THE PRIME MINISTER spent Christmas 1941 and the New Year in Washington, then returned to find a House of Commons and a public concerned about the British army’s retreat across northern Africa, together with naval losses in Asia. Churchill turned a two-day debate on the conduct of the war into a vote of confidence, at the end of which only one MP recorded a vote of opposition.
Two weeks later, on 15 February 1942, Singapore fell to numerically inferior Japanese forces, exposing the remaining Malayan peninsular. If that fell, the enemy could threaten either India or Australia and New Zealand. An increasing number of voices questioned the wisdom of one man being both minister of defence and prime minister, so Churchill restructured his government. He held on to his key positions, giving up only leadership of the House of Commons, which he handed over to a senior Labour figure, Sir Stafford Cripps. Sir Stafford also entered the war cabinet and was to deputize for the prime minister in the House of Commons, so that Churchill did not have to attend it so frequently.
Despite the numerous demands on Churchill’s time, he still wanted to settle the tax treatment of his regular Sunday newspaper articles. His tax adviser Geoffrey Mason was in favour of a challenge to the Inland Revenue’s ruling that these should be taxed as royalties, although the challenge would require an appeal to a tribunal of general commissioners of taxation. Churchill’s usual lawyers, Nicholl, Manisty & Co., had decided that such an appeal lay beyond their competence, so Mason had recruited help from a tax specialist, Anthony Moir, at Fladgate & Co., a firm of solicitors nearby in Pall Mall.
Soon after his return from the White House, and ‘in strictest confidence’, Churchill had authorized Mason and Moir to consult a barrister, Charles Graham-Dixon.*1 The hope was that the opinion of a well-respected tax barrister might persuade senior minds at the Inland Revenue to think again, but it failed to do so.1
Moir was therefore called to Downing Street in order to brief Churchill on the risks of mounting a formal appeal to a tax tribunal. Moir arrived for his first appointment on 19 May and expected the meeting would be short. Churchill was facing renewed criticism of his leadership, following the fall of the remainder of the Malayan peninsula, and the House of Commons was about to start a two-day debate on the conduct of the war. Years later Moir set down his recollection of the meeting:
I was warned that [Churchill] would probably give me ten minutes, that I must be very brief and that I must tell him (if such was the case) that he had two or more courses open to him. Thereafter he would instantly make up his mind which course he would pursue... I was ushered into the Cabinet Room... and started off and said my piece which I had carefully prepared. [Churchill] after a short time got up and started walking around the table, talking as he did so, with the result that, when he arrived at each end he was completely out of earshot.... ‘If I appeal, will it be entirely private; can anyone get to know about it?’ I replied that it would be entirely private before the Commissioners, but if we won, they could appeal further and then the hearing would be in public.... And so it went on. My ‘ten minutes’ was eventually turned into one and a half hours, but when I left I came away with instructions to lodge an appeal. I remember walking down Whitehall and buying an evening paper, the headline of which was ‘Why wasn’t Churchill in the House Today?’ and at least I felt that was a question which I could answer with some conviction!2
Churchill’s absence was part of a new policy that he should restrict his appearances in the House, but on this occasion it was criticized by many members. He was, however, exonerated by at least one his critics, Sir Edward Grigg, who concluded that Churchill had ‘important preoccupations to keep him elsewhere’.3 Little did he realize it was the prime minister’s tax affairs.
