Author pops cork on poor man, rich man Winston Churchill

SIR WINSTON Churchill may well have been the man who saved the world from the Nazis, but he was hopeless with money. Prime minister of Britain during their gravest challenge, World War II, he was what you might call an “extravagant personality”.

His love of champagne was legendary, and he smoked an estimated quarter of a million cigars in his lifetime.

David Lough was in Cape Town recently to talk about his book NoMoreChampagne. His impression is that Churchill was a flawed, if remarkable, man, and (as a financial man) says “much can be told about a person from the way he handles his money”.

What his research tells us is that Churchill was a huge risk-taker and also an incurable optimist, fully confident of his own capabilities.

He survived (with several bail-outs from family trust funds and secret admirers) many money crises to fight another day – and these character traits, of being unafraid to act boldly, and retain his nerve, were critical in defeating Hitler.

Born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace, home of his direct ancestors the Dukes of Marlborough, Churchill lived in great privilege his whole life.

His father, Lord Randolph, was an eccentric gambler and adulterer, as was his lovely American mother, Jenny Jerome (who claimed that she had had “200 lovers” and later married two more husbands as young or younger than her sons).

Winston, the elder of two brothers, inherited his parents’ extravagance with money but remained prurient with women.

Though he had several close women friends, among them Lady Violet Bonham Carter (grandmother of actress Helena), an extensive search of his papers reveals disappointingly little in the way of an affair, claims Lough, who suggests “he poured all his energies into his writing and his political work.”

The Marlborough family’s large spending habits had always given trouble. Blenheim Palace was built for John Churchill in the early 1700s as an extravagant thank you present by a “grateful nation” after he’d thrashed the French. Gratitude thinned dramatically when the costs rose to an unprecedented £400 000 – in those days a king’s ransom.

When Randolph Churchill died aged 45, Winston, aged 20, had some “expectations” but little actual cash. Then the Boer War changed the course his life.

He came to South Africa as the highest-paid war correspondent ever, after an earlier career in the army. Years later, he summed up this pivotal event: “If I had not been caught, I would not have escaped, and my emprisonment (sic) and escape provided me with enough materials for lectures and a book which brought me in enough money to get into parliament in 1900.”

It also taught him a great appreciation of Boer soldiers and their marksmanship, and particularly generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, with whom he later forged close, admiring relationships.

It’s startling to note that, as the V-2 rockets were pounding London, Churchill was locked in mortal combat with his tax wizards, trying to figure out how to keep him solvent. Gifts from the mining magnate Sir Henry Strakosch in 1938 and 1940 had saved him from financial disaster, troublingly close to the moment that Churchill took over the nation’s nervous reins.

The book’s title is somewhat ironical: in a single two-month period (April and May 1949), his household records “the consumption of 454 bottles (of champagne), plus 311 bottles of wine, 58 bottles of brandy, 56 of whisky, 58 of sherry and 69 of port”. Lough’s book recognises that there are some things about Churchill’s financial affairs that today would not bear close scrutiny.

After the war, the young Queen Elizabeth offered him the Dukedom of London, which he declined, saying coyly that such a title was meaningless unless it was accompanied by large estates (a hint not taken). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, remarking to Clementine, his wife: “tax-free!”.

This is a detailed, though somewhat dry, account of Churchill’s capacity to make huge sums of money, mainly through his prolific writing, and to spend it equally ferociously. No more champagne? Not bloody likely.

Other recommended works on Churchill include Boris Johnson’s lively TheChurchillFactor, and the biography by former UK home secretary Lord Roy Jenkins. – Beverley Roos-Muller