Churchill was our war time prime minister, highly praised and generally well thought of but there are dissenters. One such is #David Irving, an historian of the Second World War who speaks German. The Wiki is hostile to our historian but Ron Unz thinks well of his writing. I am less confident; but not because of the Wiki or Lipman's allegations. Other views are at #Churchill Explained
If someone is lavishly praised it pays to ask why. Does WSC deserve it or do the Mainstream Media have ulterior motives? They often do. Ron's criticisms seem well founded, even though he is following Irving on this. Here is part of a lengthy article #American Pravda Understanding World War II, by Ron Unz where Ron tells us:
QUOTE
My impression is that individuals of low personal character are those most likely to sell out the interests of their own country in exchange for large sums of foreign money, and as such usually constitute the natural targets of nefarious plotters and foreign spies. Churchill certainly seems to fall into this category, with rumors of massive personal corruption swirling around him from early in his political career. Later, he supplemented his income by engaging in widespread art-forgery, a fact that Roosevelt later discovered and probably used as a point of personal leverage against him. Also quite serious was Churchill’s constant state of drunkenness, with his inebriation being so widespread as to constitute clinical alcoholism. Indeed, Irving notes that in his private conversations FDR routinely referred to Churchill as “a drunken bum.”
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The Atlantic covers the ground with Why Winston Churchill Was So Bad With Money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/
American Pravda Understanding World War II, by Ron Unz
Until recently, my [ Ron's ] familiarity with Churchill had been rather cursory, and Irving’s revelations were absolutely eye-opening. Perhaps the most striking single discovery was the remarkable venality and corruption of the man, with Churchill being a huge spendthrift who lived lavishly and often far beyond his financial means, employing an army of dozens of personal servants at his large country estate despite frequently lacking any regular and assured sources of income to maintain them. This predicament naturally put him at the mercy of those individuals willing to support his sumptuous lifestyle in exchange for determining his political activities. And somewhat similar pecuniary means were used to secure the backing of a network of other political figures from across all the British parties, who became Churchill’s close political allies.To put things in plain language, during the years leading up to the Second World War, both Churchill and numerous other fellow British MPs were regularly receiving sizable financial stipends—cash bribes—from Jewish and Czech sources in exchange for promoting a policy of extreme hostility toward the German government and actually advocating war. The sums involved were quite considerable, with the Czech government alone probably making payments that amounted to tens of millions of dollars in present-day money to British elected officials, publishers, and journalists working to overturn the official peace policy of their existing government. A particularly notable instance occurred in early 1938 when Churchill suddenly lost all his accumulated wealth in a foolish gamble on the American stock-market, and was soon forced to put his beloved country estate up for sale to avoid personal bankruptcy, only to quickly be bailed out by a foreign Jewish millionaire [ Henry Strakosch ] intent upon promoting a war against Germany. Indeed, the early stages of Churchill’s involvement in this sordid behavior are recounted in an Irving chapter aptly entitled “The Hired Help.”
Ironically enough, German Intelligence learned of this massive bribery of British parliamentarians, and passed the information along to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was horrified to discover the corrupt motives of his fierce political opponents, but apparently remained too much of a gentlemen to have them arrested and prosecuted. I’m no expert in the British laws of that era, but for elected officials to do the bidding of foreigners on matters of war and peace in exchange for huge secret payments seems almost a textbook example of treason to me, and I think that Churchill’s timely execution would surely have saved tens of millions of lives.
My impression is that individuals of low personal character are those most likely to sell out the interests of their own country in exchange for large sums of foreign money, and as such usually constitute the natural targets of nefarious plotters and foreign spies. Churchill certainly seems to fall into this category, with rumors of massive personal corruption swirling around him from early in his political career. Later, he supplemented his income by engaging in widespread art-forgery, a fact that Roosevelt later discovered and probably used as a point of personal leverage against him. Also quite serious was Churchill’s constant state of drunkenness, with his inebriation being so widespread as to constitute clinical alcoholism. Indeed, Irving notes that in his private conversations FDR routinely referred to Churchill as “a drunken bum.”
During the late 1930s, Churchill and his clique of similarly bought-and-paid-for political allies had endlessly attacked and denounced Chamberlain’s government for its peace policy, and he regularly made the wildest sort of unsubstantiated accusations, claiming the Germans were undertaking a huge military build-up aimed against Britain. These roiling charges were often widely echoed by a media heavily influenced by Jewish interests and did much to poison the state of German-British relations. Eventually, these accumulated pressures forced Chamberlain into the extremely unwise act of providing an unconditional guarantee of military backing to Poland’s irresponsible dictatorship. As a result, the Poles then rather arrogantly refused any border negotiations with Germany, thereby lighting the fuse which eventually led to the German invasion six months later and the subsequent British declaration of war. The British media had widely promoted Churchill as the leading pro-war political figure, and once Chamberlain was forced to create a wartime government of national unity, his leading critic was brought into it and given the naval affairs portfolio.
Following his lightening six-week defeat of Poland, Hitler unsuccessfully sought to make peace with the Allies, and the war went into abeyance. Then in early 1940, Churchill persuaded his government to try strategically outflanking the Germans by preparing a large sea-borne invasion of neutral Norway; but Hitler discovered the plan and preempted the attack, with Churchill’s severe operational mistakes leading to a surprising defeat for the vastly superior British forces. During World War I, Churchill’s Gallipoli disaster had forced his resignation from the British Cabinet, but this time the friendly media helped ensure that all the blame for the somewhat similar debacle at Narvik was foisted upon Chamberlain, so it was the latter who was forced to resign, with Churchill then replacing him as prime minister. British naval officers were appalled that the primary architect of their humiliation had become its leading political beneficiary, but reality is what the media reports, and the British public never discovered this great irony.
This incident was merely the first of the long series of Churchill’s major military failures and outright betrayals that are persuasively recounted by Irving, nearly all of which were subsequently airbrushed out of our hagiographic histories of the conflict. We should recognize that wartime leaders who spend much of their time in a state of drunken stupor are far less likely to make optimal decisions, especially if they are as extremely prone to military micro-management as was the case with Churchill.
