Henry Strakosch
Sir Henry Strakosch (9 May 1871 – 30 October 1943) was a Jewish banker and businessman from Austria.
Life
Early life
His parents were the merchant Edward Strakosch and his wife, Mathilde (née Winters). He was born at Hohenau, Austria, and educated at the Wasa Gymnasium in Vienna and privately in England.
Strakosch entered banking in the City of London in 1891, and then began working for the Anglo-Austrian Bank of South Africa in 1895. Strakosch became a naturalized British citizen in 1907.
Financial career
Strakosch served as a financial adviser to the South African government, and was the author of the 1920 South African Currency and Banking Act. He was chairman of the South African goldminers, Union Corporation from 1924. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance during 1925 and 1926. He later served on the Council of India between 1930 and 1937, served as a delegate for India at the Imperial Economic Conference in 1932, and acted as adviser to the Secretary of State for India between 1937 and 1942.
He was knighted in 1921, and then appointed a KBE in 1924, and promoted GBE in 1927.[1] He was awarded an honorary degree of LLD at Manchester University in 1938.
Strakosch was chairman of The Economist between 1929 and 1943. He supplied Winston Churchill with figures on German arms expenditure during the latter's rearmament.[2]
Files declassified in the 2000s showed that Strakosch provided large financial gifts to Winston Churchill in 1938 and 1940,[3][4] which enabled Churchill to pay off his vast debts and to withdraw his Kent home Chartwell from sale at a time of severe financial pressures.[2] National Socialist propaganda used this to say that Churchill was under the control of Jewish bankers.[5] Strakosch was unmarried until 1941 when he married Mabel Elizabeth Vincent, widow of Joseph Temperley, a shipowner.
Death
He died at his home at Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in 1943 aged 72.
References
- ↑ Kelly's Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes, 1942. Kelly's, 1715.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Gilbert, Martin (1981). Winston Churchill - The Wilderness Years. Macmillan, 222. ISBN 0-333-32564-8.
- ↑ Aderet, Ofer (2016-09-19). "Blood, Sweat and Booze: Churchill's Debts and the Moguls Who Saved Him" (in en). Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-churchills-debts-and-the-money-men-who-saved-him-1.5437629.
- ↑ (25 February 2020) The Splendid and the Vile : a saga of Churchill, family, and defiance during the Blitz, First, 100. ISBN 978-0-385-34871-3. OCLC 1125275396.
- ↑ "Churchill Couldn't Handle His Money" (in en). The Atlantic. 22 December 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/why-winston-churchill-was-so-bad-with-money/419094/.
- Harold Gilmore Calhoun: Les théories de Sir Henry Strakosch en matière de crise et la crise de 1929–1933. Loviton, Paris 1933.