Moir was asked to suggest more tax-saving ideas to Geoffrey Mason, while they waited for the appeal process to run its course. They came up with three. The first was that Churchill should share more of his earnings from Into Battle with Randolph, who paid a lower rate of tax. Mason calculated that if Churchill handed over half, father and son could save up to £1,500 of tax between them.4
At that time, in February 1942, filial relations were strained. Randolph’s marriage had ended and he blamed his parents for taking his wife Pamela’s side. However, he needed the money after losing £3,000 playing what a fellow officer, Evelyn Waugh, described as ‘very high gambling, poker, roulette, chemin de fer’ on the way to Egypt with his regiment.5
Two days after ordering the transfer of his earnings to Randolph, Churchill worried about the propriety of such an action, but he was assured that Mason had already sounded out the tax authorities.6
Another of Moir and Mason’s suggestions was that Churchill should sell the second book of his wartime speeches for a capital sum rather than royalties. Early in February Aubrey Gentry, the Cassell director, obliged by offering £10,000, but Churchill was still undecided whether to accept the sum when the fall of Britain’s Singapore garrison led the publishing firm to withdraw its offer on the grounds that the market for it had ‘dulled’.7 Kathleen Hill was quick to accept a revised offer of £8,000, but it was conditional on Cassell finding a buyer in America. This proved difficult because Churchill’s stock was falling in tandem with the reputation of the British military. After three months of fruitless searching, Churchill met Gentry to agree a reduced price of £3,000 without American rights.8
Thirdly, Moir and Mason suggested that Churchill should resell the copyrights of his old books, because the money that he earned from exploiting them would always be subject to high rates of income tax; whereas he would pay no tax if he sold the copyrights on for a capital sum to Macmillan, the publisher who was due to produce and sell the books. Churchill approved Moir and Mason’s plan, but it failed at the first hurdle when Daniel Macmillan was not prepared to name a price: he maintained that it was simply too early in the life of these new arrangements to know what a fair price would be.
Their first results emerged in the middle of the year, when Churchill was back in Washington, suffering the indignity of his forces surrendering control of Tobruk. They provided some cheer: the books had earned Churchill £4,000 in five months, thanks to an average publishing margin of 40 per cent, far above his old royalty rates.9 Every copy of My Early Life had sold out by the time Mrs Hill told Daniel Macmillan in November: ‘I know that Mr Churchill is very much pleased with the way in which you have been managing his affairs.’10
Churchill was equally pleased with his new solicitor Anthony Moir, who saved him the time and embarrassment of appearing personally as a witness before the general commissioners of taxation. Moir had persuaded the new chairman of the Inland Revenue, Sir Cornelius Gregg, that the two parties should produce an Agreed Statement of Facts on which their respective barristers would then simply make submissions to the tribunal.11 The lay commissioners decided in Churchill’s favour at the end of September 1942 and the Inland Revenue’s solicitor advised his board that there was little prospect of reversing the decision without appealing all the way up to the House of Lords. He suspected, rightly, there would be little appetite for such a step. ‘Acquiesce’, Sir Cornelius instructed.12
This private victory over the Inland Revenue was soon matched by success on the battlefield. Within weeks Britain’s Eighth Army broke out from its defensive positions at El Alamein, while American and British forces landed successfully in Algeria, and the Russian army began to turn the tide of battle against the Germans facing Stalingrad.
A more optimistic Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca in January 1943 to settle the new year’s military plans. They postponed a north European landing for another year and instead agreed on a summer invasion of Sicily. At home, Kathleen Hill suggested an early deal on a third volume of war speeches,*2 while military victories remained fresh in the public mind, but time was lost when Churchill wanted her to put Macmillan in competition with Cassell. After Daniel Macmillan declined to offer, Cassell reduced its price for a second year running, because it felt the formula was wearing thin.13
Before a new tax year started in April 1943, Mason persuaded Churchill that they should make another attempt to sell the copyrights of his early books. This time Macmillan offered a capital sum of £7,000, on condition that his firm retained the right to publish any new books by Churchill after the war. Horrified that he had missed this stipulation which would restrict his freedom of manoeuvre when dealing with his war memoirs, Churchill insisted that Macmillan make a fresh bid without it. A disappointed Macmillan complied, keeping the same headline price, but backdating the arrangement by a year to compensate his firm. The payment helped Churchill’s bank balance at the end of June 1943 reach a record level of £21,500.14
Brendan Bracken, however, only heard of the sale in September. Furious that his his long-term strategy of Churchill owning his copyrights had been abandoned for short-term tax advantages, Bracken instructed Mrs Hill to reverse the sale – otherwise he would buy the rights back himself. Although Daniel Macmillan was bemused by the mixed signals from Downing Street, he agreed in principle to provide a refund. However, six months later, no documents had been signed. A chance conversation revealed the reason to Kathleen Hill: Daniel Macmillan was still insisting that a return to the original 1941 arrangement between Churchill and the publisher must include the clause that had given the firm the right to handle Churchill’s books after the war.
