June 21, 1948

Though Winston Churchill was an aristocrat and a grandson of the Duke of Marlborough, he was constantly short of funds. This was until he published his war memoirs, beginning with The Gathering Storm, which was the first of his six-volume work, The Second World War.

Finally, with the advance from the publishing house Cassell, he and his family would be on sound financial ground. Having spent his life in politics, he had made his living from writing. One of his daughters once quipped that growing up, they ‘lived from pen to mouth’.

Referring to Churchill’s work on the First World War, The World Crisis, Arthur Balfour said that Winston had written a brilliant autobiography and disguised it as a history of the universe. ’Churchill said, ‘I have not always been wrong. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself’.