>> david, thank you very much and a very good afternoon. ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the last session of today, one that i know will end the first day on a high. i am sure you, as i, marvel at the continuing volume of books about winston churchill that emerge year after year. what more could there be to say now, even about winston churchill, we might ask? david lough has managed not only to say new things but to add great detail and provide a fascinating exposition of churchill's finances, a topic as you know, and as david demonstrates, that had its peaks and indeed its troughs, much like churchill's own political career. david's book is thorough and engaging and offers new churchillian epithets. one of my favorites taken from his volume sees churchill seeking new funds for yet another expenditure and lamenting, had i not been so foolish as to pay a lot of bills, i should've had the money available right now. [laughter] >> david lough is well qualified to write on this topic, a former member of the london stock exchange, a fellow of the chartered securities institute, and with a career in private banking. now in semi-retirement, the world of finance's loss is the world of churchill's gain. ladies and gentlemen, david lough. [applause] mr. lough: thank you very much, rob, and thank you to the international churchill society, as i must learn to call it again, for inviting me here this afternoon. there has been a lot of talk about this being the final session, so those of you who have come to it, thank you very much. i think we will keep it quite light, it being the final session. we have been here a long time today already. fortunately, this is a subject that i think has to be taken quite lightly. although i guess churchill never took it that lightly himself. he said he hated -- money was the only thing that worried him in life. he hated business affairs. and if you read -- speaking for themselves -- the collection of his letters to clementine, money is a worry throughout his life, almost up to the end, when he -- when it probably did not need to be, but it was. it was never quite so that as my title "no more champagne" might imply. it was of course a publishers title. i want to reassure you, i don't think there was ever no more champagne literally in churchill's life. [laughter] lough -- mr. lough: it did -- in march of 1938, when his financial affairs were about to implode, he was reduced to saying, no more champagne is to be served to guests. [laughter] mr. lough: but he reserved for himself one imperial pint a day. i don't know whether you voted , yourexit, start -- sir are plotting. -- you are applauding. one of the first things that has happened since the surprising brexit vote is that they have announced they will bring back the imperial pint bottle of champagne. now -- [applause] mr. lough: to business -- to business, as churchill would reluctantly say. david gave me this title, churchill's financial team. i suppose as an englishman, i am always thinking of teams in units of 11. because these games that we pretend as englishman to have invented and given the world, like cricket and hockey and soccer, we work in units of 11. but somehow, i thought 11 was not a sufficiently churchillian size of team. so i thought maybe i should look more at american football as an example. because when i watch it on my visits over here, i'm always amazed by the number of players on the sidelines waiting to come in. and then when i did a little tiny bit of research, i found that in fact american football teams work in units of 11. did you know -- is that right? you very helpfully have an offense and a defense and, i believe, even a specialist kickers teams. are they 11 as well? so it is 33. is that right? is it 33 people in total? 53. i don't have time for 53. [laughter] mr. lough: i thought what i would do is borrow more from american football than soccer, which we call football, and i particularly like the four quarters. i'm going to take the four quarters, and i'm going to highlight a few players in each quarter. i am also going to give you -- and this is american football -- i am going to give you a bit of half-time entertainment. so first quarter. this is a defensive line up. let me tell you. it will not have escaped your attention that all the players i am highlighting in this quarter , which roughly goes from birth, 1874, up to 1900, 35 years old -- they are all women. because it was to women that churchill looked for support in the first -- while he was a student. for financial support, he had to, because he was being caps on a very tight leash by his father at the time. partly because his father had very little money until the final years, partly because his father thought he was hopeless with money, his son was hopeless. his father would not even give him an allowance at sandhurst. he appeals to the women in his letters for help, and they nearly always pay out. first, on your left is mrs. everest, his nanny, from whom he was a reasonably frequent borrower. she complained that he didn't always acknowledge the loans in writing and was often late with repaying them. on your right is his father's sister, aunt cornelia, lady winborn. aunt cornelia had the good sense to marry money. she married into the guest family, which in british terms is a a great iron and steel family. they had lots of money. aunt cornelia was very reliable. if young winston wrote her a letter, she would write back and she would always enclose a nice sum of money with that letter. in fact, she went on later in life to give him money for his parliamentary expenses. and in 1921, when he bought a rolls-royce and it didn't really meet expectations, she bought it back. she took it off him three months after he bought it at only a 10% discount off of list price. i could have added others. i