The prospect of an Allied victory in the war was already pushing up the price of any potential Churchill war memoirs. Preparatory discussions with publishers took up an increasing amount of the prime minister’s time from the summer of 1943 onwards because two earlier book contracts stood in the way. The first was the postponed A History of the English-Speaking Peoples for Cassell & Co.; the second was the yet-to-be-started After Armageddon for George G. Harrap & Co. and its two publishing partners.*3
Churchill had tried to terminate the After Armageddon contracts and to return the publishers’ advances as early as 1940, but Harrap had insisted that the option to terminate lay with the publishers, not the author. A desultory correspondence had continued, until Harrap revealed its hand in 1942 by offering Churchill a new contract at a higher price, ‘if you feel you are able to write a different book’ – in other words, his war memoirs.15
Churchill had ignored the firm at the time, but returned to the issue in 1943, now that more valuable offers were coming in from other publishers. In July he consulted privately with Sir Walter Monckton, a barrister he had befriended when they both worked on Edward VIII’s abdication settlement. Churchill wanted to know how he might extricate himself from the Harrap contracts. Sir Walter suggested that he should build a case that his assumption of wartime duties as prime minister had led to the contracts’ legal ‘frustration’.
In early August Churchill drafted for his lawyers an impassioned memorandum to substantiate the argument:
I have been called to fulfil public duties, which I could not have declined. These duties have absorbed every scrap of my time and strength since I assumed office. I have no leisure and take no holidays. I suppose I have not read a dozen books during the last five years. My full time and strength is taxed to the utmost. I cannot write any book while I am Prime Minister.
The idea of writing this particular book was now ‘abhorrent’, he wrote:
The book is dead spiritually and in every dimension. I could not write about any of these countries as I had intended to write. The picture that I had in my mind has been effaced by subsequent events... I certainly would not be on speaking terms with Stalin if I wrote the things I would have written in time of peace.16
As the Italian government prepared to surrender, Churchill asked his personal solicitor Charles Nicholl to obtain a second barrister’s opinion on this line of argument. They met early in October with Charles Henderson KC to discuss the barrister’s fourteen-page opinion. Its conclusions were not as clear-cut in Churchill’s favour as he would have wished. Frustration could not be self-diagnosed, Henderson warned; it was a matter of legal fact, which could only occur if events outside either party’s control ‘rendered the performance of a contract indefinitely impossible’. If Churchill lost his case, any damages ‘would in all likelihood be heavy’. Henderson therefore suggested redrafting Churchill’s memorandum and aiming for arbitration if Churchill’s claim of frustration was refused.17
Churchill’s revised version, drafted by Henderson, was dispatched to Harrap on un-crested Downing Street paper. Noting that the book’s completion date had already passed without any comment from Harrap, it suggested that the publishers’ silence signalled an acceptance that ‘supervening events beyond human control have rendered our contract impossible of performance and that I am accordingly discharged from liability’.18
The Harrap brothers, George and Walter, took a month to consult their partners before visiting Downing Street on 11 November. Churchill was busy putting the finishing touches to the Allied Expeditionary Force, which was due to land in France in 1944. When he met the Harraps (according to Kathleen Hill’s minutes) they agreed that high office had prevented him from writing After Armageddon as it was originally conceived. Therefore, they had no intention of holding him to the contract. However, they felt ‘entitled to the privilege of publishing another book, whenever that book might be written, but of course on Mr Churchill’s own terms’. Churchill made clear his resentment at their stance; he agreed, however, to postpone applying for arbitration on condition that the Harraps put their undertaking not to sue in writing the next day.19
No letter came. Instead the Harraps asked Churchill for a draft that they could show their partners. Sent over Kathleen Hill’s signature, it demanded from the Harraps an ‘unequivocal admission’ that their contract had lapsed, before hinting at ‘favourable consideration’ should Churchill ever write again after the war.20
By the time George Harrap responded, Churchill lay ill in Tunis, exhausted after a prolonged bout of travelling. He was annoyed not only because Harrap questioned the veracity of Mrs Hill’s minutes, but also because he insisted once again that the option to terminate their contract lay with the publishers and not the author. Churchill added a specific objection to Harrap’s ‘manoeuvring’ for his war memoirs to the draft reply which Charles Henderson prepared:
The substance of your letter put into plain terms is that you are to be entitled to use the present circumstances as a bargaining lever in any future negotiations between us. Such a state of affairs does not commend itself to me... Disinclined as I am to occupy my time with my personal affairs at the present time, your letter leaves me no alternative but to call upon your Company to submit the dispute to arbitration.21
While the Harrap camp considered their response, another complication came to the fore. Just before Churchill attended the Quebec Conference of July 1943, Sir Alexander Korda had bid for the film rights to Marlborough: His Life and Times, this time backed by a different Hollywood studio, Metro Goldwyn Mayer.22 Recalled from ministerial duties to negotiate on Churchill’s behalf, Brendan Bracken pushed the bid up to £20,000, at which point Kathleen Hill suggested that they should obtain tax advice from Lloyds Bank.
