Winston Churchill’s Gold Record

Swaddled in a brightly coloured silk dressing gown, his hair ruffled, Winston Churchill was propped up in bed and reading aloud from a sheaf of papers. It was 10 o’clock in the morning and a microphone was in front of him. British troops, he announced, had been successfully evacuated from Dunkirk. The French Army was collapsing and Britain’s great ally was on the brink of being knocked out of the war. The Nazis were swarming in French ports and preparing to invade the British Isles. Though it seemed that Britain was bound to lose the war, Churchill rejected the possibility of suing for peace. ‘We shall fight on the beaches’, he told the microphone, ‘we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.’ He finished his speech, paused and shuffled his papers. Then he began reading again. His next speech lasted five minutes. Addressing ‘Mr Speaker’, he announced that ‘on Friday evening last, I received His Majesty’s commission to form a new administration’. He had just formed a War Cabinet and all he had to offer, he gravely declared, were ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. He finished reading and looked up. The year was 1949, and the events that he had just described had long since passed: Hitler was dead, the war was won and Churchill was no longer prime minister. He was the leader of the opposition, and he was spending his morning recording his most famous speeches of the Second World War. These are the only recordings that exist of many of Churchill’s best known speeches and they are the product not of wartime London, but of peacetime Kent. Churchill had two motives that morning in 1949: preserving his words for posterity and making money.

Hand to mouth

The frantic rush to earn was an enduring obsession of Churchill’s. It had to be. The grandson of the Duke of Marlborough, he was raised in the late Victorian era with lavish expectations. His family, though, were not the rich branch; he had to earn a living. Churchill had joined the army after leaving Harrow, but soldiering would never make him rich. So he began to write, producing accounts of the battles he fought in, which proved profitable. He turned these articles into books; these, too, proved profitable. Churchill gave up his commission, and in 1899 became a full-time writer.

Though he was elected to Parliament in 1901, Churchill’s written output was consistently colossal. For almost 60 years, from his residences flowed a near unending stream of books, articles, books of articles, pamphlets, film scripts, speeches, books of speeches, histories, stories, biographies and essays which, when collected in 1973, filled 38 heavy hardback volumes. Quoting Doctor Johnson, Churchill always insisted that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’, and he commanded immense fees for his writings. Similar amounts could be made from lecture tours, particularly in North America. This work funded the incoming crates of champagne, bottles of brandy, velvet siren suits, vintage wines, boxes of cigars, monogrammed slippers, Savile Row suits, silk underwear, eccentric hats, motor cars, oil paints, unusual pets, rare books, fresh vegetables, historical memorabilia and exotic fish. Though Churchill became one of Britain’s best-paid men, his outgoings always exceeded his income and he lived from book advance to book advance, article fee to article fee, speaking tour to speaking tour. The only interruption to this pattern that he would permit was when he was a government minister. Then, and only then, would his energies be directed elsewhere. This was the pattern of his life: when in office, Churchill worked for the good of his country; when out of office, he worked for the good of his creditors.

Churchill wrote and spoke principally about himself. His experience as First Lord of the Admiralty and Minister of Munitions served as the basis of his six-volume history of the First World War, published 1923-31. His first 28 years were the subject of 1930’s My Early Life. Even his histories – most notably his biography of the first Duke of Marlborough, published 1933-38 – contained passages that were obviously autobiographical. These books’ profitability was increased by Churchill’s painstaking care to ensure that he paid as little tax on his earnings as possible. He would earn as much as he could and pay the taxman as little as he could. 

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill returned to government and, though he tried to combine his responsibilities as First Lord of the Admiralty with writing his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, it proved impossible and he quickly stopped writing. Besides, if Britain won the war, everybody was sure that he would write his history of it; offers for the rights to his memoirs began within a month of the declaration of war.

Off the record

When he became prime minister, Churchill was required to make regular statements to the House of Commons on the conduct of the war. MPs were impressed and overpowered by the quality of his speeches and the strength of his personality. On one point, however, MPs would not bow to his will: they would never consent to their debates being recorded or broadcast. The House of Commons considered its proceedings too important to be sullied by the introduction of vulgar recording equipment. Whereas President Franklin D. Roosevelt could address a joint session of Congress bathed in the light of the television cameras, with microphones arrayed before him like the plumage of a peacock, only those who attended meetings of the House of Commons could hear Churchill.

