The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (488 page)

In February 1947, Mary married Christopher Soames, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, and assistant military attaché in Paris. The newlyweds took up residence on one of the Chartwell farms, while Churchill began work on his war memoirs there and at 27–28 Hyde Park Gate. By then, Mary later wrote, “Winston now had, if not a veritable kingdom, at least a principality.” Two years later, when Christopher Soames prevailed on his father-in-law to purchase a French-bred Grey, Churchill took up the sport of kings. The horse—Colonist II—proved a champion, winning the Salisbury and Lime Tree stakes in 1949 under Churchill’s colors (his father Randolph’s colors, pink and gray), and six more prestigious races by 1951, when he was put out to stud. Clementine, in a letter to their friend journalist Ronnie Tree, expressed her wonderment at “this queer new facet in Winston’s variegated life. Before he bought the horse (I can’t think why) he had hardly been on a race course in his life. I must say I don’t find it madly amusing.”
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That Churchill could indulge in such extravagances stemmed from the second and ultimately far more powerful financial stream that irrigated his fortunes: the Chartwell Trust, created with Lord Camrose’s help to hold title to Churchill’s personal papers and to shield him from the punishing taxes of the times. Clementine, Lord Cherwell (Prof Lindemann), and Brendan Bracken would serve as trustees, and would be charged with two paramount duties: to sell Churchill’s wartime memoirs, and to make Churchill’s earlier papers available to Randolph when the time came for him to write his father’s official biography, “but not until five or ten years after his death.” The trust, far more than selling Chartwell, made Churchill a rich man. The British film director and producer Alexander Korda (who also donated a full-fledged cinema to Chartwell) paid £50,000 ($200,000) for the film rights to
History of the English-Speaking Peoples,
a four-volume work that would not be published for another decade. The American publisher Henry Luce paid Churchill £12,000 ($50,000) for the American book rights to his wartime secret-sessions speeches to the House of Commons. Odhams Press ponied up £25,000 ($100,000) for the residual value of his pre-1940 book copyrights. The Second World War, Churchill’s war
memoir and history, proved to be a most powerful generator of wealth. Houghton Mifflin agreed to a $250,000 advance for the American book rights; Henry Luce’s
Life
magazine agreed to pay $1.15 million for the American serial rights. These were princely sums, the equivalent of a modern $12 million. The memoir was to run to six volumes.
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Churchill’s intent was not to write a history of the war but to explore the wartime Anglo-American relationship, and to refute the “rubbish” being written about him by Captain Butcher, Elliott Roosevelt, and left-leaning London newspapers. He oversaw the operation with his usual military precision, with himself as minister of war directing his battalions of literary troopers, who anointed themselves The Syndicate. Captain William Deakin DSO ran the tactical side of the campaign, supported by seven secretaries and typists and a host of current and former Churchill advisers, including Pug Ismay, Field Marshal Alexander, Air Marshal Park, Duncan Sandys, the Wizard Warrior R. V. Jones, Mountbatten’s former Chief of Staff General Sir Henry Pownell, and Emery Reves as agent, fixer, and arbiter of editorial content. The Prof checked statistics and translated arcane scientific data into plain English. Denis Kelly, a young barrister, was charged with cataloging Churchill’s papers, assisted in that task by Chips Gemmell, just eighteen. The volatile Randolph, who his sister Mary later wrote “could pick a quarrel with a chair,” was not part of the team. The key to the entire operation was an extraordinary agreement Churchill struck with the cabinet secretary Edward Bridges. Churchill asked for and Bridges approved that all wartime documents written by Churchill, and replies, be removed to Chartwell for Churchill’s use in preparing the memoirs. HMG would have final approval before publication. This arrangement meant that Churchill, with exclusive access, could cull the complete record at his leisure, whereas under British law the papers would be put off-limits to other historians for more than three decades. Kelly had much to catalog.
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An early Dictaphone was installed at Chartwell to aid the Great Man in the production process. Churchill gave the machine a test run one day after allowing all the typists the day off. But he failed to press the start button. When it failed to record anything, he banished it. Instead, he dictated his work to the typists, a total of almost one and a half million words over seven years. When critics later demeaned the effort as being carried off more by The Syndicate than by Churchill, Denis Kelly replied with words to the effect that a master chef cannot be expected to prepare each course for a grand banquet. The Syndicate indeed furnished Churchill with official documents, letters, telegrams, and the recollections of some of the principals, but Churchill dictated the narrative and assembled the entire work. The first volume,
The Gathering Storm,
was published in mid-1948,
and the final volume,
Triumph and Tragedy,
came out the United States in late 1953, and in Britain in April 1954. Though in places factually incorrect—by commission as well as omission—the memoir “is an invaluable record,” wrote parliamentarian and Churchill biographer Roy Jenkins, who also called it “the ultimate literary achievement of the outstanding author-politician of the twentieth century.” Churchill’s attitude toward the work, as recalled by Deakin, was “This is not history, this is my case.”
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He prepared his case not only at Chartwell and 27–28 Hyde Park Gate, but on the shores of Lake Léman in Switzerland (August 1946); in Marrakech (New Year’s 1947 and winter 1950–51); at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo (December 1948); at Lake Garda and Lake Carezza for a month; at Beaverbrook’s villa, La Capponcina, at Cap d’Ail (summer 1949); at Reid’s Hotel in Madeira (January 1950); and in Annecy and Venice (1951). He also took time to slip across to America in 1949 in order to promote his book, visit with Bernard Baruch and Harry Truman, and address the students at MIT. With draconian British currency restrictions in place during these years, Churchill and his party often traveled as the guests of his American publishers (who often paid Churchill’s expenses with French francs rather than British pounds) in order to avoid a breach of British currency law.