could have added the woman who signed herself the deputy mother, lady wilson, who always enclosed two pounds. that is $300 today, with every letter she wrote him. i could have included aunt clara. probably not the dowager duchess of marlborough, who tended to take her son's side and administer stern lectures to winston. but pride of place in this quarter has to go to the woman in the middle, jennie jerome, about whom we have been hearing. and i endorse everything that was said earlier. she was a star. she was not necessarily a financial role model, it has to be said. rather the reverse. she is highly extravagant, has no real sense of money. she has a sense of entitlement to the best. when lordly days randolph was still alive, she felt she had to give her son winston a bit of a scolding when he asked for money, but then she normally came up with the goods. she became really important after her husband's death. he left his two sons no formal allowance. he left his money in trust with his wife. she didn't really understand what a trust was and the difference in the income calendar. she did allow winston 500 pounds -- the equivalent of about $50,000 or $60,000 -- a year allowance. she used to, for the first couple of years after her husband died, regularly coached him that he had to live within his means. all the while, she was spending the capital from the trust. eventually, the lawyers rumbled, she had to write to winston to say, i'm terribly sorry, please sign here. from then on, her lectures about sticking within his means dried up. she didn't lecture him anymore. they shared their money problems. he reacted to these financial problems by going out and doubling up as a journalist, writing from afghanistan and sudan, as well as a soldier. i closed it too much. and she acted as his agent back at home. she sold his articles, sold his first books, did a great pr campaign for him, for his first efforts. she was absolutely vital to his early steps. it was only later that the tide turned, when she got into trouble with her second marriage and she became dependent on him. he and jack had spent a lot of time sorting out her affairs in marriage, and then at her death, when she died not only without a will but owing lots of money to lots of people. so it was a bit of a mixture. now, i want to check the second slide coming up. it is not. no? can anybody help me in the back? it's on my screen but it's not up on your screen. [inaudible] ok, when we get it up, in the middle, it is going to be -- . no, back one. too much. there we go. ok. in the middle is the man who looked after the -- in today's money, about $1.25 million that churchill had saved by 1900, by the end of his lecture tours after the bohr war. you heard about his boer war escape, made him an international star. he not only wrote books but lectured in the u.k. and over here, and at the end of the tour he had made something like $1.25 million, and he needed it looked after. enter this guy in the middle, sir ernest cassel. an immigrant from europe. he had come over in about 1870. he had started as a cotton trader in liverpool. he quickly moved to london as a banker, and he over the course of about 20 years, he supplanted the rothschilds in leadership in the city of london. he looked after -- i use the word in quotation marks, he "looked after" the prince of edward vii and his coterie, he looked after their financial affairs. his next-door neighbor was the dowager judges -- duchess of marlborough, so he became friends with winston churchill's parents and he had a soft spot for young winston. particularly after his father's death. he offered to manage winston 's savings for nothing, and winston thought he did it very well. and then he invited winston out to the opening of the dam he financed in egypt. he invited him to holidays in his swiss chalet and when i say that, don't think of some modest little thing, it was huge. he equips the bolton street library for churchill. , so we him 500 pounds are talking sort of $75,000, in cash on his wedding. and he -- and when winston churchill went to fight in the front in 1915 and went on the pay,y miserly army majors and was worried about the finances at home, sir castle said, don't worry, i give you unlimited credit. his final financial service to winston churchill was in 1920, when churchill overextended theelf, found himself contractual buyer of two homes in london when he only meant to he tried to put out his sale to the duke of wellington's son. he expected to be able to get out of it, but actually the duke hey,llington's son said, you know, we have a contract, and i will blacken your name if you try to get out of it. castle wrote out a check and covered it. and conveniently died two months later and his executors never asked for the money back. now as he spent his savings in the first decade of the 20th century, his bankers became more important because they had to lend to him. his bankers were cox and co., who generally banked the british army officers. churchill never changed his bank in the whole of his life. the bank changed a bit because they were taken over by lloyds bank. it gave him a fair number of nightmares, and his bank managers had some pretty worried evenings and nights, i suspect, but lloyds never lost a single pound in lending to him in the end. and his relationship manager, as we would call him today, the first 20 years or so -- i couldn't find a picture of him, burnout,a shame -- w h but he always signed himself w.h. he was churchill's relationship manager for 20 years. we know quite a bit about the relationship because his son donated his papers, both official and the notes he took up their meetings, to churchill, and it deposited into the churchill archive center. and for a boring banker and would be historian like me, they are a dream, these papers. and