pace of 2,000 words a day, but had only reached the twelfth-century reign of Henry II early in September when he took over Randolph’s duties on the Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ for a fortnight while he was on military training.
The launch of the last volume of Marlborough was overshadowed by the sudden crisis in relations between Germany and Czechoslovakia against which Churchill had been warning.20 For some weeks Hitler had supported the claims for greater self-determination of the German-speaking residents of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. On 7 September a lead article in The Times suggested the Czech government should consider ceding this region to its neighbours, Germany, in order to make Czechoslovakia a more ‘homogenous’ state. Churchill was outraged. Taking time out from writing his History, he urged the foreign secretary Lord Halifax to warn Hitler that any aggression against Czech territory would result in war.
On 13 September the Czech government declared martial law; two days later Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to meet Hitler for the first time at the German chancellor’s Berchtesgaden retreat. Churchill told a researcher: ‘It has been a comfort to me in these anxious days to put a thousand years between my thoughts and the twentieth century.’21 He abandoned his History again to travel to Paris to persuade friends in the French cabinet to stand by the Czech president, but without success. On his second visit to Germany within a week, Neville Chamberlain was confronted by a new demand from Hitler that those areas of the Sudetenland region where German-speaking residents were in the majority should be transferred to Germany without any need for a prior plebiscite.
Chamberlain urged the cabinet to accept Hitler’s new terms on his return, but encountered some resistance, including for the first time from foreign secretary Lord Halifax. On the following day, 27 September, Chamberlain suggested to Hitler that the British, French, German and Italian leaders should hold a further meeting, while questioning during a radio broadcast whether Britain should fight over a quarrel ‘in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’.
On the morning of 28 September Curtis Brown relayed to Churchill an American newspaper’s offer for him to write a war diary for a fee of $1,000 per entry.22 Churchill replied immediately that he did not expect war, a judgement that was vindicated by events in the House of Commons that afternoon. Chamberlain was speaking to a packed chamber when an aide passed him a note. Chamberlain absorbed it in silence before informing the House that Hitler had accepted his request for a third meeting in Germany. The rest of the House rose in acclaim – and the London Stock Exchange rallied sharply – but Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Leo Amery stayed in their seats.
In Munich the following day, the British, French, German and Italian leaders met, but without any Czechs present. Churchill attended a Focus Group lunch at the Savoy Hotel and returned that evening for a dinner at The Other Club. That night early copies of the next morning’s newspapers arrived, bringing news of the Munich Agreement: Germany was to annexe all Sudetenland areas with a German-speaking majority within a fortnight, before a plebiscite elsewhere. Churchill experienced ‘a towering rage and a deepening gloom’, according to a fellow Other Club member.23
Chamberlain returned home to a hero’s welcome and promised ‘Peace in our time’. Just one cabinet minister (Alfred Duff Cooper) resigned and the thirty or so Conservative MPs who opposed appeasement still looked to Anthony Eden for leadership, rather than Churchill. He retreated to Chartwell, where he laid bricks and picked up once more the threads of his History. The House of Commons debated the Munich Agreement over three days in the following week, but Churchill delayed speaking until the final day. Those who read his Daily Telegraph column knew that he had already condemned the British and French leaders for applying ‘unbearable pressure’ on the Czech government.
By Christmas 1938 Churchill’s History had reached the Wars of the Roses. He was ahead of his target, but not enjoying the experience. ‘It is very laborious: & I resent it, & the pressure,’ he told Clementine, who was once again cruising with Lord Moyne. ‘If nothing intervenes, it will be done by June... My life has simply been cottage and book, (but sleep too before dinner).’24
At least Churchill’s bank account had finished 1938 just in credit, thanks to Sir Henry Strakosch’s rescue, plus a second successful brandy bet with Lord Rothermere, and the News of the World’s agreement to let him cash its cheque early.25 Chartwell’s economy drive had kept costs steady and as he mapped out prospects for 1939 Churchill felt relatively optimistic about his finances. The delivery of the manuscript of his History accounted for a third of Churchill’s projected income for the year of £22,000. This was well ahead of his estimate of spending, which was just £13,000.26 (The eventual outcome of 1939 was to be almost the reverse of Churchill’s estimates: he finished with receipts of £13,000, while he spent more than £20,000.)