It emerged that T. E. B. Harris, the manager of the Pall Mall branch of Lloyds, had an industry contact of his own: the larger-than-life Italian film producer Filippo Del Giudice. ‘Mr Del’, as the press called him, had arrived from Italy in 1932, ‘alone, nigh penniless and lacking a word of English’; eleven years later, he now owned a flat in Park Lane and a country house near Beaconsfield.23 It was Sir Alexander who had introduced ‘Mr Del’ to the film world before his protégé developed a more extravagant production philosophy through his own company Two Cities, backed by J. Arthur Rank. Two Cities proceeded to bid £30,000 for Marlborough, to which MGM responded by increasing its offer to £25,000, hoping that Sir Alexander’s long personal relationship with Churchill would tip the balance in its favour.24
As soon as Churchill returned from the Quebec Conference in September he discussed both bids with Bracken on the train back to London. Kathleen Hill suggested they ask Two Cities for its ‘best offer’ before making a decision. It turned out to be a sharply increased £50,000, of which no less than £30,000 was to be paid immediately on signing.25 Without waiting for tax advice, Churchill immediately accepted a contract worth twice as much as any he had previously been offered, and approved a press release prepared by Two Cities.26 It was left to Brendan Bracken, more alert as minister of information to the damage that any talk of such a large sum might cause in the middle of war, to impose a news blackout.
To Sir Alexander Korda he offered a consolation prize: for a similar price, he could buy the film rights to A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. However, talks had to be broken off almost as soon as they began when the Daily Herald published a largely accurate story by its reporter Hannen Swaffer under the headline ‘CHURCHILL’S BIG FEE’:
I heard yesterday the astounding statement that the film rights of Churchill’s Life of Marlborough have been bought for no less than £55,000. If this is true, it means that the money has been paid for the use of the premier’s name for publicity purposes, because any scenario writer of skill could adapt the life of the visitor of Blenheim from sources easily accessible in the history books and biographies.27
Negotiations remained stalled while Churchill first travelled to Cairo and Teheran and then fell ill at Tunis on the way home. Recuperating in Morocco afterwards, Churchill declared himself to be unconcerned by the publicity about his film fee and authorized negotiations with Sir Alexander Korda to restart. Sir Alexander and MGM accepted Bracken’s price of £50,000 on condition that they were allowed to extract four films from different stages of English history;28 Churchill was happy to accept, so long as they stayed away from Marlborough, which he had already sold. Sir Alexander shook hands with Bracken on 21 January 1944, the day that the Allies landed at Anzio on the Italian mainland.
Instinct then made Mrs Hill double-check that the film rights for A History of the English-Speaking Peoples still definitely belonged to Churchill. She found that it was unclear: the book’s contract – drawn up in 1933, before the routine separation of book and film rights – simply gave Cassell ‘the complete and entire copyright’.29 Frustrated, Churchill called for a counsel’s opinion:*4 he was advised to buy back the film rights just to be on the safe side.