you can see them. he took careful notes. he was a fellow mason, gave him a certain affinity with winston, and he was endlessly patient. and he always had faith and -- faith in churchill as a customer. whenever he missed loan repayments, deadlines, or failed to bring his overdraft back under the policy limit, bernard tried to make sure that within the bank's hierarchy, he was given another chance. and on the few dates that he would always try to sort him out with insurance companies. right, i'm soe picture,gave me the because i would not have been able to convey the full picture of the lady on the right. does anybody know who she is? londonderry,s of who by her 1862 will, left her own property in ireland -- not her husband's, her own property and like many women of aristocratic husbands, she was not interested in leaving it to the oldest son because the oldest son and his children were always going to be looked after by the husband. a mother is worried about the younger children. so, she left the estate to the children of her younger children. ok? then, she knew she had three grandsons at least. and she had -- there were going ,o be sons from her daughter who married the seventh duke of marlborough. there, i suppose, is the clue. but the estate had to say together, so it was to go in order of male seniority. now the amazing thing is that the three grandsons each died childless. and the last of them died in a train crash in 1921 on a strip of rail, a single track of rail in north wales. two trains collided and on them was the last of her grandsons. he was a director of the rail way company, so don't feel too sorry for him. so, there was the extremely remote chance that this happened, but the estate fell to the children of her daughter, and of course, that would have been the eldest, the second son. because the first was looked after. it would have gone to lord randolph churchill if he had been alive, but he had by then died. so it fell into the hot, sticky hands of winston churchill. and after death duties in ireland, it was still worth today's equivalent of about $5 million. very welcome it was, too. i remember that clement in -- clementine said day after this accident, she wrote to winston, her husband, and said, i cannot describe the blessed feeling of relief that we need never, never be worried about money again. and then she said in brackets -- except through our own fault, of course. and this is what happens. the spending goes out. that is when they buy the rolls-royce. she takes a lady's maid full-time who travels with her. his stock trading goes up, and when i say trading, it is not investment. and the gambling goes up. big losses in 1923. and so, that was three times budget it ran to in the end, and actually by 1925, when winston becomes chancellor of the exchequer, most of the inheritance is gone, four years later. and this is where we have a little pause while he is chancellor of the exchequer , because he has to behave pretty well. so this is the halftime entertainment with a surprising entertainer. now the clue, for those of you who may be wondering -- i thought i would call it skating on thin ice. this is the name of the entertainment, your halftime entertainment. skating on thin ice. and the clue is in the picture. that building is called somerset house. and it was -- no longer is -- but it was the headquarters of her majesty's inland revenue, which is our equivalent of the internal revenue service, the irs. and so, my halftime entertainer is in fact no less than the chairman of the inland revenue, because when winston became chancellor of the exchequer -- our secretary of the treasury -- in 1925, responsible for tax policy and tax collection, he thought first of all, i have got to sell up all my shares. i better pay down my debts. there should be a surplus. i think there is going to be a surplus. and i am just going to behave financially very responsibly when i'm chancellor. unfortunately, when he sold the shares, there was not a surplus. he was left with a deficit. -- he as much of the bank had an overdraft of the maximum size the bank would allow him to have. and he had about today's equivalent of $500,000 of tax still to pay, and he was the chancellor, but he had no money to pay it with. so what he did was summon the chairman of the inland revenue and say, houston, we have a problem, in as many words, and have you got any suggestions? and the chairman of the inland revenue is not an experienced civil servant. he is near the end of his career. gentler, i to him, think this better stop here and now. he has a high flyer with his career ahead of him. he says, chancellor, i understand the problem. let me talk to my senior people and see what we can do. and a week later, he comes back on an unofficial -- you know, his own notepaper in his own hand -- and he says, we found an anomaly. if you retire as an author, your author's earnings that are as yet unpaid and untaxed, you will be able to retire income, capital receipts, capital receipts are untaxed, and this should halve your tax bill. and churchill says, thank you very much. sounds fine. and he writes the necessary letter, and his tax bill is halved. so that is all fine, except by the following year, 1926, he is still chancellor. he is paid quite well as chancellor, but it's not enough. the bills from travels are still coming in. he realizes he has got to start writing again. and he gets the prime minister's permission to write the next volume of "the royal crisis." and he says, oh, i wonder if there is a problem. -- hetart writing now only retired a year ago -- maybe they will deem my retirement never to have taken place and i will have to pay the tax bill, which i can't afford to do. so he summons the chairman of the inland revenue again and says, you remember you helped me to retire a year ago? i now need