No More Champagne by David Lough

Author:David Lough [Lough, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784081805
Publisher: Head of Zeus

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,

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