Churchill's World Crisis

Today, whenever major political leaders come to the end of their careers, we have learned to expect an announcement at no distant point that a contract has been signed for the publication of their memoirs, with large advances mentioned.

- Peter Clarke

A hundred years ago, there was no such expectation. Indeed the Armistice can be seen as triggering the inception of a golden century in the modern memoirs industry, signing up authors with the usual motives of political vindication and— not least—financial reward. In this respect, as in many others, Winston Churchill was a pioneer. Moreover, the five volumes that he published under the title The World Crisis (1923–29)—there was later a sixth on the Eastern Front—were not the work of a retired politician. They were begun when he was still in his late forties, written in the midst of an active career. His cabinet colleague Arthur Balfour, a generation older, called it an autobiography disguised as a history of the universe.

That Churchill felt in need of money at this time will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his incorrigible spending habits. He was a cabinet minister in Lloyd George’s postwar government (1918–22) with a salary of £5000 a year, which would be worth over two hundred thousand pounds today. But this was not enough, in his eyes, to provide for the education of his four children nor to fulfil his ambition to purchase a country house of his own. Politics was indeed his vocation but, as I see it, writing was his profession, in the sense that his highly professional commitment as an author always provided an indispensable source of income.1