you to help me unre tire. the guy says, i will talk to my senior people. he comes back and says, if you write me a letter like this, it should be ok. and churchill writes the letter. and it was ok. that is my halftime entertainment. now third-quarter, this is a bit busier this quarter. more people on the field, but churchill is very much in charge. you know, he did it his way and top left is bernard, one of your own. they had become friends in the late stages of the first road were, when churchill was responsible for munitions and bernie was the chairman of -- and they learned to trust each other and the relationship was cemented really in 1929 when churchill lost his job as chancellor of the exchequer and the government was turned out , and he decided to take a long tour to the u.s. and asked bernie to arrange for his hosts here, which he did. big men, schwab, hearst, people like that. and then when he got to new host,bernie acted as his and hes hotel bills, gave him a desk. churchill by now had gotten really absorbed into the full market and shares, what was going on. in august and september of 1929, he got really sucked in. and bernie, one of the big players in wall street, gave him a desk next to his own, introduced him to his brokers, and off they went. and in the last stages of that bull market, churchill was dealing -- his turnover, i worked out in today's money terms was about $1 million a day in and out of stocks. you know, really quick, binge trading really. when the crash hit, he was down a million dollars. legend has it that he saw him right, repaid the whole of his losses. i could find no evidence that it of that old. i could find that he transferred the pockets on to personal traits to churchill. so, i think that churchill's losses would have been $1.1 million, but because bernie wo two than later, the contained a million dollars. and thereafter, there was no general rescue, and in fact his advice to churchill in the immediate aftermath of the crash was not great. he said, storm over. i am getting back involved. and churchill got back involved and lost half as much again in 1930. this is money that he certainly did not have. later on in the 1930's, his advice was better, market advice. it was not always followed by church fell -- churchill who hoped he could recover his position. but he was an important financial friend. bottom left, i have got rather jack churchill. and you know, jack was a partner in winston's london brokers. and in the first heady days of winston churchill's inheritance in 1921, when he was off in front, he gave jack discretion, a lot of discretion with the dealings in stocks. but in the 1930's, when he was trying to recover his debts, he did not give jack discretion. in fact, he dealt more with the senior partner, vickers. he listened to him occasionally, to his views on the market, but generally he took his own decisions. and all jack had to do was bail him out a couple of times because he owed the brokerage a lot of money and jack was a partner and the rest of the partners looked to jack to make good winston churchill's debts. on a couple of occasions when they got a bit out of control. but winston did repay his brother. now on the right-hand side, i've got a figure you may or may not recognize. alexander calder. because i think he is an important financial friend. hungarian born, a hollywood filmmaker, successful hollywood filmmaker in the late 1920's. and introduced to churchill by randolph in 1934. when he had come over to europe determined to re-breed europe's , film industry on the hollywood model. and he was well-funded by the prudential insurance company. scope of having winston churchill involved. and he paid churchill very handsomely in 1934 and 1935 as a screenwriter for a couple of films. they were never made. one was actually about the kings jubilee, we were hearing this morning, his later admiration for george the fifth, and another in adulation of george the fifth, the silver jubilee. they had rather extravagant taste. they got on well although calder was 20 years younger. but after these two payments in 1935, he vanishes for a moment, but keep them in mind committee will reappear. despite these payments, churchill's debts just grew and grew. if you have read my book, you will see. they grew to the modern-day equivalent of $3 million or $4 million. financial charges were costing him the equivalent of $250,000 a year. and eventually, the implosion that i spoke about right at the beginning, occurred in march 1938 on literally the day that hitler's ordered his troops into vienna. and this is where the pair in the middle come in, and they are -- the mostmost in important pair of faces i will show you today. on the top is brendan bracken. it's confusing. there are two of them. this is brendan bracken. irishman. mysterious. attached himself to churchill in 1923 as a young fixer. a fixer. then, when churchill became chancellor, went off to pursue his own publishing career, and amazingly, in his 20's still, put together a publishing empire that is still there today. the magazine is called the banker, the general practitioner, the financial news that became a major part of the financial times. and he bought 50% of "the economist." owned by aer 50% was syndicate led by the man below him. every name as which churchillian should be intimately familiar with, and yet when i talk about him in britain, no are really knows who he is. but he is the guy who rescued churchill financially in every way. he rescued him from bankruptcy in 1938. he allowed him to continue as a politician. what happened is this. when churchill's finances imploded in march 1938, churchill handed his stockbroking papers and said something like -- this is not recorded, so i am surmising -- brendan, unless you can help me, i may be finished, because you know, you