In the spring of 1940, the Germans launched their sudden armored thrust into France via Belgium, and as the attack began to succeed, Churchill ordered the commanding British general to immediately flee with his forces to the coast and to do so without informing his French or Belgium counterparts of the huge gap he was thereby opening in the Allied front-lines, thus ensuring the encirclement and destruction of their armies. Following France’s resulting defeat and occupation, the British prime minister then ordered a sudden, surprise attack on the disarmed French fleet, completely destroying it and killing some 2,000 of his erstwhile allies; the immediate cause was his mistranslation of a single French word, but this “Pearl Harbor-type” incident continued to rankle French leaders for decades.
Hitler had always wanted friendly relations with Britain and certainly had sought to avoid the war that had been forced upon him. With France now defeated and British forces driven from the Continent, he therefore offered very magnanimous peace terms and a new German alliance to Britain. The British government had been pressured into entering the war for no logical reason and against its own national interests, so Chamberlain and half the Cabinet naturally supported commencing peace negotiations, and the German proposal probably would have received overwhelming approval both from the British public and political elites if they had ever been informed of its terms.
But despite some occasional wavering, Churchill remained absolutely adamant that the war must continue, and Irving plausibly argues that his motive was an intensely personal one. Across his long career, Churchill had had a remarkable record of repeated failure, and for him to have finally achieved his lifelong ambition of becoming prime minister only to lose a major war just weeks after reaching Number 10 Downing Street would have ensured that his permanent place in history was an extremely humiliating one. On the other hand, if he managed to continue the war, perhaps the situation might somehow later improve, especially if the Americans could be persuaded to eventually enter the conflict on the British side.
Since ending the war with Germany was in his nation’s interest but not his own, Churchill undertook ruthless means to prevent peace sentiments from growing so strong that they overwhelmed his opposition. Along with most other major countries, Britain and Germany had signed international conventions prohibiting the aerial bombardment of civilian urban targets, and although the British leader had very much hoped the Germans would attack his cities, Hitler scrupulously followed these provisions. In desperation, Churchill therefore ordered a series of large-scale bombing raids against the German capital of Berlin, doing considerable damage, and after numerous severe warnings, Hitler finally began to retaliate with similar attacks against British cities. The population saw the heavy destruction inflicted by these German bombing raids and was never informed of the British attacks that had preceded and provoked them, so public sentiment greatly hardened against making peace with the seemingly diabolical German adversary.
In his memoirs published a half-century later, Prof. Revilo P. Oliver, who had held a senior wartime role in American Military Intelligence, described this sequence of events in very bitter terms:
Great Britain, in violation of all the ethics of civilized warfare that had theretofore been respected by our race, and in treacherous violation of solemnly assumed diplomatic covenants about “open cities”, had secretly carried out intensive bombing of such open cities in Germany for the express purpose of killing enough unarmed and defenceless men and women to force the German government reluctantly to retaliate and bomb British cities and thus kill enough helpless British men, women, and children to generate among Englishmen enthusiasm for the insane war to which their government had committed them.
It is impossible to imagine a governmental act more vile and more depraved than contriving death and suffering for its own people — for the very citizens whom it was exhorting to “loyalty” — and I suspect that an act of such infamous and savage treason would have nauseated even Genghis Khan or Hulagu or Tamerlane, Oriental barbarians universally reprobated for their insane blood-lust. History, so far as I recall, does not record that they ever butchered their own women and children to facilitate lying propaganda….In 1944 members of British Military Intelligence took it for granted that after the war Marshal Sir Arthur Harris would be hanged or shot for high treason against the British people…
Churchill’s ruthless violation of the laws of war regarding urban aerial bombardment directly led to the destruction of many of Europe’s finest and most ancient cities. But perhaps influenced by his chronic drunkenness, he later sought to carry out even more horrifying war crimes and was only prevented from doing so by the dogged opposition of all his military and political subordinates.
Along with the laws prohibiting the bombing of cities, all nations had similarly agreed to ban the first use of poison gas, while stockpiling quantities for necessary retaliation. Since Germany was the world-leader in chemistry, the Nazis had produced the most lethal forms of new nerve gases, such as Tabun and Sarin, whose use might have easily resulted in major military victories on both the Eastern and Western fronts, but Hitler had scrupulously obeyed the international protocols that his nation had signed. However, late in the war during 1944 the relentless Allied bombardment of German cities led to the devastating retaliatory attacks of the V-1 flying bombs against London, and an outraged Churchill became adamant that German cities should be attacked with poison gas in counter-retaliation. If Churchill had gotten his way, many millions of British might soon have perished from German nerve gas counter-strikes. Around the same time, Churchill was also blocked in his proposal to bombard Germany with hundreds of thousands of deadly anthrax bombs, an operation that might have rendered much of Central and Western Europe uninhabitable for generations.
I found Irving’s revelations on all these matters absolutely astonishing, and was deeply grateful that Deborah Lipstadt and her army of diligent researchers had carefully investigated and seemingly confirmed the accuracy of virtually every single item.
The two existing volumes of Irving’s Churchill masterwork total well over 700,000 words, and reading them would obviously consume weeks of dedicated effort. Fortunately, Irving is also a riveting speaker and several of his extended lectures on the topic are available for viewing on BitChute after having been recently purged from YouTube:
Winston Churchill ex Wiki
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British politician, army officer, and writer. He was the prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, when he led Britain to victory in the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Churchill represented five constituencies during his career as a member of Parliament (MP). Ideologically an economic liberal and imperialist, for most of his career he was a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955, but from 1904 to 1924 was a member of the Liberal Party.Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire to a wealthy, aristocratic family. He joined the British Army in 1895, and saw action in British India, the Anglo–Sudan War, and the Second Boer War, gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns. Elected an MP in 1900, initially as a Conservative, he defected to the Liberals in 1904. In H. H. Asquith's Liberal government, Churchill served as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, and First Lord of the Admiralty, championing prison reform and workers' social security. During the First World War, he oversaw the Gallipoli Campaign; after it proved a disaster, he resigned from government and served in the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front. In 1917, he returned to government under David Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions, then as Secretary of State for War and Air, and finally for the Colonies, overseeing the Anglo-Irish Treaty and Britain's Middle East policy. After two years out of Parliament, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government, returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-war parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure and depressing the UK economy.
