‘These filthy money matters are the curse of my life and my only worry,” the 24-year-old Winston Churchill complained to his mother in 1898. Money troubles dogged Churchill throughout his life, as David Lough reveals in “No More Champagne,” his fascinating study of Churchill’s finances. On several occasions, the author shows, Churchill was “bailed out” by friends with gifts or loans when his debts threatened to push him into bankruptcy.
A month after becoming prime minister in 1940, Churchill ran out of money to pay his household bills, his taxes and the interest on his large overdraft. His personal assistant, Brendan Bracken, approached Sir Henry Strakosch, an Austrian-born banker who supported Churchill’s anti-Nazi stance. Strakosch promptly wrote out a check for £5,000, which the author estimates to be equivalent to $250,000 today. (Each page includes a helpful multiplier for calculating the rough modern equivalent of financial figures quoted in the book.) “The amount reached Churchill’s account on 21 June,” Mr. Lough writes. “Thus fortified, he paid a clutch of overdue bills from shirt-makers, watch-repairers and wine merchants before he turned his attention back to the war.”
No More Champagne
By David Lough
Picador, 532 pages, $32
Strakosch had also had to rescue him two years before, in the same week Hitler’s troops marched into Austria and Churchill gave an impassioned speech to Parliament warning that Britain “would soon have to choose between resisting Hitler’s campaign of aggression or submitting to it.” On that occasion, Mr. Lough reveals, Strakosch bought Churchill’s entire portfolio of shares, which had been plunging in value, at their original price of £18,000 (equivalent to $1.2 million today), even though their value had fallen precipitously in the market’s panic at the impending war. He never asked for the money back.