Churchill’s boozy £12,000 bet

While a young man, Winston Churchill made a bet with an American businessman that the British Empire would not fall – and won. The written wager he made is now to be auctioned in London.

In 1901, on a visit to the US where he was speaking about his experiences in the Boer War, the young Churchill, then a member of parliament, was having dinner with the industrialist James Young on 23 January.

It was just a day after the death of Queen Victoria and Young suggested that Britain’s previously unassailable position as the world’s foremost global power would wane within 10 years as a result.

Churchill disagreed and the two placed a wager for £100 – the equivalent of £12,000 in today’s money.

The wager, witnessed by the British poet Richard Le Gallienne*, reads: “Mr. James C. Young bets Mr. Winston Churchill – one hundred pounds even – that within ten years from this date the British Empire will be substantially reduced by loss in Australia, or Canada, or India equal to a quarter by population of one of these provinces…”

Considering it was drawn up during a dinner and noting a number of small corrections to the wager, it seems likely the company was not entirely sober when the bet was placed.

It is hardly the first booze-related story associated with Churchill, recent calculations have suggested that from 1908 until his death in 1965 he drank around 42,000 bottles of Champagne alone.

It is not known if Churchill ever collected on the bet. By January 1911 he was First Lord of the Admiralty and the British Empire – far from declining after Victoria’s death – had indeed gone from strength to strength.

Young’s family kept hold of the wager until 1945 when it was sold to a private collector.

It is now to be auctioned again by Bloomsbury auctioneers in London on 18 March with a pre-sale estimate of £25,000.

*One of Le Gallienne’s notable works was a translation, in 1897, of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, a collection of poems by the medieval Persian writer, who often reflects on wine in his musings.