This meant that if Churchill wanted his agonisingly crafted speeches to be heard by the people, rather than just MPs, he had to make them twice, once to the House of Commons and again over the radio. He regarded this situation as an appalling waste of time. He tried, in 1940, to get MPs to back down, asking the Chief Whip ‘if a record could be taken at the time, so that the speech could be repeated over the wireless in the evening’. He was advised that ‘neither the Labour nor the Liberal Party favoured the idea’ and it was he who backed down. In 1942 he again asked MPs for permission to record proceedings. Their refusal enraged him; he denounced it as ‘a hostile Parliament and a guilty Parliament’, telling an aide, ‘that a General Election might be necessary’. On this, too, he backed down. As a consequence, many of his most famous speeches were never broadcast or recorded.

Though certain passages from Churchill’s speeches would be read over the evening news, those could never measure up to the original. Nor could Churchill’s repeat performances. Having delivered his ‘finest hour’ speech to Parliament on 18 June 1940, he was ‘bullied’ by his colleagues into repeating it over the radio that evening. Harold Nicolson, an MP and a censor at the Ministry of Information, reported to Vita Sackville-West that Churchill:

just sulked and read his House of Commons speech over again. Now, as delivered in the House of Commons that speech was magnificent … it sounded ghastly on the wireless. All the great vigour he put into it seemed to evaporate. 

Nothing could rival the quality of the originals. The speeches that Churchill made to the House of Commons were very different from those that were printed and distributed. In part that was deliberate: Churchill’s assistant private secretary was instructed to edit the transcript of the prime minister’s Parliamentary speeches, altering the text ‘in many places to improve the style and the grammar’. Jokes, phrases, even whole sections; all would get the chop. Impromptu remarks, unless noted by MPs, were lost as soon as they were made. Only a few have survived: how, on finishing ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’, he turned to his aide and told him ‘that got the SODS, didn’t it’; or how he muttered, after ending ‘we shall fight on the beaches’, ‘we’ll beat the b[astard]s over the head with broomsticks, it’s all we’ve got’. The moments when Churchill whacked the table in front of him, ‘pounded the air like a pugilist’, or ‘struck his breast like an orang-outang’; all are preserved only in diaries. Had Churchill got his way, and the recordings been made, the result would have been unique: some of the greatest speeches in the English language unfurled as Britain faced the likelihood of annihilation, in an atmosphere of intense feeling, in a city being battered by German bombs.

Taxing issues

Having guided his country to victory, Churchill lost the 1945 election. The shock was appalling. The habits of a lifetime soon reasserted themselves, however, and the need to provide for his family became his dominant concern. But, initially, he could not write. Rejecting an astronomically generous offer from an American magazine, Churchill explained that if he wrote anything he ‘would have to pay taxes of nineteen and six in the pound’ – about 98 per cent – ‘so what’s the use?’ Instead, he cut deals that would be tax exempt. He sold the transcripts of the speeches he had made in secret sessions of the House of Commons. Then he sold the reproduction rights to his paintings to LIFE magazine. He sold them again to Hallmark Cards, which printed them on their Christmas range. But the big money-spinners that would protect and burnish his reputation were his wartime memoirs. A tax barrister was tasked with ensuring that the magnificent sums offered would not be netted by the taxman. A wheeze was devised, a trust established and a contract signed.

Writing his memoirs, avoiding taxes; he had returned to his former life. Accordingly, he began to consider paid public speaking opportunities. The offers were glittering: $25,000 for a speech to the American Automobile Association; $250,000 for 12 monthly broadcasts, sponsored by a penicillin manufacturer; $4,000 for 15 minutes, sponsored by General Foods. Again, tax precluded the possibility; the burden would be too high; and – now that he was possibly the most famous man alive – there were concerns that it would seem undignified for him to make money from the lecture circuit.

As a consequence, Churchill sought new ways of making money while evading the taxman. Volumes of his speeches had been sold before, during and after the war. Why not the audio version? Recording the unrecorded, iconic speeches would serve the same purpose as his memoirs: it would make him money and burnish his legacy. So Oscar C. Preuss, the Artistes & Recording Manager of the Gramophone Company Ltd, was invited to lunch at Churchill’s country house, Chartwell, on 26 October 1946. Two proposals were discussed. First, Churchill wanted to collect his favourite songs onto a charity record, to be titled ‘Winston’s Tunes’. Nothing ever came of this idea. Second, he wanted to record his unrecorded wartime speeches to the House of Commons. Preuss was excited. But Churchill was too busy to begin recording. Preuss kept pushing, as 1946 became 1947, and 1947 rolled into 1948.

