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]
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