On 7 January 1939, following a day of talks with French leaders in Paris, Churchill caught the night train to Cannes for a New Year break. He dictated his Daily Telegraph column over a dinner washed down with champagne.
Poor weather kept him mostly inside Maxine Elliott’s home in Cannes, but this meant that his History made steady progress at 1,500 words a day. ‘BEWARE CASINO,’ Clementine warned him towards the end of his fortnight’s stay,27 but Churchill could not resist and found fortune to be on his side.
‘Just as at Chartwell I divided my days between building and dictating, so now it is between dictating and gambling,’ he told her. ‘I have been playing very long but not foolishly, and up to date I have a substantial advantage. It amuses me very much to play, so long as it is with their money.’28 Churchill had drawn 40,000 francs in cash, but had already deposited winnings of 60,000 at the Cannes branch of the Comptoir National de Paris.29 On his way to the station for the journey home, he could not resist a final visit, as his secretary Mary Penman recalled:
As we passed the Casino, he ordered the car to stop although we had little time to spare before catching the train. He jumped out and ran to the Casino entrance, his clothes flapping about him in the strong wind, looking a little shabby and untidy. He disappeared inside briefly and then came out still running, he waved his right hand triumphantly to me and grinned as he leapt into the car beside me. ‘I have just won enough to pay for our fares home – what do you think of that?’30
‘Safely home with forty-two thousand,’ he cabled to Clementine.31
On the political front, Churchill anticipated another government reshuffle, but he told Clementine that he was happy to remain on the political sidelines until after an election. He was still confident that his History would be finished well ahead of its deadline:
In the summer when I am sure the book will be finished, I think I will build a house on the ten acres. It will cost about three thousand pounds to give a lovely dwelling for a man and his wife, two children, one double and one single visiting bedroom, and I expect we could sell it for five or six thousand with the bit of land.32
By the end of January Churchill had reached ‘Cromwell’s Great Rebellion’ in his History, at which point his main researcher Bill Deakin had to leave for military service. He was replaced by George Young,*2 an older historian who had recently written about Victorian England and was introduced by Eddie Marsh. ‘I hope you will not be vexed if I venture to suggest an honorarium of fifty guineas,’ Churchill proposed to Young, setting him to work on the Stuarts.33
Meanwhile, Churchill was frustrated to find that after three months in America Revesz had still not managed to sell his newspaper column to a newspaper; his agent seemed more interested in pioneering the broadcast of the speeches of European politicians across the Atlantic. Revesz tried to explain his strategy when he unveiled his ‘greatest success to date’ in February: the New York Herald Tribune had agreed to carry Churchill’s columns at $80 each. There was no American tradition of paying politicians for newspaper articles, Revesz explained, so he had concentrated on setting up ‘an entirely new wireless service of international opinions’. Promising to pay the radio transmission costs personally, he forecast that new buyers would soon double or treble the Herald Tribune’s fee within months. ‘It will mean that all the subscribing newspapers will be able to pick up the articles directly from Europe, and that they will receive everything you and the other European statesmen write within a few hours and directly.’ The next step, Revesz expected, would be an opportunity for Churchill and other European politicians to earn additional fees by broadcasting recordings of their speeches to America over the radio.
Churchill reacted to his agent’s long and excited letter with a single sentence, insisting that he would accept nothing less than $125 a column.34 A less determined man than Revesz might have given up, but he immediately promised to pay the difference between $80 and $125 himself. His confidence was vindicated within a fortnight when he was able to cable: ‘Further contracts already signed Washington Philadelphia Boston Buffalo Cleveland San Francisco Los Angeles Toronto.’35
Revesz returned to Amsterdam for the first radio transmission, after which he reported to Churchill: ‘It is a very exciting procedure. After ten minutes came the message from New York that the reception was good and they speeded it up until 75 words per minute. About an hour later I received already the following message: ARTICLE FINE RECEPTION PERFECT THANKS.’