Unwilling to part with cash for the purpose, Churchill preferred the idea of being given the film rights in exchange for granting Cassell & Co. first refusal on the British book rights to any memoirs that he wrote after the war. It must have seemed an attractive swap at the time – the film rights of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples were worth an immediate £50,000, whereas his post-war memoirs were still a distant prospect. Churchill asked Bracken to use Lord Camrose as his intermediary in the negotiations, as the newspaperman knew Cassell’s chairman, Sir Newman Flower.*5
At this point, February 1944, the Harrap brothers conceded that their contract for Churchill’s next book, After Armageddon, would have to go to formal arbitration. Nevertheless Churchill decided to press on with the Cassell negotations, authorizing two offers to be made to Sir Newman Flower: first, ‘when the war is over and the author has some spare time he will write the introduction to the history [of the English-Speaking Peoples]’; second, ‘subject to the decision of the arbitrator in Harrap’s claim, Cassells and the Amalgamated Press will have priority in bidding for the right to buy any history of the War written by our friend’.30 As a reward for acting as Churchill’s emissary, Camrose and his business, The Amalgamated Press, won an equivalent priority in bidding for the rights to the memoirs’ newspaper extracts.*6
The talks went well, until Sir Newman asked for a legally binding agreement rather than a gentlemen’s pact. This news came on the same day that Daniel Macmillan insisted on a written acknowledgement of his own firm’s legal claim to publish any post-war book written by Churchill.
With D-Day less than two months away, Churchill now faced two competing legal claims to his post-war memoirs from Macmillan and Harrap, each potentially blocking the exchange he wanted to make with a third publisher, Cassell, so that he could sell Sir Alexander Korda the film rights to his History. Churchill convened a hurried series of meetings with his lawyers, to whom he had not previously mentioned these complications.
Nicholl and Henderson asked for a week to come up with a solution, but they were pre-empted by a direction from Churchill. In Macmillan’s case, he told them, he was happy to let current arrangements stand, in which case ‘it must be absolutely clear that... I am free in respect of any future work written’; alternatively he would return to their 1941 agreement and then give the firm notice ‘a few days afterwards’. He remained determined to proceed with his Cassell exchange on one condition: if Sir Newman offered less than he thought the memoirs were worth when the time came, he must be free to go elsewhere; he would not, however, take a lower price from anyone else ‘without returning to Cassell’s’.31
Churchill’s lawyers saw matters differently. He must press ahead with the Harrap arbitration, Charles Nicholl advised, and should acknowledge the validity of Macmillan’s 1941 claim to handle his post-war book before he bought back the copyrights from Macmillan. Churchill could then bring that arrangement to a wholly legitimate, if brutal, end by giving the firm notice, as he himself had suggested.
Meanwhile, Nicholl warned that Churchill should halt all correspondence with Cassell and Sir Alexander Korda, because he was on much weaker legal ground than he realized. The 1938 synopsis of After Armageddon had left the book’s scope unclear. ‘It might be held to include the whole or part of the period of the present War,’ Nicholl even claimed. In addition, details of any option agreement that Churchill reached with Cassell would have to be disclosed to the Harrap arbitrator, handing his opponents a ready guide to assessing damages.32
Churchill bowed to the advice. He signed the letter for Daniel Macmillan that Nicholl put in front of him six weeks before the D-Day landings. ‘I notice the comment which you make upon Clause 3 of the Memorandum of Agreement. It speaks for itself,’ he conceded, enclosing a cheque for £7,000.33 Even after this had been paid, Churchill’s bank balance now stood above £50,000, helped by a legacy of £20,000 from Sir Henry Strakosch, who had died in October 1943, and whose final will had also cancelled the debt owed by Churchill since his rescue in 1938.34
As D-Day came and went, the dispute between Churchill and the Harraps advanced towards resolution as slowly as the Allied troops across Normandy’s bocage, then Harraps blinked first. They offered to cancel Churchill’s old contract if he promised to sign a new one for his first post-war book. While visiting the invasion beaches, Churchill turned them down flat.