cannot carry on as an mp if you are bankrupt. and brendan bracken took the papers around to him and he chose carefully. he knew this man through "the economist." he knew him also because he was a currency economist. he had done work for the reserve bank of south africa. and while he was in south africa, he was asked to chair a company called union corporation, which was a mining company and they mined precious metals used in the armaments industries and they exported both to germany and to britain, and he knew the figures. and he could see the fantastic climb on what was coming into figuresand the flatter coming into britain. and he was one of churchill's in performance in the 1930's about the extent of the german rearmament. and he thought that churchill was really the only politician standing up to what was going on in germany, and he thought he had to be kept in the game. and apart from that, he was unmarried. he was a wealthy man. when bracken came and said winston is in trouble, he needs, well, in dollars today, it was more than a million dollars. he took out his pen and signed a check for the entire amount. that much was known. and he asked for nothing in return. you will find this more or less in the official biography, but what isn't in the official same sort ofe thing happened in june 1940. within weeks of churchill becoming prime minister and leading the struggle, he found he could not pay his bank interest bills, his tax in june 1940. and he had a special statement of his bank account drawn up. andave it to bracken brendan bracken took it to strakosch and strakosch wrote a check. it was the equivalent of about $300,000. not a fact that is known. but these two literally kept churchill in the game. and i said i have not quite finished with calder because he comes back in the war. he comes over to hollywood again. people thought it was a strange move. i would not leave london for hollywood. why would he leave london and moved to hollywood? he was part of a british intelligence effort to nudge americans toward the war, make films that would help the war effort. but he also worked on the u.s. studios and he made a series of offers, some of them with american film studios for churchill's on book rights. old book rights. and after the war, he and his companies paid churchill today's equivalent of about $7.5 million. beat himther film guy to the film rights. so, $10 million went into his accounts. and he started the war in serious debt. and he finished it with $5 million in his current account home that hason just gone on the market for $30 million. it did not cost him the equivalent of $30 million. r is an important player. now, fourth quarter. final quarter. another unfamiliar face, i think. i don't know if anyone can pick him, but this is a much underrated guy because he was understated. this is bill barry, better known as lord camrose. who owned and put together an amazing stable of newspapers in his life. time, he made newspapers the daily telegraph. he is an absolutely central financial friend to churchill. he plays an important part in sorting out the mess that churchill got himself into during the war when three different sets of people thought they had rights to films and ofoirs and there was a model up of the film rights for "the history of english-speaking peoples." and he really gently eased him out of the problem. 1945, 1946, he put together the syndicate. it was his idea. and he put together the them off.that bought churchill gave it to national trust. it gave them 50,000 pounds. and it was he who led the sales of the second world war memoirs, the rights package here in new york, very quietly in september 1946, october 1946. and who negotiated the details with tom life and the new york times. and it was he who again in 1953 when churchill had his stroke , provided some interest-free loans for liquidity purposes and who kept the press, persuaded the british press to keep the stroke quiet. so, signal service corp. provided by camrose. and his other partner in delivering this postwar financial emancipation of winston churchill was anthony moore, his solicitor. he started as a tax lawyer. he came in in 1942 when churchill wanted to take on the in-line revenue about the non-miniscule earnings during the war. and they did take that revenue to a tribunal. privately. it was another very surprising story, which actually randolph first put me onto. thank you, randolph. because the solicitors involved, frankly, i still have a lovely memo of his first meeting with churchill. it is almost worth reading the book just for that memo. it's a lovely memo. which i think had to be approved for copyright reasons to be in the book. very vivid. churchill retained him after the war. because he wanted a tax structure for riding the memoirs with a barrister. churchill trusted him completely. he was very methodical, there is -- very calm and thorough. churchill came to trust him over the whole range of his affairs and he did not do anything post war that had not been under his nose first. in the middle -- a financial friend you should be familiar with. if you do not recognize him immediately, the clue is in the magazines behind him. it is henry luce. his main postwar paymaster. immediately after the war, while churchill was still technically retired as an author, he could not write articles, so "life" bought a story based on his pictures, reproductions of his pictures, and his speeches made to the house of commons during the war. and "time" was the main buyer of the rights to the memoirs and it was henry luce who was sort of -- new sort of put together the consortium with "the new york times." it was luce who approved the payment of churchill's holidays. said ifrudgingly, he you think we have got to do it, we have got to do it. and he let his chairman get on with it. he was a great