Out of office during the 1930s, Churchill took the lead in calling for British rearmament to counter the growing threat from Nazi Germany. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was re-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1940 he became prime minister, replacing Neville Chamberlain. Churchill oversaw British involvement in the Allied war effort against Germany and the Axis powers, resulting in victory in 1945. His wartime leadership was widely praised, although acts like the Bombing of Dresden and his wartime response to the Bengal famine generated controversy. After the Conservatives' defeat in the 1945 general election, he became Leader of the Opposition. Amid the developing Cold War with the Soviet Union, he publicly warned of an "iron curtain" of Soviet influence in Europe and promoted European unity. Re-elected Prime Minister in 1951, his second term was preoccupied with foreign affairs, including the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau Uprising, Korean War, and a UK-backed Iranian coup. Domestically his government emphasised house-building and developed a nuclear weapon. In declining health, Churchill resigned as prime minister in 1955, although he remained an MP until 1964. Upon his death in 1965, he was given a state funeral.
Widely considered one of the 20th century's most significant figures, Churchill remains popular in the UK and Western world, where he is seen as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role in defending Europe's liberal democracy from the spread of fascism. Also praised as a social reformer and writer, among his many awards was the Nobel Prize in Literature. Conversely, his imperialist views and comments on race, as well as his sanctioning of human rights abuses in the suppression of anti-imperialist movements seeking independence from the British Empire, have generated considerable controversy.
David Irving ex Wiki
David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author and Holocaust denier[1] who has written on the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. His works include The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987) and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996). In his works, he argued that Adolf Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews or, if he did, opposed it.[2] Though Irving's negationist views of German atrocities in World War II (and Hitler's responsibility for them) were never taken seriously by mainstream historians, he was once recognised for his knowledge of Nazi Germany and his ability to unearth new historical documents.Irving marginalised himself in 1988 when, based on his reading of the pseudoscientific[Note 1] Leuchter report, he began to espouse Holocaust denial, specifically denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at the Auschwitz concentration camp.[3][4]
Irving's reputation as a historian was discredited[Note 2] when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, he was shown to have deliberately misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial.[Note 3] The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist,[5] who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".[5][6] In addition, the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.
Winston Churchill Erased From His Own Charity In Unprecedented Display Of Wokery [ 10 September 2021 ]
QUOTE
A CHARITY set up to honour Sir Winston Churchill sparked a “woke” storm by changing its name and erasing him from its website.The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust has rebranded itself the Churchill Fellowship and removed every picture of the heroic wartime Prime
Its volunteers accuse the trust of “re-writing history”.......... A 1,400-word tribute that talked about a “much loved leader” with “bulldog spirit” who had a love of brandy and cigars has also been axed.
A list of his achievements and full biography have also gone from the old site — when the charity was The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. it had featured a picture of him posing in his office with his trademark cigar, while others showed him in Parliament. Now his face is not seen once - yet there are numerous pictures of the chief executive Julia Weston and her board of trustees.
And a racism disclaimer is now repeated across various pages of the charity’s new website.
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Is the Charity Industry corrupted? Yes, it is Big Business with tax breaks and Moral Pretensions. One of the most blatant is Save The Children; its business is wholesale people smuggling, bringing Third World parasites to Europe and England. It is run by Helle Thorning-Schmidt, lately the prime minister of Denmark. She is Establishment & naturally above the law. They pay her £246,000. It beats working for a living. The newly named "Churchill Fellowship" claims that they are proud of Our connection to Sir Winston Churchill. But the link to Who we are | Winston Churchill Memorial Trust is gone.
Blood, sweat and booze: Churchill's debts and the moguls who ...
19 Sep 2016 ... Winston Churchill preparing to give a speech over the radio, Washington ... and financier David Lough recounts Churchill's fascinating financial ...
SEARCH - Winston Churchill finance Jew
Henry Strakosch - Wikipedia
Sir Henry Strakosch GBE (9 May 1871 – 30 October 1943) was an Austrian-born British banker ... He was a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance during 1925 and 1926. ... of the private debts of Sir Winston Churchill, in 1938, has been cited as evidence of Jewish involvement in British politics in ...
Blood, sweat and booze: Churchill's debts and the moguls who ...
19 Sep 2016 ... Winston Churchill preparing to give a speech over the radio, Washington ... and financier David Lough recounts Churchill's fascinating financial ...
Myth and Reality - What Did Churchill Really Think About the Jews ...
His book, Churchill and the Jews, was published in Britain in June by Simon ... economic and financial, to bear upon the Governments which persecute them.”*.
Churchill and the Jews - Churchill, Zionism, & the Holocaust
Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship (New York: ... is not so well known and what Churchill knew is that without funding from Germany, ...
Churchill, the Jews and Israel – Part 1 - The Churchill Project
28 Sep 2016 ... A fresh look at Churchill and Jewry, from an address by Ronald I. Cohen ... who was of immense help guiding Churchill's financial affairs in the ...
History - World Wars: Churchill and the Holocaust - BBC
17 Feb 2011 ... From the start of the persecution of the Jews in Germany, Churchill took ... and financial, to bear upon the governments which persecute them'.
Why Winston Churchill Was So Bad With Money - The Atlantic
15 Feb 2016 ... Some of Churchill's financial bounty came in the unlaundered (or lightly ... was with bankers and businessmen of Jewish origin, among them Sir ...
Uncovered: The “lost” paper Churchill kept from publication ...