A month later, as American forces finally fanned out across northern France, Charles Nicholl allowed Churchill to give Macmillan notice. ‘It is incumbent upon me to put my affairs on a solid basis when I am free to do so. Please do not think that I am giving the notice because of other commitments as that is not the case,’ Churchill wrote, somewhat disingenuously, before flying off to Algiers.35 Daniel Macmillan gave way gracefully, but declined the suggestion that his firm should carry on handling the author’s early books.36
The battle to liberate Paris was in full swing and Churchill was visiting the Italian frontline, when the Harraps made another attempt to settle in the fourth week of August: they would accept an informal letter giving them ‘first refusal of any book on the War if such a book should be written by Mr Churchill, he being under no obligation to write any book and free if he did so to fix his own terms’.37 Henderson and Nicholl urged Churchill to accept the Harrap offer before dealing with Sir Newman Flower by a small ‘nuisance payment’.38
In the aftermath of the German surrender in Paris, Churchill was on the point of doing so when he changed his mind. He refused to give the Harraps
any special consideration in respect of any book that I may write after the War is over about the War period. This is what they have been after all along, and they have been using this contract all this time as a blackmailing lever. The conduct of this firm, and particularly of Mr George Harrap, has been in my opinion so at variance with the usual conditions prevailing between author and publisher, that I do not wish to have any further dealings of any kind with them.39
There was a slight softening of this line when Bracken met the Harraps for informal talks on 4 September. As the Allied troops marched into Brussels, Churchill allowed him to discuss giving Harrap first refusal on a book ‘exclusively, repeat exclusively, about the pre-War period’. Bracken returned with tentative agreement on ‘say a biography of Napoleon or Hitler’, but it was not enough for Churchill. Through Kathleen Hill, he relayed the fact that he had meant ‘a book exclusively about the pre-War period, that is to say the period between the last war and this war’.40 By the time the two parties met again that evening, Churchill’s advisers had understood their master’s intent and the meeting broke up without agreement despite another concession by the Harrap brothers.
Three days later, as V-2 rockets started to fall on London, a letter arrived at Downing Street from the younger Walter Harrap.
We feel that a misunderstanding has crept into this matter in a way that is very regrettable, and to end all further discussion are willing that the Agreement shall be terminated forthwith... We are taking this course also because we greatly appreciate what you have done for us all through your courageous leadership in the world’s greatest emergency, and it is distasteful to us, whether we are right or wrong, that we should be compelled to litigate the matter with a man to whom every one of us is indebted.41
As Churchill left to attend a second conference in Quebec, he dictated a magnanimous reply, declaring all misunderstandings overcome. A ‘top secret’ cable from Bracken pursued him, explaining that the letter could not be sent until the arbitration process had run its course, although it was a mere formality.42
Sir Alexander Korda was anxious for film negotiations to resume, but first a deal with Cassell had to be struck. On Churchill’s return from Moscow, where he had travelled from Quebec for discussions with Stalin about the future of Poland and the Balkans, he set out the changed background for his emissary, Lord Camrose:
Let me point out within what very small dimensions these difficulties have been confined. At the outside, Harraps could have claimed that one chapter out of the inter-wars book should deal with the opening of the present war. I am now entirely free from even this small tie... The way is therefore open for me to write a letter for you to give to Sir Newman Flower, as you so kindly offered to do, in which I will promise to give him the first refusal of any book I may write about this War, at a price to be mutually agreed. Failing agreement, I should be free to look elsewhere, or return to him in case such quest failed.43
Camrose provided a first draft of the letter for Sir Newman, which Churchill amended before expressing the hope that it could be dispatched straightaway. In fact, it was to take another seven drafts and the lengthy involvement of Camrose, Henderson, Nicholl, Mason and Kathleen Hill – not to mention Churchill himself – before two separate letters left, four weeks later. The main stumbling block was how to engineer Cassell’s option so that Churchill was not disadvantaged on the price. Churchill and Camrose discussed the problem together on 8 November, as recorded by Camrose:
Had another discussion with W.S.C. about his book. He was anxious to get it settled so that he could sign the agreement for the film rights of the English-Speaking Peoples. With money from these, the £20,000 left to him by Strakosch and the sales of royalties of his other books, he would be quite independent and would be able to leave to his family a sum which he considered was quite adequate for them.44
They met again two days later, but questions remained in Churchill’s mind. He wrote them down in a letter to Lord Camrose, while travelling to Paris for an Armistice Day visit:
Is no offer to come from Sir Newman Flower? Am I to state my price and, if he thinks it too high, is that to be the end of the transaction with him? Am I to be entitled to go elsewhere and take a lower price if I cannot get my own figure, or am I thereafter to be inhibited from writing any book on the subject except at the original price asked for by me and the highest price which Sir Newman Flower is prepared to offer? This would seem to give him the entire power to fix the price.45
Lord Camrose produced a new formula, but Henderson and Nicholl found it fell short of the necessary legal detail. They drafted their own fifth version, but both Kathleen Hill and Churchill thought it too legalistic in tone. Churchill produced a sixth version, which the lawyers rejected. ‘Mr Churchill may feel that we are being too pernickety,’ Nicholl admitted to Kathleen Hill, ‘but we really cannot advise him to write the letter in the form of the draft that you sent me this morning.’46
On the evening of 22 November, as French troops entered Strasbourg, Lord Camrose sat down with Churchill to hammer out a final version without lawyers present. After he had successfully warded off most of Churchill’s last-minute changes, the two letters left Downing Street on 24 November.47 ‘I shall be very pleased to give your firm a first refusal, at the lowest price I am prepared to accept, in any work I might write on the present War once it is over,’ Churchill’s first letter read, detailing this option’s mechanics over three pages.48 The second, much briefer letter recorded their understandings of 1940 about finishing A History of the English-Speaking Peoples; in place of extra chapters, Churchill was to write a 10,000-word epilogue within six months of leaving office.
Unaware of these letters, Albert Curtis Brown forwarded to Churchill the latest offer he had received for the memoirs, worth £250,000, to be added to the ‘dossier’: ‘It is a letter of such importance that perhaps the Prime Minister would like to see it,’ he told Kathleen Hill.49 Alive to the sensitivity of the sum, however, Churchill wanted the correspondence brought to an immediate end. ‘I do not want you to be under any misapprehension. The “dossier” to which you repeatedly refer has no existence,’ his amended draft for Mrs Hill read. ‘Would you please be good enough to let this correspondence end with the assurance that if Mr Churchill has need of your services at any time, he will not hesitate to ask you for them.’50
Once resumed, History’s film negotiations with MGM and Sir Alexander Korda proved more protracted than expected. MGM wanted control over radio and television rights as well as film and insisted that Churchill should share the cost of any US taxes. ‘Offer Sir A entire film rights. No limit to number, and, if necessary, ½ American tax,’ an emollient Churchill instructed his team. Nevertheless, there was still no detailed agreement in March 1945, when Churchill asked Bracken to ‘get the matter settled’.51 The following day, Sir Alexander called off his lawyers and substituted his own company in place of MGM as Churchill’s paymaster. Kathleen Hill asked Lloyds Bank to put its receipt for the £50,000 cheque in a sealed envelope for delivery to her personally.52 Churchill had begun the war with a large hole in his finances; as it drew to a close, his bank balance stood above £100,000.53
*1 Leslie Charles Graham-Dixon is referred to as Leslie throughout Martin Gilbert’s biography, Winston Spencer Churchill; however, his grandson assures the author that family, friends and colleagues called him Charles.
*2 Churchill initially chose the title Onwards to Victory from a list supplied by Charles Eade, but opted a few days later for the more prudent The End of the Beginning.
*3 Churchill had signed three separate contracts: one with Harrap & Co., another with the British ‘parts’ publisher George Newnes, and a third with US publishers Harcourt Brace, under American law.
*4 Provided by a young barrister, Kenneth Diplock (1907–85), who later became a distinguished law lord.
*5 Camrose and his brother acquired Cassell & Co. as part of Amalgamated Press in 1927, but sold Cassell’s books business to its managing director, Newman Flower, to help pay for their purchase.
*6 Camrose exercised this ‘priority’ through another of his newspapers, The Daily Telegraph, in 1946.