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Did Mr Winston Churchill rely on funds from the Jews?


"Churchill's War", vol. i: "Struggle for Power" From David Irving: "Churchill's War", vol. i: "Struggle for Power"

 

ON the day after the Horsham speech [i.e. July 24, 1936] the ten top members of the Anti-Nazi Council trooped into Morpeth Mansions, his London pied-à-terre, for a second conspiratorial luncheon. In response to Churchill's wishes for a less negative title, they now called themselves The Focus but, cat-like, this was a name known only to themselves, The main decisions this day were to set up a research section under Wickham Steed and to draft a manifesto. (According to Steed it was seen by 'one American visitor' who insisted it be shown privately to certain associations, which he did not identify, in the United States.[23])

There were embarrassed coughs when the organising secretary of ANC, A.H. Richards inquired where the money for all this was to come from; Mr Churchill appeared angry at the question. Richards was taken aside and asked to announce simply that all their requirements had already been met.[24]

Funds had been arranged two days earlier at a private dinner in North London, hosted by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Its vice-president Sir Robert Waley-Cohen, chairman of British Shell, was a charismatic Zionist extrovert who would become, in the words of his authorised biographer Robert Henriques, the 'veritable dynamic force of Focus,' At a dinner on July 22 at his home, Caen Wood Towers, he launched the initial secret £50,000 fund for The Focus. His associates signed immediate cheques for £25,000 and pledged the rest.[25]

 

Notes on Sources

23. Steed, "The United States and British Policy", address at Chatham House on Nov 25, 1937: in International Affairs, London, vol. xvii, No. 1, 1938, 51-3.

24. Eugen Spier, Focus - A Footnote to the History of the Thirties (London, 1963). -- Credit is due to Dr Dietrich Aigner of Mannheim Univ. for his research into the Focus in Das Ringen um England. Das deutsch-britische Verhaltnis (München, 1969) and particularly his unpublished bibliography, On Producing Chaff. Materials for an Inquiry (Weinheim, 1980).

25. Robert Henriques, Sir Robert Waley-Cohen 1877-1952. A Biography (London, 1966) 362.

© Focal Point 2002 write to David Irving