8 Mar 2007 ... An article that Winston Churchill wrote but then banned from publication because of its “perverse” messages about the persecution of Jews has ...
Churchill took swipe at Jews in 1937 article - The New York Times
11 Mar 2007 ... LONDON — An article from 1937 under the name of Winston Churchill that blamed Jews for their own persecution has ruffled a long-held view ...
Churchill and the Jews - The Jewish Chronicle
11 Dec 2014 ... Winston Churchill was one of the fathers of the modern Middle East. ... and it was by no means unusual for politicians to receive financial ...
Why Winston Churchill Was So Bad With Money - a Jew explains but makes excuses
No More Champagne: Churchill and His MoneyIn May of 1940, as French forces crumpled in the face of the Nazi onslaught and the British anxiously scanned the skies for signs of the dreaded invasion, the newly installed prime minister was preoccupied with another pressing problem. Where would he get the money to pay his bill from the shirtmaker? Britain’s predicament was dire, but so was Winston Churchill’s. He owed not just the shirtmaker, but the watchmaker, the wine merchants, and the printers as well. He was overdrawn at the bank, he owed interest payments on his debts, his taxes were conspicuously late, and his publishers were clamoring for an overdue book on which he had taken a large advance. Churchill would lead Britain through the Blitz a few months later, but first he needed money.
Winston Churchill’s finances were a shambles for most of his life. It was a state of affairs, as David Lough reveals in No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money, entirely of Churchill’s own making. Over the course of a tumultuous political career spanning more than half a century and encompassing two changes of party and a dozen cabinet positions, including two stints as prime minister, Churchill spent money he did not have—extravagantly.
He took lavish trips to sun himself in the Bahamas and to yacht in the Mediterranean and to shoot in Normandy. He bought cases of champagne and boxes of cigars, costly pink-silk underclothes, and a succession of rickety houses. He embarked on prodigal rebuilding projects that nearly proved his ruin. Churchill, a friend reportedly remarked, was “easily satisfied with the best.” He gambled his way across Monte Carlo and Biarritz, and, in a bid to right his capsized finances, speculated in stocks just as the American market reached its vertiginous Jazz Age heights. For Churchill personally, out of office for most of the 1930s, Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in September of 1939 came as a kind of perverse relief. He had been a vehement critic of the government’s policy of appeasement, and now—his assessment of Hitler vindicated—he could return, finally, to the seat of power. For a man who had teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in the 1930s, in debt to the tune of as much as $3.75 million in today’s money, a place in the cabinet also bought him precious time with his creditors. Eventually the government would even pick up a portion of his liquor bill.
Churchill bought fine shirts and boxes of cigars—and pink-silk underclothes—that he couldn’t afford. (Ullstein Bild / Getty)The money troubles—and solutions—that preoccupied Churchill, an aristocrat who cut his political teeth in a plutocratic age, make for spicy reading in our own increasingly plutocratic times. Throughout his political career, he relied upon rich acquaintances to bail him out. After he lost his seat in Parliament in 1922, he engaged in dubious lobbying on behalf of oil companies. He stretched all available loopholes to avoid paying taxes, even (and especially) when he served as chancellor of the Exchequer, the head of Great Britain’s Treasury, from 1924 to 1929. And in the end, he made his fortune by taking advantage of papers commandeered from government files to construct his blockbuster memoirs.
Such chicanery is distressingly familiar these days, but it is also different. As Lough points out, Churchill’s conduct would hardly have met “the standards of transparency expected of today’s politicians.” Some of Churchill’s financial bounty came in the unlaundered (or lightly laundered) form of direct gifts and loans. Take the 1940 crisis when the shirtmaker presented his bill. The prime minister was saved by a discreet payment amounting to nearly $375,000 in today’s money, from a foreign-born financier, conveyed in a check written to someone else and endorsed over to Churchill.
Haberdashery subsidies may seem both quaint and crude in the era of mega-donors and super PACs. And yet one basic question remains the same. What do you get in return when you furnish a library in a politician’s house, as one of Churchill’s friends did when he was a junior government minister? Or when you pay a former secretary of state and likely presidential contender hundreds of thousands of dollars to give a canned speech? Churchill’s example suggests that in such situations, just who is the player—and who is being played—can be a trickier matter than it may first seem.
For a man spending money he didn’t have, Churchill had one big advantage. Most people assumed, given his flagrant style, that he was rich. In truth, he wasn’t born to a great fortune, nor did he marry into one. Churchill’s father, Randolph, was a younger son, and the family’s Blenheim estate was in any case seriously reduced. Churchill’s American mother, Jennie, was no Downton Abbey–style heiress but a spendthrift outfitted with a smaller-than-advertised dowry. When Jennie married a second time, in 1900, after Lord Randolph’s death, her new husband obligingly took a stack of her unpaid bills to deal with on their honeymoon, but objected that it was “a bit thick” that he was expected to pay for the carriage his predecessor had purchased in the 1880s. Though Churchill’s family talked of him marrying an heiress, when he finally did wed, at the age of 33, it was for love. His wife, Clementine, was well born but poverty stricken; before her marriage she worked as a seamstress and taught French to earn her keep.
Neither the army (Churchill’s first career) nor politics could come close to satisfying his need for money. In an era before Goldman Sachs and General Mills were willing to pay munificently for a politician’s speechifying, only by writing did Churchill have a shot at staying afloat. In 1930, Churchill pumped out more than 40 articles and in addition pledged to his publishers that he would finish three books posthaste. Hit by a car in New York City the following year, he cabled his agent that he could “produce literary gem about 2,400 words” about the accident. Churchill had to turn every thought, every experience, into words and cash, an imperative that, as the historian Jonathan Rose has recently argued, only exaggerated his propensity to cast himself as a hero on the world stage.
Had the Churchills made their home in a more modest dwelling, as Clementine apparently wanted, rather than the money pit Chartwell (which Winston purchased on the sly when she was laid up after the birth of their fifth child), his income would have been sufficient to maintain the family in style. But as a wage earner who kept company with rentiers, Churchill insisted on grandeur. Bespoke shirts, oyster-and-pheasant dinners, and nights in Monte Carlo casinos required him to find less middle-class ways of raising cash.
The most controversial of Churchill’s associations, both at the time and since, was with bankers and businessmen of Jewish origin, among them Sir Ernest Cassel and Sir Henry Strakosch. Early in Churchill’s career, Cassel paid to furnish the library in Churchill’s new house; after the First World War, he engaged in subterfuge to take a costly real-estate blunder off Churchill’s hands, claiming falsely that Churchill had acquired the property on his behalf. It was the Austrian-born Strakosch who kept Churchill from bankruptcy in 1938 and again in 1940, when the shirtmaker demanded his fee. The Nazis liked to claim that Churchill was in the pocket of Jewish financiers, a charge that the Holocaust denier David Irving has since contemptibly repeated. Lough, a banker himself, who doggedly pursues the ins and outs of Churchill’s finances in No More Champagne, argues that Strakosch sought nothing in return for his payments—and received nothing, save an invitation to membership in the dining society to which Churchill belonged. “There was no other reward.” Churchill’s out-of-office lobbying on behalf of a deal for the oil companies ultimately went nowhere too; as soon as he had the chance to get back into government, he ditched the assignment (but kept the money), and the deal fell apart. Nor did Churchill give special favors to Cassel, though as contemporary money-grubbing politicians discover, the appearance of impropriety can prove damaging on its own. During Churchill’s 1923 campaign for reelection to Parliament, socialists hectored him: “What about the 50,000 quid Cassel gave you?”
Positions can be bought or influenced, of course, but as in the case of Churchill, big money can also flow to a political figure simply because he or she is already backing the cause the donor supports. Strakosch was willing to help Churchill not because he saw a personal gain in the arrangement but because he thought him the only politician in Europe capable of standing up to Hitler. The bona fides of this transaction, though hardly an argument in favor of money in politics, do serve as a reminder that sometimes the suspicious financial smoke comes only from a cigar. Churchill was in any case too much of a loose cannon to be aimed. He was also too high-handed to view bailouts as anything but his due. And apart from the complaints of a few socialist agitators, his presumed wealth largely insulated him from the charges of corruption that dogged self-made politicians like his predecessor David Lloyd George.
Churchill started 1938 nearly bankrupt, but by the time he left office in 1945, he was a rich man. More than any political gift, it was a series of film deals that saved him, enabling him to pay back some of the money he owed Strakosch. Selling the film rights to his biography Marlborough: His Life and Times proved particularly lucrative; so did his arrangement with the producer and director Alexander Korda, who bought the rights to, of all things, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. And the prospect of publishing his wartime memoirs was never far from the prime minister’s mind, not even as German bombs devastated British cities. Churchill instructed his private secretaries during the Blitz to gather up boxes of his official papers every month and mark them as “Personal Minutes.” (Even her worst enemies don’t accuse Hillary Clinton of a maneuver like that.)
After the war, he took 68 bundles of state papers home with him. To his successor, Clement Attlee, Churchill explained that he needed the documents to recount “the British war story.” “I am convinced,” he told Attlee’s emissary, “it would be to the advantage of our country to have it told, as perhaps I alone can tell it.” The old alchemy of turning experiences into words would at last yield blockbuster-size cash. Churchill’s Second World War set a global record for a nonfiction-publishing deal: $27.5 million in today’s money.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com
Deborah Cohen is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and a history professor at Northwestern. She is the author of Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Cassel
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https://thehill.com/hilltv - good???????
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/01/12/hedging-their-bets-who-really-decides-elections/
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/01/12/hedging-their-bets-who-really-decides-elections/
https://gilad.online/writings/2020/1/12/code-panica-controlled-opposition-spectacle
https://gilad.online/writings/2020/1/12/code-panica-controlled-opposition-spectacle - bent jews
https://web.archive.org/web/20120304232434/http://www.oswaldmosley.com/te-lawrence.htm
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https://www.irishsavant.net/?p=395 churchill was a shit
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Peter Padfield, maritime historian who sailed across the Atlantic on a replica of the Pilgrim ship the Mayflower – obituary.html
In Hess, Hitler & Churchill (2013) he challenged official accounts of Hess’s flight, claiming that Churchill’s moral imperative for continuing the war after the fall of France – when other British statesmen would have agreed to the peace deal that Hess undoubtedly, in Padfield’s view, brought from Hitler – had led to a cover-up.
In 1960 Peter Padfield married Jane Yarwood, with whom he moved to Suffolk, where he supplemented his income by founding a company to sell sketches of East Anglian scenes. He bought a gaff-rigged replica of a 1900 Norfolk shrimper which he sailed on the River Deben, and enjoyed bi-annual holidays in Switzerland.
The Great Naval Race (1976), about the naval armaments race before the First World War, sparked an interest in German history which led him to write three biographies of Nazi leaders: Dönitz: The Last Führer (1984); Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (1990) and Hess: Flight for the Führer (1991), the last updated with new material as Hess: The Führer’s Disciple (1993).
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10382165/Churchills-darkest-hour.html -
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10382165/Churchills-darkest-hour.html
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/?highlight=irving+churchill
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/?highlight=irving+churchill
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/
Understanding World War II, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review.html
https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler-Unnecessary-War-Britain/dp/0307405168
https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler-Unnecessary-War-Britain/dp/0307405168
About the Author
Patrick J. Buchanan was a senior adviser to three American presidents; ran twice for the Republican presidential nomination, in 1992 and 1996; and was the Reform Party candidate in 2000. He is the author of nine other books, including the bestsellers Right from the Beginning; A Republic, Not an Empire; The Death of the West; State of Emergency; and Day of Reckoning. He is now a senior political analyst for MSNBC.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The End of “Splendid Isolation”
[T]he Queen cannot help feeling that our isolation is dangerous.1
—Queen Victoria, January 14, 1896
Isolation is much less dangerous than the danger of being dragged into wars which do not concern us.2
—Lord Salisbury, 1896
For as long as he had served the queen, Lord Salisbury had sought to keep Britain free of power blocs. “His policy was not one of isolation from Europe . . . but isolation from the Europe of alliances.”3 Britannia would rule the waves but stay out of Europe’s quarrels. Said Salisbury, “We are fish.”4
When the queen called him to form a new government for the third time in 1895, Lord Salisbury pursued his old policy of “splendid isolation.” But in the years since he and Disraeli had traveled to the Congress of Berlin in 1878, to create with Bismarck a new balance of power in Europe, their world had vanished.
In the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, Japan defeated China, seized Taiwan, and occupied the Liaotung Peninsula. Britain’s preeminent position in China was now history.
In the summer of 1895, London received a virtual ultimatum from secretary of state Richard Olney, demanding that Great Britain accept U.S. arbitration in a border dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela. Lord Salisbury shredded Olney’s note like an impatient tenured professor cutting up a freshman term paper. But President Cleveland demanded that Britain accept arbitration—or face the prospect of war with the United States.
The British were stunned by American enthusiasm for a war over a patch of South American jungle, and incredulous. America deployed two battleships to Britain’s forty-four.5 Yet Salisbury took the threat seriously: “A war with America . . . in the not distant future has become something more than a possibility.”6
London was jolted anew in January 1896 when the Kaiser sent a telegram of congratulations to Boer leader Paul Kruger on his capture of the Jameson raiders, who had invaded the Transvaal in a land grab concocted by Cecil Rhodes, with the connivance of Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.
These two challenges, from a jingoistic America that was now the first economic power on earth, and from his bellicose nephew in Berlin, Wilhelm II, revealed to the future Edward VII that “his country was without a friend in the world” and “steps to end British isolation were required. . . .”7
On December 18, 1897, a Russian fleet steamed into the Chinese harbor of Port Arthur, “obliging British warships to vacate the area.”8 British jingoes “became apoplectic.”9 Lord Salisbury stood down: “I don’t think we carry enough guns to fight them and the French together.”10
In 1898, a crisis erupted in northeast Africa. Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who had set off from Gabon in 1897 on a safari across the Sahara with six officers and 120 Senegalese, appeared at Fashoda in the southern Sudan, where he laid claim to the headwaters of the Nile. Sir Herbert Kitchener cruised upriver to instruct Marchand he was on imperial land. Faced with superior firepower, Marchand withdrew. Fashoda brought Britain and France to the brink of war. Paris backed down, but bitterness ran deep. Caught up in the Anglophobia was eight-year-old Charles de Gaulle.11
In 1900, the Russian challenge reappeared. After American, British, French, German, and Japanese troops had marched to the rescue of the diplomatic legation in Peking, besieged for fifty-five days by Chinese rebels called “Boxers,” Russia exploited the chaos to send a 200,000-man army into Manchuria and the Czar shifted a squadron of his Baltic fleet to Port Arthur. The British position in China was now threatened by Russia and Japan.
But what awakened Lord Salisbury to the depth of British isolation was the Boer War. When it broke out in 1899, Europeans and Americans cheered British defeats. While Joe Chamberlain might “speak of the British enjoying a ‘splendid isolation, surrounded and supported by our kinsfolk,’ the Boer War brought home the reality that, fully extended in their imperial role, the British needed to avoid conflict with the other great powers.”12
Only among America’s Anglophile elite could Victoria’s nation or Salisbury’s government find support. When Bourke Cockran, a Tammany Hall Democrat, wrote President McKinley, urging
him to mediate and keep America’s distance from Great Britain’s “wanton acts of aggression,” the letter went to Secretary of State John Hay.13
Hay bridled at this Celtic insolence. “Mr. Cockran’s logic is especially Irish,” he wrote to a friend. “As long as I stay here no action shall be taken contrary to my conviction that the one indispensable feature of our foreign policy should be a friendly understanding with England.” Hay refused even to answer “Bourke Cockran’s fool letter to the president.”14
Hay spoke of an alliance with Britain as an “unattainable dream” and hoped for a smashing imperial victory in South Africa. “I hope if it comes to blows that England will make quick work of Uncle Paul [Kruger].”15
Entente Cordiale
So it was that as the nineteenth century came to an end Britain set out to court old rivals. The British first reached out to the Americans. Alone among Europe’s great powers, Britain sided with the United States in its 1898 war with Spain. London then settled the Alaska boundary dispute in America’s favor, renegotiated the fifty-year-old Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, and ceded to America the exclusive rights to build, operate, and fortify a canal across Panama. Then Britain withdrew her fleet from the Caribbean.
Writes British historian Correlli Barnett: “The passage of the British battlefleet from the Atlantic to the Pacific would now be by courtesy of the United States,” and, with America’s defeat of Spain, “The Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, now American colonies, were gradually closed to British merchants by protective tariffs, for the benefit of their American rivals.”16
Other historians, however, hail the British initiative to terminate a century of U.S.-British enmity as “The Great Rapprochement,” and Berlin-born Yale historian Hajo Holborn regards the establishment of close Anglo-American relations as probably “by far the greatest achievement of British diplomacy in terms of world history.”17
With America appeased, Britain turned to Asia.
With a Russian army in Manchuria menacing Korea and the Czar’s warships at Port Arthur and Vladivostok, Japan needed an ally to balance off Russia’s ally, France. Germany would not do, as Kaiser Wilhelm disliked Orientals and was endlessly warning about the “Yellow Peril.” As for the Americans, their Open Door policy had proven to be bluster and bluff when Russia moved into Manchuria. That left the British, whom the Japanese admired as an island people and warrior race that had created the world’s greatest empire.
On January 30, 1902, an Anglo-Japanese treaty was signed. Each nation agreed to remain neutral should the other become embroiled in an Asian war with a single power. However, should either become involved in war with two powers, each would come to the aid of the other. Confident its treaty with Britain would checkmate Russia’s ally France, Japan in 1904 launched a surprise attack on the Russian naval squadron at Port Arthur. An enraged Czar sent his Baltic fleet to exact retribution. After a voyage of six months from the Baltic to the North Sea, down the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean, the great Russian fleet was ambushed and annihilated by Admiral Heihachiro Togo in Tshushima Strait between Korea and Japan. Only one small Russian cruiser and two destroyers made it to Vladivostok. Japan lost two torpedo boats. It was a victory for Japan to rival the sinking of the Spanish Armada and the worst defeat ever inflicted on a Western power by an Asian people.
Britain had chosen well. In 1905, the Anglo-Japanese treaty was elevated into a full alliance. Britain now turned to patching up quarrels with her European rivals. Her natural allies were Germany and the Habsburg Empire, neither of whom had designs on the British Empire. Imperial Russia, Britain’s great nineteenth-century rival, was pressing down on China, India, Afghanistan, the Turkish Straits, and the Middle East. France was Britain’s ancient enemy and imperial rival in Africa and Egypt. The nightmare of the British was a second Tilsit, where Napoleon and Czar Alexander I, meeting on a barge in the Neiman in 1807, had divided a prostrate Europe and Middle East between them. Germany was the sole European bulwark against a French-Russian dominance of Europe and drive for hegemony in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—at the expense of the British Empire.
With Lord Salisbury’s blessing, Joe Chamberlain began to court Berlin. “England, Germany and America should collaborate: by so doing they could check Russian expansionism, calm turbulent France and guarantee world peace,” Chamberlain told future German chancellor Bernhard von Bulow.18 The Kaiser put him off. Neither he nor his advisers believed Britain could reconcile with her old nemesis France, or Russia, and must eventually come to Berlin hat-in-hand. Joe warned the Germans: Spurn Britain, and we go elsewhere.
The Kaiser let the opportunity slip and, in April 1904, learned to his astonishment that Britain and France had negotiated an entente cordiale, a cordial understanding. France yielded all claims in Egypt, and Britain agreed to support France’s preeminence in Morocco. Centuries of hostility came to an end. The quarrel over Suez was over. Fashoda was history.
The entente quickly proved its worth. After the Kaiser was persuaded to make a provocative visit to Tangier in 1905, Britain backed France at the Algeciras conference called to resolve the crisis. Germany won economic concessions in Morocco, but Berlin had solidified the Anglo-French entente. More ominous, the Tangier crisis had propelled secret talks already under way between French and British staff officers over how a British army might be ferried across the Channel to France in the event of a war with Germany.
Unknown to the Cabinet and Parliament, a tiny cabal had made a decision fateful for Britain, the empire, and the world. Under the guidance of Edward Grey, the foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, British and French officers plotted Britain’s entry into a Franco-German war from the first shot. And these secret war plans were being formulated by Liberals voted into power in public revulsion against the Boer War on a platform of “Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform.” Writes historian Robert Massie,
[O]n January 16 [1906], without the approval of either the Prime Minister or Cabinet, secret talks between British and French staff officers began. They focussed on plans to send 100,000 British soldiers to the Continent within two weeks of an outbreak of hostilities. On January 26, when Campbell-Bannerman returned to London and was informed, he approved.19
As Churchill wrote decades later, only Lord Rosebery read the real meaning of the Anglo-French entente. “Only one voice—Rosebery’s—was raised in discord: in public ‘Far more likely to lead to War than Peace’; in private ‘Straight to War.’ ”20 While praising Rosebery’s foresight, Churchill never repudiated his own support of the entente or secret understandings: “It must not be thought that I regret the decisions which were in fact taken.”21
In August 1907, Britain entered into an Anglo-Russian convention, ending their eighty-year conflict. Czar Nicholas II accepted Britain’s dominance in southern Persia. Britain accepted Russia’s dominance in the north. Both agreed to stay out of central Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. The Great Game was over and the lineups completed for the great European war. In the Triple Alliance were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Opposite was the Franco-Russian alliance backed by Great Britain, which was allied to Japan. Only America among the great powers remained free of entangling alliances.
“You Have a New World”
Britain had appeased America, allied with Japan, and entered an entente with France and Russia, yet its German problem remained. It had arisen in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. After the French defeat at Sedan and the abdication of Napoleon III, a united Germany stretching from France to Russia and from the Baltic to the Alps had emerged as the first power in Europe. Disraeli recognized the earthshaking importance of the unification of the German states under a Prussian king.
The war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of the last century. . . . There is not a diplomatic tradition, which has not been swept away. You have a new world. . . . The balance of power has been entirely destroyed.22
Bismarck had engineered the wars on Denmark, Austria, and France, but he now believed his nation had nothing to gain from war. She had “hay enough for her fork.”23 Germany should not behave “like a nouveau riche who has just come into money and then offended everyone by pointing to the coins in his pocket.”24 He crafted a series of treaties to maintain a European balance of power favorable to Germany—by keeping the Austro-Hungarian Empire allied, Russia friendly, Britain neutral, and France isolated. Bismarck opposed the building of a fleet that might alarm the British. As for an overseas empire, let Britain, France, and Russia quarrel over colonies. When a colonial adventurer pressed upon him Germany’s need to enter the scramble for Africa, Bismarck replied, “Your map of Africa is very nice. But there is France, and here is Russia, and we are in the middle, and that is my map of Africa.”25
As the clamor for colonies grew, however, the Iron Chancellor would succumb and Germany would join the scramble. By 1914, Berlin boasted the world’s third largest overseas empire, encompassing German East Africa (Tanganyika), South-West Africa (Namibia), Kamerun (Cameroon), and Togoland. On the China coast, the Kaiser held Shantung Peninsula. In the western Pacific, the House of Hohenzollern held German New Guinea, German Samoa, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline islands, and the Northern Solomons, of which Bougainville was the largest. However, writes Holborn,
Not for a moment were Bismarck’s colonial projects intended to constitute a revision of the fundamentals of his continental policy. Least of all were they designs to undermine British naval or colonial supremacy overseas. Bismarck was frank when he told British statesmen that Germany, by the acquisition of colonies, was giving Britain new hostages, since she could not hope to defend them in an emergency.26
By 1890, Bismarck had been dismissed by the new young Kaiser, who began to make a series of blunders, the first of which was to let Bismarck’s treaty with Russia lapse. This left Russia nowhere to turn but France. By 1894, St. Petersburg had become the ally of a Paris still seething over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. France had broken free of the isolation imposed upon her by Bismarck. The Kaiser’s folly in letting the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapse can hardly be overstated.
While Germany was a “satiated power, so far as Europe itself was concerned, and stood to gain little from a major war on the European continent,” France and Russia were expansionist.27 Paris hungered for the return of Alsace. Russia sought hegemony over Bulgaria, domination of the Turkish Straits to keep foreign warships out of the Black Sea, and to pry away the Austrian share of a partitioned Poland.
More ominous, the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 stipulated that a partial mobilization by any member of the Triple Alliance—Austria, Italy, or Germany—would trigger hostilities against all three.28 As George Kennan writes in The Fateful Alliance,
A partial Austrian mobilization against Serbia, for example (and one has only to recall the events of 1914 to understand the potential significance of this circumstance) could alone become the occasion for the launching of a general Eu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
Winston Churchill ex Wiki
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill,[a] KG, OM, CH, TD, DL, FRS, RA (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Best known for his wartime leadership as Prime Minister, Churchill was also a Sandhurst-educated soldier, a Nobel Prize-winning writer and historian, a prolific painter, and one of the longest-serving politicians in British history. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an economic liberal and imperialist, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955, though he was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire to a wealthy, aristocratic family. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British India, the Anglo-Sudan War, and the Second Boer War, gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns. Elected a Conservative MP in 1900, he defected to the Liberals in 1904. In H. H. Asquith's Liberal government, Churchill served as President of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary, championing prison reform and workers' social security. As First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, he oversaw the Gallipoli Campaign but, after it proved a disaster, he was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He resigned in November 1915 and joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front for six months. In 1917, he returned to government under David Lloyd George and served successively as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, and Secretary of State for the Colonies, overseeing the Anglo-Irish Treaty and British foreign policy in the Middle East. After two years out of Parliament, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government, returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-war parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure and depressing the UK economy.
Out of government during his so-called "wilderness years" in the 1930s, Churchill took the lead in calling for British rearmament to counter the growing threat of militarism in Nazi Germany. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was re-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. In May 1940, he became Prime Minister, replacing Neville Chamberlain. Churchill oversaw British involvement in the Allied war effort against the Axis powers, resulting in victory in 1945. After the Conservatives' defeat in the 1945 general election, he became Leader of the Opposition. Amid the developing Cold War with the Soviet Union, he publicly warned of an "iron curtain" of Soviet influence in Europe and promoted European unity. He lost the 1950 election, but was returned to office the following year in the 1951 election. His second term was preoccupied with foreign affairs, especially Anglo-American relations and the preservation of the British Empire. Domestically, his government emphasised house-building and completed the development of a nuclear weapon (begun by his predecessor). In declining health, Churchill resigned as Prime Minister in 1955, although he remained an MP until 1964. Upon his death in 1965, he received a state funeral.
Widely considered one of the 20th century's most significant figures, Churchill remains popular in the UK and Western world, where he is seen as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role in defending Europe's liberal democracy against the spread of fascism. He is also praised as a social reformer. However, he has been criticised for some wartime events – notably the area bombing of German cities and his government's response to the Bengal famine – and also for his imperialist views, including comments on race.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-churchill-idUKKBN0TM1E620151203
Winston Churchill refused to pay his tailor's bills
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LONDON (Reuters) - Refusal to pay the bills of one’s tailor was famously almost a point of honour among English gentlemen in past centuries and Winston Churchill was no exception, newly released archives show.Britain’s World War Two leader had racked up a bill of 197 pounds by 1937 - around 12,000 pounds at today’s prices - with Savile Row tailor Henry Poole and Co before he was finally asked to pay up.
He took offence, refused to settle the bill and never darkened Poole’s door again.
Despite the arrears, the tailor had continued to make clothes for Churchill, said James Sherwood, a historian who has examined Poole and Co’s archives.
“Churchill said it was for morale, it was good for us [Henry Poole] to dress him and he wasn’t aware we were short of cash. He never did pay, and never came back – he never forgave us,” Sherwood added on Poole’s website.
Churchill, who led the British government during the war and again in the 1950s, was in exalted company when it came to not settling tailors’ bills.
The son of author Charles Dickens, for example, ran up a bill with Poole which eventually had to be paid by his father.
When he was prince of Wales in the 1870s, King Edward VII, made “infrequent payments on account that accumulated over years”. When a bill was eventually sent to the prince, he withdrew his custom and only came back 20 years later when he became king.
Other famous - and better behaved - customers of the tailor included author Bram Stoker, Prussian Prime Minister Prince Otto von Bismarck, American banker J.P. Morgan and Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, who was visited in person by the tailors in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
When company founder Henry Poole died, his high-profile clients owed him a huge amount and the firm was in a bad financial situation, the archives show.
The last surviving letter from Poole, written in 1875, said: “there will be nothing much to leave behind me. I have worked for a prince and for the public and must die a poor man.”
The archives, which go back to 1865, have been dusted off, rebound and the public can view them by appointment for the first time at Poole’s in Savile Row, central London.
Reporting by Lisa Barrington; editing by Stephen Addison
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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Was he a drunken shit? It looks that way.
Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.
Email me at Mike Emery. All financial contributions are cheerfully accepted. If you want to keep it private, use my PGP Key. Home PageUpdated on Saturday, 24 June 2023 13:33:03