Churchill’s easel and paints always went along on these trips, but Clementine often did not, although she and Lord Moran hastened to Marrakech when Churchill came down with bronchitis during his 1947 visit there. He enjoyed his painting and basking and swimming on these jaunts, although in a letter to Clementine written from Marrakech before the onset of the bronchitis, he wrote of bleak weather and his fear of catching a cold, adding: “England and politics seem very distant here. I continue to be depressed about the future. I really do not see how our poor island is going to earn its living when there are so many difficulties around us.” He was back in the wilderness, but with two critical distinctions. He now led the opposition, whereas in the 1930s he had been in opposition to his own party. And he believed he would play a vital role as the future played out, if not in Downing Street, then in his beloved House of Commons. Yet, in response to a 1946 birthday toast raised by Bracken, Churchill, after expressing appreciation at having his friends and family by his side, added: “But we are the past.”
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The bronchitis crisis of early 1947 passed without effect, but the taps on Churchill’s shoulders grew more frequent, more varied, and more serious. His brother, Jack, six years his junior and long afflicted with a bad heart, died in February 1947. “As you get older these things seem less tragic,” Churchill told Moran. “In any case there is not much time left.” Jack was buried next to his parents in the little churchyard at St. Martin’s, in Bladon,
just a mile south of Blenheim Palace. Later that year, Churchill underwent a hernia operation, in preparation for which and on the advice of his surgeon, who feared a pulmonary crisis might occur while the Old Man was under anesthesia, he promised to quit cigars. He did not. He then promised the surgeon to reduce his alcohol intake by half. This, too, he failed to do, yet apparently to no ill effect. The surgery went well. By 1948, Moran believed Churchill’s arteries were hardening, and the Old Man by then complained regularly of feeling tightness in his shoulders. In August 1949, he lost feeling in his right arm and leg. Moran was summoned from London. He diagnosed a minor stroke, telling Churchill that he had not suffered a hemorrhage but that a “very small clot has blocked a very small artery.” A year later, Moran detected a “disturbance of cerebral circulation.” If hardening of the arteries is a sign of old age, Moran later wrote, “Winston was an old man before he began writing
The Second World War.
” Churchill believed he should not look too far forward; however much of a future he was to have, it could not be long. But he could always look back, to the days of honor. When asked by Moran’s wife which year of his life he’d want to live over, he replied, “Nineteen-forty every time. Every time.”
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A
s Churchill’s financial fortunes improved during the late 1940s, those of Britain continued their descent. “Victory,” Churchill told Moran in 1946, “has turned into sack cloth and ashes.” When the Attlee government sent John Maynard Keynes to the United States in 1946 to negotiate a $3.75 billion loan to finance reconstruction, the great economist secured his loan, but on hard terms. Interest was pegged at 2 percent over fifty years (with the proviso that London could skip annual payments in times of economic duress, which it did six times in the coming two decades). This was generous on America’s part. But Washington also insisted that London leave the gold standard and make the pound fully convertible in accordance with the Bretton Woods agreement.
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This proved a calamity when in 1949 the Attlee government—under continuing economic pressure, and despite months of denials that it would do so—devalued the pound by 30 percent, from $4.08 to $2.80.

A devalued currency results in that nation’s products becoming cheaper in foreign markets, but Britain had little to export, and very little that Americans wanted. Of Britain’s plight, Churchill told the house in 1950:
“Owing to their [the Attlee government’s] follies and wrongful action, a great part of all the loans and gifts we have received from abroad has been spent not upon the re-equipment of our industry, nor upon the import of basic foodstuffs: instead much of this precious aid was lavishly frittered away” on socialist programs. He excoriated Attlee for “[raising] our taxation until it is the highest in the world, and even stands higher today than in the worst years of the war.” Between the loans “and the unparalleled sacrifices exacted from the taxpayers” there was no reason why Britain should not have attained “solvency, security and utopian independence. This has been denied us not only by the incompetence and maladministration of the Socialist Government and their wild extravagance, but even more by the spirit of class hatred which they have spread throughout the land, and by the costly and wasteful nationalization of a fifth part of our industries.”
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That U.S. products were made more expensive in Britain by the pound’s devaluation was of little concern in America: Americans were buying American—GM, Studebaker, Ford, Packard, and Chrysler automobiles, and electric clothes dryers, radios, and televisions. American children rode bright-red Schwinn bicycles, sales of which—as with all American products—benefited from tariffs slapped on European imports. Now that Parker Pen could make pens instead of bomb fuses, it rolled out the Parker “51” pen—the latest in writing tools—which sold out at Gimbels in New York. Housewives who had been forced through war rationing to buy the Hormel company’s Spam—“the taste tickler”—kept buying it. After all, it was easy to prepare as a suitable and delicious main course for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
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In America, consumption was now a way of life; in Britain, consumption was still a disease that took off old people. Other than shipping their best scotch whisky and linen to America, Britons were not exporting much, not producing much, and not buying much, including British-made Fords or even squat and cheap little Morris Minors. Daimler, Austin, Rolls-Royce, and Humber still produced machines that were virtually handcrafted (Churchill always preferred a Humber), but most Britons could not afford them, and little else for that matter. Ford U.S.A. produced more than 1.1 million motor cars in 1949; Morris Minor produced only 250,000
between
1948 and 1953. Londoners did not experience traffic jams because few Londoners owned automobiles, and those who did found petrol to be in short supply and expensive. Britons stayed home and, as they had for decades, found their entertainment via gramophones and little Bakelite wireless sets.

Americans went on a spending spree while Britons banked their sallow coal fires and pulled on another sweater. Most could not even commiserate over the telephone: fewer than 10 percent of British homes contained one.