Cooperation started adding £50 ‘on account’ for US sales to its payments, taking Churchill’s earnings from each newspaper column close to £200.36
Three-quarters of Churchill’s History was in print by the end of February, but he was facing mounting distractions. Picture Post magazine – only two years old, but already boasting a readership of one million – sent a crew to Chartwell to photograph Churchill writing and bricklaying.
Meanwhile, Randolph confessed to yet another set of debts that forced Churchill to release his son’s final tranche of Lord Randolph’s will trust, having first worked out that he could do so without having to repay any of his own loan from the same source.37
Most importantly, Chartwell remained the destination of choice for anyone who wanted to share private information about Hitler’s military preparations, among them Sir Henry Strakosch. On 22 February he handed Churchill an unofficial estimate that Germany was spending 26 per cent of its national income on armaments, in contrast to Britain’s 12 per cent.38
Three days later, Hitler’s troops marched into Prague, Bohemia and Moravia, bringing an effective end to Czechoslovakia’s existence as an independent state. It proved a pivotal moment for the British public, after which the word ‘appeasement’ began to carry a different meaning. Churchill called for Britain’s air defences to be put on full alert.
He had only reached Queen Anne’s reign in his History and Churchill realized that he was falling seriously behind schedule. Turning aside from a long memorandum to the prime minister on the use of sea power, Churchill asked the publishers of Marlborough: His Life and Times if he could reuse whole passages from the book to cover the reign of William and Mary in his History. ‘I do of course paraphrase and alter as I go along, but still the identity of the two versions would be noticeable,’ he admitted to George Harrap junior, who had taken over the running of Harrap with his younger brother Walter after the sudden death of their father. At the end of his letter Churchill offered them first refusal on a book of his Evening Standard and Daily Telegraph articles, which he described as ‘a continuous survey of the darkening scene... Under some title such as Step by Step, I should think they would have a very good sale.’39 The Harraps were not convinced: they allowed the reuse of the Marlborough material, but bid just £500 for Step by Step, thus allowing Thornton Butterworth a chance to take back his old author, by pledging £750 and promising to find buyers in Europe and America.40
Churchill’s History fell further behind schedule in April. He put the book aside to prepare a speech to the House of Commons welcoming Chamberlain’s surprise guarantee of the security of Poland, the country widely expected to be Hitler’s next target. Churchill deprecated ‘a sinister passage’ in a leading article in The Times of 1 April which suggested that there was a distinction between guaranteeing Poland’s ‘independence’ and guaranteeing its territorial ‘integrity’. Churchill’s suspicions were well founded – on 3 April Chamberlain confirmed privately that The Times’s interpretation of the government’s intentions was correct.
On 7 April Mussolini’s troops massed on the border before invading Albania. Harold Macmillan, who was visiting Chartwell at the time, recalled Churchill spreading maps all over his study, then sending Chamberlain unsolicited advice on how best to use the British fleet to seize Corfu and prevent a further Italian advance. On two further occasions in April Churchill had to put his History aside to prepare speeches in the House of Commons. He called for the establishment of a new ministry of supply (which Chamberlain did establish, but without appointing Churchill to head it) and urged as much co-operation with Russia as with France.
