March 7, 2015

Finest Hour 158, Spring 2013

Page 10

Q: In our next Churchill novel, our heroine reporter places a transatlantic call from Berlin to William Randolph Hearst to send her $5000 care of American Express in Munich. Aside from that being too easy, we want to add more suspense. So…the call to America doesn’t go through and an increasingly desperate Mattie calls her godfather, Winston Churchill. Now $5000 or so was real money in those days, so:

(a) Would Churchill have had ready access to that kind of money, so his bank could wire it to American Express the same day? And (b) If not, which of his many wealthy friends would he call to help out his goddaughter in distress?
—MICHAEL MCMENAMIN, CLEVELAND

A: According to the “Currency” chapter in our new Churchill Companion, the pound had risen from $3.66 in 1920 to $4.80 in 1930, thanks to the return of the Gold Standard, and stayed there for much of the Thirties, despite Britain going off gold in 1931. So $5000 would have been equivalent to £1042 or about a thousand guineas.

Now that was real money, all right, but Churchill often made that much for an article or two—e.g., the Daily Mail paid him £500 or about $2500 for his traffic accident story in 1932. So he would probably have been able to lay hands on a stray thousand in an emergency. His bank was Lloyd’s Bank Ltd. in Pall Mall.

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However, if you want him to ask a friend, he probably would have gone to Brendan Bracken, who was already wealthy and handily surviving the Depression, thanks to his success with the Financial Times. It might be a little early for Sir Henry Strakosch, who assumed management of Churchill’s portfolio, saving Chartwell, in the late Thirties. And Churchill was always much closer to Bracken. So if it were us, we would go with the “Irish Mountebank.”

Mr. McMenamin replies: Thanks very much. I wanted a scene where he asks someone for money. Brendan Bracken is perfect.

Q: Thank you for the great website where I have found so much interesting material, especially “Leading Churchill Myths.” I have a question about a possible myth: There’s been a popular rumor circulating in China recently about Churchill in World War II.

It is said that a resident’s house was located at the site of a planned military airport and he refused to move. The airport couldn’t be built without the government condemning the property for defense purposes. But Mr. Churchill replied to the effect that the country was fighting the Germans so that one’s legal property may not be infringed, saying, “If we demolish his home, then why do we fight?”

I can’t find the source and I don’t think it is true, but it is so popular in China that I really want to know whether it’s real.
—SHENG ZHONG, BEIJING

A: We could not track that remark or anything like it in the =Churchill Archive, nor have we ever run across such a situation in our readings and researches. It sounds suspiciously like the false quote about Churchill refusing to cut a budget for the arts, in which he supposedly asks, “What are we fighting for?” (He supported the arts, but he never said those particular words.)

In this case he might likely have been sympathetic to the homeowner if such a situation was ever brought to his attention, but we can find no proof of the incident.

Sheng replies: Thank you so much for the quick reply which totally makes things clear. There seem to be a lot of myths or rumors in China, about especially foreign celebrities. I will propagate the truth as extensively as I can.