In January 1949, Emery Reves, Churchill’s literary agent, contacted his client to draw his attention to the immense success of a recently issued record of various politicians’ wartime speeches. ‘If the legal minds can find a way’, Reves wrote, ‘I think this would be a good psychological moment to negotiate and sell, for a lump sum, the radio and gramophone record rights.’ Churchill should, Reves suggested, record not only the House of Commons speeches, but also his memoirs.

This was the final kick that Churchill needed. Preuss was given 15 recording sessions over the course of March, April and May 1949. These took place either in the morning when Churchill worked from his bed, or late in the evening, after a heavy dinner. The news that he was recording his great wartime speeches was, on his instructions, kept ‘strictly confidential’. On Reves’ instruction, some sessions were dedicated to his memoirs. 

Interruptions

Churchill’s bedroom and study were not ideal recording studios. They were not quiet. The sound from builders below, who were installing a new water garden, drifted into his bedroom. Meanwhile, Churchill’s instructions that he was not to be disturbed were not always heeded. In the middle of one speech, Churchill stopped to yell at his poodle: ‘Rufus, you filthy beast, you’ve spilt my coffee.’ On another occasion, a visitor arrived, demanding to see him. ‘No, I can’t see him now’, Churchill told his staff: ‘Tell him to come back later. Can’t you see I’m trying to record this bloody speech? Now, as I was saying…’

Even so, Churchill was satisfied with the results. He wrote to his solicitor, asking:

whether it would be possible to provide Mrs. Churchill with a fund of dollars in the United States which could, if necessary, (and if this is legally possible) be kept immune from English taxation. The asset now in my possession, and which at present is unexploited, is a series of recordings which I have made of my speeches, broadcasts and readings from my War Memoirs. I would be grateful if you will consider and if advisable obtain Counsel’s advice whether some arrangement could not be made whereby on my death Mrs. Churchill has an option of a contract in America for distribution of these recordings.

His solicitor’s response was positive: ‘If Mr. Churchill gave these to Mrs. Churchill either now or by Will I think Mrs. Churchill could by contract secure a lump sum not liable to United Kingdom Income Tax.’ Churchill became prime minister again in 1951 and the question of the recordings was crowded out by Britain’s economic and international problems.

Good business

Churchill retired in 1955 and concluded his career as a writer with the publication of the History of the English-Speaking Peoples. His family was secure, his bank account full. He began to wind down. The question of what to do with the recordings slumbered, until President Kennedy was shot in Dallas in November 1963. After this tragedy, the market was quickly flooded with hastily issued collections of Kennedy’s most famous speeches. The Churchill camp was spooked by the thought that the same would happen after their boss’ death, reducing their recordings’ value. As Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s private secretary, wrote to his boss’ lawyer: ‘I think that we should consider whether a definitive edition of Sir Winston’s speeches could now be issued.’ Bids were solicited and Decca’s offer of a £20,000 signing fee, with royalties of 15 per cent up to £500,000, accepted. Churchill, in the last year of his life, approved the offer with the words ‘I accept. Good Business’. To save stamp duty of £5,000, Montague Browne flew to Paris to sign the contract on 26 June 1964.

Until the announcement of their upcoming release, it was unknown that these recordings existed. The news was received euphorically. ‘What would we say if we could hear the authentic voices of Cromwell, Chatham or Burke as they uttered famous phrases?’ asked the Daily Express. ‘This is a measure of the privilege which posterity will gain from the record, immortal words of Churchill.’ But Churchill’s team knew that the record had to be released while their ailing boss was alive, otherwise copyright would be lost. As Churchill slipped into a coma on 15 January 1965, the printing presses were whirring and the vinyl was distributed. Churchill died on 24 January. The Voice of Churchill hit Number 6 of the Top Ten four weeks later, outselling the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Dusty Springfield. It was the final, unlikely achievement of a remarkable life.

Joel Nelson is Assistant Editor of Foreign Affairs and is working on a book about President Kennedy.