By May his History had already overrun its intended length, but Churchill had not yet reached the American Civil War. He dictated passages during car journeys to and from London, but he realized that he now needed literary reinforcements. John Wheldon*3 arrived at Chartwell to check the section on Henry VIII, while Maurice Ashley returned to inspect Cromwell and the Stuarts. ‘It is very hard to transport oneself into the past when the future opens its jaws upon us,’ Churchill told Ashley.41 He also recalled Eddie Marsh to renewed proofreading duties. ‘It has been a most educative ride for me,’ he told his former private secretary. ‘Though I have frequently had to dismount and talk politics to the wayfarers.’42
Churchill’s fortnightly Daily Telegraph column was due to come to an end in mid-summer 1939. Cecil King, a friend of Randolph’s and a young journalist at the Daily Mirror, suggested that his newspaper should take over. The editor Cecil Thomas offered 70 guineas a column, but for a period of only three months, until Revesz inspired a counter-bid by the News Chronicle, after which Thomas increased his bid to £100 and six months.43
Churchill’s relief at this new arrangement was short-lived when the New York Herald Tribune announced it was cutting its fee by a third at the end of its trial three months, even though the number of American newspapers now signed up to print Churchill’s journalism had grown to fourteen.44 Revesz set off immediately for America to take up the cudgels on Churchill’s behalf, but once there he changed his priorities, preferring to concentrate on the other reason for his trip. He successfully concluded arrangements with the National Broadcasting Company for Churchill and other European politicians to make fortnightly broadcasts to America on ‘international topics or events of worldwide interest’. Churchill’s fee of £100 a broadcast, Revesz confided, was to be three times as much as any of his political colleagues.45
In Britain, there was a mounting press campaign for Churchill’s restoration to the government, but he was locked in a race against time to finish the History. His bank overdraft had risen back above £7,000 and, if he did not complete his manuscript before the declaration of war (which he now regarded as inevitable), he would not only forfeit the £15,000 still due from the publisher, but have to reimburse the £5,000 he had already received – and long since spent.46
While Churchill continued writing, the Bank of England started secret shipments of its gold to Canada.47 Nevertheless, life continued: debutantes danced in London beneath the Rembrandts and Gainsboroughs of Londonderry House; young men in striped blazers turned out for the rowing regatta at Henley; and at Blenheim the new duke and duchess of Marlborough threw open the palace’s gates for a party in honour of their daughter. Powdered footmen in red velvet waited on guests in the library and chefs cooked lobster on the terrace beneath the palace’s floodlit façade, but Churchill stayed in London to work on his History. ‘I am staggering to the end of this job,’ he told Marsh.
He promised his publisher in July that the work was almost done: ‘I have had to work very hard, and many a night have sat up until two or three in the morning.’48 Right up to the end, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples had to compete for time with magazine articles for Picture Post or a Daily Mirror column or a last speech to the House of Commons before its summer recess or a first American radio broadcast. Then there was the 1940 series for the News of the World to consider. ‘In view of the uncertainties which may affect me personally,’ he told the newspaper’s chairman, ‘I should like to get the series for 1940 in an advanced condition, or at any rate on the stocks before the end of September.’49
In the middle of August Churchill made a short diversion to France to watch the French army on manoeuvres: the visit ‘tore to shreds any illusion that it was not Germany’s intention to wage war and to wage it soon’, recalled his travelling companion General Spears.50 Afterwards, Churchill painted in Normandy with his artist friend Paul Maze. ‘Suddenly he turned to me,’ Maze recalled, ‘and said: “This is the last picture we shall paint in peace for a very long time.”’51
With speculation mounting that Hitler’s next move was imminent, Churchill flew back early to London, arriving as news broke that Germany and Russia had reached a non-aggression pact and that George VI had left his summer home at Balmoral to meet government ministers in London. The bank rate doubled to 4 per cent on 24 August. Churchill’s Daily Mirror column that day was entitled ‘At the Eleventh Hour’. The following day the British government advised Britons still living in Berlin and Germans living in Britain to return home.
On 29 August Churchill was still discussing passages in his History concerning the Seven Years’ War with Bill Deakin. On 31 August, as some children began to leave London, Churchill wrote to his publisher Sir Newman Flower:
I am, as you know, concentrating every minute of my spare life and strength upon completing our contract. These distractions are trying. However 530,000 words are now in print and there is only cutting and proof reading, together with a few special points, now to be done.52
Churchill was still dictating at one o’clock on the morning of 1 September, as the first German tanks rolled into Poland.
*1 Reginald Thompson (1896–1956), served on the Western Front 1914–18; journalist, Daily Express, Evening News; editor Evening Standard 1938–9; editor and managing director, Essex Chronicle.
*2 George Young, (‘G.M.’, 1882–1959), fellow of All Souls College, Oxford 1905; civil servant 1908–20; author of an essay on Victorian Britain, Portrait of An Age (1936).
*3 John Wheldon (b.1911), literary assistant to Churchill 1934–5, lecturer Balliol College, Oxford 1935–6, Courtaulds Ltd. 1936–9; war service including with the Special Operations Executive 1939–45; Courtaulds Ltd. 1945–60.