delegator. top right, every reeves. -- emery reeves. he was very important in churchill's prewar newspaper sales. he took his columns worldwide. it was more important for churchill's morale and his political reach than just financial terms. notas good to have him, but a game changer. and actually, he played very much second role to camrose in the negotiation of the sales of the war memoirs. very much second. they were a pair, but he was second. rather contrary to the account he gave to martin gilbert in the official biography. i'm afraid there is no doubt about it. he oversold his role to martin gilbert, big time. but he did get into the foreign rights and he made a huge amount of money out of the memoirs. particularly the foreign rights. he had a lovely house in the south of france on the back of it. he built up a collection of impressionist paintings and he gave the money to churchill. which is a present in -- and finally, bottom right, anthony montague brown, when first appointed churchill's secretary, howard mcmillan who was defending him, he said, whatever you do montague brown, do not get sucked into mr. churchill's financial affairs. but of course, he found that such was the scale of spending he had to. he had to get involved. they had to create new revenue streams. there had to be ones that would not get taxed, there had to be sales of rights. he had to learn about the film industry and the recording industry and he did. he was a diplomat. he was a very good networker. he built up contacts over time and after a slow start -- by the end, he was getting big money. and he also performed the signal service of holding off the in-line revenue service, or the irs, until after churchill's d eath. though his executors would have to deal with them. churchill would not have the stress. finally, finally a little bit of postmatch analysis. i think it's wonderful. those of you who have been to britain in the last month no -- know that churchill graces the back of our newest banknote, this man who was a great expert in debt and derivatives and risk-taking -- [laughter] mr. lough: and rescues and failed austerity regimes now graces the back of the bank of a -- england. i think he would just be profoundly unhappy with the denomination chosen. five pounds is the cheapest, our lowest denomination banknote. and five pounds today, i look back, five pounds today pre-world war i was worth one shilling. one shilling, and what did one shilling by? -- buy? it did not even by a half bottle. that cost three shillings. thank you very much. [applause] mr. lough: yeah, so we have 5, 6, 7 minutes, something like before we have to make an announcement. so, just wait for the microphone. otherwise i will have to repeat your question. >> i was wondering -- churchill's reputation was on the street in political circles, and how anybody would have put him in the chancellor of the exchequer given his expertise in financial matters? mr. lough: yeah. what was his reputation on the street? i think actually at the time he was chancellor, not very much was known about his private finances. he did not let on about his inheritance. he told stanley baldwin, the prime minister, that he would be able to buy with the earnings from his book "the crisis." after the second world war, his enormous.ere he did not make huge amounts of money from his books. in the 30's, things changed a bit. he was so late paying a lot of bills. he kept his rescue by strakosch -- the knowledge of that was very, very tight. he did not tell his lawyers. he did not tell his bankers. the money went straight to the stockbrokers. the only people who knew, i think, were his brother jack and obviously strakosch. think -- of,f my i think in may 1940 there were a lot of people who were almost as worried about winston churchill becoming prime minister as people were worried about trump -- [laughter] because he did have a reputation as an adventurer. he was not 100% trustworthy. i'm talking about may 1940. there was a bit of knowledge. that his affairs were a bit rickety. , it is myaying understanding that clementine churchill found herself quite aggravated unconcerned about concernedted and about their cash flow and the debt they were going into, particularly -- [indiscernible] can you comment on the distress this caused clementine churchill? mr. lough: yes, i think you are undoubtedly right. she hated -- i read that little excerpt about when the inheritance came their way, and the feeling of relief. she said it was like floating in a bath of cream. she was so relieved because she hated not being able to pay their bills. the reason she did not like the chatwell, was it would prove to be a millstone around the neck. i suppose in purely financial terms, it was. the staff needed for upkeep was very expensive. but i did find most of the time the household accounts are not in the archives because clementine was in charge of paying them and she needed a whole lot more money to do so than the monthly allowance. there are only two years, 1935 in 1936 when the household accounts merged churchill's accounts, because that is when they were getting really worried about money and they brought in accountants to try to sort it out and reduce expenditure. the accountants had the overview of everything. and for those two years, we find the household accounts in there. i can only say i was astonished by the scale of spending. i thought she was always the restraint and had a very modest taste. i think that is how we all saw her. book, i cannote remember, 1935, 1936, a bill at harrods, and she had bills and about a dozen department stores that ran 80 pages. and there were times when she did seem to, you know, her husband would announce one of his economy regimes and she would seem to go out and buy some big-ticket items immediately afterward. [laughter] mr. lough: