Chapter One
TO WRITE OR NOT TO WRITE?
Had churchill won the election of 1945, he would probably not have
written his memoirs-certainly not in the form they did take. A
further spell in office for such an exhausted man, assuming he
survived, would have sapped his energy and dulled his appetite for
any major writing project. But while electoral defeat made possible
literary triumphs, Churchill did not retire from politics and
statecraft. Such was the scale of his defeat in 1945 that he burned
for political vindication, and the story of The Second World War is
inextricably bound up with his zeal to keep on making history. Nor,
despite expectations, did he embark straightaway on the war memoirs.
He was to take the plunge only when the conditions were right, and
they took time to establish. It was not until the spring of 1946
that Churchill resolved the conundrum: to write or not to write.
Between 1923 and 1931, Churchill had published six bulky and
remunerative volumes on the First World War, entitled The World
Crisis, which A. J. Balfour, the former Prime Minister, described as
“Winston’s brilliant Autobiography, disguised as a history of the
universe.” It seemed certain that another set of memoirs would
follow the conflict of 1939-1945, and he made many comments during
the war to this effect. One was recorded by his private secretary
Jock Colville-a diarist with Boswellian aspirations-as Churchill
mused expansively over brandy at Chequers in December 1940. He said
that after the war he had no wish to wage a party struggle against
the Labour leaders who were now serving so well in the coalition.
“He would retire to Chartwell and write a book on the war, which he
had already mapped out in his mind chapter by chapter. This was the
moment for him; he was determined not to prolong his career into the
period of reconstruction.”
In November 1941, Churchill had a dinner conversation with William
Berry, Lord Camrose-a close friend and also owner of the Daily
Telegraph and Morning Post. According to Camrose, Churchill said
that his intention was to retire immediately after England had
“turned the corner,” by which Camrose understood him to mean once
victory had been achieved. He added that he was determined not to
repeat the “ghastly error” made by David Lloyd George after his war
premiership of 1916-1918, carrying on in office till humiliatingly
pulled down in 1922. “While he did not say so,” Camrose noted, “I am
sure he also had in mind that he would make provision for his
family. To do this he would have to be able to write.”
Publishers had long been salivating about a new set of Churchill war
memoirs. As early as 28 September 1939, Thornton Butterworth, who
published The World Crisis, reminded Churchill that “although we are
only in the early days of the war, there must come a time when
authors will be able to lay down their arms and take up their pens
once more.” Butterworth hoped that Churchill would then write the
history of the second “World Crisis” and entrust it to the
publishers of the first World Crisis. He received only a curt
acknowledgment from Churchill’s secretary at the Admiralty. The
following summer, Prime Minister Churchill was more interested by a
proposal from Lord Southwood of Odhams Press for a 000 deal for
four volumes. But with the Battle of Britain about to break, he
scribbled on 2 August 1940, “I do not feel able to give this
consideration yet.” The following spring, the literary agency Curtis
Brown, who had represented him for some years, constructed a bigger
package involving Odhams and American publishers such as Houghton
Mifflin, amounting to 000. From this point onward, such
proposals received a standard reply from Kathleen Hill, Churchill’s
personal secretary, stating that he would make no decision about his
war memoirs while in office.
After the 1945 election, however, the offers started flooding in.
King Features, one of the world’s leading newspaper syndicates,
reminded him of their interest via a telegram sent at 6:36 P.M. on
26 July, before Churchill had even gone to the Palace to resign.
That night, Emery Reves, who had handled foreign rights for many of
Churchill’s prewar articles, sent urgent telegrams from New York
assuring Churchill that he could arrange the best possible terms for
the memoirs and articles: “Could come [to] London for negotiations
anytime.” Curtis Brown sent equally importunate letters pressing
their services. But Churchill was not to be tempted. The standard
reply from Hill stated that Churchill was “not undertaking any
literary work at the present time.”
There were several reasons for Churchill’s coyness. Having lost job,
home, and reason for living in a matter of hours, he needed time to
recover. In August 1945, the accumulated exhaustion of five years
took hold. Also important was his tax status. On legal advice,
Churchill had officially ceased to exercise his “professional
vocation” as an author on 3 September 1939-the day he became First
Lord of the Admiralty. Although his wartime speeches were published
in six volumes between 1941 and 1946, all the editorial work was
done by a journalist. Churchill was able to claim that he had not
resumed his profession as an author. Thanks to this tax loophole,
the substantial income earned by the war speeches was not subject to
income tax at the punitive wartime rates. Any return to writing,
even a single article, could jeopardize that favorable status, both
in the present and retrospectively.
In secret, Churchill had already half promised any war memoirs to
the London publishers Cassell and Company. On 24 November 1944,
Churchill wrote to Sir Newman Flower, the head of Cassell’s-who in
the 1930s had published his four volumes on the first Duke of
Marlborough-stating that “I shall be very pleased to give your firm
a first refusal, at the lowest price I am prepared to accept, of
publishing rights in serial and book form … in any work I may
write on the present War after it is over.” This was hardly a firm
commitment. Churchill made clear, “I undertake no obligation to
write anything,” and, even if he did, “the lowest price I am
prepared to accept” gave him plenty of room to refuse an
unattractive offer.
In the weeks after the election, Churchill’s intentions about the
war memoirs remained unclear. According to Sir Edward Bridges, the
Cabinet Secretary, on 28 July, Churchill “said he was not sure
whether he would write his memoirs of the present war.” He “thought
he would do so but the work would not be completed for four or five
years.” On 7 August, Lord Camrose noted: “At the moment, he has
decided that he will not publish his account of the war direction in
his lifetime.” And on 31 August, Churchill told Charles Eade, the
editor of his war speeches, that he had received an offer of
,000 ($1 million) from America for the memoirs and was confident
he could write them in a year. But his present idea was that they
should not be sold and published until some ten years after his
death. Laughing, he said that he would quite like to have ,000,
but “in fact, I should get only 250,000 sixpences.” Given current
rates of income tax and surtax, Churchill faced the prospect of
paying nineteen shillings and six pence in every pound (97.5
percent) of his literary earnings to the government. He told Eade,
in a quip he had been using for half a century, “I agree with Dr.
Johnson that only a block-head writes except for money.”
Churchill’s mood that summer was often very bleak. He complained to
his doctor of depression and insomnia: “I go to bed at twelve
o’clock. There is nothing to sit up for.” He would wake at four, his
mind full of “futile speculations,” unless he took another sleeping
tablet. “It would have been better to have been killed in an
aeroplane, or to have died like Roosevelt,” he said. Nor was family
life much consolation. At the end of August, Mary Churchill received
a poignant letter from her mother, written among the dustcovers and
mildew of Chartwell: “I cannot explain how it is but in our misery
we seem, instead of clinging to each other, to be always having
scenes. I’m sure it’s all my fault, but I’m finding life more than I
can bear. He is so unhappy & that makes him very difficult.” Winston
was totally undomesticated. He had little understanding of the
difficulties of daily life outside the official cocoon, complaining
about the lack of meat, staff, and so on. For her part, Clementine
was highly strung and needed frequent rests from her husband’s
emotional and practical demands. In a few days, she told Mary, “we
shan’t have a car. We are being lent one now. We are learning how
rough & stony the World is.”
The only ray of light was that Churchill spent most of September on
vacation in Italy, staying in villas placed at his disposal by
Field-Marshal Sir Harold Alexander and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
On 5 September he wrote to his wife, “I feel a great sense of relief
which grows steadily, others having to face the hideous problems of
the aftermath.” Alluding to her comment on Black Thursday, he now
struck a more positive note: “It may all indeed be ‘a blessing in
disguise.'”
At Lake Como, between painting fifteen pictures, he regaled his
companions with recollections of 1940 and 1941, such as the “magic
carpet” of Dunkirk and his first wartime meeting with Roosevelt, off
Newfoundland. These had been brought to mind by his blue-bound
minutes and telegrams from the war, which he had read avidly
throughout the flight from England. He seemed scarcely to take his
eyes off the pages, except when rekindling his cigar. “They are
mine,” he told Moran. “I can publish them.” But that did not mean he
would. On 2 September, he said that he wasn’t in the mood for
writing and, echoing his remarks to Charles Eade, added that “I
shan’t write while the Government takes all you earn. Dr. Johnson
said that only a fool wrote when he wasn’t paid for writing.” He
took the same line with the International News Service, whose
European manager, J. Kingsbury Smith, pursued Churchill throughout
his vacation, begging for even five minutes face-to-face. “I never
thought it would be so difficult to catch up with a gentleman to
whom I was authorized to offer one million dollars,” he said. Smith
finally cornered Churchill in the lobby of the Hotel de Paris in
Monte Carlo on 1 October, only to be told it was hardly worth being
an author if nineteen and sixpence in the pound went to the
government.
back in england, Churchill found the domestic situation much
improved. Thanks to Clementine, the family’s new home at 28 Hyde
Park Gate was ready, and the renovation of Chartwell was under way.
Opportunities were also opening up to make money. Life magazine, the
great American picture weekly, was one of his suitors for the war
memoirs, and it proposed a feature article about Churchill’s
paintings. Life’s photographers paid several long visits to
Chartwell, capturing Churchill, the house, and his studio, and their
labors provided the magazine’s cover story on 7 January 1946, an
eight-page article with color reproductions of eighteen paintings,
mostly from his 1945 trips to France and Italy. Apart from posing
and proofreading, Churchill did nothing on behalf of the article,
thereby preserving his tax status. In return, $20,000 (00) was
deposited in his bank account in November.
Another money-spinning opportunity emerged in October 1945, again
without prejudice to Churchill’s tax position. On 17 October,
Clement Attlee told Churchill that the Labour Cabinet had decided to
lift the ban on disclosing the proceedings of the secret sessions
held by the Commons during wartime. In most cases, secrecy had been
imposed to avoid giving the Luftwaffe notice of the dates and times
of future sittings, but Churchill had delivered five major secret
speeches during the war and immediately approached Life, which
offered $50,000 to publish them-only “a pig in a poke,” remarked
Life’s owner, Henry Luce, “to keep a position in the meat market.”
They would be “worth the space plus the money if, in some sense,
Churchill becomes ‘our author.'” On 20 December, Churchill saw
Charles Eade to discuss editing the speeches as another book
published by Cassell’s. He told Eade that the last volume of his war
speeches had brought in 00 and reckoned that the secret session
speeches should make more, perhaps 00.
Life had intended to use three of the speeches, but in the end
printed only two (at no reduction in fee), for fear of saturating
the market for Churchilliana. It published the speech of 23 April
1942, offering a tour d’horizon of the global war, in its issue of
28 January 1946, followed on 4 February by the address of 10
December 1942 about France and the North African landings. Churchill
had submitted the texts for official approval, and Sir Edward
Bridges, the Cabinet Secretary, asked him to omit three unflattering
pages about Charles de Gaulle, currently President of France, from
the second speech. It was, however, the April 1942 speech, from
which Bridges had requested no cuts, that caused a major fuss.
The British and Australian press seized on Churchill’s (brief)
references to the surrender of Singapore in February 1942.
Particularly inflammatory were his comments that “the 100,000
defenders of Singapore surrendered to 30,000 Japanese after five or
six days of confused but not very severe fighting” and that “it does
not seem that there was very much bloodshed.” In Australia and
Britain there were calls for an official inquiry into the debacle in
the Far East in 1941-1942, but the British government had no desire
to open this can of worms. A public postmortem into the Malayan
campaign could set a dangerous precedent, Attlee told Ben Chifley,
the Australian Prime Minister, on 31 January. If Singapore, then why
not “other disasters such as Tobruk, Crete and Hong Kong”? The
“strong feelings aroused might well be inimical to Commonwealth
solidarity.” Chifley entirely agreed and followed Attlee’s public
line: what mattered was to learn lessons rather than apportion
blame. This could best be done by publishing the final dispatches of
the commanders involved, which Whitehall was doing with deliberate
slowness, and by commissioning official histories of the campaigns.
To the relief of Attlee and Chifley, the furor in both countries
soon died down.
There were other problems, however. Aware that he could be
criticized for the lucrative deal, Churchill had arranged with Life
to give the texts gratis to all British newspapers for simultaneous
publication. But Life’s issue of 28 January 1946 hit the newsstands
a few days before the cover date, and reports of the speech appeared
in the British press on the twenty-fifth, long before editors had
received the text
(Continues…)
Random House
Copyright © 2005
David Reynolds
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-45743-7
Excerpted from In Command of History
by David Reynolds
Copyright © 2005 by David Reynolds.
Excerpted by permission.
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